<I am sometimes guilty of hideous cynicism and the occasional fit of utter stupidity. Despite these character flaws, I think ObL is an evil scumbag and responsible for the 911 atrocity. I have no doubt that he is guilty of organizing the WTC terrorist action and numerious other crimes against humanity

I've been there and done that. Anyway, you obviously get the point.

1) Is the Mossad capable of producing a technically high quality fake ObL video tape?



2) Does the Mossad under the Sharon government have a motive for producing a fake ObL video tape?



Who can resist a rhetorical question?

I would hope that Mossad could do better than what we saw and while the motive is there, it does not seem compelling to me.

1) ObL would have shown amazing stupidity to have allowed such a tape to be made.



2) The tape systematicly hits all the "hot buttons", i.e. admits prior knowledge thus establishing guilt, names the guys flying the planes, shows utter contempt for the highjackers lives, hobnobs with an important Saudi cleric, etc.



It would only be stupid if he really wants to avoid credit/responsibility for the attack.

Maybe I need to study the tape more. I saw two guys talking about the event like you or I might talk about a ball game. They knew the players well. They knew the mission. He said that all the players did not know the game plan but they all knew it was a martyrs mission. He has never denied responsibility and while this tape showed callous disregard for the innocent lives lost, there is nothing really new about that and there is still no direct admission that he personally planned and executed the attack. Overall the tape was degrees but not magnitudes more incriminating than previous evidence. If I were making a fake tape I would have included an unambiguous admission somewhere along with a couple of harem girls in the picture somewhere.

I left myself some wiggle room with the statement "based on what we know now" but any future finding that we created this tape would be an epiphany beyond any I have had in this life and to find that we were scammed by Mossad would be almost as bad.

If the government suspected or knew that it was fake but knew there were copies in circulation why would we risk releasing it? Just let it leak and react to it in the same non-committal way. By releasing it we must accept some responsibility for it's validity, in spite of our disclaimers.

If this is black propaganda by Israel, I don't think they got enough bang for their buck. They need to be faking a tape of Arrafat and OBL plotting something together.