Bin Laden tape 'heavy-handed attempt' to influence US election

Experts around the world called the videotape from Osama bin Laden a heavy-handed attempt to influence the impending US election, while warning against dismissing it as just propaganda.

“It’s a very crude but sinister attempt to try to influence the presidential election,” said Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

“The US authorities must take the threat of violence seriously,” he said in an interview with the BBC shortly after the tape aired last night.

Tony Blair’s office said it was looking at the tape. A spokeswoman declined to comment on the tape’s timing or whether Blair had seen it himself.

Montasser el-Zayat, a Cairo-based lawyer who defends Islamic radicals, said the video amounted to an ”unprecedented attack on President George Bush at a very critical time, before the US elections”.

Bin Laden suggests Bush was slow to react to the September 11 attacks, giving the hijackers more time than they expected. The al-Qaida leader mentioned Bush continuing to read to kids in Florida while the attacks were under way.

“That gave us three times the time we needed to carry out the operation, thanks be to God,” bin Laden says on the tape.

Diaa Rashwan, a Cairo-based expert on extremist Muslim militants, said bin Laden was trying to influence Americans ”to give Kerry their votes, not Bush”.

But he said the ploy could backfire because Kerry, whom Bush has attempted to paint as soft on terrorism, is unlikely to benefit from what appears to be praise from bin Laden.

Wilkinson told the BBC it was “too early” to predict whether it would help either candidate.

“It is certainly a more flagrant form of propaganda than we have seen before in relation to the American public, but it hasn’t got a hope of influencing American foreign policy,” he said.

“Whoever wins the US election will continue to wage war on al-Qaida and its affiliates … whoever wins the election is unlikely to cut and run from Iraq because they know that policy would be seen as a defeat.”

On websites devoted to extremist Muslim comment, contributors reacted with glee to the tape, saying it was proof bin Laden was alive and a “slap” at America.