U.S. Officials Look for Clues in Bin Laden Tape

Dec. 14 -- A day after the United States released a translated videotape that showed Osama bin Laden rejoicing over the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence officials were poring over the tape for clues that could help the crackdown on the al Qaeda network.

The Bush administration has said the apparently homemade tape, which was seized from an abandoned house in eastern Afghanistan and obtained by U.S. intelligence, was the "smoking gun" that proves bin Laden's direct responsibility for the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people.

The grainy videotape shows bin Laden describing how he and his close associates knew about the timing of the attacks days in advance and made estimates about the number of deaths that would result.

"[inaudible] We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower," bin Laden said, according to a translation released by the Pentagon along with the amateur videotape on Thursday.

"We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all," the Saudi-born militant is quoted as saying in apparent reference to the two hijacked jets that slammed into the World Trade Center.

Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all we had hoped for," the translation reads.

"We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day," bin Laden says, according to the translation.

The White House said the tape is believed to have been shot Nov. 9 in the southern Afghanistan city of Kandahar, which was the Taliban's spiritual capital.

The tape shows bin Laden at a dinner speaking to a gathering of his associates and well-wishers, who are off camera. However, seated to his right on camera was Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who is bin Laden's closest adviser, and to bin Laden's left, also on camera, was a visiting Saudi sheikh.