Al-Qaeda Run PR For Bush Before Union Speech

Two days before State of the Union and for second year running, al-Zawahiri vindicates Bush administration claim that critics of Iraq escalation are siding with America's enemies

Paul Joseph Watson
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Prison Planet

Two days before President Bush's State of the Union speech, Al-Qaeda have graciously popped up once again to launch a public relations stunt that vindicates the administration's claim that opponents of the Iraq troop surge are siding with America's enemies.

Al-Qaeda's "deputy leader" Ayman al-Zawahiri appeared in a video tape Monday in which he mocked Bush's troop surge, claiming it would make no difference in Iraq even if Bush sent as many as 100,000 more troops.

"The message is the first apparent reaction by al-Qaeda to Mr Bush's planned "surge" in Iraq," reports the BBC.

How thankful the administration must be for al-Zawahiri's best efforts to tarnish critics of Bush's escalating catastrophe in Iraq, especially Dick Cheney and Tony Snow, who were criticized last week for comparing surge skeptics to Al-Qaeda sympathizers.

"It's probably worth asking," Snow said during a White House briefing, "what message does Congress intend to give, and who does it think the audience is? Is the audience merely the President? Is it the voting American public? Or in an age of instant communication, is it also Al Qaeda?"

Cheney characterized lawmaker's opposition to the plan to send over 20,000 more troops into the meat grinder as "just what America's terrorist enemies are counting on," during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.

Now that al-Zawahiri has publicly aligned himself with escalation dissenters in scoffing at Bush's surge plan, the administration has all the ammunition it needs to tar and feather war critics with the charge of "aiding the enemy," during Bush's address to the nation tonight.

Al-Qaeda have a long and fruitful history of miraculously releasing video tapes at the most opportune political time for the Bush administration.

Both Kerry and Bush attributed the President's 2004 re-election to Osama Bin Laden's appearance in a video tape just days before the vote.

Veteran newsman Walter Cronkite mused that the whole farce was a Karl Rove orchestrated set-up.

On the eve of the Iraq war and during Colin Powell's infamous presentation to the UN, an audio tape in which bin Laden claimed he was allied with Saddam Hussein surfaced, a gift-wrapped present for the Neo-Cons who had consistently been proven wrong in their assertion that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11.

Even more telling is the fact that al-Zawahiri appeared right on cue around this same exact time last year, days before the State of the Union, to slam Bush as a "butcher" and a "failure." His timing is impeccable! Right when Bush needs to reinforce the fear of the shadowy enemy to mute his critics, al-Zawahiri can be relied on to come up with the goods!

Previous tapes which featured Ayman al-Zawahiri were found to be cobbled together from old footage but that doesn't bother a lapdog media well versed in manufacturing consent and never offering retractions when said tapes turn out to be questionable frauds.

In our previous groundbreaking expose, we unveiled the ties between Intelcenter, a group that regularly 'obtains' Al-Qaeda tapes and the Pentagon. Intelcenter is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, which was staffed by a senior military psy-op intelligence officer, Jim Melnick, who has worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld.

Intelcenter were behind the October 2006 release of the "laughing hijackers" tape that showed Mohammad Atta and Ziad Jarrah allegedly attending a 2000 Al-Qaeda meeting and reading their last will and testament.

Segments of the video that were interspersed with footage of the "laughing hijackers," Jarrah and Atta, showing Bin Laden giving a speech to an audience in Afghanistan on January 8 2000, were culled from what terror experts described as surveillance footage taken by a "security agency."

News reports at the time contained the admission that the U.S. government had been in possession of the footage since 2002, while others said it was found when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and yet it was still bizarrely reported that the tape, bearing all the hallmarks of having been filmed and edited by undercover US intelligence and having admittedly been in US possession for five years, was released over the weekend of September 31/October 1 by Al-Qaeda.

The video also contained segments that were first broadcast in a British documentary called The Road to Guantanamo, which was originally aired in March 2006. The context of the corresponding scene in the dramatized documentary featured U.S. interrogators attempting to coerce Gitmo detainees into confessing Al-Qaeda membership by showing them fake videos where their likeness had been computer generated to appear as if they were in attendance during Bin Laden's January 8 2000 speech.

We are told that the new tape was "intercepted" by an organization called the SITE Institute, which claims to investigate links between different terrorist groups and forwards the information to the government. Its staff have close ties with the U.S. intelligence apparatus, having consulted with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the FBI.

Next time Bush faces the nation during a time of heightened criticism, expect one of the Al-Qaeda boys to make his ride that little bit smoother by associating dissent against the war with terrorism. Though it seems the impact of such scams is registering less and less with the American people, the public relations gurus behind the Bush administration cannot seem to curb their addiction for staged Al-Qaeda tapes. Until the mainstream media do their job and start asking serious questions, expect the fraud to repeat ad infinitum.