This may not be just a threat. It may be a recounting of an actual plan he has heard of--in a moment of lack of control because he is under terrible pressure, he spits this out.
I have always assumed that Ussama had some kind of end game in mind other than just sitting there and letting us shoot him up. I think he miscalculated the speed with which our efforts combined with the Northern Alliance could take over Afghanistan. However he clearly foresaw most of our general stratigy before he hit us on 9-11.
I assume that before he started the evening of 9-10, he had a scheme he thought would bring us down.
The actual number of Islams here in the US is somewhere between 3.5 and 7 million. They poll 70% thinking that although taking down the towers was not a directly reasonable remedy, the US is really responsible because of its bad conduct--its our own fault. So if you start with a number like 5 million Islams; 70% or 3.5 million thinking we have nobody but ourselves to blame--you take the polls from these islam schools of the kids through 19 being over 90% in support of ussama; it is not unreasonable to believe that 15% of these guys or around 750,000 would support attacks on US soil.
If ussama has an army of 750,000 in North America, they can do us a lot of damage with a sound plan and good tactical execution. I am concerned and think we should dig into the domestic group to find out what people know.
It's simple:
Bin Laden knows that modernization is destroying the life he espouses.
He must have hoped 911 would have initiated a cycle of violence that would have so spiraled out of control the civilized world would have been consumed in a worldwide apocalypse--thus preparing the way for his stoneage culture to flourish among the ruins.
But history has shown that nutjobs like Bin Laden possess an overly inflated opinion of their own ability to influence events on such a grand scale.
If his mother had spanked him, probably none of this would have happened.