[images and captions added by this website]     New York, Friday, October 29, 2004 'American' voice on new terror video ABC News is in possession of a tape purportedly from the group, threatening attacks on the US. By Gretchen Peters Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- A new videotape that has surfaced in Pakistan threatens a massive attack against the United States by a purported American member of Al Qaeda. It is not yet known if the tape is an authentic Al Qaeda production, but it bears enough resemblance that some experts are taking the tape seriously. David Irving comments: SENDING me this item, my baffled correspondent asks: "Should we wail and gnash and rip our hair out in panic?    "The interesting thing that's not mentioned in the news reports is that US Government investigators think the guy is an American named Adam Pearlman, who has since gone Muslim and changed his name several times."    Perhaps he should have followed my advice and changed his names in succession, in case anybody asked what his name was before that. Because the name "Pearlman" indicates ... ahem, no, let's not go down that road after all.    First media note, however: See how in this newspaper the Pearlman identity is slipped in, dutifully, almost as an afterthought, in the last paragraph but one. My own guess is that Pearlman was hoping to pass himself off as a native Arab. The fair skin gave him away, as did the fair skin of the five "Muslim" men standing behind the (already dead?) victim in the famous Nick Berg video: not only was their skin fair, but one wore a wedding ring, which Muslim men do not. A Gold ring, at that: which metal again Muslims eschew in their ornaments.    Next time, perhaps a liberal application of Amber Solaire is called for.    A possible scenario: the same ingenious US Army PsyWar production team that made the Berg box-office hit has come up with latest scare video, to palm off onto gullible US television viewers in support of the Bush campaign. It's better than the 572s. BUT now, alas, something far nastier has turned up and trumped them: today's television screens worldwide are showing a genuine video portraying the real thing -- Osama bin Laden, alive and well.    Everybody, here in the UK at least, is commenting on his sage presentation, his wisdom, and even his choice of wallpaper. But nobody, frantically, is mentioning the obvious elephant standing just off-camera in the living room: the fact that Mr. bin Laden, as the Christian Science Monitor decorously calls him, is manifestly alive, and well, and undamaged, despite the hundred billon dollars invested by the Bush regime so far in its "war on terror".    It is the first visual evidence that he has dodged everything that the US armed might has thrown at him. How humbling is that fact for the US armed forces and Mr Donald Rumsfeld. Second media note: Mr. bin Laden has seemingly been advised by his media people about backgrounds. Just as the confidential British Trades Union media-manual advises their officials not be filmed outside the (closed) factory gates, but seated solemnly behind a large desk, with rows of law books in the shelves behind them, Osama has been advised that he will more lasting admiration in such surroundings than by being filmed in a cave. The chilling 75-minute digital videotape, seen by a Christian Science Monitor reporter in Pakistan, where it was obtained by ABC News, shows a high degree of sophistication and bears the logo of Al Qaeda's video production house, As-Sahab. On the video, the unknown man's face is masked with a Palestinian scarf and sunglasses. He stabs the air with his finger, which appears to be fair-skinned, as he delivers his warning in American-accented English. "Allah willing, the streets of America will run red with blood, matching drop for drop the blood of America's victims," says the speaker, who calls himself Azzam al Amriki (or Azzam the American). "What took place on September 11th was but the opening salvo in the global war on America." The next attacks, he adds, "could come at any moment." This is the first time a purported Al Qaeda video has featured an English-speaking messenger, and while he references the top two Al Qaeda leaders, neither Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri appear. This unique circumstance, as well as the highly charged timing of the tape's release just days before Americans head to the polls, has the US intelligence community approaching the tape with caution. "As-Sahab is an Al Qaeda propaganda outfit and engages in psychological warfare," says Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terror at the RAND Corp. in Washington. "Given the hype of the US election in general, that the jihadists claim credit for affecting the outcome of the Spanish elections, and the heightened chatter that intelligence agencies acknowledge, I'm surprised we haven't seen something like this sooner." While ABC has not aired the video, knowledge of its existence was leaked to the Drudge report and picked up by the mainstream press including NBC, Fox, the Washington Post, and Reuters who all reported on the video without seeing it. "ABC News has shared this tape with both the CIA and FBI as part of our reporting process. ABC News is committed to accurate, credible, and complete journalism and is applying the same scrutiny to this tape that we apply to all raw information. ABC continues to report this story very aggressively," says Jeffery Schneider, vice president of ABC News. At press time, the US intelligence community had yet to authenticate the video but they continued to work on it. "Unless you can identify the individual or compare [it] to known samples, it is difficult to authenticate," says a US intelligence official. "There's no information in the intelligence community that links this video to a specific threat. So what [the speaker] is talking about doesn't appear in other intelligence." The tape, delivered to ABC in Islamabad last Sunday by a courier who was paid a $500 transport fee, contains a lengthy Q&A session between "Mr. Amriki" and an off-camera interviewer. It ends with his warning, which cuts off abruptly when the tape runs out.   ANALYSTS Analysts at Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI, say the tape is genuine, explaining the material bears the same "signature" as previous As-Sahab video releases, which are unique in the world of jihadi video for their sophisticated editing techniques. It features the same gold logo that appeared, among other places, in a 2003 statement from Mr. bin Laden. There's also simultaneous Arabic subtitling -- a complicated and time consuming process to put together -- and a scrolling message across the bottom of the screen (similar to the news tickers on CNN and Fox) that was featured on a recent statement from al-Zawahiri. Since Sept. 11, 2001, as-Sahab has consistently pushed the frontiers of jihad media, publishing everything from "Nineteen Martyrs" (the story of the 9/11 hijackers) to live action terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia captured on video, says terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann, who saw a portion of the material. "For someone to put that amount of advanced effort into fabricating an as-Sahab video sounds a little far-fetched," he says. Ahmad Muffaq Zaidan, Pakistan's bureau chief for the Arab-language network Al Jazeera and the recipient of past As-Sahab material here, also rated the material genuine. "We have seen this style before -- the translation, the logo, the scroll," he says. The US intelligence official agrees that "there's a production value" to the tape. "The tape itself was edited and portions were spliced together," he says. "It probably was worked on for a period of time -- probably done fairly recently, as recently as late summer." The tape's speaker references the conflict in Darfur, the 9/11 commission, Massachusetts same sex legislation, and the upcoming US presidential election. Nevertheless, it's become easier and cheaper to produce a relatively sophisticated video. With about $3,500, one can purchase a small digital video camera and a laptop with video editing software, and create output, which as Kohlmann puts it, is worthy of "a half-decent Hollywood studio." "Terrorist wannabes [have] manufactured an encyclopedia full of fraudulent threats and communiques on the Internet," says Kohlmann. "It is now getting easy enough that similar wannabes can produce their own jihad videos too." Al Amriki issues several bursts of Arabic, mainly from the Koran, speaking the language well, but not as a native, say Arabic speakers who've heard the tape. And he's clearly a sophisticated news consumer -- quoting sources ranging from BBC's Arabic language radio to US comedian Bill Maher. His rhetoric -- both in English and Arabic -- closely mirrors past statements by Al Qaeda: calling US leaders crusaders and weaving a picture of America as a corrupt empire about to expire. The courier who delivered the tape would reveal nothing about Al Amriki's identity, saying only that he received the material last Friday in Peshawar. He insisted it had been filmed in Pakistan's tribal belt, where militants are battling the Pakistani military. ISI analysts believe dozens of US and European passport holders of Muslim descent have joined jihadi groups there, and say this man is probably one of them. Others believe he may be a new John Walker Lindh, the California native caught fighting with the Taliban in 2001. US law enforcement agents have suggested it could be Adam Yahiye Gadahn, an Orange County [Los Angeles area] native, suspected by the FBI to be working with Al Qaeda, possibly as a translator. Mr. Gadahn, who was born Adam Pearlman, also goes by the nom de guerre Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki. "In the realm of psychological warfare, which is calculated to ratchet up the fear level, if it is a sworn enemy making those threats it's one thing, if it's someone speaking our language, living among us, it does heighten the sense of fear," says Mr. Hoffman of RAND. "That's what terrorism tries to do -- raise the level of fear." • Reporter Gretchen Peters is also ABC's producer in Pakistan. Staff writer Faye Bowers contributed from Washington.   October surprise Drudge reports: ABC News holding back terror warning tape -- masked terrorist believed to be Californian, Adam Pearlman MSNBC CIA unable to authenticate tape

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