MEMRI doesn't think a truce was offered:
Quote:On January 19, 2006, Al-Jazeera TV broadcast excerpts from a new audiocassette by Osama bin Laden, in which the Al-Qaeda leader threatens further attacks on the U.S., "immediately with the completion of the preparations."
At the same time, bin Laden makes a plea to accept and uphold a long term truce under fair conditions [if America offers it to him], which will provide security and stability to both sides and will make it possible to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. "We are a nation forbidden by Allah to betray and lie," promises bin Laden.
Contrary to mistranslations in the media, from Al-Jazeera for example, [1] bin Laden did not offer a truce,
but made a plea to genuinely uphold one if America offers it to him.
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD107406
JustWonders wrote:MEMRI doesn't think a truce was offered:
Quote:On January 19, 2006, Al-Jazeera TV broadcast excerpts from a new audiocassette by Osama bin Laden, in which the Al-Qaeda leader threatens further attacks on the U.S., "immediately with the completion of the preparations."
At the same time, bin Laden makes a plea to accept and uphold a long term truce under fair conditions [if America offers it to him], which will provide security and stability to both sides and will make it possible to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. "We are a nation forbidden by Allah to betray and lie," promises bin Laden.
Contrary to mistranslations in the media, from Al-Jazeera for example, [1] bin Laden did not offer a truce,
but made a plea to genuinely uphold one if America offers it to him.
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD107406
That's a great source ... no kidding! I have bookmarked it I'm so impressed. I did not know of MEMRI ... I will pay more attention to your posts from now on! Thank You!
Anon
JustWonders wrote:MEMRI doesn't think a truce was offered:
Quote:On January 19, 2006, Al-Jazeera TV broadcast excerpts from a new audiocassette by Osama bin Laden, in which the Al-Qaeda leader threatens further attacks on the U.S., "immediately with the completion of the preparations."
At the same time, bin Laden makes a plea to accept and uphold a long term truce under fair conditions [if America offers it to him], which will provide security and stability to both sides and will make it possible to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. "We are a nation forbidden by Allah to betray and lie," promises bin Laden.
Contrary to mistranslations in the media, from Al-Jazeera for example, [1] bin Laden did not offer a truce,
but made a plea to genuinely uphold one if America offers it to him.
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD107406
Listening to the talking heads on the early news this morning, most seem to agree with MEMRI. They think that Osama is not offering a truce but would consider one if the US offered one. He would also no doubt have some pretty far reaching demands in order to accept one.
There were one or two, however, who point out that public opinion of peaceful Muslims is turning against Osama, a big chunk of the al Qaida leadership has been captured or killed, and they sense they are losing. They may in fact be looking for a way out without losing face.
Probably the actual truth is different from either of these speculative points of view.
You gotta' hand it to Osama, he always turns up when the Bush crime syndicate is in trouble. Follow that with the Cheney speech last night that explained the "urgency" for the passage of the new and updated (to include more dictatorial activities) Patriot Act.
On "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS, and as a participant discussing the tape, was former CIA chief McLaughlin, who was of the firm opinion, that the text on the tape, according to it's colloquialisms and lack of Qu'ran verses, obviously was originally written in English and then translated into Arabic! I am not making this sh*t up, McLaughlin himself was pondering that point together with Lehrer and another guy who had studied bin Laden for years.
You gotta' ask yourself: when did Osama run out of Arabic speaking advisors and confidantes? It would be kinda' like Bush's speeches being written by an Arab and translated into English. Washington has completely lost its mind - they don't even bother trying to make it look authentic anymore. McLaughlin also touched on another point - Osama's offer of truce! There were no conditions involved and no supporting quotes from the Qu'ran, which would have been consistent with previous tapes, as well as having been necessary to support his speech if it was meant to inflame and garner support from Muslims.I don't know what to read into McLaughlin's commentary on the Newshour, on the surface he seemed to toe the official Bush line, so why belabor points which indicated that the tape was a fraud?
And this response from a posting friend:
He sure does, doesn't he? And hey, he's got so many second in command right hand men, it just blows your mind. And all of them have more lives than a cat too, considering they keep getting killed over and over and then pop up again to be hunted down some more. That one-legged guy was a real trip. He got killed at least twice, then he got shot in the lung, hobbled on over to Iran to get patched up, and two weeks later he was back in Iraq to get blown up by a bomb but last I heard, he's still alive and kicking and our military is still looking for him. I'm sure they'll find him too whenever Bush needs to divert attention from something else again.
Osama now, well he's a tough customer too. In spite of his obituary showing up in an Egyptian newspaper 5 years ago and Pakistan confirming his death, he just makes one tape after another. It seems now he even composes them in English first and then translates them into Arabic before he reads them into a tape recorder. Apparently his video recorder has been on the blink for quite a while already since his last tape was an audio tape too. Well, he'll be spotted in Iran soon enough after his stay in Afghanistan turned to zilch when Uzbekistan decided to sell its oil to China instead of pumping it through the pipeline Enron was gonna build across Afghanistan to Pakistan's port.
Of course, Hussein's sons got killed at least three times too..... PumaClaw
And I think Magginkat needs a new and very different news source.
Foxfyre wrote:And I think Magginkat needs a new and very different news source.
I say Fox..... just when did we need a news source to write opinions???
Online already for more than 12 hours, but nevertheless still value.
Frm the
Independent:
Quote:Osama bin Laden: Is it him? Almost certainly.
By Robert Fisk
Published: 20 January 2006
So why only on audio? Why no video tape? Is he sick? Yes, say the usual American "intelligence sources". It's the same old story: Osama bin Laden talks to us from the mouth of a cave, from within a cave, from a basement perhaps, from a tape almost certainly recorded down a telephone line from far away. Yesterday's message, broadcast as ever by al-Jazeera television, was a reminder that security - not sickness - decides his method of communication.
We invaded Afghanistan to find Bin Laden and we fight and die in Iraq to kill his supporters - yet still he eludes us, still he threatens us, still he taunts us.
How much longer can this nonsense go on? President Jacques Chirac warns that France - of all countries - might use nuclear weapons, if attacked. On whom, I wonder? America blows Pakistani children to pieces and claims it has killed five wanted men, including a bomb-maker. But there's absolutely no evidence. Bin Laden says that America will be attacked again unless it accepts a truce in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weren't we supposed to be winning the "war on terror"? Oh no, the "experts" tell us, Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida are losing, that's why they want a truce. Some hope.
It's a game. Bin Laden has no intention of calling an end to his own war and nor has George Bush and nor has Tony Blair. The Bin Laden offer, almost certainly, is intended to be rejected. He wants Bush and Blair to refuse it. Then, after the next attack, will come the next audio tape. See what happens when you reject our ceasefire? We warned you. And we'll ask: is it him? So why no video tape? Never before in history have so many wanted men sent pictures and messages and video tapes out of the dark.
The irony, of course, is that Bin Laden is now partly irrelevant. He has created al-Qa'ida. His achievement - that word should be seen in context - is complete. Why bother hunting for him now? It's a bit like arresting the world's nuclear scientists after the invention of the atom bomb. The monster has been born. It's al-Qa'ida we have to deal with.
So we are told that America's security hasn't prevented an attack, that " operations" take time to prepare. "It is better not to fight the Muslims on their land," Bin Laden says. "We'd not mind offering you a truce that is fair in the long term ... so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan," he says. Forget for a moment the deep cynicism behind this message - deconstructing the Shia of Iraq seems to be one of the Iraqi insurgents' aims - it also reveals one of Bin Laden's old themes: the idea that these wars will bankrupt the United States.
"There is no shame in this solution because it prevents the wasting of billions of dollars ... to the merchants of war." These are almost the same words Bin Laden used to me when we last met. "The Americans will be bankrupted," he said, not realising that war primes the pumps of a superpower economy.
It is as if both "sides" in this conflict live on illusions. Mssrs Bush and Blair keep telling us things in Iraq are getting better, when we all know that they are getting worse. Anarchy has seized that entire country. American bodies coming home to the United States? Just don't let the press take photographs of the coffins. Bombs in London? Nothing to do with Iraq, Blair haplessly told us last July.
Now there's a website in Spanish about Iraq on the White House screens. Why? Because the Spaniards are interested in the war their army has left? Or because so many of the American soldiers dying in Iraq are Hispanics? And now we have Paul Bremer, America's equally hapless former pro-consul in Baghdad, telling us that those same Spanish troops contributed to the uprising in Najaf because they weren't performing their tasks in Iraq. More nonsense. What started the uprising was Bremer's own anger at an attack on him in a tiny Shia Muslim newspaper which he ordered to be closed (in an announcement of execrable Arabic). It was this which prompted Muqtada al-Sadr to fight the Americans.
And so we go on. Blame foreign fighters - even if 158,000 of them in Iraq happen to be wearing American uniforms - blame Syria, blame Iran. And blame Spain of course. Blame anyone who is not "with us".
In truth, it will need Iran and Syria to help get the US and Britain out of this shameful adventure. Yet what do we do? Raise the stakes on Iran by claiming that it intends to make nuclear weapons. And why Iran? Why not that infinitely more unstable Islamic state called Pakistan whichhas nuclear weapons? Because its dictator, President General Musharraf is on "our side". Why not attack North Korea, whose leader is more unstable than any Iranian cleric? Because he also has nuclear weapons.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are slowly returning. Outside Kabul every woman wears a burqa. Weren't they supposed to have taken them off? Weren't women now "free" in Afghanistan? US troops are being killed at an increasing rate there. Weren't they supposed to have won? Now Canada has split its troops and sent a battalion to Kandahar to fight the Taliban and al-Qa'ida. What are the Canadians now doing in combat operations? What risks does this now pose for the Canadian nation which kept out of Iraq?
It was only a few months ago that Bin Laden was bombarding us with explanations for his movement's attacks. Why did no one ask, he said, why Sweden was not assaulted? And so, I suppose, we can indeed fear more attacks on the United States, more bombing raids, further chapters in the "war on terror".
And all the time we in the West fail to look for a way to end this "war" . How about some justice in the Middle East? How about lifting the blanket of injustice that has lain across the region for so many decades? Muslims there will probably like some of the democracy we say we're trying to export to them. They would also like human rights off our Western supermarket shelves.
But they would also like another kind of freedom - freedom from us. And this, it seems, we are not going to give them. So the war goes on. Stand by for more audio tapes, and more threats, and more death.
M-Kat, You have opinions about obituaries in Egypt and Enron's plans to lay pipelines? Most of us read about that kind of stuff somewhere rather than deducing it intuitively. I'm impressed.
Read Blatham's lastest post Fox. (Correction Walter's latest post)
Just for the record I did not come here to impress you or anyone else.
Robert Fisk has impressive credentials, but is a darling of Amnesty International and other groups who think any military aggression is evil and who focus only on the negatives of war while rarely pointing or balancing with the successes. I read commentary from people like him to help keep things in perspective, but I don't swallow their point of view as the way things actually are.
Military aggression is evil. Defense, is not. I imagine AI has seen the effects of war often enough to know.
Right, Freeduck. I really wonder that Foxfyre now is a supporter of military aggression.
You live and learn.
Or you two could be putting a spin on it that you both very well know I neither said nor intended. I would like to think that neither of you would intentionally deflect the discussion to something that was not said because you didn't wish to deal with what was said.
Then why your previous comment?
Because you posted an opinion piece by Robert Fisk as if he was an authority on this subject. I was simply expressing my opinion that he is neither an authority on the subject nor is he always fair and balanced when he offers his opinion.
Walter Hinteler wrote:Right, Freeduck. I really wonder that Foxfyre now is a supporter of military aggression.
You live and learn.
Apparently we don't live and learn Walter. We just keep on killing each other. Just think what kind of world we could have if all the money spent on stupid wars (and they are stupid) had been used instead to help people.
Military agression kills and it keeps the hatred going.
Just look around this country since bu$h has been acting like a dictator. Not even the civil rights uprising was there so much hatred by so many people all over this country. Bu$h & his gang of thugs are directly responsible for that hate.
The secondary responsibility goes to those people who jumped on his "You're either with me or your're agin' us" bandwagon. I have zero respect for those who forego the use of their own brain.
If France and England has insisted on the treaty rights and integrity of Czechoslovakia (and Poland) in the 1930s, and stated their intent to live up to the assurances of military support they had given to these countries by the threat of military action against Germany unless Hitler was either directly overthrown or renounced his demands for territorial expansion, would that have constituted "military aggression"?
Subsequent history strongly suggests that such an action might have spared Europe a good deal of suffering and destruction. Certainly the deaL struck in Munich, which was widely hailed at the time as preventing "military aggression"and preserving "peace in our time" involved the doom of the Czechs, and later the Poles, and provided very little of either peace or time for the French and the British who sold them out.
The point is that there are worse evils tham military aggression.
Re military aggression, it is not always evil. Sometimes it is necessary and just when weighed against the alternative.
Fisk is a world classed douche bag and his opinion matters as much as a pile dog crap on a cold winter day.
