Saturday, September 8, 2007

Provenance: Where The Newest Bin Laden Video Came From

Here's how we know whether the newest Osama bin Laden video is genuine:
The video was obtained early yesterday by U.S. intelligence officials and was first made public on the Web site of the SITE Institute, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that studies terrorist organizations. The circumstances of its release were unusual: No copy of the video had appeared on Islamic Web sites as of yesterday, as has been the norm for past al-Qaeda videos. A spokesman for SITE declined to comment on how it obtained the most recent video.
This is far from the first time that SITE has had an al-Q'aeda video before al-Q'aeda did. SITE never says where they get them. So why do you believe anything else they tell you?