The Response to Terror: Opinions Divided on Tape's Authenticity --- Conspiracy Theories Run Gamut, With Some Calling Him a CIA Operative

• Published in: The Wall Street journal Asia
• Main Author: By staff reporters Yaroslav Trofimov in Rome, Scott Neuman in Quetta, Pakistan, and Daniel Pearl in Peshawar, Pakistan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Victoria, Hong Kong Dow Jones & Company Inc 17.12.2001
• Subjects: Conspiracy
• ISSN: 0377-9920

The video, with its barely audible Arabic conversation, was aired both by Western satellite channels such as CNN and BBC and by Arabic news networks such as Qatar-based al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV. Al Jazeera, a station through which Mr. bin Laden chose to communicate with the world in recent months, broadcast a short interview with a U.S. State Department official immediately after the tape. The network dedicated the rest of the evening to topics seen by many as more urgent in the region: a possible U.S. invasion of Somalia and Israeli missile strikes against Palestinian Authority targets. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the tape showed that Mr. bin Laden was a "fiend" and "the personification of evil." Showing the tape was wise, he said, since it justifies the U.S.'s actions. But many relatives of World Trade Center victims found the tape too painful to watch. Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the tape "fully vindicates" the allied attack on Afghanistan. And George Galloway, one of a small number of rebel members of Parliament from the ruling Labor party who have opposed the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, said the new video wouldn't change his views, because for him Mr. bin Laden has never been the issue. "I've believed and have said that Osama bin Laden and his fellow Islamist obscurantists were dangerous and unpredictable, ever since the U.S. and Britain started funding them in the 1980s," Mr. Galloway said.