The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [266]
Doubts have been expressed about a videotape released in December 2001, supposedly following its seizure by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. It purports to show bin Laden in conversation the previous month with a visiting sheikh, openly acknowledging his foreknowledge of the 9/11 attack. While there may be other good reasons to doubt the tape’s authenticity, the authors suggest that a couple of points made in support of the forgery theory have no validity.
Skeptics noted that the bin Laden figure wears a ring in the video—supposedly out of character for him, perhaps even contrary to religious law. As noted in another chapter, his wife Najwa had given him a ring as a token of her affection just before leaving Afghanistan on the eve of 9/11. He is, moreover, shown wearing a ring in another video accepted as authentic. Bin Laden’s son Omar, meanwhile, has scotched the argument that a shot of his father writing with his right hand is a giveaway—as the real Osama was supposedly left-handed. “My father,” Omar wrote in 2009, “is right-handed.”
That is not to say that the “confession” videotape is necessarily authentic. Professor Lawrence did not use the transcript of it in his published collection on bin Laden, and has reportedly expressed the view that the tape is indeed a fake. No quotations from it have been used in this book (scheduled: CR, 10; ed. Lawrence, 158–244 & see BBC News, 4/15/04, “The Osama bin Laden Tapes,” Special Report, undated, www.guardian.co.uk; Sukarno: Interim Report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Govt. Ops with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 11/20/55, 74n4, Anthony Summers, Goddess, NY: Macmillan, 1985, 182; Hussein sex/“purporting”: WP, 5/25/10; video 12/01: transcript by Defense Dept. cited www.defenselink.mil, NYT, 12/14/01; not ring: e.g., Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 209, “Farce: Control of the Village Through Terror,” 2/6/07, www.opednews.com; had ring: bin Ladens & Sasson, 282 & see “Confession Video,” www.911myths.com; left-handed: David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden, Gloucestershire, U.K.: Arris, 2009, 30, Bergen, OBL I Know, 335; “right-handed”: bin Ladens & Sasson, 159–; reportedly expressed: Griffin, OBL, 36).
97 “I knew”: Fury, 286;
98 “This was where”: National Geographic, 12/04.
Part IV: PLOTTERS
CHAPTER 17
1 phenomenon: Staff Statement 13, CO, Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 176–, CR, 278;
2 target: James F. Pastor, Security Law & Methods, NY: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006, 522, 539, Barrett & Collins, 107.
3 OBL visit to U.S.: bin Ladens & Sasson, 25–, 302, & see (1981 visit) New Yorker, 12/14/08. Though the best, firsthand source, Najwa is not the first to refer to an early bin Laden visit to America. Kahled Batarfi, a boyhood friend, has spoken of the episode, offering details that to some extent conform with Najwa’s account. Bin Laden’s sometime supervisor at the family construction firm, Walid al-Khatib, said bin Laden made “trips” to America. Allowing for confusion over the date, Khatib’s and Najwa’s recollections may be corroborated by the account of wealthy Saudi businessman Yassin Kadi. Kadi said he met bin Laden in Chicago in 1981, when the future terrorist leader was recruiting engineers for the family business. Khaled Bahaziq, a boyhood friend of bin Laden who knew Azzam, has recalled that Azzam was “lecturing in America in the 1970s.” He certainly visited repeatedly in the 1980s (Batarfi: Bergen, OBL I Know, 22, Coll, Bin Ladens 209–; Khatib: Coll, Bin Ladens, 209–, but see New Yorker, 6/30/09, citing Khatib as referring to visiting “once”; Kadi: NYT, 12/13/08, Bahaziq: Robert Lacey, Inside