In Video Message, Bin Laden Issues Warning to U.S

By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: October 30, 2004

ASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - In a new videotape televised Friday, Osama bin Laden made a direct, formal address to the American people, saying that the best way for Americans to avoid a repeat of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, was to stop threatening Muslims' security.

The videotape of the leader of Al Qaeda was the first to surface in more than a year. In contrast to his haggard appearance in his last videotaped message televised on Sept. 10, 2003, Mr. bin Laden appeared vigorous and healthy, more than three years after the United States began the intense manhunt that he has so far evaded.

Mr. bin Laden did not explicitly threaten any new attacks in an excerpt of the videotape, first broadcast on Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite network. But the appearance of the tape four days before Election Day injected Al Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden into a presidential campaign in which the threat posed by terrorism has weighed heavily.

Though Mr. bin Laden's statement referred to President Bush and Senator John Kerry by name, he said the prospect of a future terrorist attack would depend not on the outcome of the election but on concrete actions taken by the United States.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or Al Qaeda; your security is in your own hands," Mr. bin Laden said. He added: "Any state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security." Gesturing emphatically at times with his hands, the Qaeda leader wore a long gray beard, traditional white robes, a golden cloak and a turban. He gazed directly into the camera as he delivered the address, which he appeared to be reading from a text behind a lectern in front of a plain brown backdrop.

"Oh, American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results," he said. He added: "Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you, and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened."

The appeal to Americans to reconsider United States policy toward Muslims echoed the theme of Mr. bin Laden's last public message, an audiotape in April that offered a truce to European nations if they pulled troops out of Islamic countries.

American intelligence officials, who indicated that they had obtained access to the entire videotape, said it appeared to have been made recently, possibly as recently as last Sunday, the date that appeared in Arabic in script superimposed on part of the tape. American intelligence and law enforcement officials said an analysis by the C.I.A. had established with "a high degree of confidence" that the tape was authentic. They offered no other immediate assessment of the videotape.

A senior State Department official said the United States had sought unsuccessfully to persuade Al Jazeera not to show the videotape, consistent with past efforts to deny a podium to terrorist threats.

The channel rebuffed the American request, the official said, but a spokesman for Al Jazeera said it had televised just one minute of a five-minute tape.

American officials said they would try to determine whether the address contained hidden messages or clues about a possible future attack against the United States, but they said it was too early to know.

A spokesman for Al Jazeera would not comment on what the portions of the videotape not televised by the network had contained. American intelligence officials said they saw nothing even in the part of the tape that was not televised that conveyed an explicit threat.

It was unclear exactly when and where the videotape was made, but it referred to recent events like the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The American authorities have long believed that Mr. bin Laden had been hiding out in a remote region along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The tape surfaced a day after ABC News broadcast a threatening taped message from a man in traditional Arab dress who, speaking English with an American accent, identified himself as a follower of Mr. bin Laden. American intelligence officials have said they have no information linking those warnings to a specific threat.

The new tape followed five months of warnings by law enforcement and homeland security officials that Al Qaeda hoped to carry out a catastrophic strike in the United States timed to disrupt the presidential election season.

In recent days, counterterrorism officials have said they have seen no concrete evidence of an election-year plot and it was unclear how the new tape would affect those assessments. The White House said there would be no increase, for now, in the current threat warning.

Mr. bin Laden said Mr. Bush reacted slowly to the Sept. 11 attacks as they were occurring, giving the hijackers more time than they expected to carry out the plot. At the time of the attacks, the president was visiting a group of second graders at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla., holding a book called "My Pet Goat."

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone," Mr. bin Laden said, referring to estimates of the number of people who might have been at the World Trade Center.

Referring to the president, Mr. bin Laden said: "It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God."

The timing of Mr. Bush's actions on the morning of Sept. 11 have been reported on numerous occasions. He was notified at about 8:55 a.m. by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. He was told at about 9:05 a.m. by Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff, that a second plane had hit the south tower. Mr. Bush left the classroom several minutes afterward.

In Mr. bin Laden's last videotape, in September 2003, he and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his chief lieutenant, walked on a rocky mountainous path. In an eight-minute soundtrack, Mr. bin Laden praised the hijackers who caused "great damage to the enemy," identifying five by name.

In that videotape, Mr. bin Laden appeared gaunt and somewhat halting as he picked his way along a trail with a walking stick.

In the latest tape, Mr. bin Laden spoke more directly about the Sept. 11 attacks than he has in previous messages, saying that he had told Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader, that the attacks should be carried out "within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed." Mr. bin Laden said the idea of attacking buildings in United States occurred to him when he said he watched Israeli aircraft bombing tower blocks in Lebanon in 1982.

"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way - to destroy towers in America so that it can taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women." He claimed direct responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks.

"We decided to destroy towers in America," he said, apparently referring to the World Trade Center. "God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and the inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind," Mr. bin Laden said.

The last time a message from Mr. bin Laden referred to the attacks was in a rambling videotaped conversation with a Saudi sheik televised Dec. 15, 2001.

6. WASHINGTON

President George W. Bush has instructed his new national security team to end the running battles between the State and Defense departments and the CIA, and to extend his personal control over agencies he has suspected of impeding his foreign policy aims, according to current and former administration officials.

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One senior official said Bush had decided months ago to make no effort to retain Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had long indicated he planned to leave. A close associate of Powell said he would have stayed if asked, at least for a while. "He was never asked," the associate said.

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So when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told Bush at Camp David, Maryland, on the weekend just after his re-election that she was willing to stay for a second term, he quickly offered her the secretary of state job, a post that she told friends last year she thought did not suit her sometimes impatient temperament.

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"Her interests ran to Defense," said a national security official who just left the administration. "But the president didn't want to change horses in the middle of a war."

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Bush nominated Rice as secretary of state on Tuesday and said the world would see in her "the strength, the grace and the decency of our country."

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The president said he would appoint Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, to succeed her as national security adviser. And Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, announced that he would step down.

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Armitage's resignation continues a rapid postelection reshuffling of a foreign policy team that, even as it wrestled over deep internal divisions, led the United States during the terrorist attacks of 2001, two subsequent wars and wrenching strains on relationships with allies and adversaries.

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The essence of Bush's moves since his re-election has been to fill key cabinet agencies with people he has relied on in the Oval Office, people who know his mind. "This is a different cabinet - it's a true Kitchen Cabinet," said one official who no longer works in the White House but deals with it often.

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But one of the mysteries is whether the reorganization foreshadows a change of approach, particularly in U.S. diplomacy.

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Some saw the departure of Powell as the moment for conservatives under the influence of Vice President Dick Cheney to assume an even larger role and seize key subcabinet posts.

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But Rice is considered less ideological than many in the administration and more attuned to the president's own thinking.

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The question is whether she will arrive at the State Department with an agenda known chiefly to her and the president. According to officials who have heard accounts of the case Bush made to Rice, he argued that their strong personal ties would convince allies and hostile nations like Iran and North Korea that she was speaking directly for the president and could make deals in his name.

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"This is what Powell could never do," said a former official who is close to Rice and sat in on many of the White House situation room meetings where policy conflicts arose. "The world may have liked dealing with Colin - we all did - but it was never clear that he was speaking for the president. He knew it and they knew it."

Rice's brief acceptance speech gave few hints of what course she planned to set if confirmed, as is expected. But several officials said that in recent days she had spoken of leaping at the opportunity created by the death of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and of deciding whether North Korea and Iran could be induced to end their suspected nuclear weapons programs.

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The State Department and the White House were already bubbling with talk that senior officials of the National Security Council who work on those issues may be moving to the State Department.

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If a large-scale migration takes place, it could mark a transition between the two institutions not seen since Henry Kissinger controlled both of them, three decades ago, and would put the State Department under much closer scrutiny by White House loyalists.

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Several officials said they believed that was Bush's intent.

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The process of moving confidantes into key cabinet posts began with the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. It accelerated on Tuesday with the nomination of Rice and the elevation of Hadley to replace her as national security adviser, whose role is to adjudicate conflicts between agencies.

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Margaret Spellings, the president's top aide on social and education policy, is expected to be named secretary of education.

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But that leaves in place Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a strong-willed hawk who often clashed with Rice. Most notably, she took over control of the occupation of Iraq, creating an "Iraq Stabilization Group." Her aides had made no secret of her opinion that Rumsfeld had failed to devote enough planning, attention or resources to making a success of the occupation.

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Their relationship worsened after the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib, the U.S.-run prison west of Baghdad, became publicly known. Rice, her associates say, had warned Rumsfeld to pay attention to detention issues, but the defense secretary often sent subordinates to meetings on the subject.

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So there is no end of speculation about whether Rumsfeld will have the kind of relationship with Rice that he had with Powell: one of constant bickering. Rumsfeld tried to tamp that speculation down on Tuesday, telling reporters traveling with him in Quito, Ecuador, "I have known Condi for a good number of years," and adding that "long before this administration, we were friends."

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But he acknowledged that tensions would inevitably occur, and he said, "It is the task, the responsibility, the duty of people who are participating in that national security process to make sure that the issues are raised and discussed," a process that he said "has worked very well in this administration."

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Rice's associates said they expected that there would be fewer and less heated arguments in the future, in part because Rumsfeld would be more wary of Rice and her relationship with the president.

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State Department officials said that events, more than personalities, would be driving the administration in its second term to make diplomatic approaches to Iran and North Korea, despite the urgings of conservatives who prefer confrontations over those two countries' nuclear policies.

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Not least is the demand by Europeans for engagement with Iran - an approach Bush's aides viewed with disdain, but now feel compelled to embrace because they have few alternatives - and the demand by South Korea and China for a policy that offers more incentives to North Korea.

. 7. The lost opera of Camelot takes centre stage in Madrid

CAMELOT, the court of King Arthur, has been rediscovered in Madrid. To give an exact location, it is in the Teatro Real, where an expectant house has been thrilled by the world premiere of Merlin, the ”lost” opera of Isaac Albéniz.

Albéniz´s reputation rests on his masterpiece Iberia, 12 piano suites of technical sophistication synthesising Spanish folk idioms with the impressionism of his hero Franz Liszt. But in the decade before Iberia, Albéniz devoted himself to composing an Englishlanguage opera which, in scope and depth, he dared dream would rival Wagner´s Ring cycle.
It seems bizarre now to consider that a man best known for capturing in music the Mediterranean and Andalusian spirit of his own country struggled, with so little success, to make his operatic name with a trilogy of works based on Britain´s Arthurian legends using Wagnerian musical techniques. The task would never have been undertaken had it not been for the patronage of the wealthy banker Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, also known by his title Lord Latymer.
The Spanish have described the aptly named Money-Coutts as a dilettante who longed to have his badly-written poetic dramas set to music and staged. But they should give thanks; had it not been for his financial support of Albéniz, one of their greatest musicians may never have lived to compose Iberia. The pairing of Albéniz with Latymer came in 1894, when the pianist was living in London, composing and giving acclaimed concerts. Albéniz was briefly principal composer and conductor at the Prince of Wales Theatre, but yielded to the temptation of Latymer´s patronage to indulge his growing interest in composing on a grander scale.
The collaboration was not a success, although Albéniz persevered with Latymer´s wooden libretti for ten years. Merlin was composed between 1898 and 1902 but its quality was never recognised and Albéniz, who, disillusioned and in deteriorating health, turned again to piano composition, failed to have it performed. Until now. Many believed that the score was lost until the conductor Jose De Eusebio painstakingly reconstructed it from various manuscript sources and publishers´ proofs.

It was performed for recording, with Placido Domingo taking the role of Arthur, in 1998 and 2001. But it took 101 years for it to receive its real premiere on Wednesday night, under the artistic direction of the Briton John Dew. It seems appropriate that, despite the delay, the conception and realisation of Merlin have been a joint Spanish-British venture. One wonders what Albéniz would have made of Dew´s spartan but colour-drenched sets, with a giant, glowing Harry Potter-style wand and the suggestive couplings of damsels and gnomes.
The recovery of Merlin was made possible by the support of the Madrid regional government whose head, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, is a descendant of Isaac Albéniz. Señor Ruiz-Gallardón, who was last weekend elected Mayor of Madrid, is a clear contender to replace Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish Prime Minister, when he steps down in the autumn as leader of the ruling People´s Party.
Señor Ruiz-Gallardón this week unveiled a plaque on the house where his grandfather´s brother lived in Lavapies, now Madrid´s most culturally mixed neighbourhood. With its tale of political intrigue in the fight for the Camelot crown, it is little wonder that the mayor of Madrid is attracted to Merlin.
From its opening stage scene, as dawn breaks outside St Paul´s Cathedral in London on a Christmas morning, to the final curtain, with the sun having set behind Madrid´s encircling mountains, turning the Plaza de Oriente and the Teatro Real pink, it is easy to imagine that Camelot is here after all