US President George W. Bush lashed out Friday at those who deny Osama bin Laden masterminded the September 11 terror strikes, calling a video of him boasting of the attacks "devastating" evidence of guilt.
And as US and Afghan forces led their heaviest attacks yet against the Saudi-born militant's al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan, Bush declared he wanted bin Laden brought to justice "dead or alive."
"It doesn't matter to me," the US leader said flatly a day after television networks worldwide showed a tape of the suspected terrorist mastermind laughing about strikes on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
"I don't know whether we're going to get him tomorrow or a month from now or a year from now," he said, urging patience from the US public. "He may hide for a while, but we'll get him."
Bush's outrage was clear when he was asked about doubt in some parts of the Islamic world that the video -- which the US government says was seized in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan -- was genuine and not a ploy by Washington.
"It is preposterous for anybody to think that this tape is doctored. That's just a feeble excuse to provide weak support for an incredibly evil man," he insisted. "This is bin Laden unedited."
The US government on Thursday released the recording, which shows bin Laden in meetings with several associates, apparently in Afghanistan, rejoicing over the scale of the carnage in the attacks.
A Pentagon spokesman said Friday US authorities had performed a "scientific analysis" to confirm the authenticity of the tape, saying bin Laden's voice as checked for consistency throughout the recording.
Lieutnant Colonel Dave Lapan said the analysis was not carried out by the Department of Defense, but "another US government agency."
Bush said he had "mixed emotions" about showing the video because it risked reopening the wounds of those who lost family and friends in the hijacked airliner attacks that killed some 3,300 people.
"On the other hand, I knew that the tape would be a devastating declaration of guilt for this evil person," said the president. "This is the bin Laden who has murdered people. This is the man who sent innocent people to their death."
The Arab world reacted with a large dose of skepticism to a videotape which US officials portray as a "smoking gun" proving Osama bin Laden's guilt in the September 11 attacks in the United States.
Although the tape was widely watched in the Arab world and satellite television stations hosted pundits to comment on the broadcast, press coverage was mostly non-committal, perhaps partly because it was aired during the Muslim weekend and on the eve of Eid al-Fitr marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
But one Gulf daily stuck its neck out to question the authenticity of the amateur videotape released by the Pentagon on Thursday, saying that if genuine, it belonged in a court of law not on television screens.
"If the United States is confident of the evidence contained in the tape, it should have presented it to the courts instead of airing it on television," wrote Qatar's Al-Sharq.
"Far from revealing the truth, airing the videotape in this manner will only thicken the mystery surrounding the whole affair," it said.
But for Kuwait's conservative al-Siyassa, the evidence from the videotape was clear, splashing across its front page the news that "bin Laden confessed to plotting the September 11 attacks."
Beirut's pro-Syrian ad-Diyar opined in its banner headline that Washington had "released the bin Laden tape to justify its intention to kill him and intimate that his end is near."
In the tape, bin Laden boasted that the destruction of September 11 exceeded his hopes and calculations and was shown with associates rejoicing over the carnage in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
Some ordinary Arabs questioned the tape's authenticity or the circumstances in which it was obtained.
The tape was either "forged" or "deliberately left behind by bin Laden for it to be picked up by the Americans," said Suha, a Lebanese dietician who would not reveal her surname.
The videotape might have been juicy, but it added nothing of substance to bin Laden's applause of the "group of vanguard Muslims who destroyed America" in an address broadcast by Qatar's al-Jazeera satellite channel on October 7, said a Lebanese Christian political analyst who identified himself as Khalil.
The poor quality of the tape, and the fact that it had to be accompanied by an official US translation into English of mostly inaudible remarks, played into the hands of both Arab skeptics and bin Laden apologists.
Relatives of bin Laden's mother, who live in Latakia on Syria's Mediterranean coast, said they could not confirm that he was the man on the tape.
"I watched the tape on TV like everyone else, but I cannot tell if it was him or someone who looks like him," said one.
"There are so many interests at play -- how do you expect us to know if the tape is authentic or otherwise?" asked another relative, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
The videotape has failed to convince people in Egypt, where some even talk of a "Hollywood farce."
The United States "has the technology to forge a videotape of this kind," said Abdullah Omar Abdel Rahman, whose brother was seized last month in Afghanistan as a suspected leader of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network of Muslim extremists.
"In openly admitting his involvement, bin Laden is contradicting himself, as he has always blessed attacks, but has never explicitly claimed them."
His brother, Ahmed Omar, was captured by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in November. His father is Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Muslim cleric sentenced to life in prison in 1995 for a foiled plot to bomb several New York landmarks.
The tape was found at a house in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad in November and shows the West's most wanted man in meetings with associates rejoicing over the scale of the carnage in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
Egyptian television broadcast extracts of the tape late Thursday following its release by the Pentagon, while newspapers gave it only a brief mention in their Friday editions without comment.
"I strongly doubt that the Americans found it as they claim in one of the caves of Afghanistan. It's illogical," Abdel Rahman said.
"At the moment of flight, the first instinct is to destroy incriminating evidence, so they (bin Laden's men) would have burned it."
On the streets of Cairo, where the destruction of the World Trade Center that killed more than 3,000 is regarded as a metaphor for the "collapse of American arrogance" towards Arabs, many doubted that the tape was genuine.
"It's a Hollywood farce. They have studios which can simulate earthquakes and all sorts of special effects so nothing would stop them from finding a bin Laden double," charged advertising agent Munir Salem.
"If they can made a film with an actor shaking the hand of the American president, what prevents them from using such special effects to fake a video. Even the inaudible parts were done deliberately to give it an authentic flavour," said architect Hend al-Alfi.
"The Americans lie as easily as they breathe. They had promised a Palestinian state and now they bless Israel's destruction of Palestinian land, so to fabricate a cassette is nothing," said Amr Abdel Mohsen, political science student at the University of Cairo.
Muntasser al-Zayyat, foremost defence lawyer for Egyptian Islamist militants, pounced on the tape to accuse the United States of launching an onslaught on Afghanistan without proof of bin Laden's responsibility for September 11.
The tape "shows that the United States had no evidence whatsoever when it blamed bin Laden hours after the September 11 attacks and when it launched its air raids on Afghanistan (on October 7), killing people and destroying homes," he said.
While he did not dispute the authenticity of the tape, "recorded with bin Laden's knowledge," Zayyat said it did not show that he plotted the anti-US attacks. Instead, it merely showed that he was trying to "take credit" for them in order to boost his supporters' morale after the defeat he suffered in Afghanistan.
Abdel Moneim Said, director of the government-run Al Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, said he considered the cassette was "the flagrant confession of a criminal."
But he said he would have preferred that it had been broadcast without the running translation of interpreters "to give all Arabophones the undeniable proof of Bin Laden's guilt."
In non-Arab Iran, former parliament speaker Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri was also unconvinced.
"We still don't know who masterminded" the September attacks, he said after watching the tape--AFP
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
