Tape Heads

Why the Bush administration's plea to stop broadcasting Al Qaeda video may have done the mass murderers an unintended favor.

The White House took the startling step Wednesday of trying to block the rebroadcast in the U.S. of Al Qaeda's videotaped harangues. In doing so, it may have done the mass murderers an unintended favor.

Two such tapes have emerged since the bombing of Afghan targets commenced Sunday, both first broadcast by Qatar's Al Jezeera TV service (itself a target of Bush administration special pleading). The administration has maintained that, at best, news organizations rebroadcasting the tapes are facilitating terrorist propaganda, and that at worst, the tapes may contain covert signals or messages aimed at sleeper agents still at large. Either way, according to the White House, they shouldn't be on the air. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice made that argument to news executives in a conference call; she was echoed in statements by Secretary of State Colin Powell and White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer. Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, chimed in as well. "Our nation is at war. All of us have to act responsibly," Edwards said.

Fox News immediately consented. "We will no longer act as a transmission belt for propaganda of the Al Qaeda organization," said Brit Hume, the network's Washington managing editor. Other organizations responded more vaguely, promising to "review" future tapes before deciding how to handle them.

But if the White House got its wish and stopped all access to these tapes, the only likely result would be that Americans, who are living in uncertainty because of Al Qaeda, would be the only people in the world unable to examine their enemy's statements. The White House has no chance whatsoever of preventing the rest of the world's news organizations from playing these tapes, and a great many foreign news broadcasts are regularly available here. The White House cannot keep the tapes off the Internet. It cannot prevent transcripts of the tapes from appearing in print. If there are in fact persons seeking information from the tapes, they will have little trouble gaining access to them.

In the meantime, the White House will have greatly reduced the chance that any hidden information will be discovered. The American populace is large and diverse, with a great deal of knowledge and expertise dispersed through it. It includes subcultures knowledgeable about the Middle East, about Afghanistan, about radical Islamism, about international terrorism's personnel and methods, even subcultures knowledgeable about codes, cryptography, and other methods of transmitting hidden data using new technologies. By blocking access to the tapes, the White House will have prevented knowledgeable persons from examining and discerning possibly important clues. The administration seems to think that everyone with germane knowledge is known to it, which is manifestly absurd and potentially dangerous.

Furthermore, the administration's approach to the tapes as propaganda is similarly obtuse. It is true that the tapes, which contain threats of more murderous acts, may be demoralizing to some viewers, and thus may serve an Al Qaeda purpose. But unless the White House intends to stop all reporting on the existence of the tapes, these threats will become known in any event. Indeed, it is vital that Americans be aware of such threats.

But it is just as vital that they learn of the threats in the form in which they are made, so that viewers can judge them, respond to them, and add to their knowledge of those who would harm them. The form of a message often contains much more information than its sender intends, and these Al Qaeda tapes are rich in potential information about the condition in which the group and its leaders find themselves, the state of their struggle against history, and the relative value of various possible responses. This kind of knowledge is obviously contingent; it is subject to continual review as new information arises. The very contingency of our knowledge about our enemies makes the careful examination of such primary documents as the tapes all the more pressing.

What can be gleaned from the tapes? First of all, things may not be going at all according to Al Qaeda's plan. By perpetrating an atrocity against Americans on American soil, the murderers may well have intended to foment a confrontation between the U.S. and the Islamic world. Certainly, its tapes pretend that the U.S. is at war against Islam. The truth is that numerous Muslim states are cooperating with the U.S. military effort, and that only fringe groups in a handful of places have objected to that support. Al Qaeda's tapes repeatedly condemn cooperating Muslim states, and more importantly, call on Muslims everywhere to rise. "The [Muslim] nation should shoulder its responsibility," screams Sulaiman Abou Ghaith in the second tape. "Otherwise it will be a disgrace." Is there a note of impatience, frustration, or even desperation in his words and tone?

Second, Al Qaeda's extraordinarily primitive worldview may not be resonating with the millions of Muslims in the West. In the first of the tapes, Osama bin Laden claimed that "the entire world" is split "into two regions–one of faith where there is no hypocrisy and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us." Bin Laden certainly has sympathizers in the West, but the point is that thus far none of them have seen fit to demonstrate on his behalf. For most Western Muslims as for everyone else, the world is actually divided into the half where one can better oneself, and the half where one cannot.

Third, it is noteworthy that Sulaiman Abou Ghaith feels it necessary to defend the murderous hijackers of Sept. 11. "I would like to tackle an important point in this speech," he says, "which is that those youth who destroyed America and launched the storm of airplanes, they did good, by taking the battle to the heart of America." Why is that "an important point"? Abou Ghaith is ostensibly addressing the world Muslim community. Is Al Qaeda concerned about the perception of the mass murderers among Muslims?

In short, while the tapes contain threats, and may contain hidden signals, they may also reveal inadvertent confessions and unintentional admissions. It is important that we see these tapes and come to our own contingent conclusions about them. We live on the front. It is not a case of "allowing" us to see them; it is necessary that we see them. The administration is calling for all manner of security measures to protect the populace physically. Does it think its role is to protect everyone's mind as well?