Looked at realistically Osama bin Laden's intervention in our presidentialelection was undoubtedly an act of immediate organizational weakness, notstrength. Had he had been capable of orchestrating the bringing down of anotherAmerican tower or its equivalent, he certainly would have done so, but it was noless ingenious for that. His last major intervention, his self-scriptedaction-adventure film in real time, The Humiliation of America, cost hisorganization hundreds of thousands of planning dollars and 19 suicidal believers(plus the price of airplane tickets, box-cutters, and mace). Still, those 19followers and the almost 3,000 dead from the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, andUnited Flight 93, which never made it to Washington thanks to the heroic actionof its passengers, was clearly a cheap enough price to pay in his eyes for thenotoriety he instantly achieved.