Saturday, May 7, 2011

Old and vain: videos strip away Bin Laden mystique (AFP)

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States wanted to depreciate the mystique close Osama containerful Laden on Saturday, emotional seized videos that exhibit him watching himself on television, hunting old, mediocre and vain.

In the most exceptional footage among fivesome videos prefabricated public, the New Al-Qaeda honcho sits wrapped in a brown bedding and season hat, gazing at broadcasting programme footage of himself as he holds a remote curb in his right hand.

His fibre has absent gray and he looks older than his years. He sits in a spare-looking room, stroking his fibre and rocking back and forward as he watches the broadcasting screen.

Al-Qaeda tried to promote the ikon of a fearless and powerful blessed warrior, but containerful Laden appears in the "home video" as an mediocre and inaccessible figure, low to watching programme clips of himself.

"I think it's pretty country what they're trying to do is demystify this represent who has terrorized the concern for the instance ten years, to exhibit for a fact he was not ten feet tall," said Mark Kimmitt, a older US Army brigadier general.

The recording mitt an notion that "he seems to be a tired, older man," Kimmitt told CNN television.

As the footage of Bin Laden was shown to reporters at a bureaucratism briefing, there was an audible aspiration in the room.

The recording raised a garment for the prototypal instance on an artful and almost mythical figure, who had managed to carelessness the accomplish of a superpower for more than a decade.

"It's fascinating to wager him category of hunting at himself," said Peter Bergen, who has cursive books most the Al-Qaeda mastermind.

The US polity free the videos -- without audio -- days after a nighttime assail in which a aggroup of US Navy commandos shot and killed Bin Laden after swooping on his bilobed in the Asiatic city of Abbottabad.

President Barack Obama has chosen not to promulgation photos of Bin Laden's corpse, saying the United States should not move trophies or risk inciting the Islamic world.

But the fivesome videos designated for release, discover of a trove of machine files, DVDs, winkle drives and additional touchable seized from Bin Laden's residence, served to counteract the open represent of the Al-Qaeda leader.

"This is not a ingratiating image," said Bergen, who recalled how Bin Laden and his aides strictly dominated how he was filmed for a broadcasting discourse before 9/11.

Apart from the footage of him watching himself, there is a more old environs in additional recording with Bin Laden datum from a text, a propaganda speech likely recorded terminal assemblage and never released.

US officials said the recording is a self-styled communication to America, criticizing the United States and "denigrating capitalism."

Then there are threesome additional videos in which Bin Laden appears to be rehearsing the speech, including digit with a wrinkled blue artefact behindhand him.

The practice videos allow apparent problems with illumination and what officials said was a missed cue, leaving the notion of a amateurish operation.

The grownup intelligence official who presented the videos, while describing the footage as an example of how Bin Laden worked to shape his image, also said additional touchable condemned from the bilobed showed the Al-Qaeda founder was deeply involved in effective and tactical planning and not a mere "figurehead."

Some analysts and past officials said the Obama administration's communication appeared contradictory, as emotional the videos served to minimize Bin Laden while officials also portrayed him as a hands-on terror commander.

"The problem is, at the same instance they're trying to demystify him, they're also saying he's in farther more effective curb than we had ever thought. So there's a contradiction in this message," said Kimmitt, who also served in the State Department low past president George W. Bush.

He additional that "the administration needs to be careful."


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