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Bin Laden, Resurfacing in Audio Recordings, Urges Aid for Pakistan Flood Victims
2010-10-03 08:05:39.508 GMT
Bin Laden, Resurfacing in Audio Recordings, Urges Aid for
Pakistan Flood Victims
By SCOTT SHANE; Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from
Washington.
Oct. 3 (New York Times) -- It was an odd call for compassion
from a terrorist who has proudly claimed responsibility for mass
murder and who Western intelligence agencies say is still active
in plotting terrorist attacks.
But two new audio recordings from Osama bin Laden released
on Friday and Saturday, urging help for victims of floods he said
were produced by climate change, were only the latest of his
wide-ranging, idiosyncratic commentaries on current events.
"We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work
because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in
modern times," Mr. bin Laden said, in the first of the messages
posted to jihadist Web sites. He recalled his own experience with
farming in Sudan, called for creating a "unique relief agency,"
and described watching a father in Pakistan holding his two young
children above chest-high flood water, according to a translation
by the private SITE Intelligence Group in Washington.
In Saturday's release, Mr. bin Laden, who trained as an
engineer, mused about the cost and materials for embankments to
control flooding and chastised wealthy Muslim countries for not
doing more to help Pakistanis.
The recordings, in which he said little about his usual
Western enemies, were accompanied by video images of disasters
and a smiling portrait of Mr. bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda.
Since escaping American troops invading Afghanistan in late
2001, Mr. bin Laden, 53, has issued some 30 messages, in audio,
video or electronic text. Intelligence officials believe they are
passed from hand to hand repeatedly to obscure any trail back to
his hiding place, presumed to be in the border regions of
Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The pronouncements sometimes brag of past plots or warn of
new ones, and most attract only fleeting media attention. His
less menacing comments, like the latest calling for disaster
relief, appear intended to show that his concerns extend beyond
scheming violence against those he sees as enemies of Islam.
"After 9/11 he came to see himself as a world leader," said
Steven N. Simon, an expert on terrorism at the Council on Foreign
Relations. "He thinks he can speak from a kind of Olympian
stance. Plus, every time he pops up it implies a poke in the eye
to the United States," where three presidents have vowed, and
failed, to capture or kill him.
Analysts study the rambling messages for clues to his
whereabouts, and the releases give clues about what Mr. bin Laden
is reading and thinking.
Wherever he is hiding, he follows the news closely. A 2007
message carped that Democratic control of Congress had not ended
the war in Iraq (he blamed "big corporations"), complained that
the Bush administration was not moving against global warming and
commended the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In eight messages last year, he remarked on the tensions
between Georgia and Russia, recommended Jimmy Carter's book
supporting Palestinian rights and cited two American professors'
book criticizing the pro-Israel lobby.
His mention of a book said to be by a former Central
Intelligence Agency officer that Mr. bin Laden called "The
Apology of a Hired Killer" set off a guessing game -- including
at the C.I.A. -- for which of several books with similar titles
he might have in mind.
This year, a January message discussed climate change, even
referring by last name to James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist who
has warned of global warming. In March, in a brief statement
directed to Americans, he warned that executing Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed and other prisoners accused of planning the Sept. 11
attacks would prompt Al Qaeda to kill any Americans in its
custody.
Lawrence Wright, who studied Mr. bin Laden for his book "The
Looming Tower," said the pronouncements on climate, irrigation
and agriculture in the latest recordings reflected Mr. bin
Laden's work as an avid farmer in Sudan in the early 1990s.
"He had a seed laboratory," Mr. Wright said. "He went around
Khartoum showing off his sunflowers and saying they should be in
the Guinness Book of World Records."
But he added: "It's a little galling to hear bin Laden
lecturing on flood relief when Al Qaeda has never done any
socially constructive work, but has only sowed chaos."
Nearly a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. bin Laden
remains a potent symbolic figure. But American officials believe,
based on intercepted communications from second- and third-tier
Qaeda operatives, that he also still helps shape Al Qaeda's
strategy.
The officials, who spoke about the classified intelligence
on the condition of anonymity, said he might have encouraged a
plan for attacks in European cities modeled after the ones on
Mumbai, India, in 2008.
"There's reason to believe that bin Laden has become more
active in encouraging his terrorist associates in Pakistan, as
well as Qaeda affiliates in other parts of the world, to step up
their attacks against Western targets," one American official
said. "He's delivered that message to them."
Mr. bin Laden has occasionally taunted President Obama, who
had vowed during his presidential campaign: "We will kill bin
Laden." As president, keenly aware that intelligence agencies
have few clues to the Qaeda leader's whereabouts, Mr. Obama has
not publicly repeated the pledge.
Still, finding Mr. bin Laden remains a top American goal,
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan,
insisted in August on the NBC news program "Meet the Press."
"I think capturing or killing Osama bin Laden is still a
very, very important task for all of those who are engaged in
counterterrorism around the world," General Petraeus said. But he
cautioned: "I don't think anyone knows where Osama bin Laden is."
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