Bin Laden voice identified on terror video

The CIA has said Osama bin Laden provided the voice recording for the latest al Qaida videotape to air on television, but intelligence officials do not believe he was taped recently.

The agency matched the voice on the tape to previous recordings of bin Laden, said a US intelligence official. The Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera has been airing excerpts of the tape this week and was due to air the entire video today.

“It isn’t clear when the recording was made,” the official said. “It definitely was a while ago.”

In Tuesday’s broadcast, the voice identified as bin Laden’s named all 19 of the September 11 hijackers and their places of birth. The men were lauded for their actions.

“Those men have realised that the only course to achieve justice and defeat injustice is through jihad for the cause of God,” bin Laden said in Arabic on Tuesday’s clip.

On Monday, the station broadcast a portion of the tape in which the same voice named the four leaders of the September 11 attacks - Mohammed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah and Hani Hanjour.

US officials also say they now believe Atta, the ringleader among the 19, met bin Laden in Afghanistan in late 1999.

The meeting took place at one of bin Laden’s training camps, officials said. But one official noted that bin Laden frequently toured camps and met numerous trainees during that time, so it is unclear whether they would have discussed the September 11 plot.

Bin Laden himself has been absent for all of 2002. Officials say the videotape of him having dinner with his associates is the last absolutely certain sign he was alive. That tape was made in early November in Afghanistan.

Intelligence and military officials believe that bin Laden was at his Tora Bora hideout in late November, before the US began bombing it. Their best guess is that he fled south toward the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in early December.

Officials cited two pieces of evidence: interviews with prisoners captured in the Tora Bora region and a radio transmission intercepted in early December that US personnel identified as from bin Laden.

But the assessment is by no means certain. Prisoners’ stories have not always added up, and the radio transmission could have been relayed from elsewhere as a trick.

Since, officials have said that if bin Laden is alive, he has probably stayed in the remote border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But since Tora Bora, there have been no reports of bin Laden’s whereabouts, or even whether he is alive, wounded or dead, that US intelligence has deemed credible. Other bin Laden tapes released this year appear to have been made before December, US officials say.

The absence of evidence have opinions within the American government running the gamut. Counterterrorism officials at the highest levels believe he died in the bombing at Tora Bora, but acknowledge they have no evidence to back this up.

Others believe the complete silence over communications channels and from other intelligence sources could only be the result of an orchestrated effort to hide bin Laden, and conclude he is therefore still alive.

But US officials almost universally say they will operate under the assumption he has survived until they find proof to the contrary.