Subject: ROBERT FISK --  BIN LADEN IS ALIVE
From: MichaelP 
Date: 15 Nov 2002 03:38:57 -0600

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=351901

INDEPENDENT (London) 14 November 2002
   by ROBERT FISK

========
 BIN LADEN IS ALIVE. There can be no doubt about it. But the questions 
remain: where on earth is he, and why has he resurfaced now?
========

It is him. The man on the tape is Bin Laden. He is alive. It took only a
brief flurry of phone calls to the Middle East and south-west Asia for the
most impeccable sources to confirm that Osama bin Laden is alive and that
it was his gravelly voice that threatens the West in the short monologue
first transmitted by the Arab Al-Jazeera television channel.

So the Saudi billionaire, the man in the cave, the "Evil One", the
bearded, ascetic man whom the greatest army on earth has sought in vain,
is with us still. It's the real McCoy.

As usual, "US intelligence"  the heroes of 11 September who heard about
Arabs learning to fly but didn't quite manage to tell us in time came up
with rubbish for the American media. It may be him. It's probably him. The
gravelly voice may mean he's been hurt.

He is speaking fast because he could have been wounded by the Americans.

Untrue.

The US was finally forced to acknowledge yesterday that the man some of
them had claimed to be dead was still very much in the land of the living
and uttering the kind of threat that fulfils the worst nightmares of
Western leaders. "Just like you kill us, we will kill you," he said.

When he was recorded, bin Laden was not talking into a tape-recorder. He
was talking into a telephone. The man on the other end of the line quite
possibly in Pakistan held the recorder. Bin Laden may not have been in the
same city as the man with the recorder. He may well not have been in the
same country.

Osama bin Laden always speaks slowly. His voice is rapid, and the reason
for this is apparently quite simple: the recorder's battery was low. When
replayed by Al-Jazeera at proper speed, the voice goes up an octave.

I know Bin Laden and, though I did not meet him after 11 September, I got
to understand him over the years. But writing about him is now one of the
most difficult journalistic tasks on earth. You have to say what you know.
You have to say what you think must be true. You have to ask why he made
this tape. The story moves deeper into questions. Why? What for? Why now?
It requires a new, harsh way of writing to tell the truth, the use of
brackets and colons.

Knowledge and suspicion and probability and speculation keep grinding up
against each other. Bin Laden survived the bombing of Tora Bora. Fact. Bin
Laden escaped via Pakistan. Probability. Bin Laden is in Saudi Arabia. A
growing conviction.

So here, with all its imperfections and conditional clauses, is what I
suspect this tape recording means.

The story is a deeply disturbing one for the West. It is one which is not
easy to write. I am frightened of the implications of this tape. One of
its messages to Britain above all others after the United States is: watch
out. Tony Blair was right (for once) to warn of further attacks, though
the Bin Laden phone call was not (I suspect) monitored. But it was Bin
Laden.

We should start with Tora Bora in the autumn of 2001. Under heavy
bombardment by the US Air Force, Bin Laden's al-Qa'ida fighters realised
they could not hold out indefinitely in the cave complex of the White
Mountains above Jalalabad. Bin Laden was with them. Al-Qa'ida men
volunteered to fight on to certain death against the Afghan warlords paid
by the Americans, and Bin Laden at first refused to leave them. He argued
that he wished to die with them. His most loyal bodyguards and senior
advisers insisted he must leave. In the end, he abandoned Tora Bora in a
state of some anguish, his protectors hustling him down one mountainside
with much the same panic as Dick Cheney's security men carried the US
Vice-President to the White House basement when al-Qa'ida's
killer-hijackers closed in on Washington on 11 September. All of the above
comes under the label of "impeccable source".

If he fled on a white horse a story that originally came from one of
Jalalabad's corrupt Northern Alliance gunmen Bin Laden must have taken
leave of his senses. He can ride, but travelling by horse under fire only
adds to the danger. And a white horse, for heaven's sake? A horse than can
be seen in the night?

Bin Laden went either to Kashmir (possible, though unlikely) or Karachi
(most probable). I say that because Bin Laden boasted to me once of the
many admirers he had among the Sunni clergy of this great, hot and
dangerous Pakistani city. He always talked of them as his "brothers". He
once gave me posters in Urdu which these clerics had produced and pasted
on the walls of Karachi. He liked to quote their sermons to me. So I'll go
for Karachi. But I may be wrong.

In the months that followed, there were little, tiny hints that he
remained alive, like the smell of tobacco in a room days after a smoker
has left. An admirer of the man insisted to me that he was alive (fact,
but not an impeccable source). He was trying to find a way of
communicating with the outside world without meeting any westerner.
Absolute fact. His most recent videotape which was dismissed as old by
those famous "US intelligence sources" because he didn't mention any
events since November 2001 was new. (Strong possibility, backed up by a
good though not impeccable source.)

So why now? The Middle East is entering a new and ever more tragic phase
of its history, torn apart by the war between Israelis and Palestinians
and facing the incendiary effects of a possible Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq. Bin Laden must have realised the need to address once more the Arab
world and his audiotape, despite the direct threats to Britain and other
Western countries, is primarily directed towards his most important
audience, Arab Muslims. His silence at this moment in Middle East history
would have been inexcusable in Bin Laden's eyes.

And just to counter the predictable counter-claims that his tape could be
old, he energetically listed the blows struck at Western powers since his
presumed "death". The bombings of French submarine technicians in Karachi,
the synagogue in Tunisia, Bali, the Chechen theatre siege in Moscow, even
the killing of the US diplomat in Jordan. Yes, he is saying, I know about
all these things. He is saying he approves. He is telling us he is still
here. Arabs may deplore this violence, but few will not feel some pull of
emotions. Amid Israel's brutality towards Palestinians and America's
threats towards Iraq, at least one Arab is prepared to hit back. That is
his message to Arabs.

Bin Laden always loathed Saddam Hussein. He hated the Iraqi leader's
un-Islamic behaviour, his secularism, his use of religion to encourage
loyalty to a Baath party that was co-founded by a Christian. America's
attempt to link al-Qa'ida to the Baghdad regime has always been one of the
most preposterous of Washington's claims. Bin Laden used to tell me how
much he hated Saddam. So his two references to "the sons of Iraq" are
intriguing. He makes no mention of the Baghdad government or of Saddam.
But with UN sanctions still killing thousands of children and with Iraq
the target of a probable American invasion he cannot possibly ignore it.
So he talks about "Iraq's children" and about "our sons in Iraq",
indicating Arab Muslim men who happened to be Iraqi, rather than Iraqis.
But not Saddam. It's not difficult to see how the US administration may
try to use these two references to make another false link between Baghdad
and al-Qa'ida, but Bin Laden who is intelligent enough to be able to
predict this clearly felt that an expression of sympathy for the Arabs of
Iraq outweighed any misuse Washington could make of his remarks. This has
to come under the label of speculation (although near certainty might be
nearer the mark).

Back in 1996, Bin Laden told me that British and French troops in Saudi
Arabia were as at risk of being attacked by his followers as American
forces. In 1997, he changed this target list. The British and French he
now dissociated from any proposed attacks. But in the new audiotape, they
are back on the hit list along with France, Canada, Italy, Germany and
Australia. And Britain is at the top.

The message to us the West is simple and repeated three times. If we want
to back George Bush, the "pharaoh of the age"  and
"pharaoh" is what Anwar
Sadat's killers called the Egyptian president after his murder more than
two decades ago we will pay a price. "What business do your governments
have in allying themselves with the gang of criminals in the White House
against Muslims...?" I have heard Bin Laden use that Arabic expression
ifarbatu al-idjran twice before in conversation with me. "Gang of
criminals". Which is what the West has called "al-Qa'ida".

So what comes next? A few weeks ago, I was asked by a member of an
American university audience where I thought the next blow would come. The
two words I thought of were "oil tanker". This came under the
label "total
speculation". But I didn't want to give anyone any ideas. So I said
nothing. The following week, al-Qa'ida struck the supertanker Limburg off
Yemen. Now I search my mind for worse thoughts. And I prefer to end my
story.

======================

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