Another Bin Laden video coming.
The message is irrelevant. Who cares what a mass murderer has to say, except insofar as it helps apprehend him and convict him?
Besides, the medium is the message. Will this video will be real, or another fake?
Will Bin Laden's image be frozen whenever he refers to current events?
Update: It's an audiotape. Bo-r-r-r-ing!
So we're either dealing with a vocal imitator of Bin Laden or the mass murderer himself -- afraid to show his scraggly face.
Here's a gem from the AP story on the audiotape:
U.S. counterterrorism authorities were studying the content and authenticity of the audiotape. However, officials often note that no one has faked a bin Laden recording in the past.
"No one has faked a bin Laden recording in the past" is either a made up quote or complete propaganda. It is utter nonsense to state that no one has faked a Bin Laden recording in the past. Many of the past audio recordings were of poor quality, and the videos were spliced in such a suspicious manner that a vocal imitator's voice could easily have been spliced together with old footage of Bin Laden.
There is, in fact, disagreement about the authenticity of prior Bin Laden audiotapes:
Spectrographic analysis remains controversial. It is permissible as evidence in 35 of 50 states, and has a status—both in the eyes of the law and of professionals—akin to that of polygraphy or lie detection; although not perfectly reliable, it can be a helpful tool for screening suspects. Controversy over spectrographic analysis came to the forefront in November, 2002, when the Arabic news station al Jazeera released a recording of an alleged telephone call from bin Laden.
Analysts working for the U.S. Central Intelligence and National Security agencies studied, and verified the authenticity of, the tape, in which the voice spoke of recent terrorist actions and promised to unleash more attacks. At the Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland, however, researchers were not as certain. Using biometric software, they judged it a 55%–60% likelihood that the tape was not genuine.
None of this room for doubt about the authenticity of recent Bin Laden video and audio recordings -- which may bear on the critical question of whether Bin Laden is even still alive (or his whereabouts if he is alive) -- is being reported by the major broadcast and print media. They are continuing to commit journalistic malpractice. No wonder their viewers and readers are hemorrhaging to the internet.
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