"We Calculated In Advance The Number Of Casualties From The Enemy..."

By Michael Elliott With Reporting by James Carney and Douglas Waller/Washington, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Helen Gibson/London and Scott MacLeod/Cairo

It was one of those moments when you forget all the trash for which television has been responsible, and give thanks for a technology that pumps words and images into a billion living rooms. By now the world knows what Osama bin Laden looks like, and most of its inhabitants, perhaps, decided long ago what they thought of him. But with a quick nod to those who remain convinced that the whole performance was a fake, there's no substitute for the real thing. The videotape shown last week of bin Laden, his colleagues and a visitor from Saudi Arabia discussing, with evident pleasure, the attacks of Sept. 11 provided a peek into the world of terrorism of a kind that can be matched by no other form of reporting.

Everyone saw the same tape, but each saw it in a different way. Experts on terrorism scrutinized the video for what it might tell them about the structure, methods and support of al-Qaeda. For most viewers in the Western world, some of its themes were perplexing--the importance attached to dreams, the thanks and praise to Allah, whose name was repeated about as often as a teenager says "cool" in a typical conversation. In the Islamic world, by contrast, the central mystery of the tape had little to do with its content and more with the process by which it had been made public. Why had the Americans produced it now? And so the tape became the perfect example of a wider truth: technologies like television may have shrunk the world, but they have not given it a common understanding.

Speaking the day after the tape was broadcast, President George W. Bush said he had wrestled with whether to release it at all. Bush first saw the tape toward the end of November and discussed its message with Karen Hughes, his counselor. The President was nervous about its effect on the families of victims, some of whom, when they heard of its existence, argued that it should be kept under wraps. But Bush said he thought the tape amounted to a "devastating declaration of guilt"--and to all but the most blinkered of viewers, it does. Bin Laden boasts of a detailed prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. Talking in a relaxed fashion with a Saudi visitor whose identity was a matter of some debate, he discusses the team that pulled off the hijacks, the moment he was told of the day the attacks would take place, and his estimates of the likely effects of the crashed planes on the World Trade Center. For Bush, this self-incrimination was worth the renewed pain it might cause those who lost loved ones. So more than two weeks after the tape was discovered, it found its audience.

According to U.S. intelligence sources, the tape was found in late November in a house in Jalalabad after forces opposed to the Taliban moved in. The recording passed through several hands before ending up with CIA officers in the region. Back in the U.S., officials of several federal agencies used facial-and voice-recognition technology to confirm that the central character was indeed bin Laden. Officers at the CIA's "bin Laden station," which has been poring over the wealth of documents, artifacts and computer files found in al-Qaeda compounds in Afghanistan, then had to satisfy themselves that the recording had not been doctored. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted on a thorough translation--vetted by outside experts--before the tape was released. Officials also checked the recording for coded signals to al-Qaeda cells. "It doesn't appear that it was designed for that purpose," says a senior intelligence official.

So what was the tape's purpose? Professional bin Laden watchers--the sort who know how to read a loosely knotted turban--shrug off the conspiracy theorists who maintain that the recording must have had some mysterious ulterior motive. This was the Hindu Kush version of "What I did on my vacation." Magnus Ranstorp, an al-Qaeda expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, speculates that the visiting Saudi wanted to immortalize his meeting with bin Laden and was planning to keep the tape private. Mustafa Alani, a Middle East security scholar at London's Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, says, "It was not the first time there has been a private video of bin Laden. They record these sort of things." Possibly it was intended for a small audience of true believers. Roland Jacquard, a leading French expert on terrorism, thinks the footage might have been intended for later editing into a propaganda tape; many such tapes are collector's items in the world of terrorist sympathizers.

Those meant to see it must have been delighted at the tape's atmospherics--the air of relaxed enjoyment, the camaraderie and kissing, the excited praise by the Saudi visitor ("A plane crashing into a tall building was out of anyone's imagination. This was a great job"). Bin Laden seemed on top of the world. Abdul Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, has interviewed the al-Qaeda leader and noticed a change in the man he had met five years ago. "I was watching his body language," says Atwan, "and he is in a joyful, very happy mood. He rarely smiles, but here you see him smiling all the time." Acolytes will also have reveled in the tape's recounting of dreams--no fewer than eight are mentioned. Jacquard says fundamentalists "believe that dreams are inspired by the Prophet, and that the subconscious is the state through which Allah instructs the faithful." To dream of the Sept. 11 attacks, says Jacquard, would suggest that they were "inspired by God, and therefore a legitimate, even holy, act."

For analysts of terrorism, the tape held rich pickings. Bin Laden confirmed what has been suspected by law-enforcement officials: that there was a clear hierarchy among the Sept. 11 hijackers and that they operated under a strict need-to-know code. Though all those who died knew they were engaged in a "martyrdom operation," said bin Laden, most of them were ignorant of the precise target of their mission until the morning it took place. Alani says, "The degree of secrecy they established was unbelievable. Only five or six people had a full picture of the whole operation." (They did not include bin Laden's "spokesman," the Kuwaiti Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who--in a glimpse into the everyday life of a terrorist--turns out to be a soccer fan.) St. Andrews' Ranstorp thinks the tape suggests that the Sept. 11 attacks fit into a classic al-Qaeda pattern: an operation is conceived in the field (in this case, by Mohamed Atta, who is thought to have piloted American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the Twin Towers), then referred back to the leadership in Afghanistan for approval.

In the Islamic world, the tape's effect was muted. It may help those--such as President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan--who would like to argue that the war in Afghanistan is being waged against terrorists, not against Islam. But the tape was released on the eve of Eid ul-Fitr, a major holiday marking the end of Ramadan, when Arabs tend to family festivities rather than the news. Besides, the hot political issue in the past few weeks has been not the war in Afghanistan but the renewed violence between Israel and the Palestinians.

Some of those who bothered to watch muttered about body doubles and voice manipulation, but most newspapers and TV stations in the Middle East played the story straight, accepting that the tape was authentic. That doesn't mean it will change the minds of those who oppose the war. "I don't believe it will have a huge impact on the Muslim world," says Atwan, the editor of al-Quds. "It's too late. It's like accusing somebody of murder and executing him, and then saying 'Now we found the evidence.'" For Atwan and many other commentators, the point is not bin Laden's responsibility for attacks like those of Sept. 11; that is a given. It is, rather, the actions the U.S. took to visit justice on the terrorists. "I want the U.S. to behave as a civilized superpower," says Atwan. "To take revenge, to send these bombers to kill innocent people, isn't justified."

Victory justifies a lot, but experts on al-Qaeda warn that winning the war will not eliminate the organization. For Jacquard, a central significance of the tape was the overt support offered to al-Qaeda by a network of radical and militant Saudi clergy; bin Laden and his guest mention four other clerics approvingly. "That kind of sympathy with Islamic militancy and rationalization of terror," says Jacquard, "has become common in Saudi Arabia and the gulf states." Ranstorp thinks the poem bin Laden recited--"Our homes are flooded with blood...we will not stop our raids/Until you free our lands"--could mean that a new wave of attacks on the U.S. will be launched after Afghanistan has been pacified. "One of the worrying things," he says, "is that we will be lulled into a false sense of security."

In the fight against terrorism, caution is a virtue. Still, a month ago, bin Laden could spend a happy hour chatting with friends in the comfort of a well-appointed house. By the time the tape of that event was shown to the world, he was--in all likelihood--hidden in a cave, being bombed by American planes. On the tape, bin Laden said, "Over weeping sounds, now/ We hear the beats of drums." They beat for him.

--With reporting by James Carney and Douglas Waller/Washington, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Helen Gibson/London and Scott MacLeod/Cairo