Osama bin Laden evades capture
After some tough talk on Pakistan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says some people in its government are aware of the whereabouts of elusive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Omar.
Edited by John Stokes
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Numerous audio and video statements purporting to be from Bin Laden have been released, but their authenticity has been continually questioned.
The veracity of all of the videos is questioned by David Ray Griffin, a former theology professor and member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, which also questions mainstream accounts of the attack on the World Trade Centre.
“None of them can be proven to be authentic,” he says. “At least three of them can be shown to be almost certainly fake.
“And if somebody is faking Bin Laden videos, then that leads to the suspicion that all the videos and audio tapes have been faked.”
His first example is a video released by the US Department of Defense in December 2001. In it, Bin Laden confesses to 9/11, yet Mr Griffin points out that al-Qaeda has only rarely admitted responsibility for terrorist attacks.
He also maintains that the Bin Laden figure looks very different to previous footage – fatter, with shorter fingers, and that he is even writing with the wrong hand.
Most of Bin Laden’s statements are audio only. Only two that show Bin Laden speaking have been issued since 2001.
Griffin claims both are fakes.
He argues that a video released in October 2004 – just days before the presidential election – lacks the religious rhetoric contained in previous statements.
This video, he says, helped George W Bush secure a second term.
But it is the last video, released in September 2007, that has attracted most attention.
Mr Griffin calls it “Blackbeard: the terrorist tape”. Bin Laden’s trademark grey beard has been replaced with a neat, jet-black beard, and there are a number of frames in the video, where Bin Laden carries on speaking but the picture of him freezes.
One former CIA agent also questions its authenticity. Robert Baer dismisses the suggestion of a conspiracy by Western intelligence but thinks that al-Qaeda may have faked the video.
“[al-Qaeda has] an interest in manipulating it to look like current tapes,” he says. “You can digitally manipulate voice to say anything. You can change months, years, you can tape vowels and syllables and put it into a recording and change it.”
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