NEW YORK — Osama bin Laden has once again managed to occupy the stage and to insist on his relevance to the 9/11 story. In his most recent video message, released by Reuters a few days before the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, bin Laden voiced some typically absurd statements, calling on Americans to embrace Islam and so forth.
What is really worth noting in bin Laden's message, however, is not the message itself, but the underlying factors that can be deduced from it. First, bin Laden wished to convey that he is alive and well and that U.S. military efforts have failed miserably. Second, his reappearance — the first since October 2004 — will be analyzed endlessly by hundreds of experts who will inundate widespread audiences with every possible interpretation — the fact that he looked healthy, that he dyed his beard, that he dressed in Arab attire as opposed to a military fatigue and Kalashnikov, that he read from a paper, and so on.
Conspiracy theorists are already up in arms, some questioning whether the video character is bin Laden at all, and others wondering why the tape was promoted by an American terrorist watch group — SITE Intelligence Group — even before its release by Reuters, and why it didn't make it directly to the various extremist Web sites first, as is usually the case.