At Jihadica, which to my great relief is going strong despite Will McCants’s departure, Thomas Hegghammer decodes bin Laden’s latest audiotape and concludes all may not be well at the house of al-Qaeda:
What we have here is a short, outdated tape delivered manually following a series of longer, up-to-date statements distributed online. This suggests to me that Bin Ladin’s personal situation has changed in the past few months. He may have moved to a new location, and/or he is taking much stricter security precautions than before.
Peter Bergen, speaking in an International Press Institute panel here in Helsinki earlier today, suggested Al Jazeera may actually have sat on the tape for some time, waiting for “a newsworthy moment”.
