Grim's Hall

Where are our foes?

Pro-Qaeda website Jihad Unspun has an answer: they're on videotape.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahari have released a brand new video tape on the eve of the anniversary of 911 which appears to be specifically timed to coincide with the memorial date.

But there is an interesting twist, Reuters reports:

A leading French terrorism expert cautioned Thursday against taking the latest Osama bin Laden video at face value, saying it was largely an edited collection of old footage and sound tracks that have already been aired. . . . Roland Jacquard, head of the Paris-based International Observatory on Terrorism, told French radio that the tape was above all a show of defiance on the eve of the September 11 anniversary by al Qaeda number two al-Zawahri.

"We have to be extremely prudent about this message," Jacquard told Europe 1 radio.

"Given that Osama bin Laden has not appeared on a video cassette for many months it's pretty incomprehensible that in the only video cassette where he appears beside Ayman al-Zawahri he doesn't speak, he just allows the latter to speak.

"The voice of bin Laden we hear in the background, thanking the World Trade Center plane hijackers, is exactly the same message that was broadcast in a video cassette by Al Jazeera on 26 December 2001," he said.

Al-Zawahri's message was also old and had been broadcast by Dubai's Al Arabiya network on August 3, Jacquard said.