Bin Laden's 'Submission Tape' - Jihad slumping - but fugitive's endorsement of book by ex State Dept employee causes sales to skyrocket

Bin-Laden's "Submission" Tape

http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=binladentape%2Ehtm

January 20, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - A quick look at bin-Laden's latest offering, especially his apparent change of heart/tactics...

"our conditions are always improving, becoming better, while yours are the opposite."

It appears that al-Qaeda is far worse off today compared to where it was at any previous time in its short history.

In the mid 1990s it declared war without consequence, ran terror operations with impunity, maintained bases openly and recruited without being hampered by the specter of massive retaliation. This side of Waco, no one was afraid of the Clintons.

Al-Qaeda is far worse off now than it was on September 11.

The majority of bin-Laden's network has been destroyed or compromised, his funding sources seriously impaired and many of his contemporaries either killed or looking forward to water-boarding. He has lost Afghanistan and his battle commanders live like hunted animals.

Though the public are generally not aware of the practice, run of the mill Muslims don't just - without motive - volunteer to place IEDs, they must be paid. While religious fervor and the promise of the 72 virgins [male or female] that Islam offers for "martyrdom" is an inducement, it hardly suffices any longer. The bombers and moreover their families, must be monetarily compensated. As a result of strategic setbacks, Al-Qaeda is now having to pay its operatives far more than in the past, a sure sign of the direction things are heading for the enemy and the ultimate hopelessness of their position. Post mortems reveals high concentrations of opiates in the bodies of Iraqi "mujahideen" - very un-Islamic and symptomatic of depression and defeat.

"However, what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush in his comment on the outcome of US opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq."

Here bin-Laden is spinning the polls like Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi, it's revealing how much this statement sounds like a RAT sound bite. While opinion polls do show the President has been harmed by the steady media drumbeat of negativity coming out of Iraq, a majority of the public [December 17, 2005 Pew Research Poll finds only 17% favor immediate withdrawal] does not want to see U.S. forces to simply leave which they rightly perceive to be defeatist.

"Bush said: It is better to fight them on their ground than they fighting us on our ground. In my response to these fallacies, I say: The war in Iraq is raging and operations in Afghanistan are on the rise in our favour, praise be to God. The Pentagon figures indicate the rise in the number of your dead and wounded, let alone the huge material losses."

But of course there have been no IEDs exploded in the U.S., a consequence of the wise decision to "fight them on their grounds" making bin-Laden's analogy absurd.

In Iraq the total number of attacks has decreased, although their lethality has risen. There are no engagements between al-Qaeda and Coalition forces, for obvious reasons. As to the cost both human and material, we have lost relatively few in number, though obviously any death of an American in battle is a sad occurrence. The key fact that seems to elude bin-Laden is that this country is impossibly rich, our GDP is $13 Trillion dollars a year, as long as the nation doesn't lose its nerve, the cost of the war in monetary terms is chump-change. Such a level of economic power is simply beyond bin-Laden's ability to comprehend as is the realization that we can sustain this level of output forever.

"In fact, Iraq has become a point of attraction and recruitment of qualified resources."

This again sounds like something coming from the thin lips of Harry Reid. There are a billion disciples of Islam, the fact that a relatively few thousand can be recruited to swell the ranks of the deposed Baathist Sadamites is not only not surprising it is evidence of the relative paucity of numbers willing to sign what amount to death warrants.

Compared to the approximately 4,000 mujahideen bases scattered throughout Afghanistan and deployed against the Soviets, the resistance against the Coalition in Iraq is anemic. It used to be common for mujahideen commanders to be able to deploy force strengths exceeding 10,000 against the Soviets and did so repeatedly in Khost and Paktia provinces.

Bin-Laden and Zarqawi can't do this in Iraq. The size of the hard-core insurgency is approximately only 8,000 total and 80% of the attacks occur in Sunni dominated areas. The effect is essentially localized, something again not evident from news coverage.

"The evidence for this are the bombings you have seen in the capitals of the most important European countries of this aggressive coalition."

England and Spain's death count from the bombings?

Less than 300 - insignificant.

"As for the delay in carrying out similar operations in America, this was not due to the failure to breach your security measures. Operations are in preparation and you will see them on your own ground once the preparations are finished, God willing."

Bin-Laden has been threatening catastrophe now for over 4 years yet nothing has happened, such claims increasingly make him look ineffectual.

"..it is better not to fight the Muslims on their land and for them not to fight us on our land."

Agreed, it is far better for the Muslims that we dont fight them on their land because they can't possibly hope to win that battle.

"We do not object to a long-term truce with you on the basis of fair conditions that we respect. We are a nation to which God has disallowed treachery and lying. In this truce, both parties will enjoy security and stability..."

Historical note - the idea of this type of truce goes back to the time of the "final prophet."

In the year 622 Mohammed was forced to leave Mecca.

Mohammed was at that point a soft man, who had fled as a youngster from his first battle. His newly crafted religion was not going over very well; learned men scoffed at his amateurish attempts to bend Jewish and Christian thematic material into his flights of fancy and as a result he was increasingly seen as being unbalanced and worse...disloyal to his tribe. As a result he was forced to flee for his life.

He took up residence in Yathrib, a town to the North of Mecca which had a substantial Christian and Jewish populations. After putting these non-believers to the sword he and his followers changed the name of the town to Medina and advanced upon Mecca for revenge.

Seeing that his forces were still not strong enough to conquer the Meccans he negotiated the first of his "truces," all the time conducting razzias or probing raids on the outskirts of the town. Eventually his forces were strong enough to overthrow the Meccans, which he did while disregarding his truce.

That is the ultimate fate of anyone relying upon promises made by Muslim fundamentalists.

"There is no defect in this solution other than preventing the flow of hundreds of billions to the influential people and war merchants in America, who supported Bush's election campaign with billions of dollars."

Shades of MoveOn.org, leftists in general and the current Democrat leadership. It's Noam Chomsky type brain-dead Marxism, further illuminating the weakness of bin-Laden's analytical prowess as well as his fading jihad.

The key lesson that the West must draw from bin-Laden's latest proclamation is that he is admitting psychological defeat. He understands that his bleak future holds nothing aside from watching his top lieutenants - and his ability to make war - spontaneously combust without warning or sanctuary.

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http://www.azcentral.com/ent/arts/articles/0121binladen-book.html#

Historian 'glad' of mention by Bin Laden as book sales skyrocket

David Montgomery
The Washington Post
Jan. 21, 2006 01:02 PM

WASHINGTON - Twenty-four hours after Osama bin Laden told the world that the American people should read the work of a little-known Washington historian, William Blum was still adjusting.

Blum, who at 72 is accustomed to laboring in relative left-wing obscurity, checked his emotions and pronounced himself shocked and, well, pleased.

"This is almost as good as being an Oprah book," he said Friday between telephone calls from the world media and bites of a bagel. "I'm glad." Overnight, his 2000 work, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower," had become an Osama book.

In gray slacks, plaid shirt and black slippers, Blum padded around his one-bedroom apartment on Connecticut Avenue. A portrait of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the ‘50s hung on his kitchen wall. Bookshelves bowed under the weight of secret histories of the CIA. The cord on his prehistoric phone let him roam across the living room. He'd already done CNN and MSNBC. A guy from the New York Post knocked on the door to take pictures. The BBC rang, then Reuters and Pacifica Radio stations on both coasts.

From Blum's end of the conversations, you could tell the reporters were expecting him to express some kind of discomfort, remorse, maybe even shame. Blum refused to acknowledge feelings he did not have.

"I was not turned off by such an endorsement," he informed a New York radio station. "I'm not repulsed, and I'm not going to pretend I am." He patiently reiterated the thesis of his foreign-policy critique - that American interventions abroad create enemies.

You could almost hear the ticking of a stopwatch. These were Blum's 15 American minutes, brought to him by a murderous zealot on the other side of the world who had named him to a kind of Terrorists Book-of-the-Month Club. The CIA duly verified the audiotape from bin Laden, and there it was: Blum had a bona fide book blurb from the evil one.

Now it was time for the soft-spoken, bespectacled radical son of Brooklyn to look thoughtful for the cameras - "I don't have a good smile" - and sound pithy for the microphones. Better known in radical circles and on the college lecture circuit than he is among most readers of American history, Blum is a former underground journalist who specializes in sharp critiques of foreign policy. Published by a small outfit in Maine, he also sells his books over the Internet and issues a free monthly e-mail newsletter called the Anti-Empire Report.

What bin Laden said was this, as translated from Arabic by the Associated Press:

"And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book ‘Rogue State,' which states in its introduction: ‘If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First, I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all.' "

By Friday night, "Rogue State" shot up from 205,763 to 26 on Amazon.com's index of the most-ordered books.

"I'm calling it the book review of the decade," said Sam Smith, editor of the Progressive Review in Washington and a fan of Blum's work. Smith, too, has blurbed the book ("an especially well-documented encyclopedia of malfeasance") as has Gore Vidal.

Chortled Smith Friday, "Neither Vidal nor Smith came close to lifting ‘Rogue State' into the double digits" on Amazon.

Since Amazon's delivery service, while comprehensive, would not seem to extend to faraway caves, how might bin Laden have gotten his hands on Blum's work?

The author noted "Rogue State" had been published in Arabic in Egypt and Lebanon. And perhaps bin Laden owns the entire Blum canon, because the quote he cited actually is not in "Rogue State," but on the back cover of a collection of Blum essays, "Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire." (That book is languishing on Amazon, while two other books titled "Rogue State" have enjoyed a spike in ranking.)

Blum's exact words? "If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize - very publicly and very sincerely - to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism."

Friday, he made clear that he deplores the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But he argues, as many other essayists have, that they were an understandable retaliation against U.S. foreign policy. "The thesis in my books and my writing is that anti-American terrorism arises from the behavior of U.S. foreign policy," he said. "It is what the U.S. government does which angers people all over the world."

"I am totally against what they did. But we cannot view that as totally the acts of a bunch of madmen. If we do ... we will continue making the same mistakes, and the so-called war on terror will be as doomed to fail as the war on drugs."

In a chapter called "Why Do Terrorists Keep Picking on the United States?" Blum lists as possible reasons everything from support of Middle East dictators, including the Shah of Iran and Saudi rulers, to occupying military bases in the region, to favoring the Israelis over the Palestinians.

"I think bin Laden shares that view, and that is why I'm not repulsed by his embrace of my book, because that is one of my major themes," Blum said.

When it is pointed out that terrorists target innocent civilians, which is not U.S. policy, he replies that U.S. tactics in Iraq have led to the deaths of thousands of civilians. "We bomb homes and these people have families, and the U.S. refuses to apologize for these civilian deaths," Blum said. "The absence of concern makes their actions almost equal to a deliberate targeting of civilians."

Until now, the mainstream media have paid virtually no attention to Blum. His books rarely are reviewed. But Noam Chomsky has praised his work, and Blum is right there along with Steve Earle, Jane Fonda and Barbara Ehrenreich as a signer of a full-page ad in the New York Times in the fall of 2002 against the military buildup for war in Iraq.

His publisher, Common Courage Press, Friday could not provide estimates of his sales. Blum says "Rogue State" and "Killing Hope" together have sold more than 100,000 copies, plus an additional 50,000 in a dozen foreign languages. He said he supports himself with his writing and speaking engagements on college campuses.

The son of Polish immigrants, Blum said he studied accounting in college, then landed a low-level computer-related position at the State Department in the mid-1960s. An anti-communist with dreams of becoming a foreign service officer, he said he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War, so he resigned from State and helped found the Washington Free Press, an underground paper. Separated from his German wife, with whom he said he is on good terms, and the father of a 24-year-old son, he lives alone and writes at home.

"He's an alternative journalist, a researcher type," said Smith, who uses Blum's work as a reference when he wants to find, say, a list of dictators the United States has supported in Latin America and the Middle East. "What Bill Blum has basically done is what a historian does, which is to compile the available record and organize it in a way that is useful."

Blum said his life's mission has been this: "If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It's causing so much suffering around the world."

And if he is happy to accept bin Laden's plug, he certainly doesn't want to meet his terrorist fan.

"If he would contact me," said Blum, "then I would be scared."