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CounterPunch
November
15, 2002
bin
Laden: He's Back!
Has He Taken Refuge in Saudi Arabia?
by ROBERT FISK
The
Independent
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.
Yesterday's
Features
William Hughes
The Mad
World of A.M. Rosenthal
Robert Fisk
War Dance
with Saddam
Ron Lare
Getting 9/11-Baited
War and a Union Election
Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
Why
Newsweek is Bad for Kids
Jerre Skog
When Big Biz Has Taken Over Everything
The Brave New Nightmare of GATS
Pierre Tristam
Deferral by Default
Lee Sustar
Dockworkers in the Dark
Anis Shivani
"The Doctors' Vote Is Now Up for Grabs"
The Fading Democratic Delusion
Alexander Cockburn
The Anti-War Movement and Its Critics
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- The Shafts of Death: Bush, Coal Mines, and Death
in the Tunnels;
- Speak Memory!: Carter and the Draft;
- Daniel Pipes' World: Smearing Pro-Arab Academics;
- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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