James Blackwell

Update 1 - The transcript of the video has been released. To quickly sum up the video:

• Muslims, unlike Christians, do not do holocausts (examples of provided Christian holocausts include WW2 and 650k Iraqis killed in gulf war II)
• That the US government, rather than being controlled by it's citizens, is controlled by corporations.
• Neo-conservatives such as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are the ones responsible for the war.
• The US wouldn't be in this mess if everyone believed in Allah.

The press is reporting that a new video tape from Osama bin Laden is going to be before or on Sept 11, 2008. What is harder to find out is exactly what is going on with this video. Included herein is an educated guess based upon a buried story from April.

National Terror Alert reported, then reported doubt about, a rumor started on a forum post of an upcoming video from OBL. The post, dated 4 April 2007, said that production on the OBL video had just completed.. The announcement also doesn't quite jibe with the "message to America" teaser reported in the news, but contains (according to NTA):

Furthermore, the poster of this note maintains that the speech includes several messages to the “mujahidin” in Iraq, the Palestinian People on ” the capitulation choice which HAMAS gave in to,” the Riyadh Arab summit, the “fears” of America and its allies of the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate state in Iraq, and the “good tidings of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.”


The video is likely done by As-Sahab (also known as Al Sahab), which is the part of Al-Qaeda that creates media for 'The Base'. The group, which started off rather amateurish, has improved the quality of it's media as they propagandize the viewpoint of isolationist and extremist Muslims. Many recent videos are now subtitled in English and have good quality video. You can see examples of the types of media that they have done before at places like Archive.org and Al Jazeera.