Hiding Osama

Al-Jazeera's improbable rationales force us to consider a host of less flattering explanations. And there's no shortage of possibilities.

One rumor that has circulated widely among journalists and in the Arab world has it that bin Laden's harsh rhetoric during the interview toward the Emir of Qatar, the owner of Al-Jazeera, got the tape shelved. But as Bergen points out, any small mentions of the Emir could have easily been edited out of the interview, which runs some 60 minutes. Others have speculated that, as the anonymous Al-Jazeera reporter commented to Reuters, the network held off because it was stung by Western charges that it was acting as a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden. But this explanation hardly works either since Al-Jazeera continued to air bin Laden videos as late as the end of December, when it broadcast the tape of the then-enfeebled bin Laden attacking the U.S. for causing civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

Bergen actually does not find any of the explanations of Al-Jazeera's decision fully convincing and believes there must be some missing part of the puzzle we are not yet aware of. "Surely it's the TV scoop of the last 20 years. It's the only TV interview of bin Laden after Sept. 11. It would be one thing if this were some minor al-Qaida functionary. But that's hardly the case," he said. "It certainly doesn't add up." (Representatives in Al-Jazeera's Washington office did not return calls by Salon for comment.)

But with so many of the explanations falling apart on close scrutiny, one remains. It would turn out to be the most damning.

From the start, Al-Jazeera's defenders have argued that it is as legitimate a journalistic enterprise as any other -- just one that appears (from a Western perspective) as biased or inflammatory since it operates from such a different worldview. The network's detractors have claimed quite the opposite: Al-Jazeera operates under a patina of journalistic professionalism and objectivity, they argue, while actually acting in sympathy with al-Qaida. To its critics, Al-Jazeera had an interest in making al-Qaida look good and America look bad. And indeed, when the bin Laden interview is seen in the context not of today but of three months ago, bin Laden looks worse -- guilty, boastful, full of hate -- than he did in his al-Qaida-produced performances.

At the time, it was almost two months before the United States released the home video -- which, again, was released by the U.S. government and not from Al-Jazeera -- in which bin Laden detailed his intimate and detailed knowledge of the attacks. By late October, Americans were more than convinced that bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. But that certainty was far from widespread in the Muslim world. And there were questions even in the United States about whether bin Laden had actual operational control over the attacks or whether he was simply their instigator and funder. In other words, in late October the interview was extremely newsworthy and would have fatally undermined those still arguing that bin Laden might be innocent of the crime. Such as Al-Jazeera.

Another key part of the tape is bin Laden's evasive non-denial of responsibility for the anthrax attacks in the United States. Law enforcement officials now seem increasingly convinced that the anthrax mailings were a case of domestic, and not al-Qaida-related, terrorism. But that certainly wasn't the assumption three months ago. In late October, the United States was in the throes of the anthrax scare and it was widely believed that al-Qaida was behind the attacks. In that climate, bin Laden's refusal to deny responsibility for the anthrax attacks would have been almost as damning as his quasi-admission about Sept. 11.

It's in the nature of journalism to always err on the side of publishing information rather than retaining it. And thus it was always difficult to question Al-Jazeera's decisions to broadcast bin Laden's rants, even when U.S. networks decided to refrain, because whatever their inflammatory effect, they had an undeniable news value. Al-Jazeera still can't be dismissed out of hand. It remains an exception to the rule of government-controlled media in the Arab world, and has broadcast on many topics that the government-controlled media ignore.

But the irony of this apparent denouement of the long-running debate over bin Laden videos is that Al-Jazeera's credibility as a journalistic rather than a propagandistic entity has apparently been sealed not by what it chose to broadcast, but what it chose not to.

That Al-Jazeera didn't deem the interview fit to print raises a nauseating, and inevitable, question: Did the network refuse to show the tape because it was too unfavorable to bin Laden? In the face of Al-Jazeera's lame excuses so far, it seems a logical conclusion.

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