The bin Laden tapes cache

Fox News:

For five years, a lone professor has painstakingly been translating and transcribing more than 1,500 audiocassettes in his personal search for revealing clues about the most wanted terrorist in the world: Usama bin Laden.

Flagg Miller, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Davis, has been combing through never-before-heard audiotapes that once were in the Al Qaeda leader’s private library.

Al Qaeda terrorists have released numerous audio and video recordings of bin Laden since the Sept. 11 attacks, but the tapes in Miller's possession offer the first behind-the-scenes access to the terrorist’s private world. They reveal how he developed his anti-American sentiment and the progression of Al Qaeda's military strategy, warfare tactics, recruiting methods and training camps.

"He has a far more raw militant voice than what many people are used to," Miller said in an interview with FOXNews.com. "He talks about the United States being the No. 1 enemy dating back to a time before the first Gulf War. These tapes suggest that anti-Americanism was there earlier than many have thought."

But it may be the more banal conversations — the backroom chit-chat, the everyday gossip and discussion about world events — that are most revealing.

Click here to hear a poem read by Usama bin Laden in Arabic.

Click here to read the English translation of the poem.

Click here to hear Usama bin Laden's "Safe Base" recording in Arabic.

Click here to read the English translation of the "Safe Base" recording.

In one instance bin Laden gets into an elaborate comparison of frying eggs and fighting holy war. In the background, breakfast is cooking and the roar of a gas stove can be heard.

Anthropologist David Edwards, head of Williams College's Afghan Media Project, was instrumental in acquiring the tapes and passing them on to Miller. He is one of only a few who are privy to his findings. He said some of the tapes are fascinating and insightful, but others not so much.

"They pretty much taped everything. It seems like bin Laden just hit 'record' and sometimes forgot he was recording," Edwards said.

"It's kind of random. The conversations are hit or miss, kind of like YouTube is today. That's how analog cassette recordings were back in the 1980s."

There are conversations about the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, the deadly American Embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, and the setting up of militant base camps. Voices of at least 20 suspected terrorists, either currently in custody or still at large, have been identified so far.

Conversations center on American politics and news from global headlines, such as the cartoons depicting the image of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked worldwide protest and violence after they were published in Denmark in 2005.

Not only does the library contain tapes recorded by bin Laden, there are also recordings of prominent Islamic clerics and scholars that were given to bin Laden as gifts. Miller said he's putting together a "Who's Who" index of the most notable names found within the thousands of tapes.

About 200 speakers from all over the Muslim world appear in bin Laden's cache. Among them, Saudi cleric Muhammad al-Munajjid, who has made headlines for claiming that Mickey Mouse is "one of Satan’s soldiers" and condemned the Beijing Olympics as the "bikini Olympics." Also on the tapes are Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian currently fighting extradition from the United Kingdom to the U.S. on terrorism charges; Omar Abd al-Rahman, the blind sheik who was the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the central figure in the jihad movement who mentored bin Laden and encouraged him to go to Afghanistan.

The tapes were recovered from bin Laden’s compound in 2001, when American forces invaded Afghanistan. When the Taliban fled, they left nearly everything they had behind.

An Afghan boy working for an American television producer found the tapes just before they were about to be destroyed, outside a shop near bin Laden's former home in Kandahar. According to the Los Angeles Times, the FBI listened to the tapes and determined them to be "free of smoking guns," before they were transferred to Edwards’ Afghan Media Project. Edwards then reached out to Miller, who has a background in Arabic language translations. The tapes were later moved to a larger archival facility at Yale University, where they continue to be restored, digitized and catalogued.

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While we only have a partial view of the tapes they seem to confirm that bin Laden's religious bigotry has been around a lot longer than George Bush. They also demonstrate that the truthers have really lost the plot on the war being waged against us. I think more manpower should be devoted to this effort.