TRANSCRIPT OF USAMA BIN LADEN VIDEO TAPE
(Transcript and annotations independently prepared by George Michael, translator, Diplomatic Language Services; and Dr. Kassem M. Wahba, Arabic language program coordinator, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. They collaborated on their translation and compared it with translations done by the U.S. government for consistency. There were no inconsistencies in the translations.)
In mid-November, Usama Bin Laden spoke to a room of supporters, possibly in Qandahar, Afghanistan. These comments were video taped with the knowledge of Bin Laden and all present.
Note: The tape is approximately one hour long and contains three different segments: an original taping of a visit by some people to the site of the downed U.S. helicopter in Ghazni province (approximately 12 minutes long); and two segments documenting a courtesy visit by Bin Laden and his lieutenants to an unidentified Shaykh, who appears crippled from the waist down. The visit apparently takes place at a guesthouse in Qandahar. The sequence of the events is reversed on the tape- the end of his visit is in the beginning of the tape with the helicopter site visit in the middle and the start of the Usama bin Laden visit beginning approximately 39 minutes into the tape. The tape is transcribed below according to the proper sequence of events.Due to the quality of the original tape, it is NOT a verbatim transcript of every word spoken during the meeting, but does convey the messages and information flow.
EDITOR'S NOTE: 39 minutes into tape (actually 37 minutes-Mac), first segment of the bin Laden meeting, begins after footage of helicopter site visit. (source)
Well, there is something strange about the video being out of sequence. Analogue tape (as in a VHS tape) cannot be edited to the point that you can relocate sections to be out of sequence with the analogue camcorder you are shooting with. I assume you would have to resplice the tape, which is an almost impossible task, since this is not 8 mm film where you can see the tiny images. To edit tape sequences, you have to convert to digital somehow.
So how is it that the middle of bin Laden's meeting begins the tape and the start of his meeting ends it, with a trek to a helicopter crash site in between? That would be like you or I recording the end of a birthday party at the beginning of the tape (with an analogue tape camcorder), going to the zoo, and then recording the party's start afterwards. You would need a time machine to do this, or a video-editing lab. Are we to assume that this safe-house had such a lab? The Pentagon, by the way, released the tape as they said they found it, out of sequence, while NPR used its high-tech equipment to digitally rectify the sequence for its online site. (see the NPR version or Pentagon version)
However, there is another explanation as to this strange out of sorts sequence, the argument that the cameraman simply started taping at the end of the footage of a crashed helicopter, ran out of tape and consequently reran the tape to the beginning and picked up taping the meeting again. That sounds like a very obvious explanation. But there is a problem with this too. Maher Osseiran has done extensive research on this tape, analyzing it frame by frame and following up on the times and places, etc., and has this to say about the crash:
..... both the Bin Laden tape and an Al-Jazeerah tape show the kids handling the wreckage of the Special Forces helicopter that went down in bad weather on November 2, 2001, less than half a mile from a small village in Ghazni province; a fact not disputed by the Pentagon. (source)
(source)
I won't get into Ghazni and the kids yet, but Maher's rather emphatic statement that the helicopter on the tape crashed on November 2 leads to another problem. The Pentagon didn't say exactly when the tape was shot, but the tape itself bore a label of November 9, yet Maher argues that this time stamp had to have been entered wrong or, I would add, jimmied with somehow? Was the date actually really earlier? Maher does a careful analysis of this question.
First, Maher points out that the sheikh, whom he identifies as Khaled Al-Harbi, states that he was en route to bin Laden during a full moon:
In the transcript, the visiting sheikh to whom Bin Laden confessed is reported to have said: "We came from Kabul..... We asked the driver to take us, it was a night with a full moon, thanks be to Allah." On the tape itself, the sheikh actually infers prominent moon, which I interpret as 3 to 4 days before and after a full moon. He is later reported to have said: "Allah has bestowed on us...honor on us...and he will give us blessing and more victory during this holy month of Ramadan." In the tape he never uses the word Ramadan, he actually says: ".......victory during this Moubarak (meaning blessed) month and the month after." The translators decided to interpret "Moubarak month" as Ramadan since the word Moubarak is usually used to describe the month of Ramadan and totally omitted the fact that he said: "and the month after".
If Ramadan were the month the taping took place, Ramadan in 2001 starts like every other Ramadan with a new moon, as black as the night can get, and was on Nov. 16, while a full moon is not until Nov. 30, which means a prominent moon is between Nov. 26 and Dec. 4. The taping could not have happened during a prominent moon in the month of Ramadan since Kabul, the town the sheikh traveled through, had fallen on Nov. 12, Jalalabad, where it was found, on Nov.14, and Kandahar, where supposedly it was taped, was surrounded by anti-Taliban forces during that period and fell towards the end of it.
Now that we have established that the taping could not have taken place during Ramadan and that the reported date stamp of Nov. 9 on the tape could have been a programming error on the part of the camera operator, we need to go back in time and examine the previous periods of a prominent moon which are: Oct. 27 through Nov. 4, and, Sept. 28 through Oct. 6.
Going back to the transcript released by the Pentagon we find no mention of carpet bombings, coalition operations, or travel difficulties due to the military operations that officially started on Oct 6, 2001. I find it incredible that, over a period of 40 minutes of tape, there was no mention of military activities by the coalition or their effects on travel, considering the magnitude of such activities and the chattiness of the sheikh, which puts the period of Oct. 27 through Nov. 4 in doubt.
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