New al-Qaida video out
CAIRO, Egypt – A videotape posted on the Internet late Sunday, purportedly by al-Qaida, showed previously unseen footage of a smiling Osama bin Laden and other commanders in a mountain camp apparently planning the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
The 55-minute documentary-style retrospective of the five years since the attacks was unusually long and sophisticated in its production quality compared to previous al-Qaida videos. The footage – with English subtitles – surfaced on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the attacks, on a Web site that frequently airs messages from bin Laden’s terror network.
“Planning for Sept. 11 did not take place behind computer monitors or radar screens, nor inside military command and control centers, but was surrounded with divine protection in an atmosphere brimming with brotherliness … and love for sacrificing life,” an unidentified narrator said.
The tape showed bin Laden meeting with colleagues in a mountain camp thought to be in Afghanistan as well as clips of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney defending his old job at the oil company Halliburton and President Bush at his inauguration.
Excerpts of the footage aired on Al-Jazeera television on Thursday, and al-Qaida had said it would later release the full video on the Internet. The video released Sunday was stamped with the emblem of As-Sahab, al-Qaida’s media branch.
It included the last testament of two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Wail al-Shehri and Hamza al-Ghamdi, and showed bin Laden strolling in the camp, greeting followers.
“Among the devout group which responded to the order of Allah and order of his messenger were the heroes of Sept. 11, who wrote with the ink of their blood the greatest pages of modern history,” the narrator said, referring to the hijackers who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
Al-Shehri and al-Ghamdi were each shown speaking to the camera, their image superimposed over background pictures of the crumbling World Trade Center towers and the burning Pentagon, as well as a model of a passenger jet.
They both spoke of how Muslims must stand up to fight back against the West.
“If jihad now is not an obligation (on Muslims), when will it be?” said al-Shehri, pointing to attacks on Muslims in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya.
“If we are content with being humiliated and inclined to comfort, the tooth of the enemy will stretch from Jerusalem to Mecca, and then everyone will regret on a day when regret is of no use,” al-Ghamdi said.
The two videotaped testimonies had never been seen before this release.
Al-Shehri was on American Airlines Flight 11, which was the first to hit the World Trade Center. Al-Ghamdi was on United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the second tower.
In the footage, bin Laden wore a dark robe and white headdress, and was shown sitting alongside his former lieutenant Mohammed Atef and Ramzi Binalshibh, another suspected planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001. Binalshibh was captured four years ago in Pakistan and is currently in U.S. custody, and last week President Bush announced plans to put him on military trial.
Bin Laden was shown expressing his appreciation for the Taliban, the Islamic regime that ran Afghanistan and gave refuge to al-Qaida until the U.S.-led invasion toppled them in late 2001.
The footage was the fourth in a series of long videos that al-Qaida has put out to memorialize the attacks, said Ben Venzke, head of IntelCenter, a private U.S. company that monitors militant message traffic and provides counterterrorism intelligence services for the American government.
The previous ones were issued in April and September 2002 and September 2003, each showing footage from the planning of the suicide attacks and hijackers’ last testimonies, Venzke said Thursday, when the excerpts aired on al-Jazeera.