Bin Laden tells US he ordered Sept 11 attacks

CAIRO, Egypt: Osama bin Laden, addressing the American public four days ahead of presidential elections, said in a video aired yesterday that the United States can avoid another September 11 attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims. Reading a statement, the al-Qaeda leader refrained from threats of new attacks and appealed to Americans. “Your security is not in the hands of (US Democratic presidential candidate John) Kerry, (US president George W) Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands,” bin Laden said. “Each state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security.” Admitting for the first time that he ordered the September 11 attacks, bin Laden said he did so because of injustices against the Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel and the United States. It was the first footage in more than a year of the fugitive al-Qaeda leader, thought to be hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The video, broadcast on Al-Jazeera television, showed bin Laden with a long gray beard, wearing traditional white robes, a turban and a golden cloak, standing behind a table with papers and in front of a plain, brown curtain. He gestured and his hands were steady as he spoke. The Bush administration said yesterday it believed the videotape was authentic and had been made recently. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration did not plan to raise the nation’s threat level for now. “All Americans are united in our strength and resolve to defeat the ideology that bin Laden articulates in this tape,” McClellan said. Al-Jazeera said it broadcast one minute of the five-minute tape. There was no way to determine when the tape was made — but Kerry emerged as the Democratic candidate in the spring. Bin Laden said he wanted to explain why he ordered the suicide airline hijackings that hit the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon so Americans would know how to avoid “another disaster.”

“To the US people, my talk is to you about the best way to avoid another disaster,” he said. “I tell you: security is an important element of human life and free people do not give up their security.” He accused president Bush of misleading Americans by saying the attack was carried out because al-Qaeda “hates freedom.” Bin Laden said his followers have left alone countries that do not threaten Muslims. He said he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed in the siege of the capital. “While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women,” he said. “God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind,” he said.

Bin Laden suggested Bush was slow to react to the September 11 attacks, giving the hijackers more time than they expected. At the time of the attacks, the president was listening to schoolchildren in Florida reading a book, an incident to which bin Laden referred. “It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone,” he said, referring to the number of people who worked at the World Trade Centre. In planning the attacks, bin Laden said he told Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers, that the strikes had to be carried out “within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed.” Instead, he said, his attackers had three times that period. Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar, did not say how it had received the tape. The channel has previously broadcast audio and video tapes from members of al-Qaeda.

The station’s spokesman, Jihad Ali Ballout, said Al-Jazeera aired what was “newsworthy and relevant” and refused to describe the unaired parts, including whether they included any threats. Diaa Rashwan, a Cairo-based expert on extremist Muslim militants, said bin Laden was trying to influence Americans “to give Kerry their votes, not Bush.” If that was bin Laden’s intention, the ploy could backfire. Kerry, whom Bush has attempted to paint as soft on terrorism, is unlikely to benefit from what appears to be praise from bin Laden. Montasser el-Zayat, a lawyer who defends Islamic radicals, said the video amounted to an “unprecedented attack on Bush at a very critical time, before the US elections,” and also served as proof bin Laden was alive and at large. Bin Laden’s exact whereabouts are unknown, but he is believed to be somewhere in the mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. On Web sites devoted to extremist Muslim comment, contributors reacted with glee to the tape, saying it was proof bin Laden was alive and a “slap” at America.

The image of bin Laden reading a statement was dramatically different from the few other videos of the al-Qaeda leader that have emerged since the September 11 attacks. In the last videotape, issued September 10 2003, bin Laden is seen walking through rocky terrain with his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, both carrying automatic rifles. In a taped message issued at the same time, bin Laden praises the “great damage to the enemy” on Sept 11 and mentions five hijackers by name. In December 2001, the Pentagon released a videotape in which bin Laden is shown at a dinner with associates in Afghanistan on Nov 9 2001, saying the destruction of the Sept 11 attacks exceeded even his “optimistic” calculations. But in none of his previous messages, audio or video, did bin Laden directly state that he ordered the attacks. The last audiotape purportedly from bin Laden came in April. The speaker on the tape, which CIA analysts said was likely the al-Qaeda leader, offered a truce to European nations if they pull troops out of Muslim countries. The tape referred to the March 22 assassination by Israel of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin.