Videotape Is Gruel for Splurge of TV News Speculation

Thursday morning’s lurid CNN promo sounded as if the man most Americans wanted dead had been captured by a hidden camera soliciting sex from a minor:

“Osama bin Laden caught on tape! Is this the conclusive evidence we’ve all been waiting for? Watch Aaron Brown tonight!”

At 7:48 a.m., as the drum roll built for the epic show, MSNBC was still playing the “What if?” game. “What if,” someone wondered, “this was staged to look unstaged?” A pundit greeted the question with a thoughtful nod.

And, urged a Fox News Channel anchor when going to a commercial: “Keep it right here, ‘cause it could happen any time now.”

Less than 10 minutes later, it did happen. The Super Bowl of Bin Laden tapes--which Americans had been promised would drive a stake through the cold heart and deep pockets of the globe’s most notorious terrorist--was on its way, released by the Pentagon and beamed to U.S. viewers about 8 a.m. by the major networks and cable news channels.

It would be the talk of the airwaves and cable through much of Thursday, the gun as widely advertised. But how much smoke it produced was in the eye of the beholder.

“There’s no way to watch this tape and not come away with the very clear impression that they’re celebrating,” said CBS anchor Dan Rather.

“It turns your stomach,” announced grossed-out CNN anchor Bill Hemmer.

“He could be making it up,” said John King, CNN’s chief White House man.

In other words, the tape may have been staged to look unstaged? Always measured, King was playing devil’s advocate in noting that the tape of Bin Laden appearing to take credit for Sept. 11, while dining with associates somewhere in Afghanistan, was thought to have been made nearly two months after those terrorist attacks on the U.S. So, perhaps, as this hypothesis went, the crafty Bin Laden was using this “amateur video” to inflate his reputation by pretending to know in advance of the “event,” as he titled the lethal hijackings of U.S. airliners.

If so, then why hadn’t he taken immediate credit instead of waiting months? More gruel for TV speculation.

In fact, assuming the accuracy of its government-provided translation, the tape was affirmation that at the very least Bin Laden was aware of the attacks and took part in the planning. He was predictably guilty as charged.

So other points of note about the video may appear arcane. But here they are anyway:

* Bin Laden’s self-indicting words speak for themselves. Yet advance disinformation about the tape from government members had it also showing that most of the hijackers weren’t told they would be dying, and that Bin Laden’s amusement over that on camera would diminish his luster with those he wished to impress.

“Making fun of the young Muslim suicides will not endear him to a culture that puts a [priority] on sacrifice . . . and will cut him down to size,” scholar Fawaz Gerges told ABC anchor Peter Jennings after the tape had aired.

“It was as if they tricked some of those hijackers into getting on that plane,” complained CNN’s Wolf Blitzer later in the day.

You could infer quite the opposite, in fact. Bin Laden does speak of most of the hijackers’ not being told the nature of the “operation” until “just before boarding the doomed planes.” But he says, too, that they came to the U.S. knowing they’d be in a “martyrdom operation,” meaning that they knew death awaited, only not precisely how it would come.

NBC’s Pete Williams noted that, as did another reporter during Thursday’s televised news briefing with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. But most of Thursday’s TV coverage climbed lazily onto the Bin Laden-betrayed-his-own-men bandwagon.

* Regarding the Sept. 11 operation, Bin Laden says on the tape that he was the “most optimistic of them all.” More than once he mentions “we” in connection with planning the assault on New York’s World Trade Center. Elsewhere, he says, “We had notification the event would take place that day.”

Do “them all” and “we” refer to his close Al Qaeda partners or to unknown others? Why would Bin Laden have to be notified, and who provided that “notification?”

With so much speculation about Bin Laden possibly acting in concert with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein or reputed supporters of terrorism, these ambiguous references should have surfaced somewhere in TV’s micro-dissection. But they apparently didn’t.

* Much is being made of Bin Laden’s coldblooded attitude on the tape in seeming amused about the slaughter of thousands of Americans. CNN spoke of New York restaurant patrons responding to Bin Laden’s callousness “in horror and shock,” and Rep. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) expressed dismay on CNN about the Al Qaeda leader’s “smugness” while hashing over Sept. 11.

Say what? Had Graham and the others really expected Bin Laden to break down and say he regretted the carnage, which an unidentified sheik beside him jubilantly called “the blessed fruit of jihad”?

Does it matter, in any case, whether a mass killer is gleeful or somber about his victims? Would a sorrowful Bin Laden soften the hurt? Did a celebratory Bin Laden increase the hatred? Unlikely. Even before Thursday, the only video of Bin Laden that would have pleased most Americans was one of him in a shroud.

The tape’s most visible achievement, in fact, was in affirming that video technology, however rudimentary, is a common denominator that connects on a primal level societies with diametrically opposed concepts of good and evil. And that “caught on tape” applies even to terrorists.