0 COMMENTS

Arab World Suspicious of Tape -- By DONNA ABU-NASR
.c The Associated Press

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Poor sound quality and reliance on U.S. government translations significantly lessened the impact of the latest Osama bin Laden videotape in the Arab world and fueled suspicion of a U.S. scheme to blame Muslims for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

``Is that possible! I can’t believe bin Laden did it. The translation is wrong and we hardly heard his voice. America just wants to implicate Muslims,’’ said Nadia Saqr, an Egyptian mother of two.

In the tape released Thursday by the Pentagon, there was no finger-waving >or grandiose threats and bin Laden referred to the Sept. 11 attacks in a casual tone.

As he leaned back on a mattress describing elements of the Sept. 11 plot, the tape revealed what bin Laden is like when he is not making a speech.

``What you were listening to was just a dinner conversation. He wasn’t performing,’’ said Sateh Noureddine, managing editor of Lebanon’s As-Safir newspaper.

In tapes shown of bin Laden over the years, the Saudi dissident’s every word and move appeared choreographed to portray him as a heroic warrior able to lead Muslims against their enemies, mainly the United States, Israel and Europe.

One of the most striking examples is the bin Laden tape aired by the Al-Jazeera Arabic station on Oct. 7, hours after the U.S. airstrikes against the Taliban and bin Laden’s al-Qaida network began in Afghanistan.

Looking straight into the camera in that tape, bin Laden wagged his finger as he delivered his threat:

``To America, I say only a few words to it and its people: I swear by God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine, and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad, peace be upon
him.’’

Over dinner with his aides in the tape released Thursday, bin Laden recited a poem about freedom and struggle and teased his spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, because he had known nothing about the Sept. 11 attacks. ``Not everyone knew,’’ bin Laden said in the tape.

It was a striking contrast to previous tapes. Coupled with poor sound quality and U.S. government translations, the tape released by the Pentagon instead of the Al-Jazeera station, left many Arab skeptics.

In Jordan, political analyst Labib Kamhawi said, at most, the video shows bin Laden praising the attacks, but ``does not prove that bin Laden was responsible for’’ them.

Mohamed Salah, an Egyptian expert on militant Islamic movements who writes for the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat, said bin Laden may have left the tape behind in the Afghan city of Jalalabad on purpose so the Americans would show it and show the world that he played a role in the terrorist attacks in the United States. Bin Laden no longer has anything to lose by claiming responsibility, Salah said.

In a recruiting video released after the October 2000 suicide attack on the destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, bin Laden praised the deadly bombing but did not claim responsibility.

As he recited a poem about the Yemen attack, background footage showed bin Laden’s masked militants training in Afghanistan as a song played with the lyrics: ``We thank God for granting us victory the day we destroyed Cole in
the sea.’’

AP-NY-12-13-01 1713EST
========================

Bin Laden’s mother disappointed by her son-paper


RIYADH, Dec 9 (Reuters) - The mother of Osama bin Laden was quoted on Sunday as saying that she was not angry with her son, but just disappointed by his ideas and actions.

"I do not approve of his ambitions and the actions attributed to him, but I am not angry with him," the woman, whose name was withheld, said in comments published by Saudi Arabia’s English-language Arab News newspaper.

"Like all mothers, I am satisfied and pleased with my son and pray to God to guide him and save him," she added.

The United States accuses bin Laden of masterminding the devastating September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, and U.S. troops in Afghanistan are currently hunting him down.

The soft-spoken Islamist militant is also wanted in connection to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya and other strikes against U.S. targets.

Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden’s citizenship several years ago but several members of his family, who run a multi-billion dollar construction business, remain in the kingdom.

Bin Laden is said to be 17th of 57 children born to his father, who was killed in an air crash when his son was a teenager.

Bin Laden himself was reported some years ago to have three wives and more than a dozen children, one of whom was believed to have been killed in a U.S. air strike a few days ago.

05:16 12-09-01
==================
Bin Laden Solicited Clerics’ Views

By TAREK AL-ISSAWI
.c The Associated Press

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - The latest Osama bin Laden videotape released on Thursday revealed his interest in the views of several Persian Gulf clerics known for anti-American edicts and their support for holy war.

In bin Laden’s conversation on the tape with a visiting Saudi cleric, four religious leaders were mentioned, including Sheik Hamoud bin Oqla al-Shuaibi, a man who is no stranger to Saudi jails and government pressure.

In October, al-Shuaibi issued a religious edict urging Muslims to fight alongside the Taliban, Afghanistan’s former rulers, as the United States began a campaign to root out those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and
their Afghan hosts.

``America is an infidel country, an enemy of Islam and Muslims,’’ al-Shuaibi said.

Al-Shuaibi, who is believed to be in his 70s, enjoys substantial support in Saudi Arabia, especially in his hometown of Buraida, in the northeast.

His fiery comments, however, have earned him the disfavor of the Saudi establishment, landing him in jail in 1995 for two months on charges of inciting dissident.

Another Saudi cleric mentioned in the videotape was Sulaiman al-Ulwan who told followers that the Sept. 11 victims ``were not innocent,’’ but were part of the enemy forces.

Al-Ulwan, 33, has also issued edicts that have gone against the interests of the Saudi royal family.

Since Sept. 11, the Saudi government has had to tread a fine line between maintaining its close ties with the United States and appeasing its conservative Muslim population. While the government officially supports
Washington’s war on terrorism, there is sympathy in the streets for bin Laden and opposition to the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan. Fifteen of the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudis.

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has asked the nation’s clerics not to be ``overpowered by emotions or agitated by others,’’ warning that anything less could put the kingdom ``in a critical position.’’

AP-NY-12-13-01 1732EST
===============================

Bin Laden tape fuels US anger,
doesn’t change minds

By Jon Herskovitz

NEW YORK, Dec 13 (Reuters) - Americans stood even firmer in their views that Osama bin Laden masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks after watching a videotape released on Thursday in which the Saudi-born militant says the attacks were more deadly than he expected.

Trading slowed on Wall Street and clusters of people in Times Square stood motionless for a moment before the billboard television screen there to watch the low-quality videotape the United States said clearly implicated
bin Laden in the attacks that killed about 3,300 people.

"Maybe, for someone, this will be the smoking gun. But I don’t need no more convincing," said Yvonne Torlio, a health care worker who watched the broadcast at Times Square.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the tape showed that bin Laden was the "personification of evil."

"He is obviously delighted he killed more people than he anticipated," Giuliani said at a news conference. "Unless he was brought to justice he would kill a lot more innocent human beings."

Delivery man Mike Contandi joined the crowds watching the tape in Times Square, just a few miles (kilometers) from the site where two hijacked airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center, collapsing the twin towers.
In the tape, bin Laden talks about his calculations of death in felling the 110-story towers.

"The smoking gun will be when we finally catch bin Laden," said Contandi.

For Ryan Amundson of Brookfield, Wisconsin, the tape only added fuel to the rage he felt over the attacks.

"It renewed a sense of anger in me. Just to see them sitting there and laughing and going about things nonchalantly while they’re talking about killing thousands of Americans," he said.

"They were acting like it was business as usual for them. It made me angry - again," Amundson said.

WALL STREET PAUSES

Wall Street traders said the airing of the roughly hour-long videotape at 11 a.m. EST (1600 GMT) significantly dampened market action as participants stopped watching their trading screens and turned their attention to
television screens.

"We already knew what was on there. It’s not very interesting. I’m more interested to see the reaction from the world community and how they take it," said Wall Street trader Brian Pears, head of equity trading at
Victoria Capital Management in Ohio.

U.S. officials say the tape, released by the Pentagon and accompanied by an official U.S. government translation, proves bin Laden was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that killed nearly
3,300 people.

"(Inaudible) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower," bin Laden says in the U.S. translation.

"We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all."

Bin Laden, who inherited millions from his family’s construction fortune in Saudi Arabia, makes reference to his own knowledge of that business.

"(Inaudible) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only," bin Laden said. "This is all that we had hoped for."

Instead, the weight of the upper floors brought down the entire structures as they collapsed.

The amateur videotape shows a relaxed and smiling bin Laden sitting and talking to a group of people. It was shot in November and found in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said.
Alan Dean, a financial industry worker from San Diego, who was visiting New York, said that he did not see any need for releasing the tape. He said there was already enough evidence that implicated bin Laden.

"Do we really need to release it? It didn’t change my thoughts or opinions," Dean said.