Osama using TV to send coded messages?

WASHINGTON, OCT. 11. Suspicious that Osama bin Laden is using American TV to send coded messages, the White House asked the networks on Wednesday to think twice before airing his organisation's videotaped messages.

``At best, this is a forum for prerecorded, pre-taped propaganda inciting people to kill Americans,'' the White House Press Secretary, Mr. Ari Fleischer, said. At worst, the broadcasts could contain signals to ``sleeper'' agents, he added. ``The concern here is not allowing terrorists to receive what might be a message from Osama calling on them to take any actions.''

After a conference call with the National Security Adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox agreed they would not broadcast transmissions from Osama's Al-Qaeda group without first screening and possibly editing them.

In a statement that echoed those of its counterparts, Fox News said: ``We believe a free press must and can bear responsibility not to be used by those who want to destroy America and endanger the lives of its citizens.''

One day earlier, CNN and NBC's cable network aired unedited a tape of the Al-Qaeda spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, praising the September 11 terror attacks and warning there would be more. That message, like the one from Osama just after the U.S. military attacks began in Afghanistan on Sunday, was picked up from Al- Jazeera television, the only station now broadcasting from within Afghanistan.

The target of a high-tech global manhunt, Osama cannot simply pick up the phone to activate his network and it is logical to expect he might embed instructions in taped public messages, Mr. Fleischer said. An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said CIA analysts studying the broadcasts detected nothing specific but made a compelling enough argument about the risk of coded messages that the administration rushed to put the President, Mr. George Bush's highest ranking national security official on the phone to TV executives. The suspicion was based on hunch and common sense, a second administration official said, because Osama's language was filled with flowery, fuzzy images.

A third official noted that Osama and his spokesman both wore white turbans, the Muslims' traditional color of martyrdom, in the two tapes aired since the military attacks began on Sunday. Osama also wore combat fatigues.

``He wears a camouflage jacket to signify he's at war. There's nothing obscure about it,'' said retired CIA counter- terrorism expert, Mr. Vincent Cannistraro. ``He wore that jacket when ABC interviewed him in 1998 and two months later the bombings in the east African embassies took place.'' There is historical precedent - in the West. During World War II, for example, resistance forces inside Nazi-occupied France knew to listen for coded phrases in the speeches of Winston Churchill broadcast over the BBC.

At the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a news- media watchdog group, Mr. Matthew Felling called the administration's request ``a silky form of censorship... uncomfortable but understandable.''

``Because Osama is resourceful, he would use our cultural tools as weapons, be they airplanes or airwaves,'' said Mr. Felling, the Center's media director.

Mr. Ibrahim Hilal, chief editor of Al-Jazeera, scoffed at the notion of hidden signals and said the terrorists were sophisticated enough to communicate with each other directly. ``I don't think the U.S., who taught the world about freedom of expression, should now begin to limit it,'' he said. The warning about Al-Qaeda broadcasts was the latest in a series of White House efforts to limit the flow of information about its war against the terrorists and the Afghan Taliban militia that shelters them.

- AP

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