Sorting through this one could take all day, and I’ve got deadlines. But I’ll be interested to see the fact checking on this:
We were listening to (Osama bin Laden). He was using a type of cell phone, a type of phone, and somebody put it in the newspaper, that this was the type of device he was using to communicate with his team, and he changed … and this is before they attacked us by the way.
Somebody with Lexis/Nexis needs to do some digging and see if there was actually a newspaper article sometime before 9/11 about the type of phone Osama bin Laden was using, or if Bush just pulled that one entirely out of his ass.
…Update via an alert reader below. The punchline: the paper was the Washington Times.
The Commission footnote (chapter 4, no. 105) refers to a front page
story in the Washington Times on August 21, 1998 entitled “Terrorist
is Driven by Hatred for U.S., Israel,” by Martin Sieff, and to
interviews with several intelligence community officials.That Washington Times story stated in passing that “He [bin Ladin]
keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones and
has given occasional interviews to international news organizations,
including Time magazine and CNN News.”