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CNN Live Today

White House Official Calls Tapes 'Visual Confirmation'

Aired August 19, 2002 - 11:06   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: A senior White House official tells CNN the al Qaeda tapes confirm the group has an urgent desire to develop weapons of mass destruction. He calls the tapes "visual confirmation" of what the U.S. has long suspected.
Joining us now with more reaction, CNN national security correspondent, David Ensor.

David -- what has been the reaction to these tapes from the intelligence community?

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, officials I have spoken to, Carol, are saying that for the most part, the tapes show them, in an interesting and a very striking way, that al Qaeda had capabilities that they, frankly, already knew it had. That it was experimenting with chemical weapons on animals was already known. That it was -- that the level of training for terrorist attacks was quite sophisticated and carefully organized, also know.

They will be looking closely at these tapes, Carol, for faces and names, if they can get them, but especially faces. The people around bin Laden, as Mike just mentioned, are of a particular interest. When you see bin Laden with his security detail, most of them have their faces covered, but some do not. Are any of those faces people that the U.S. doesn't yet know about? If so, U.S. intelligence will be watching for those people from now on.

Also, there may be people in the tape -- for example, one of tapes that CNN has is the 1998 announcement by bin Laden and Al- Zawahiri and others, of this jihad against America. Are there cutaways in that tape that show members of al Qaeda that U.S. intelligence has not yet heard about or known about? That will be the kind of thing that intelligence officials will be interested in looking into once they get their copies of these tapes -- Carol.

LIN: The videotape that we were just looking at of Osama bin Laden was taken back in 1998. Is it useful at all in helping the intelligence community assess the state of his health?

ENSOR: No, not really. It's not useful for assessing his health in 2002. There are much more recent tapes, lengthier, that are shot that they can use for that purpose, and they have other sources, I understand. They still believe on balance that he is probably alive and is probably in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

LIN: What was the intelligence community's body of knowledge about al Qaeda's ability to use chemical weapons? ENSOR: Well, they knew already, and this gives us, of course, very dramatic proof -- additional proof of it, that al Qaeda was experimenting with chemical weapons, and was interested in trying to find ways of using weapons of mass destruction, not just chemical.

But the general consensus of intelligence officials I have spoken to is that al Qaeda is likely to continue, as other terrorist groups mostly have in the last decade or so, to use conventional explosives, to use -- well, for example, aircraft, to use simpler methods. More bang for the buck, in effect. These WMD, weapons of mass destruction, are very difficult. It's one thing to kill a dog in a small area. It's another to try and effectively use chemical weapons against hundreds of thousands of people. Not very easy to pull off.

So U.S. intelligence believes less likely than another conventional attack -- Carol.

LIN: All right, thank you very much, David Ensor, our national security correspondent on these tapes.

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