By: E&P Staff In a Thursday article in The Washington Post, veteran reporter Glenn Kessler writes that the much-lamented press leak about Osama bin Laden's use of a satellite phone "appears to be an urban myth."
Most recently, President Bush asserted once again this week that the news media, notably the Washington Times, published the leak in 1998, alerting al Qaeda to U.S. monitoring and causing bin Laden to abandon the device.
But Kessler reports that bin Laden's use of sat phone "had already been reported in 1996 -- and the source of the information was another government, the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time.
"The second time a news organization reported on the satellite phone, the source was bin Laden himself.
"Causal effects are hard to prove, but other factors could have persuaded bin Laden to turn off his satellite phone in August 1998. A day earlier, the United States had fired dozens of cruise missiles at his training camps, missing him by hours."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that the president was referring to the same article fingered in this case by the 9/11 commission and others -- it appeared in the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 1998, the day after the cruise missile attack.
"The article, a profile of bin Laden, buried the information about his satellite phone in the 21st paragraph," Kessler revealed. "It never said that the United States was listening in on bin Laden, as the president alleged. The writer, Martin Sieff, said yesterday that the information about the phone was 'already in the public domain' when he wrote the story."
A search of media databases by Kessler shows that Time magazine had first reported on Dec. 16, 1996, that bin Laden "uses satellite phones to contact fellow Islamic militants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa."
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