"Guess who showed up, no less than four days before the US elections? ...In a Video Tape with clean clothes just coming from the dry-cleaners, which means he ... probably went back to Pakistan.... Osama bin Laden, addressing the American public said in a video aired Friday that the United States can avoid another September 11 attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims.

Admitting for the first time that he (bin Laden) ordered the September 11 attacks, he said he did so because of injustices against the Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel and the United States. It was the first footage in more than a year, of the most wanted fugitive, the Al-Qaeda leader, thought to be hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Bin Laden accused President Bush of misleading Americans by saying the attack was carried out because Al-Qaeda "hates freedom." He said his followers have left alone countries that do not threaten Muslims.

"I am so surprised by you. Although we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11, Bush is still practising distortion and misleading you, and obscuring the main reasons; and therefore the reasons still exist to repeat what happened before. I will tell you the reasons behind these incidents."

Bin Laden went on to say that he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed in the siege of the capital.

"I will be honest with you on the moment when the decision was taken to understand. We never thought of hitting the towers. But after we were so fed up, and we saw the oppression of the American Israeli coalition on our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind and the incidents that really touched me directly goes back to 1982 and the following incidents:

When the US permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon with the assistance of the Sixth Fleet. In these hard moments, it occurred to me many meanings I can't explain but it resulted in a general feeling of rejecting oppression and gave me a hard determination to punish the oppressors. While I was looking at the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it came to my mind to punish the oppressor the same way and destroy towers in the US to get a taste of what they tasted, and quit killing our children and women."

"While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women," he said.

"God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance towards our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind," he said.
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