Osama bin Laden speaking on the recent tape,

O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results.

Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example...

...we fought you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security we squander yours.

I am surprised by you. Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.

God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance...

Overall, a surprisingly coherent response to the nonsense "they hate us because we are free" rhetoric of this administration. But why release this 72 hours before the election? Why now? What is he trying to accomplish?

Update: So as I mentioned in passing above, I was struck by how coherent this video this. You have to admit - it really is a response to the pervasive claims in the U.S. public discourse that terrorists attack us purely because we are free. The arguments it makes are arguments that are accepted by many on the west: Israel is abusive, America supports it, American policies cause destruction in the middle east, and so on. The video shows a degree of political sophistication I would not have expected from an Islamic fundamentalist.

But now I wonder: the original video was 18 minutes, Al Jazeera trimmed it down to 5. We don't know what Bin Laden said in the other 13 minutes. Did Al Jazeera edit out the fundamentalist rants?