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COVER STORY Looking For Osama: The Update
Thursday, December 27, 2001
By Frank Pellegrini
TIME

Osama Bin Laden speaks from an undisclosed location.
Photo Credit: The Associated Press.

An excerpted tape, a vehement denial and the caves of Tora Bora

The full 34-minute version of the latest Osama bin Laden tape aired in its entirety on the Al Jazeera network at 1:30 p.m. ET Thursday. But the U.S. cable news channels didn't carry it Thursday, and Donald Rumsfeld, pestered at his afternoon briefing about the tape's intelligence value, declared that he hadn't even watched the excerpts. The White House dismisses the tape as "terrorist propaganda."

And so the clues to the whereabouts of the world's most wanted terrorist remain only those gleaned from the 5-minute snippet that made the rounds Wednesday -- that Bin Laden was alive as of November 16 (he referred to a U.S. bomb attack then on the Afghani town of Khost that claimed a mosque). He boasts of how easy it is to "shake the throne of America" by striking at its economy, and declares "the end of the U.S. is imminent." (Translations may vary.) He didn't move his left arm. And he looked a bit wan.

So where the heck is bin Laden? The leader of a radical Islamic group in Pakistan scoffed at reports from the new Afghan Defense Ministry that bin Laden is alive and under his protection. Maulana Fazalur Rehman, head of the fundamentalist Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party, told CNN he has no idea of bin Laden's whereabouts. The Defense Department says the U.S. has no opinion on the matter. (In other Islamic terror news, the leader of Lashkar e-Tayyiba, a Pakistani organization deemed a terrorist group by the United States -- and a denounced as a Pakistan-sponsored terrorist group by India -- denied that it was either. It then accused Washington of waging war against Islam, and vowed to continue its jihad.)
(More: TIME.com News Source)
2001 © TIME, Inc.

Dan