Can Bin Laden Be Caught?
The voice was muffled, labored, weak–as you might expect from a man who has spent the past four years on the run. If it didn’t belong to one of the world’s most feared men, it would hardly scare a child. Having disappeared from view, sheltering in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Osama bin Laden may have lost the ability to send a chill down the world’s spine. Governments don’t shut down airports or send security forces into red alert. Even when he makes the direst threats, we no longer feel compelled to slow down, much less stop, the course of our daily lives. But bin Laden’s re-emergence last Thursday was still a jolt, coming after a 13-month silence that raised questions about whether the al-Qaeda boss was incapacitated or even dead. The U.S. believes the 10-minute taped message, which aired on the Arab TV channel al-Jazeera, was probably recorded sometime since November, partly because of a reference to British newspaper reports from that time about a purported proposal
