bin Laden Fisking Fisk?

I was reading through the transcript of the bin Laden speech and came across this nugget that seems to have been overlooked: Osama's in a bit of a huff because we are dissing Robert Fisk.

Seriously.

Let's go to the text:

This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.

And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998.

You can observe it practically, if you wish, in Kenya and Tanzania and in Aden. And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan, as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk.

The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at The White House and the channels controlled by them able to run an interview with him? So that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?

If you were to avoid these reasons, you will have taken the correct path that will lead America to the security that it was in before September 11th. This concerned the causes of the war.

Now I bet Noam Chomsky is fuming at being left from this list of Osama's "neutrals" but Osama is making a very Chomskyist point here about Fisk not being taken seriously by the American media. For good reason: he's not neutral, he's on the other side.

Reading through the text I'm torn: more and more I think this thing is fake. There's none of the glowering Islamic mysticism characterizing his earlier work. It's kind of like a Wings song compared to an early Beatles: it's just not the same. But if it is in fact genuine, I think Wretchard is spot on: it's a sign of how weak bin Laden has become that he's in effect offering a truce if Americans vote for Kerry.

UPDATE: Wretchard has some thoughts on the order of battle in the coming Battle of Fallujah.