Bin Laden "Truce" Offer Reveals Terror Network in Tatters. Richard Miniter, author of the books Disinformation , Shadow War, and Losing Bin Laden , says that the recent audiotape of Osama bin Laden reveals that the U.S. is winning the "information war" with al Qaeda, and that bin Laden is losing ground with the Muslim world. Here is the Human Events article:

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/sarticle.php?id=11750&o=DIB007

Here is key text:

It was not long ago that the propaganda arm of al Qaeda could easily get videotapes onto al Jazeera in hours. But the new tape played on al Jazeera took upwards of five weeks to move from bin Laden to al Jazeera.

Could al Qaeda's network be fraying? One thing is for certain: Al Qaeda's reliance on a network of human couriers to smuggle these tapes suggests fearfulness and potential apprehension.

I think it's become more apparent that bin Laden is no longer in operational control of al Qaeda. He merely serves as a mythological figure at this point, and one with diminishing power, at that. Here's more:

Bin Laden's offer of a "truce" to help rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan is actually an attempt to rebuild support among Muslim populations in those two countries, who have borne the brunt of terrorist attacks since 9/11. With Muslim opinion increasingly alienated away from bin Laden the truce and rebuilding effort is a last chance effort by bin Laden to win back the hearts and minds of his one-time Muslim supporters.

Bin Laden's threat to strike inside the United States is not as frightening as it once was. More than 600 individuals linked to Islamic terrorism have been deported from the United States since September 2001. And al Qaeda cells from the Virginia suburbs to Bly, Ore., have been dismantled or disrupted. Since 9/11, the U.S. and its allies have killed or captured more than 5,000 al Qaeda operatives in 102 countries, and more than two thirds of its senior leadership has been killed or captured over the same period.

And one more thing:

This tape explodes the myth that bin Laden died in the recent Pakistani earthquake.

This tape should caution analysts who repeatedly predict bin Laden's demise, based solely on the fact that "we haven't heard from him in a while."

Good point. But did anyone really believe Sen. Harry Reid's baseless speculation that bin Laden supposedly died in the earthquake?