The groundswell for the release began when The Washington Post first disclosed the existence of the tape on Dec. 9, the same day that Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed some of the tape's contents on NBC's Meet the Press.
The tension built throughout the week as the US indicted Zacarias Moussaoui, the first person to be charged as a conspirator in the Sept. 11 plot, and carried out a relentless bombing campaign of the Tora Bora caves in eastern Afghanistan, where bin Laden is thought to be hiding.
Administration officials said that the timing of the tape's release was designed neither to draw attention from the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, nor to intensify public opinion against bin Laden as the US attempts to close in on his forces and capture or kill him.
Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, indicated on Thursday that the tape was found by people other than Americans at the house in Jalalabad. The Taliban abandoned the city in mid-November. "The manner in which the tape was acquired would suggest that people were leaving the house in a real big hurry and left it behind," he said.
The tape was then turned over to the CIA, which translated it. The president was informed of its existence on Nov. 29, and saw excerpts at the White House during an intelligence briefing on Nov. 30.
Administration officials said that the president wanted to release the tape to the public as soon as he saw it, but with the caveat that it should not compromise intelligence gathering and that the CIA double-check its authenticity.
At that point, officials said, the government asked at least two independent interpreters to help with on another translation of the videotape and compare it to the one done by the US government. Pentagon officials said those interpreters were George Michael of the Diplomatic Language Service and Kassem M. Wahba, the Arabic language program coordinator of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Pentagon officials said the two versions were virtually identical.
The CIA ran a number of tests to determine whether the tape had been altered and to determine whether the voice matched bin Laden's on previous videotapes that he himself had released. In every case, officials said, the matches were identical.
Bin Laden appeared in the tape with Ayman al-Zawahri, his top deputy and the former leader of a faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and Abu Ghaith, who has been a spokesman for bin Laden.
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