Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaida, spoke publicly for the first time about the botched Christmas Day airliner bombing, praising the attempt – but not explicitly taking credit for it – in an audiotape broadcast Sunday that was aimed personally at President Barack Obama.
Bin Laden said that the bombing attempt was a heroic act meant to recall the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. He warned that more strikes against the United States were looming because of American support for what he called Israel’s repression of the Palestinians, one of bin Laden’s recurring themes in his occasional audio-taped anti-West invectives.
“America will never dream of security unless we will have it in reality in Palestine,” bin Laden said. “God willing, our raids on you will continue as long as your support to the Israelis will continue.”
Bin Laden said his statement was “from Osama to Obama.”
The one-minute recording, broadcast by al-Jazeera’s Arabic news channel, was the first time bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border, had issued an audiotape in four months.
White House officials said they could not immediately authenticate the recording, but did not dispute that the voice was bin Laden’s. David Axelrod, a White House senior adviser, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that whatever the source, the message “contains the same hollow justification for the mass slaughter of innocents.”
It was not clear why bin Laden waited nearly a month to say anything about the Dec. 25 bombing attempt on Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, which was carried out by a passenger who sought to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear but was overpowered by other passengers. Federal investigators have said the suspect, a 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, received training and the explosives in Yemen.
“The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes” of Sept. 11, bin Laden said. American and Yemeni intelligence analysts said that they believed the veracity of the statement issued Dec. 28 by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate based in Yemen, claiming responsibility for the attack.
Experts on Al-Qaida said Sunday that bin Laden’s statement did not change that assessment, since it did not explicitly claim that he or his closest associates in Pakistan played a role in planning or directing the Christmas attack.
“If you read it carefully, it’s not really a claim of responsibility,” said Steven N. Simon, senior fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations. “He endorses the attack. He valorizes it. He says, ‘You’re going to get more of the same.”‘
Indeed, American intelligence officials have expressed concern that the Yemeni group may have trained other suicide bombers, and Britain last week increased its terrorism threat level in advance of a conference this week in London on aid to Yemen organized by the British government.
The increasing terrorist threat from Yemen prompted Obama to decide to send Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the conference, even though that meant that Clinton would miss Obama’s first State of the Union address, a senior administration official said.
“Prudence dictates we should assume Northwest Flight 253 was a test run for a campaign of attacks,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer now at the Brookings Institution, a research organization. “We are putting more pressure on Al-Qaida, and it plans to hit back in Afghanistan and at home.”
Simon said bin Laden’s statement, which was very brief by bin Laden’s standards, did not suggest that he was merely belatedly claiming responsibility for an attack perceived as at least partly successful, since it penetrated airport security measures that have been greatly enhanced since the 2001 attacks.
Rather, he said, it vividly illustrated the way Al-Qaida had become a franchise, with branches of varying size and strength in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
“A franchise, just like McDonald’s, is supposed to create mutual benefits,” Simon said.
“The benefit for bin Laden is he gets to associate himself with this attack. The benefit for the regional group is it gets to use the Al-Qaida name for fundraising and recruiting.”
In the case of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the franchise relationship may be particularly close, since its current leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, once served as bin Laden’s personal secretary.
Analysts offered varying interpretations of bin Laden’s decision to highlight American support for Israel, as opposed to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq or other grievances, as a motive for attacks. Some said the Qaida leader was simply focusing on an issue with broad popular resonance across the Muslim world. Simon said the remarks might reflect bin Laden’s longstanding desire to create a Palestinian branch of Al-Qaida, a decade-long project that has so far made little progress.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that the recording showed that bin Laden was “still a motivating force for jihadists, Islamist extremists throughout the world.”
He added, “And so we have to stay after him.”
The last audiotape attributed to bin Laden was issued Sept. 25. It urged European nations to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, with a veiled threat of reprisals and an allusion to past bombings in Madrid and London.
The last bin Laden tape directed at the United States was issued Sept. 13, two days after the eighth anniversary of the attacks in New York and Washington. That tape advised how the conflict between Al-Qaida and the United States might come to a close.
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