Captain’s Quarters questions the editing of released
excerpts of the most recent Osama bin Laden tape:
This is what ran in the original piece by Maamoun Youssef, which I have also cached here:
The terror mastermind did indicate that two suspects had links to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon:
“All the prisoners to date have no connection to the Sept. 11 events or knew anything about them, except for two of the
brothers,” bin Laden said [emphasis mine -- CE]. But he did not provide names or elaborate further and it wasn’t possible
to determine if or where they were held.However, that passage cannot be found in the AP excerpts. It does, however, include this:
“And then I call to memory my brothers the prisoners in Guantanamo - may Allah free them all - and I state the fact,
about which I also am certain, that all the prisoners of Guantanamo, who were captured in 2001 and the first half of 2002 and who
number in the hundreds, have no connection whatsoever to the events of September 11th…”Note the strategic appearance of the ellipses at the end of the quote in the later article. The AP wants to cut off Osama before
he admits that Gitmo holds two accessories to the 9/11 attacks. One would think that a news organization might have found that
somewhat, oh, newsworthy.
While I think it’s entirely likely that the AP is guilty of shoddy reporting, I fear that Captains Quarters may be erroneously
elevating shoddiness to the level of deception here. Another collection of excerpts can be found at Islam-Online. In it, there appears to be a
distinction made between prisoners at Gitmo, and prisoners in general. At the very least, the “no prisoner” and “none but two”
appear to come from two different portions of the tape.
Whether this is imprecision on Osama’s part, an indication that the U.S. captured two 9/11 conspirators but is not holding them at
Gitmo, or a deception intended to taunt the U.S…. I can’t really say.