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White house warns of coded messsages { October 11 2001 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-101101message.storyhttp://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-101101message.story
TV Officials Cautioned on Videos of Bin Laden
Security: White House urges news executives to deliberate before airing tapes, saying they could contain secret messages to terrorists.
By JAMES GERSTENZANG,ELIZABETH JENSEN and JOSH MEYER
Times Staff Writers
October 11 2001
WASHINGTON -- The White House asked television networks Wednesday to use caution in carrying unedited videos of Osama bin Laden because they are unfiltered propaganda and may send coded instruction to his operatives.
President Bush's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, made the request in a conference call with top officials of broadcast and cable networks.
Promising to curb Bin Laden's seemingly unfettered access to American television screens, network executives pledged to review all video before airing it.
Soon after the United States began striking targets in Afghanistan on Sunday, networks displayed a video that was reportedly delivered to the Kabul office of Al Jazeera television, an independent Middle Eastern cable network. A Bin Laden spokesman has also been shown on American television.
"At best, Osama bin Laden's message is propaganda calling on people to kill Americans," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. "At worst, he could be issuing orders to his followers to initiate such attacks."
The White House concern is that the Islamic fundamentalist or his organization, Al Qaeda, may have planted followers in the United States or elsewhere some time ago, and that his statements may be giving them instructions to begin new operations.
"People are analyzing that now," Fleischer said. "There are no easy conclusions to reach."
He added that communications links out of Afghanistan are limited and one way for Bin Laden to reach his followers beyond that country "is through Western media."
Privately, intelligence sources said Al Qaeda frequently uses such tactics. Videotapes in which Bin Laden speaks have been made public before each of the past three terrorist attacks attributed to Al Qaeda. Each attack killed Americans.
"It is something we are extremely concerned about," said a Bush administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It is no coincidence that the release of a Bin Laden video is subsequently followed by a terrorist attack."
He said such videos were released before terrorists bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and attacked the warship Cole last year in the port of Aden, Yemen. And Bin Laden released a "training video" this summer, before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"This one may be no different," the official said of the video that came out Sunday but appeared to have been taped before the bombing began.
The message could have been in the words themselves--"saying now is a good time to attack," the Bush aide said. But administration officials also fear that Bin Laden and his aides may have been sending a signal by what he wore--combat fatigues--or where he was taped.
Officials said each Bin Laden tape is being compared with others and the terrorist actions that followed, to search out a pattern or code.
Intelligence and law enforcement officials have given special scrutiny to the video released this summer to see whether it launched last month's attacks. In addition, the Bush aide said, people who have been taken into custody who may have played a role in those attacks have been asked whether the video contained a message. He would not say what, if anything, those being questioned had said.
During World War II, governments used the news media to send coded messages--and listened to the enemy's reports for clues.
"The most famous example was the BBC French service," said David Isby, author of several books on Afghanistan and the Taliban. He said the British newscasts included phrases or sentences that were meaningful as codes to Resistance cells fighting the Nazis.
Rice called the network executives about 6 a.m. PDT. She spoke for about 30 minutes with the presidents of the news divisions at ABC, CBS and NBC and the chairmen of CNN and Fox News.
The TV news organizations said in similar statements that their top executives had agreed to stop airing video from Bin Laden or other Al Qaeda spokesmen without judging whether it was newsworthy.
Executives, who described the conference call as cordial, said material they televise was likely to be highly edited or paraphrased.
"If there's no news value, it may not air at all," said Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News.
But he and other TV news executives stopped short of saying they would never air such video. Shapiro cited one hypothetical example--pictures of Bin Laden walking in a bomb crater--as material that might be important enough to display.
"It's going to be case by case, day by day, situation by situation," said Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC.
Bin Laden's first statement on Sunday was widely televised almost as soon as it was disseminated by Al Jazeera. The networks said at the time that they did not know where or when it was taped. A second statement from Bin Laden's organization Tuesday also received wide distribution. But it prompted more scrutiny.
Fox started televising it without reviewing it, but cut it off after about 20 seconds. At MSNBC, after the statement ran without screening, Sorenson said he changed the network's policy.
"These people are terrorists; this is not an official government," he said. "We have added problems with these releases because they are coming to us third-hand from Al Jazeera. While I have a certain level of respect for Al Jazeera, I don't allow other news organizations to vet our journalism for us."
Some networks had already wondered whether the tapes contained embedded or coded messages; indeed, MSNBC televised a discussion of that possibility this week.
Network executives and the White House described Rice's presentation not as a request to stop broadcasting the messages but as a request that they consider the content before automatically carrying them.
"In fact, Dr. Rice acknowledged the potential importance of messages and other appearances by Bin Laden," CBS News said in a statement. "She did ask the networks to keep national security in mind while exercising their independent news judgment."
Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, said Rice's focus was less on the potential of coded messages and more on the unfiltered access to American television screens that the networks were giving to "sworn enemies of the United States exhorting terrorists to kill more Americans."
The administration's request raised questions about the responsibility of the news media to censor itself, as well as questions about whether the administration was masking its desire to limit Bin Laden's efforts to spread his message regardless of the operational impact it has.
Sanford J. Ungar, former director of Voice of America and president of Goucher College in Baltimore, urged caution in exercising self-censorship because it could lead to greater pressure from the government to restrict news coverage.
"Once the camel's nose is in the tent, the rest is sure to follow. What will be the next demand?" he asked.
The White House limited its specific request to television networks. But Fleischer said his account of Rice's call could influence other media, such as Internet sites capable of carrying video.
The Bin Laden video is posted on the Los Angeles Times Web site. Joseph M. Russin, assistant managing editor, said: "The tape had been played repeatedly on television, and we felt it had significant news value."
Merrill Brown, editor in chief of the popular news Web site MSNBC.com, said his bosses had not asked him to hold off distributing video of Bin Laden.
He said that his Web site serves an international audience and that it would be unthinkable to base his news judgments only on expressions from U.S. officials.
"We are the international arm of NBC News and anybody anywhere in the world with a phone connection can look at our streaming videos on demand. The Web changes the dynamic here," he said.
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Gerstenzang and Meyer reported from Washington and Jensen reported from New York. Times staff writers Norman Kempster, Jube Shiver and Marisa Schultz also contributed to this report.
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