Massoud A Derhally* finds only absurdity in Bin Laden's 'message' to the American people Well there you have it. Osama Bin Laden has acknowledged responsibility for the devastating attacks of 11 September 2001. In the newly released Al-Jazeera video Bin Laden provides insight into his involvement in the planning of the 11 September attacks, saying he instructed Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 20 hijackers, to carry out the attacks within a time frame of 20 minutes. He then mocks President George Bush. "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," said Bin Laden, referring to the number of people working at the World Trade Center towers. Such a revelation will leave advocates of conspiracy theories, in the Middle East and around the world, gasping as they try to come to terms with facts they have long had difficulty believing. But it was also designed to implicate Bush, to suggest that, through his poor leadership and negligence, he allowed more people to perish. Perhaps Bin Laden has either watched, or read about, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 : certainly his comments about Bush talking to a young girl in a classroom whilst the attacks were underway suggests as much. Comfortable and collected, speaking with an ironically soothing voice, Bin Laden abandoned his usual calls to Jihad, his urging of Muslims to kill Americans and their supporters. He instead tried, if that is what one can call it, to reach out to the American people -- rationalising his hideous attack against the United States three years ago. "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or Al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands," Bin Laden said, addressing the American people. "Any state that does not mess with our security has naturally guaranteed its own security." There is no way to rationalise the slaughtering of thousands of innocent lives -- and clearly the tape is an attempt by Bin Laden to try and sway American foreign policy. More importantly, it also conveys the contradictory and devious nature of Bin Laden. If the message here is that American people should feel at ease and are not at fault, then why did Bin Laden, in the aftermath of 11 September, say that America will never be safe, and that Americans would never know security? It seems that the Sheikh, as he is called by some of his admirers, has been going through a period of introspection. The Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 appears to have played a role in spreading venom in the psyche of Bin Laden. "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... God knows it had not occurred to us to attack the towers until after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance towards our people in Palestine and Lebanon..." Notice here a clear shift in strategy. Bin Laden is no longer talking about ejecting the infidels from the Arabian peninsula. He isn't attacking any particular Arab leader. If Lebanon had such a profound impact, if it played such a salient role in shaping his views and hatred of America why did he wait until 2001 to launch a large-scale attack on the United States? He would have had more support in waging an all out guerrilla war in Lebanon against Israel's invading army. But Bin Laden is no Che Guevara. He is not Yasser Arafat or Gamal Abdel-Nasser. He is what people in the intelligence community call a rogue agent -- a rogue agent who is also a multidimensional psychopath with a self-prophesied mission to instill fear, terror and hatred in the hearts of human beings. * The writer is a freelance journalist, former correspondent of and deputy editor of Dubai-based Arabian Business magazine.
