Rove behind bin Laden tape, whispers latest conspiracy theory

1.00pm - By ANNE PENKETH


For weeks now, the Republicans have been suggesting that a vote for Senator John Kerry means a vote for al Qaeda. Even bumper stickers have reinforced that message.

As House speaker Dennis Hastert put it, before his remarks were drowned out by protests from the Democrats, Osama bin Laden's network would be able to be operate in more comfort if the Democratic candidate wins the vote.

Mr Hastert uttered his opinion six weeks before the Al Qaeda leader lobbed his own grenade into the US election on Friday night.

Now, in the light of the bin Laden video, people are asking: why would the media savvy Saudi dissident issue a tape that could lead to the re-election of President Bush?

As conspiracy theories ran rife over the weekend, one of the most bizarre was that the man who had stage-managed the video's release was the chief political strategist of the US President, Karl Rove.

The revered American former news anchor, Walter Cronkite, said on CNN's Larry King programme that he is "inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man ... probably set up bin Laden to this thing."

President Bush knew in advance that the video was in the offing. But presumably not even the talented spin doctors in the White House could engineer the timing of the tape's broadcast by the Arabic television channel Al-Jazeera.

It was meanwhile claimed that far from inspiring the tape, the US ambassador to Qatar tried to prevent its broadcast after it was dropped off at the al Jazeera offices in Islamabad on Friday night, hours before it was broadcast to the world.

In fact, bin Laden's message refrained from directly endorsing one candidate or the other in his extraordinary pre-election intervention. His first video message in more than a year was actually quite ambiguous in US political terms.

Addressing Americans directly, he said: "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security."

Analysts said yesterday that the tape could cut both ways, in terms of its effect on tomorrow's election.

On the one hand, it reminded Americans that the US enemy number one was still alive, which could benefit the Kerry campaign by highlighting President Bush's failure to capture bin Laden.

But on the other hand President Bush could profit from the sense that he, as commander-in-chief since September 11, remains best placed to wage the "war on terror".

After Mr Kerry and Mr Bush initially sought to gain political advantage from the bin Laden tape on Friday night, by yesterday they had cooled their rhetoric and did not refer to it specifically in their campaign speeches.

CIA experts are poring over the tape as they attempt to discover whether it may have contained a coded message that could lead to further attacks.

Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security Secretary, stressed that no new intelligence had been received about a possible attack on America on election day.

"America has been dealing with the general threat to our homeland now since September 11," Mr Ridge said, adding that there were no plans to raise the terror threat level, which now stands at yellow.

- INDEPENDENT