Punk Talk From Bin Laden

Muslim terror boy Osama Bin Laden says in a tape delivered to Al Jazeera, the broadcaster of choice for Al Qaeda, that new terror attacks are coming to America, he will never be taken alive, and offers a truce to America. It's punk talk.

Bin Laden is a cowardly weenie. All this talk about never being taken alive is punk bravado. Every time he has had a brush with death, he wasn't anxious to become better acquainted. Osama has shown himself to be awfully fleet of foot when death is about and kept a large posse of bodyguards to keep harm far away. When American bombs started peppering Tora Bora, he was the first to flee, radioing back to his troops to fight to the death. Fighting to the death is for Al Qaeda chumps, not for Bin Laden. This follows the elitist tradition of Arab Muslim armies, where the leaders do not dirty their hands with combat and care nothing for their troops.

If new terror is coming to America from Bin Laden, he certainly is taking his time. It's been five years since his last attack on the American homeland. Al Qaeda has been whittled down to nothing. While nobody doubts that Bin Laden would love to massacre more Americans, the last five years proves that he lacks the muscle to make it happen.

His offer of a truce demonstrates that he's on the ropes. Bin Laden is following Koranic tradition, which allows jihadis to make a truce of ten years to regroup to renew the jihad at an advantage. All this talk of truce and never being taken alive provides an interesting view into Bin Laden's frame of mind, which has turned sharply pessimistic. He wouldn't be talking about truces and being captured if he thought he was winning.

Bin Laden is too much of a weenie to take his own life. If we don't obliterate him with a missile from a Predator, our Delta operators are likely to snatch him in the night from some Waziristani hut and bring him back to America with a big pee stain down the front of his thobe. I give it 50-50 odds: death by Hellfire or capture a la Saddam.