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Video isn't big news in Arab world's papers
©Associated Press CAIRO -- Newspapers in the Arab world Friday played down an Osama bin Laden videotape that the United States hopes will convince people that the Saudi terrorist instigated the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. The bin Laden tape, released Thursday by the Bush administration, was broadcast simultaneously that evening in the Middle East by CNN and Al-Jazeera satellite television. It showed bin Laden discussing the attacks with a visitor in Afghanistan, who congratulates him on their success. In Washington, U.S. officials now believe the visitor being entertained by bin Laden is Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Ghandi, a Saudi Arabian cleric known for extreme anti-Western views. Al-Ghandi was a professor of Islamic theology who was suspended and arrested by the Saudi government in 1995, just after the release of another radical sheik, Hammud al-Shuaybi, who is mentioned in the tape, said one official on the condition of anonymity. In Friday prayer sermons, a traditional indicator of national sentiment in the Middle East, mosque preachers did not speak of the tape. Instead, they focused on religion; the day was the last Friday sabbath in the holy month of Ramadan. At Cairo's Al-Azhar mosque, many worshipers said they had not seen the tape. And those who had seen it said they could not make out the Arabic and that they either did not trust the English translation or did not understand it. "I heard the tape but it didn't explain anything to me. I don't see it as evidence," said Salah Abdel Moneim, a merchant. He added that America had released the tape to "hurt the image of Islam." A linguist hired by the U.S. government to translate the tape prepared an Arabic transcript. But the Pentagon didn't release the Arabic transcript or a version of the tape with Arabic subtitles. Administration officials gave no explanation for the decision. Mohamed Salah, an Egyptian expert on militant Islamic movements who writes for the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat, believes bin Laden left the tape for Americans to find in Afghanistan because he wanted the world to know of his role in Sept. 11. Bin Laden no longer has anything to lose by claiming responsibility, Salah said. "Bin Laden wanted to show America that he is steadfast following the war, not defeated and still strong," Salah said. While Western media gave huge coverage to the tape, in which bin Laden outlines how the attack was planned and says he did not expect the World Trade Center towers to collapse, the Arab press ran the story sparingly. Most Friday papers were dominated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Jordan, the English-language Jordan Times was the only paper to report the tape as a separate story and to publish some of bin Laden's remarks. Arabic papers in the kingdom mentioned the tape briefly in their stories on the war in Afghanistan. In Lebanon, the respected daily An-Nahar did carry the full text of the tape, but it was the only newspaper to do so. Others ran short articles on their inside pages. In Qatar, Al-Sharq was one of only a few newspapers to comment on the tape in an editorial. Noting the tape's poor quality -- unclear sound and amateur camerawork -- Al-Sharq said it was "unlikely to clarify the truth, but rather increase the fog." "If the United States was confident of the "proof' contained in the tape, then the tape should have first appeared in a court of law and not on the television screen," the paper said. In Saudi Arabia, the home country of bin Laden and 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, headlines highlighted bin Laden's comments that most of the hijackers did not know their mission until shortly before they boarded the planes. Bin Laden said that during their training, they knew only they would conduct a "martyrdom operation." Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, on Friday denounced bin Laden and "this horrific crime." "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," the prince said in a statement released by the Saudi Embassy on Friday. Saudi newspapers omitted the tape's references to several Saudi clerics. Bin Laden asked his visitor, from Saudi Arabia, about the reaction of Saudi clerics to Sept. 11. State-run Saudi television broadcast the bin Laden tape in full on Thursday, as did the official station in another Persian Gulf nation, the United Arab Emirates. Neither station provided analysis or commentary of the tape before or after its airing. Egyptian local and satellite television stations also played the tape in its entirety. Parts of it appeared on Friday morning shows, accompanied by comments from an analyst.
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