Osama tape is
‘nothing shocking’
Valley reacts to
terrorists’ home video
"I
accepted that it (the bin Laden tape) was authentic. What makes me angry
more is on TV they showed over and over the towers falling. But this is
newsworthy."
Eric
Remais, KART bus
driver
By TRAVIS
PURSER
Express Staff Writer
Mary
McLaughlin was careful how she phrased this. The 51-year-old reference
librarian at the Community Library in Ketchum doesn’t want anyone to
think she is cynical about the world. But when she saw television images
of Osama bin Laden walking into a room and laughing about the Sept. 11
attacks on America, she "just felt sadness."
She worries
about mankind.
Three
months after terrorists sowed carnage on national television, Wood River
Valley residents watched with stoicism what appeared to be a home video of
Osama bin Laden casually gloating in Afghanistan about the attacks to a
friend. Television networks broadcast the tape over and over Thursday.
Valley
residents were not surprised at what they saw. They said it only
reinforced what they already felt to be true—that Osama bin Laden is the
irredeemably evil mastermind behind the attacks and that he should be
killed. Others were no more emotionally stirred than they already had been
since Sept. 11. Some questioned the circumstances surrounding the United
State’s acquisition and release of the tape. But, in the end, they
believed the tape was authentic.
Kim Rogers,
a Ketchum parking enforcement officer making the rounds in her
three-wheeled cart Friday, couldn’t wait to get home and watch a
recording she had made of the previous night’s news, "just so I can
see what the little monster is up to."
Investigators
for the FBI told the national media the tape is the most important piece
of evidence against bin Laden. Found by U.S. soldiers in an abandoned
Afghan home, the tape shows grainy, poorly lit images of bin Laden
lounging in conversation with a Saudi sheik. In a translation, bin Laden
said he knew the hijack team members and explained how the teams were kept
apart to foil detection. The Saudi militant embroidered his talk with
biblical references and poetry. At one point, he compared the attacks to a
point scored in a soccer game.
"Nothing
shocking," said Bill Bohrer, 51, a Ketchum businessman who was
checking his mail Friday at the Ketchum Post Office. "I thought the
guy was that way all along."
"The
circumstances are a little odd that they found this thing in a house, and
there it is," said Bohrer, who watched the Osama show when he got
home Thursday night. "The thought crossed my mind" that the tape
could have been planted as propaganda.
Eric Remais,
46, a KART bus driver working his route Friday, said the tape "didn’t
surprise me."
"I
accepted that it was authentic," he said, without elaborating.
"What makes me angry more is on TV they showed over and over the
towers falling. But this is newsworthy."
"It’s
pretty convincing that that is Osama bin Laden caught in private showing a
considerable amount of smugness," said Frederic Mabbatt, a retired
senior member of the Foreign Service, who lives in Sun Valley.
Mabbatt,
who served in Jordan during the 1967 Six Day War and in Sudan, said he was
"disgusted" when he saw segments of the tape on public
television and network news at his home Thursday night. "The guy’s
a megalomaniac. We shouldn’t consider him a Muslim at all."
Unlike
others, he did not question the tape’s veracity. And he did not question
the timing of the release of the tape, which coincided with the possible
surrounding of bin Laden by opposition troops in Afghanistan.
"It
wouldn’t be in our best interests to do anything to deceive
people," he said. "We’d be caught at it sooner or later."