A Gleeful Bin Laden Shown on Tape, Say Lawmakers

In a videotape seized in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden describes how he tuned in radio news Sept. 11 in anticipation of the attacks planned that day and identifies Mohamed Atta as the leader of the deadly hijackings, according to intelligence officials and members of Congress who viewed the tape Tuesday.

Those are among the most incriminating remarks caught on a 40-minute tape that officials say is critical evidence confirming many of their suspicions about the attacks and Bin Laden’s role in them.

The White House is expected to release the tape to the public as early as today. Pentagon officials said Tuesday that they were awaiting a review of the recording by independent experts to verify accuracy of the translation from Arabic to English.

The tape, obtained recently by American forces from a private residence in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, was shown to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees Tuesday. Members said they were struck by Bin Laden’s combination of candor and glee.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the tape as “a smoking gun.”

“It’s self-indicting in terms of his knowledge of and participation in” the attacks, Graham said. “His demeanor is so sneering.”

Graham said Bin Laden describes the plot to topple the World Trade Center towers “as if it were an engineering challenge.”

Bin Laden cites his knowledge of structural engineering and his family’s construction empire in Saudi Arabia in saying that the disintegration of the towers exceeded his expectations.

“He said that the expectation was that the fuel in the planes would destroy the top of the buildings but that the buildings wouldn’t necessarily collapse,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Feinstein said Bin Laden makes it clear on the tape that Atta was the leader of the terrorist cell that carried out the hijackings. Atta, a 33-year-old Egyptian, was the pilot of the American Airlines plane that struck the trade center’s north tower at 8:46 a.m.

At about that time, Bin Laden was halfway around the world in Afghanistan, tuning in radio news reports and awaiting bulletins on the attacks, according to officials citing remarks Bin Laden makes on the tape.

“He said he knew it was supposed to happen that day, so he tuned in the radio to listen to the news,” said a U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Those radio accounts, the official said, were “where he first heard about the first strike and then the second.”

Televisions were banned by the Taliban regime.

The tape carries a date stamp of Nov. 9, officials said. It appears to have been recorded at a residence in Kandahar, at a dinner event honoring a visiting Saudi Arabian sheik.

Intelligence officials said they believe the sheik’s name is Suleyman, but they had little information about him. Bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, also appears on the tape, officials said.

Most who have seen the tape, including President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, have described it as damning evidence of Bin Laden’s culpability. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered a more muted evaluation when asked about it at a news briefing Tuesday.

Rumsfeld said he intended to withhold judgment until he had more time to review it and until it had been more thoroughly analyzed by linguists and other experts.