Taped Evidence
The new videotape by SoCal's alleged Al Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn is cartoonish propaganda.

http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/?IssueNum=120&id=2639


By Annette Stark
The most recent videotaped message from Al Qaeda, delivered on September 11 by self-avowed, homegrown terror suspect Adam Yahiye Gadahn, should have come as "no surprise," said LAPD Chief William Bratton and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in a joint press release last week. "Bombastic pronouncements are expected on the eve of terrorist incidents like September 11th, but we cannot let such pronouncements alter our lifestyles."
The video was dropped off at ABC News and aired on Good Morning America. It featured a heavily masked man spewing warnings in English about potential attacks: "Yesterday, London and Madrid, tomorrow, Los Angeles, Melbourne, and Australia." While the FBI will only say it "believes" that the man in the video is Gadahn, it's been widely reported that he is. Gadahn, who was born Adam Pearlman, was an Orange County native and was briefly involved in the death metal music scene before turning to Islam at age 17. He is believed to be married and living in Pakistan and is now 27 years old.
The tape has prompted a flurry of responses by officials in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, but it also raises more than a few suspicions about alleged Al Qaeda operative Gadahn and how he came to be, as Bratton called him, "a mouthpiece, a spokesperson, not an operative."
A well-researched September 16 piece in the L.A. Weekly establishes that Gadahn was recruited by Islamic activist Hisham Diab and his business partner Khalil Deek to work for an Orange County funding group called Charity Without Borders. U.S. officials now believe that group funneled cash to Al Qaeda. It's important to note, however, that neither Diab nor Deek, both of whom left the country, were never charged in the U.S. for alleged terrorism ties, even after intense investigation of several bombings and plots.
The Gadahn tapes, however, suffer from suspicious timing. The latest, for instance, though linked to September 11, hit just as President Bush's ratings plummeted over his administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina. The first tape came only days before the 2004 election (though, strangely, not on the 9/11 anniversary), in which Bush's War on Terror was being challenged.
The 2004 tape was also dropped off at an ABC News office. That video bore the logo of the Al Qaeda production house, As-Sahab, and featured a young man staring directly into the camera, calling himself "Azzam the American" and making violent threats in the name of his leader, Osama bin Laden, speaking in fluent English and bursts of Arabic.
Oddly, however, a tape made by Osama bin Laden himself appeared only days afterward, and made no mention of the Gadahn tape. The two have not been linked.
In an appearance on Larry King Live shortly after the preelection bin Laden tape surfaced, veteran news anchor Walter Cronkite delivered these stunning remarks: "So now the question is basically [...] how will this affect the election? And I have a feeling that it could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I'm a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing. The advantage to the Republican side is to get rid of - as a principal subject of the campaigns right now - get rid of the whole problem of the Al Qaeda explosive dump."
Amazingly, King passed right over this remark, and more than a few media commentators surmised that Cronkite had "gone senile." For the mainstream media, the issue died there.
But the absence of credible information regarding Gadahn has fueled growing sentiments in the blogosphere that the tapes are more than a hoax. "It is certainly no coincidence an American al-CIA-duh patsy, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, was splashed all over the corporate media on the anniversary of nine eleven," wrote Kurt Nimmo on his website Another Day in the Empire. CityBeat's e-mail attempts to reach Nimmo, a self-described "photographer, multimedia artist, and writer," were unsuccessful, but his musings have been picked up all over cyberspace.
In The Scotsman, Scotland's national newspaper, staff writer Jane Bradley takes a similar position, proclaiming this "is part of an ongoing scare campaign of fake and bluster terrorism designed to remind Americans of the 'threat' posed by Al Qaeda [...] what is sincerely comical is the seriousness right-wingers put into this obvious al-CIA-duh operative, believing the transparent and ludicrous propaganda Al Qaeda is in America, poised to attack at any moment."
Her column concludes: "Gadahn-Pearlman is an illusory (and cartoonish) demon custom-made for the right-wing paranoids who buy into the neocon 'clash of civilizations' scam."
Gadahn was raised in Riverside County on a goat farm. His father - former '60s antiwar protester and leader of the band Beat of the Earth, Phil Pearlman - made it a point to keep his four children out of the mainstream; the farm had no electricity or running water and Gadahn was home-schooled. So, records of his alleged proficiency with foreign languages have been hard to come by, and according to Imam Haitham "Danny" Bundakji, one of the leaders of Gadahn's Orange County mosque, Gadahn knew only a few Arabic words.
The few people who remember Gadahn from his death metal days have described him as "decent, quiet" and "intelligent." But Bundakji told CityBeat in November 2004 that he met an entirely different Gadahn. "He came charging into my office screaming. I never knew him to be violent before that. He was not even very talkative, at least to me and people of my rank. That day, he came in screaming and yelling and slapped me across the face." Bundakji also confirmed then that the man in the preelection video was definitely Gadahn.
Gadahn's membership and employment in his Orange County mosque was not unlike his death-metal phase - fanatical and brief - and the violent episode led to Gadahn's arrest and dismissal.
Nearly a year later not much else is known, including how Gadahn managed to become fluent in Arabic. According to his aunt, Nancy Pearlman, Gadahn was "quick to learn languages," but nobody has produced any evidence to substantiate this. A source at the FBI speculated for CityBeat that maybe he has an aptitude for languages, but refused to elaborate further.
Gadahn first posted his conversion to Islam online in an essay titled "Becoming Muslim." The writing is dated 1995, and is a deeply personal account of the young man's life at that point. However, this appears to be the only account Gadahn has left on the web, which some have suggested is incredibly strange. People who post tend to continue to post. And according to one death-metal aficionado who interacted with Gadahn briefly just prior to this, Gadahn wasn't much for the computer. He began living with his grandparents in their home in Santa Ana at age 15, and preferred snail mail, keeping a post office box for his death-metal band project, Aphasia Productions.
In other words, he's a cipher. The FBI's website cautions that he may be "armed and dangerous" - a warning that appeared when former Attorney General John Ashcroft first announced that Gadahn was one of the Justice Department's Most Wanted. And, with the CIA's understandable reluctance to definitively identify the young man in the preelection video as Gadahn, other questions arise: Is he making these tapes himself? Was he snagged in the Charity Without Borders investigation and recruited for a government job? Are there two American men who got lured by Al Qaeda?
Counterterrorism experts continue to weigh in 24/7 that this is a credible threat that ought to be taken seriously. "It's a propaganda message. It's an attempt to try to intimidate, to try to suggest they're still a force to be reckoned with," one official told The Boston Globe. "We take these things seriously."
But skeptics are inclined to agree with Chief Bratton that Gadahn is very low level.
In Los Angeles, Bratton and Villaraigosa have reminded everyone that a serious homegrown threat was thwarted one month ago when four local residents were indicted for planning attacks. Their statement continues: "The best thing any Angeleno can do is go about his or her daily life as you normally would."
Published: 09/22/2005