A speaker believed to be al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden (above, in an undated photo) states in a recently recorded message that that "The [BushCheneyCorp's] occupation of Iraq is the beginning of the full occupation of the other Gulf states" for their oil. He's probably right.
Osama's probably right
Now that its other Middle Eastern bogeyman is in custody, having been captured from his "spider hole" last month, Osama bin Laden is the Bush regime's main Middle Eastern bogeyman, and he apparently has resurfaced, just in time for Election Year 2004, too.
Reports The Associated Press:
A speaker believed to be Osama bin Laden said on an audiotape that the U.S.-led war in Iraq was the beginning of the "occupation" of Gulf states for their oil and called on Muslims to keep fighting a holy war in the Middle East.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said [today] that a technical analysis showed the speaker on the tape was probably bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaida terror network....
The voice on the audiotape, broadcast Sunday on the Al-Jazeera satellite channel, referred to recent events, including the Dec. 13 capture of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and peace initiatives between Israel and the Palestinians.
The speaker urged Muslims to "continue the jihad to check the conspiracies that are hatched against the Islamic nation"....
"My message is to incite you against the conspiracies, especially those uncovered by the occupation of the crusaders in Baghdad under the pretext of weapons of mass destruction, and also the situation in (Jerusalem) under the deceptions of the road map and the Geneva initiative," the speaker said.
A Mideast peace plan dubbed the Geneva Accord was launched Dec. 1 by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. The phrase "road map" refers to a U.S.-backed plan for a Palestinian state by 2005.
Ibrahim Hilal, Al-Jazeera's editor-in-chief, told The Associated Press the network received the message Sunday. However, he declined to reveal how it was delivered....
The AP also reports that the speaker believed to be bin Laden encouraged Muslims to "liberate the Islamic world from the military occupation of the Crusaders" and said that "The occupation of Iraq is the beginning of the full occupation of the other Gulf states.... The Gulf is the key for control of the world in the point of view of the big powers because of the presence of the biggest deposits of oil."
While I certainly don't agree with the tactics that Middle Eastern terrorists have used -- the images of people jumping to their deaths in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001 are burned into my brain -- bin Laden is right about the bogus Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for which the Bush regime has not and probably never will be held to account, and he's right about BushCheneyCorp's and its subsidiaries' Iraqi oil grab and the billions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars that come with it. (I read in a column -- I can't remember whose -- that the Bush regime dubbed its illegal, immoral, imperialistic and unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Freedom" instead of "Operation Iraqi Liberation" because the latter spells out what it's all about: O-I-L.)
Further, the United States -- self-appointed global cop -- has no business whatsoever in the Middle East and should expect Middle Easterners to defend their homeland against invaders just as the United States defends its homeland, to the point that it created a superfluous federal department with that charge, complete with risible color-coded terrorist threat alerts.
It's a common, interesting American belief that other peoples have no business defending themselves from U.S. encroachment, just as early Americans believed that the Native Americans should not have defended themselves from the creeping colonization of the continent by Anglos. (Those nasty, no-good Native Americans just attacked those well-meaning, innocent Anglo settlers who were displacing them from their lands and decimating their peoples.)
A more recent example of this American phenomenon is that shortly after the United States illegally, immorally, imperialistically and unprovokedly invaded Iraq in March, I recall clearly that one of the major television network news reporters reported from Iraq that Iraqi soldiers were "attacking" American soldiers who had just invaded Iraq. The Iraqi soldiers weren't defending themselves from an unprovoked attack by Americans; those nasty, no-good Iraqis were just attacking the morally superior United States' soldiers for no good cause!
Clearly, the common American belief is that other nations are not to defend themselves, which is also evidenced by the fact that the United States wishes to dictate which nations will have nuclear arms and which nations will not. The United States may have nuclear arms because, of course, it is morally superior and would never misuse such awesome weapons of mass destruction.
(The fact that the United States remains the only nation in the history of the world that has dropped nuclear bombs on another nation is dismissed with the conventional "wisdom" that it was necessary to kill tens of thousands of Japanese civilians to end World War II. Our every motive and action is pure and just, and everything we do is in the best interests of the world. Because hey, we're the good guys.)
Of course, the United States wouldn't need a Department of Homeland Security if it would just listen to what Muslim Middle Easterners (yes, even the Osama bin Ladens -- especially the Osama bin Ladens!) have to say, and, for once, once in its 225-plus-year history, try to see things from an another people's point of view -- and to be the Christian nation that it claims to be and do unto others only as it would have others do unto it.
11:41:50 PM 
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