Nerd alert: My brother Bob and I have a long-standing competition to identify anonymous celebrity voice-overs on TV ads (and we’re pretty good — picking out Gene Hackman shilling for Lowes is amateur hour), but I don’t claim to ID celeb voices for a living. That’s why I can’t definitively say that the recently released Bin Laden tape isn’t him, but I suspect there’s a decent chance that it just might not be.
Last January, Bin Laden released a 22-minute tape on the eve of the Obama inauguration about everything from Israel to the economic crisis. The long-winded diatribe, replete with OBL’s standard Koranic references, was standard fare from al Qaeda’s chief taco. His tapes of May and March 2008 were also 22 minutes. That’s a far cry from this week’s version, which barely clocks in at 22 words (actually 144, but you get my drift), according to the Middle East Media Research Institute’s transcript.
Second, keep in mind that al Qaeda’s senior leadership has always had its eye on the big prize — the spectacular attack that generates either genuine fear or awe for its daring size, scale, or target. In 1998, they leveled two American embassies simultaneously; in 2000 they struck at the heart of the American military by blowing a massive hole in the side of an American Navy destroyer; and 9/11 speaks for itself. Even AQ’s latest significant attempt at a large-scale operation – the multi-flight Heathrow plot in 2006 – was an impressive feat of imagination. But in this tape, a man claiming to be Bin Laden embraces not a spectacular success that improves upon complex and sickeningly impressive plots, but a complete failure of an attempt that he likely had nothing to do with.
Then again, maybe even notable failures at small operations are enough these days. It’s possible that the combination of a tighter American safety net and the embarrassing overreaction of the pundit class has convinced AQ that small-fry attacks are sufficient to carry AQ’s fundraising and recruiting goals in the current climate. So if this was really OBL on the tape, it would signal a major degradation of AQ’s modus operandi and attack capabilities.
But the irregularity continues to bug me — it doesn’t make sense that Bin Laden would essentially admit al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. That’s why I keep thinking someone might be masquerading as the big man. By tying the Christmas Day attempt to Bin Laden, the real perpetrators of the plot — al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — could gin up money and recruits in its aftermath.
It would be a serious scandal within Islamic extremist circles if the CIA came out in the next 24 hours and declared the tape fake, so I have to imagine that even uppity terrorists aren’t that stupid. Then again, perhaps the CIA should consider floating a trial balloon about the tape’s “questionable authenticity” just to see what sort of reaction it generates.
