It deserves attention in ways which many recent al-Qaeda communications have not.
Bin Laden's Return to Form | Marc Lynch - 0 views
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the growing problems that al-Qaeda really does have with its distribution mechanisms
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By far the most important technical point about the tape is this: no English-language subtitles were offered on the video version. Al-Sahab productions very often provide such subtitles. For them to be absent in a video ostensibly produced as a direct message to the American people is frankly quite odd. Does it suggest degraded capabilities? Poor judgement? I really don't know, but it's worth noting.
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My son, Osama: the al-Qaida leader's mother speaks for the first time | World news | Th... - 0 views
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According to officials in Riyadh, London and Washington DC, Bin Laden had by then become the world’s number one counter-terrorism target, a man who was bent on using Saudi citizens to drive a wedge between eastern and western civilisations. “There is no doubt that he deliberately chose Saudi citizens for the 9/11 plot,” a British intelligence officer tells me. “He was convinced that was going to turn the west against his ... home country. He did indeed succeed in inciting a war, but not the one he expected.”
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Hamza bin Laden’s continued rise may well cloud the family’s attempts to shake off their past. It may also hinder the crown prince’s efforts to shape a new era in which Bin Laden is cast as a generational aberration, and in which the hardline doctrines once sanctioned by the kingdom no longer offer legitimacy to extremism. While change has been attempted in Saudi Arabia before, it has been nowhere near as extensive as the current reforms. How hard Mohammed bin Salman can push against a society indoctrinated in such an uncompromising worldview remains an open question.
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