2004 Osama bin Laden video

On October 29, 2004, at 21:00 UTC, al Jazeera broadcast excerpts allegedly from a videotape of Osama bin Laden addressing the people of the United States; in this video, he accepts responsibility for the September 11 attacks, condemns the Bush government's response to those attacks, and presents those attacks as part of a campaign of revenge and deterrence motivated by his witnessing of the destruction in the Lebanese Civil War in 1982. News analysts speculated that the release of the video was timed to influence the 2004 U.S. presidential election, which would take place four days later.

The video is reported to be 18 minutes in length; Osama only speaks for 14 minutes 39 seconds.Al-Jazeera released a transcript of the complete tape on November 1, 2004.

Bin Laden appears wearing a turban and a white robe partially covered by a golden mantle, standing in front of an almost featureless brown background and reading his comments from papers resting on a podium. He moves both of his arms (dispelling rumors that one of them is limp after having been wounded) and looks healthy as far as can be told, but a bit older and greyer than in his former tapes. His remarks, in Arabic but addressed to citizens of the United States, instruct them that "the best way to avoid another Manhattan" (a reference to the September 11, 2001 attacks), is to not threaten the security of Muslim nations, such as Palestine and Lebanon.

He speaks of his desire to bankrupt the U.S., saying:

[It is] easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses. ... This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.

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