The Osama Bin Laden story isn't dying off yet, as the Pentagon over the weekend released snippets of several videos seized in last week's raid in Pakistan. They are interesting for a variety of reasons.
There's Bin Laden channel surfing and watching himself on TV while sitting with a blanket and hat on.
Several times there is video of him on the news and he watches it, then the station moves on to other issues, and Bin Laden brings up his "Favorites" on the screen and picks a new channel.
At one point, there's even a few seconds of the floor of the U.S. Senate on his television, before he moves on to something else. I don't think he was watching The Deuce (C-SPAN2), but who knows?
His hideout is sort of a mess in those shots - and doesn't really mesh with the guy who is seen living in the wild back in the days of September 11, 2001.
Other videos show Bin Laden doing multiple takes on his own propaganda films, evidently blowing his lines, repeating them, and even having the lights go out on him.
The backdrops are bad - what looks like a wrinkled bed sheet, a wooden armoire and more.
One of the tapes was entitled, "Message to the American People," but one could almost imagine it with some funny lines passing for a comedy skit on Saturday Night Live.
Think of these videos another way - this is clearly an effort by the Obama Administration to take Bin Laden down a notch in the Muslim World.
Just as Bin Laden worked hard to finish his propaganda tapes for world consumption, the Pentagon is using this material to portray him in a less than flattering light.
A quick review of headlines on the internet show how well that strategy has worked already:
"Home movies show a vain Bin Laden," says one. "Candid Videos Show View of Unkempt Bin Laden," reads another.
The basic story that went out on Reuters - which is to the world what the AP is in the United States - show how Al Qaeda does not have control of the message right now.
"Tapes Reveal An Image Conscious Terrorist Leader," read the Reuters headline, which included several interesting lines about the videos.
"Looking older than his 54 years, he sits on the floor and uses a remote control to flick between satellite coverage of himself on a television," read the Reuters report.
This is just a small piece of what's been described as a treasure trove of items seized in the raid by Navy SEALs. The much more important items deal with possible terrorist threats, and leads on others linked to Al Qaeda.
"It will take time, therefore, to perform a thorough review. But we are already disseminating intelligence across the U.S. government based on what we found," said a Senior intelligence official over the weekend.
Officials said it represented the 'most significant amount of intelligence ever collected from a senior terrorist.'
