Many Watch, but Opinions Mostly Unchanged

Proof is in the eye of the beholder.

To those already convinced of Osama bin Laden’s guilt, the video released by the U.S. government is a bona fide confession for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. To doubters, the blurry tape is fabricated evidence against a man already convicted and sentenced.

There are few fence-sitters between these parallel universes of belief, and few people around the world appear to have changed their mind after listening to Bin Laden discuss the calculations that went into the deadly assault on the World Trade Center.

“Damned by His Gloating Smile,” said the headline in London’s center-right newspaper the Daily Telegraph, which called the tape “the key piece of evidence in the prosecution’s case.”

Not so, said the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Quds al Arabi. “The tape does not provide the strong evidence the Bush administration had hoped for,” it said Friday. “The way it was filmed, unclear in some parts, the difficulty of confirming the source and its authenticity, these are issues that can lead collectively or separately to a legal and political controversy.”

Those who found confirmation of Bin Laden’s guilt in the video heard the Al Qaeda leader say his crew “calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed.” They heard him say the hijackers weren’t told the details of the assault until just before they boarded the planes. And they heard that when his Al Qaeda cohorts rejoiced after a plane hit the first tower, he told them to “be patient.”

All of this, said with smiles and giggles and the bravado of someone recounting victory on the soccer field, is seen by believers as the DNA of the Bin Laden case, irrefutable evidence that is beyond question.

“Like many other psychopathic assassins in the past, Osama bin Laden could not resist the temptation to claim for posterity the criminal act for which he will be remembered for centuries: the attack on the twin towers,” Spain’s conservative El Mundo newspaper said in an editorial.

This view, shared by victims of terrorist attacks attributed to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, is widely held in the West by people who generally trust their governments and who do not see the United States as an enemy or an oppressor.

Saudi Arabia, the land of Bin Laden’s--and many of the hijackers’--birth, was quick to condemn the actions in the tape.

“The tape displays the cruel and inhumane face of a murderous criminal who has no respect for the sanctity of human life or the principles of his faith,” said Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, the kingdom’s ambassador to the United States. “Bin Laden and those he mentions in his tape are deviants and renegades who do not represent the Islamic faith or the Saudi people.

“We reject and condemn in the strongest terms possible their attitudes and their actions. We hope that the perpetrators of this horrific crime will soon be brought to justice and severely punished.”

In Egypt, the tape was released after government offices had closed for the weekend and the start of the days-long celebration marking the end of Ramadan. Egyptian officials did not issue any comments on the tape.

In Jordan, the tape proved little more than a distraction to a public fixated on the rising violence between Palestinians and Israelis, according to Information Minister Saleh Qallab.

“Our people here concentrate on what is happening in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” he said. “They received the tape carelessly. Today I asked many people about their opinion, and they told me, ‘It means nothing for us, maybe true, maybe not.’ Our problem now is the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

But Qallab said he thinks the tape helped bolster America’s case.

“I think it is a good evidence against Bin Laden,” he said. “It is very good evidence. I think it is good evidence to send him to court in case the Americans catch him.”

But among those who view the United States as an aggressor or an enemy, the video was not self-evident.

Sheik Nafitulla Ashirov, who as the supreme mufti of Asiatic Russia is the Muslim leader east of the Urals, said it was ludicrous to suggest the tape proved Bin Laden’s complicity in the attacks.

“The United States treats the whole world like little children who sit in front of television sets and swallow everything it chooses to feed them,” Ashirov said.

“On that day [Sept. 11], millions of people were watching the tragic developments live on television, and many of them were discussing technical issues connected with the acts, for example why the towers were collapsing like this and what would happen if the planes had struck higher or lower, etc.,” he said.

“Millions of people discussed those things in front of their televisions, but that doesn’t make you responsible for those acts, whether you are Osama bin Laden or somebody else.”

Viewers of the Arabic-language Al Jazeera television station were shown the same tape as viewers of the U.S. networks, but many saw a different picture--a fuzzy image of Bin Laden and guests in an undisclosed location, and an incomprehensible audio that had been translated by linguists in the United States.

“The tape is unreal, and they are blaming Islam for everything bad happening all over the world,” Fathya Abdul Samie, 55, said in the historic center of Cairo.

The video apparently did little to dispel the belief among some radical Muslims that the attacks were some kind of Jewish conspiracy to commit murder and blame Islam.

“They want to do anything to blame Bin Laden, and that is something from inside the States, maybe a Jewish thing,” Rifaat Khalaf, 56, a financial manager for a pharmaceutical company, said as he left a mosque after prayer. “How can he shoot that video and leave it in such a place when he knows they can have it?”

On the latter point, even some people convinced of Bin Laden’s guilt agreed that the video poses a conundrum: Why would such a careful planner of terrorism be so careless as to admit a role in the Sept. 11 attacks on video and leave it lying around?

The footage “is as close as the world is now likely to get to finding a man holding the smoking gun” for the attacks, London’s left-of-center newspaper the Guardian said in an editorial.

But the paper, suspicious of Bin Laden and President Bush’s “war on terrorism,” added that a “dose of level-headed caution” is in order because the video was made after Sept. 11, “when any crackpot with a camcorder could claim responsibility for something that the whole world now knew about.”

The video was so audacious, the paper said, “that it is impossible not to think that something about it is a put-up job. It provokes all kinds of skeptical questions. When, where and why was the video made? How was it obtained by the Americans? Is it the sole piece of incriminating evidence collected against Bin Laden, or is it just the juiciest bit? If the latter, where is the rest? How long has the video been in American hands and why has it been released at this time? It should not be taken wholly at face value.”

Many people and papers did take the tape at face value. They believed what they heard and saw.

The video offers viewers “the possibility of seeing evil as it defines itself,” said Italy’s left-leaning newspaper La Repubblica.

“The proof is so overwhelming that one wonders why Americans hesitated several days before making it public,” Patrick Sabatier wrote in the French daily Liberation.

Back on the streets of Cairo, it was a rare viewer who said he had been influenced by the video.

“The tape is real and I support what the States has been doing in Afghanistan,” said Ismail Mahmoud, 26, a bookstore owner who had just finished praying. “I was not sure that Bin Laden was the one who did that, but now I am pretty sure he is the one.”

Some people said the video showed Bin Laden to be not a religious leader as he claims, but a wicked reveler in slaughter.

Ahmed Mourad Hussein, 33, an engineer, said the tape left him depressed.

“Bin Laden is the one who did it, and Islam is ashamed for such a person. I am sure that the translation is right because I heard the Arabic,” Hussein said. “I support the States for what it did [in] its fight against such a person who gave a bad name to Islam.”

*

Times staff writers Michael Slackman in Cairo and Robyn Dixon in Moscow, and researchers Maria de Cristofaro in Rome, Ali Khalil in London and Achrene Sicakyuz in Paris contributed to this report.