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Tape sting { December 16 2001 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.observer.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1501,619524,00.htmlhttp://www.observer.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1501,619524,00.html
Bin Laden videotape was result
of a sting
The CIA may have set up the terrorist leader to
incriminate himself
War in Afghanistan: Observer special
Ed Vulliamy and Jason Burke
Sunday December 16, 2001
The Observer
In the cavernous front room, beneath flickering neon lights, they
gathered to watch. Outside, darkness had fallen, but though the
Ramadan fast was over the men who sat riveted to the screen of
the single television in Jalalabad's Afghan Hotel were not in the
mood for the customary celebration.
On the screen flickered a blurred picture: a tall, grey-bearded
man in a white turban talking in Arabic to a number of other
similarly attired associates. These fuzzy, broken images were
the 'smoking gun' - bin Laden's long-awaited, albeit apparently
unwitting, personal confession.
The men in the Afghan Hotel had a more pressing, more local
interest too. According to the American authorities who
solemnly released the tape last week, it had been found nearby,
in a ruined building once used by Arab fighters from bin Laden's
al-Qaeda organisation. It had been seized when Mujahideen
fighters entered their city a few hours after al-Qaeda's Taliban
protectors had left.
That, the viewers knew, was certainly possible. By the morning
after the 'liberation' of Jalalabad, fighters loyal to Commander
Hazrat Ali had seized safehouses and training complexes linked
to al-Qaeda. Ali has cooperated with the Americans and the
story that he had passed the tape on to the CIA was very
plausible.
But then doubts began to surface. Why had bin Laden broken
his tight security to talk? Why had he not used one of his
normally favoured media outlets? Was the tape genuine? Was
this indeed bin Laden at all?
The tape was certainly damning. It showed bin Laden laughing
and boasting about the 11 September attacks as he talks to his
interviewer, a Saudi cleric who has travelled through war-racked
Afghanistan to see him. Bin Laden, flanked by two key aides,
describes how the planes did far more damage to the World
Trade Centre than he ever imagined. 'We calculated in advance
the number of casualties from the enemy... that the floors that
would be hit would be three or four floors,' he says. 'I was the
most optimistic of them all.'
Bin Laden also indicates that the men who carried out the plot
knew that they were on a 'martyrdom operation' but did not have
details of the mission until the last minute.
This weekend, as the debate the tape has provoked continued
across the Islamic world, several intelligence sources have
suggested to The Observer that the tape, although absolutely
genuine, is the result of a sophisticated sting operation run by
the CIA through a second intelligence service, possibly Saudi or
Pakistani.
'They needed someone whom they could persuade or coerce to
get close to bin Laden and someone whom bin Laden would feel
secure talking to. If it works, you have got the perfect evidence
at the perfect moment,' said one security source. 'It's a
masterstroke.'
The focus of suspicion is the Saudi dissident preacher who
appears to have taped the interview, conducted according to the
timecode on the video on 9 November, in what appears to be a
guesthouse in the Afghan city of Kandahar. Though unidentified
in the one-hour recording, security sources have told The
Observer that the interviewer, who appears to be disabled from
the waist down, is Ali Saeed al-Ghamdi, a former assistant
professor of theology at a seminary in Mecca. Saudis who
watched the tape said the interviewer's accent betrayed roots in
the south-west of their country, either the lower Hejaz or Asir
province, where most of the 15 Saudi hijackers were from. Bin
Laden bows down to greet the cleric, who has not stood up to
greet him. Only someone who was incapable of rising would not
be on his feet in the presence of such a famous and revered
man, Islamic experts said yesterday.
Al-Ghamdi, who is known to Saudi intelligence services, is a
marginal figure who tried to make a name for himself through
inflammatory anti-Western speeches before being banned from
preaching in 1994, one Saudi close to the government said. In
the late Nineties he preached in obscure mosques along the
highway leading from the port city of Jedda - where bin Laden
grew up - to the holy city of Mecca, but his firebrand oratory
drew only small audiences.
Senior Saudi government figures and religious scholars tend to
dismiss such men as insignificant. 'They are not big-time and
they don't have the legitimacy and the religious scholarship that
the big guys have,' said Nawaf Obeid, a Saudi security analyst.
'They make a name for themselves with how extreme they are.
They aggrandise themselves by claiming they are with bin
Laden.'
Security sources stress that, despite his Islamist credentials,
al-Ghamdi would still be a potential point of contact for
Pakistani, Saudi or Egyptian intelligence.
'He was known because he was suspected of being involved in
the gathering of international finance for al-Qaeda. He is a
peripheral figure who wants to be something bigger and is
frustrated. It's a classic profile. They could have turned him,' one
security official for a Gulf intelligence agency contacted in
Peshawar said. Experts told The Observer that the tape bears a
marked resemblance to secretly filmed evidence used by the
FBI against major American Mafia figures in recent years.
And though US security officials said there was 'no confirmation'
that the tape was made by an 'intelligence source', a Pentagon
official confirmed to The Observer that 'curious circumstances'
surrounded al-Ghamdi, who appeared to be aware of the taping.
Whatever its provenance, the video has polarised opinion in the
Arab world. 'The vast proportion of people always believed he did
it and condemned him for it. They have not altered their view,'
said Abdul Wahab Badrakhan, the deputy editor of al-Hayat
newspaper. 'Only those with a fanatical mindset would deny
what they can now see.'
One such man is Syed, a 38-year-old man who fought alongside
bin Laden in Afghanistan during the Eighties. 'There is no way
Osama would have done something like this,' he said. 'He was a
quiet man with great reverence for human life. The Osama I see
happily describing people dying is not the Osama I knew and
loved.'
Images of the 44-year-old Saudi-born dissident, who studied civil
engineering as a young man, laughing as he talks of how he
used his specialist knowledge to calculate how much damage
the planes would do, have been difficult for supporters to explain.
General Hamid Gul, a hardline former head of Pakistan's ISI spy
agency, suggested that the figure in the video might be a
lookalike. Others have queried the translation of the poor-quality
Arabic soundtrack and the way that certain key elements - such
as the location where the film was made - are inaudible.
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