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Actually, they said they were 95% certain it is Bin Laden on the tape, but they couldn't be 100% certain because of the tape's poor quality.

Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview with Steve Croft, Infinity CBS Radio Connect, Thursday, November 14, 2002:

Kroft: Mr. Secretary, what kind of significance do you place on this latest audio tape that was played on Al-Jazeera, allegedly from Osama bin Laden?

Rumsfeld: I'm open-minded on it. I don't know if he's alive or dead. I suspect if he were alive and healthy he would be doing video tapes, which seems to be his preference.

They just had Mansoor Ijaz on Fox news about the speculations about the tape and he basically said that he's convinced that it's legitimate according to his sources and that the Swiss institute was basically just wrong. He also made a number of interesting comments stating that Ayman al-Zawahiri was in Jakarta last September and recently arrived in Bangladesh, as well as that al-Qaeda may try an attack on the poorly protected Indian nuclear power plants.

Regarding Rumsfeld, his statement that he's open-minded about the legitimacy of the tape puts him ahead of most of FR in terms of triumphalism, IMO. Note that he says "alive and healthy," which strikes me as a reference to the reports that Osama was clipped by a bomb on his way out of Tora Bora and that he was seriously injured, hence the reason for his prolonged absence from the center stage.

The statement that the US was 90% certain that the bin Laden tape was the real McCoy was made by White House spokesman Scott McClellan (who took over for Ari while he was off on his honeymoon). As I said, I see no reason to believe that Bush would have McClellan lie to the American people in this regard.