Bin Laden Rejoiced on Sept. 11

ByABC News
December 12, 2001, 2:47 PM

Dec. 13 -- Osama bin Laden rejoiced over the Sept. 11 hijack attacks on a translated videotape released today, saying he was surprised at the amount of damage caused and that the attacks had benefited Islam.

Bin Laden describes how he and his 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.

"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.

Bin Laden, at times smiling and laughing, says the Sept. 11 attacks benefited Islam. "This event made people think [about true Islam] which benefited Islam greatly," he said.

The Bush administration has called the tape, which officials said was found in a house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, the "smoking gun" that proves bin Laden's direct responsibility for the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people. At the Pentagon this morning, a technician played the videotape for all major U.S. television networks, which carried major portions of the tape live, as did the Arabic language television station Al Jazeera.

At a briefing today, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the tape, which shows bin Laden's calm yet chilling description of the Sept. 11 attacks, justifies the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism.

"It should be clear from the very matter-of-fact way that he refers to the attacks that killed thousands of innocent people, from several dozen different countries, why terrorists and terrorism must be defeated before they get their hands on weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfeld said.

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