Bin Laden videotape was result of a sting
The CIA may have set up the terrorist leader to incriminate himself
War in Afghanistan: Observer special

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,619480,00.html

On the screen flickered a blurred picture: a tall, grey-bearded man in a white turban talking in Arabic to a number of other similarly attired associates. These fuzzy, broken images were the 'smoking gun' - bin Laden's long-awaited, albeit apparently unwitting, personal confession.

The men in the Afghan Hotel had a more pressing, more local interest too. According to the American authorities who solemnly released the tape last week, it had been found nearby, in a ruined building once used by Arab fighters from bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation. It had been seized when Mujahideen fighters entered their city a few hours after al-Qaeda's Taliban protectors had left.

This weekend, as the debate the tape has provoked continued across the Islamic world, several intelligence sources have suggested to The Observer that the tape, although absolutely genuine, is the result of a sophisticated sting operation run by the CIA through a second intelligence service, possibly Saudi or Pakistani.

'They needed someone whom they could persuade or coerce to get close to bin Laden and someone whom bin Laden would feel secure talking to. If it works, you have got the perfect evidence at the perfect moment,' said one security source. 'It's a masterstroke.'

The focus of suspicion is the Saudi dissident preacher who appears to have taped the interview, conducted according to the timecode on the video on 9 November, in what appears to be a guesthouse in the Afghan city of Kandahar.



Some commentary on this story...

The tape was supposedly made on November 9th
Now it is mid-December
in the interim we have been repeatedly treated to 'Bin Laden - I confess' stories that proved to be bogus, including a the story of a nonexistent tape existing only as a 'transcript' while a furious propaganda war is going onyou would think that if this was a truly crafty intelligence operation they wouldn't have taken so long to release their grand prize, a wonderful candid bin laden tapefurthermore, the tape was also 'discovered' in the wrecked ruins of some al queda hang out
so let's get our stories straight here
one or the other please

seems to me that there are a number of possiblities that could be considered

Now we know that the US gov't was planning the attack on AFghanistan, to begin in October, late in the spring and early of the summer of this year ... they also made a point of touring the area to get countries like India and Pakistan to sign on for an attack on Afghanistan, because India, Iran and other regional countrries wanted to build an oil and gas pipe line through Afghanistan, and also wanted to protect the source of this untapped fossil fuels in the ex-Soviet caucusus free of a Taliban like Islamic regime, which, they feared, would be unlike the Taliban regime in Saudi Arabia, and thus somehow make the oil reserves untappable. Add onto the fact, that for some reason known only to them, the Taliban said no way to UNOCAL on the pipeline deal.

Now recall that in the months before Pearl Harbor, the American gov't was deliberately starving Japan of oil, so that at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack Japan had six months to total economic collapse, well, unless they atacked America, with the obvious target being the American fleet docked almost lock stock and barrel at Pearl Harbor. Nothing gets those hawks strengthened than a threat like total economic collapse, and so war it was, and if the US gov't expected any less when they were starving Japan of oil, well it seems hard to believe that anyone could be so naive to think that war would not eventually result. And the declassified cable traffic indicates that the military was indeed informed of the approach of the Japanese carriers towards Pearl Harbor, and the story of being 'caught totally by surprise in complete innocence' is just a national myth.

Now then, with the Taliban I am sure getting wind of this upcoming American attack in October, the details of the war coalition building being published after all in newspapers in India, it could be possible that extremists in the country then planned a Pearl Harbor, and that the US gov't kind of expected that, not exactly being secretive about the whole coming war in Afghanistan after all, the published stories indicating this was not exactly being kept top secret.Now the hardest part of bombing Afghanistan for those oil pipelines is getting support from the public, but after being Pearl Harbored that wouldn't be a problem any more as we can see. As for most Americans, they never knew at the time, and still do not know today, about the plans to invade Afghanistan in October that were made earlier on this summer before their country got "Pearl Harbored' by Afghanistan, if that is what happened.

Another scenario that seems reasonable, given that the plans are to attack '50 or 60 countries' and 'go warring for the rest of our lives' that the attacks were skillfully infiltrated, controlled and mani[ulated by extremist right wingers in the military and CIA. This would be a repeat of the old 'Gulf of Tonkin' fraud that kick started the bombing and invasions of Vietnam, the phony Polish invasion of Germany that kicked of World War 2 in Europe, the burning down of the Reichstag which mobilized the entire German nation behind their regime, a regime that received only 30 per cent of the vote before that time, but suddenly started getting 90 per cent approval ratings after the Reichstag burned down in Germany (and historians ask, 'was that 90 per cent faked' but I don't think so, people are just that easy to manipulate, the techniques are standard, nothing new there...)

In either case of the above, 'Bin Laden did it' perhaps Bin Laden fired the first Pearl Harbor shot in that upcoming invasion of another Muslim country, something that pissed him off when he was working for the Americans kicking out the Russians, and that pissed him off when the Americans set foot on Muslim soil (Saudi Araibia) or perhaps some Saudi Muslim fanatics were infilitrated by the American right and manouvered into bombing that building in time for the upcoming oil and gas war in Afghanistan, which, remarkably coincidentally went ahead just as planned for October , which is handy, and damned suspicious to say the least...

I remain convinced that whatever the state of Bin Laden it hardly matters, and it certainly doesn't matter to me...what matters to me is that warring for the rest of our lives thing which history shows they will now proceed to do, moving onto the next country on the list. Now it seems, based on the war lording and gun battles going on in Afghanistan that if that pipeline now gets built and the oil and gas start pumping now that they have gotten rid of that uncoperative Taliban, they will need to do what the Russians once did, and station permanent troops and permanent marines in Afghanistan just to perpetually guard that pipe, all paid for of course by tax payers, as it turns out to be the case that the war in Afghanistan just never really ends. Sure, they will move on to the next country on their list, and with marines moving into Kuwait I think we can guess Iraq, another uncooperative country with oil and gas that will have to be straghtened out sooner or later. Given the convenient coincidences, unburned passports, hijackers luggage missing the flight and turning up incriminating evidence, the desperation for the last three months to get a bin laden confession, each one phony, hijackers slipping past security at all those airports and getting onboard all those planes, no jets scrambled, no intercepts, the planned war in Afghanistan for October, planned well before any buildings blew up, well, until now, when I suppiose we are to forget all that ridiculous crap that went on before, and also assume that this was a 'brilliant spy operation', which it doesn't seem to be, but its good spin, I will say that. Whatever the truth turns out to be, it is impossible to believe that either the US gov't did the provoke the Japanese thing and then turned their innocent backs long enough to get conveniently and expectedly I assume Pearl Harbored, if it isn't the case that extremists hawks in the military industrial complex did not simply maniupulate the situation to burn down their own Reichstag, hardly unheard of from those hawks after all...