Am I the only person to find the Bin Laden US presidential broadcast a bit...well, phoney? It just reads like a cynical, third-rate PR hack stringing together a list of golden highlights in the anti-Bush media over the past few months in order to make a yah-boo point about driving the US to bankruptcy. It's passages like this, where he talks about his message, that strike a false note in the tone and the language used:

'And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998. You can observe it practically, if you wish, in Kenya and Tanzania and in Aden. And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan, as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk. The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral.'

Apart from the great professional plug for Fisk, it seems curiously banal and bathetic for such a man with such a history of terrorism to be listing at such a time his named interviewers like this. It seems so weak. Or take this kind of language:

'So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider...I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere...'

Instead of the usual religious imagery and imprecations, this is more like a B-movie script. On the other hand, much of it is so nutty that no-one could possibly make this up. And as Yigal Carmon notes on MEMRI, the whole thing is a blatant attempt to intimidate not just the US but individual states into not voting for Bush. The Islamist website al Q'ala explains what bin Laden meant when he said:

'Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security':

'This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, 'Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,' it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn't treat all American people as if they're the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections.'

So now we know. What we don't know yet is whether in reacting to this, America will choose to be like Spain or Australia.