This morning the London Sunday Times put up a series of al Qaeda video clips dating from early 2000. They are poor quality video, with lots of annoying moments when the video freezes or goes black, and long stretches of audio-less reading of suicide testaments by terrorists. But there is also a lot of interesting footage, and I spent some time today, maybe more than it was worth, capturing and editing the Times's footage. I've now merged the Times's five clips together, and edited them down to somewhere between eight and nine minutes--a watchable video. I'm still working on it, but later tonight it will be posted on Power Line Video, and I think it will be a good resource for some time to come.

UPDATE: OK, the video is up on Power Line Video. I got it down to around 8 1/2 minutes. It's well worth watching, I think. Here is how the Sunday Times described the five clips that I've combined and edited:

Clip 1: Speech by Osama Bin Laden on January 8, 2000, to 100 hardcore members of Al-Qaeda at his family clan base at Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar airport, Afghanistan.

Clip 2: Faces in the audience include Ramzi Binalshibh, who was the co-ordinator of the September 11 attacks. He shared a flat in Hamburg with Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian-born leader of the team of 19 suicide attackers, and was arrested in Pakistan four years ago.

Clip 3: Mohammed Atta, flanked by an AK-47, toys with a Pashtun hat and glances wryly at the camera as he prepares to read his handwritten will. He flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Clip 4: Ziad Jarrah, a middle-class Lebanese, joins Atta in high spirits, breaking out in smiles and laughter. Jarrah, who also lived in Hamburg, was ordered not to be seen with Atta in Germany. These are thought to be the only images of them together.

Clip 5: Jarrah, wearing a collarless shirt, removes his glasses and reads out his will. He piloted United Airlines flight 93, which was assigned the target of Capitol Hill, but crashed.

One More Thing: For those who may be curious about the technology, I captured the Times's original WMV files and transferred them into Quicktime using SnapzProX; edited them and combined them into a single file on iMovie; exported the video back to Quicktime; and translated the product into the Flash file that plays on our video site with On2Flix.

Posted by John at 08:28 PM  |    |