Over the weekend a new Osama bin Laden tape appeared in which bin Laden (or someone claiming to be him) takes credit, sort of, for the botched Christmas day airliner bombing. Why he's taking credit for screw-ups I don't know, but it's the first we've heard from him in a while, and so people are trying to figure out what it all means.

Coincidentally, my article just came out on the research of Flagg Miller, a linguistic anthropologist, who has spent several years listening to the personal audiotape collection of the al-Qaeda leader (you can hear a podcast here. It features excerpts of the tapes themselves along with further thoughts from Miller). These tapes are not Official Statements but rather more intimate recordings that shed light on how jihadis talk to each other.

One question addressed briefly in the article and also in the podcast is: What good are these tapes? I was thinking about that when I came across this sentence in John Horgan's recent book Walking Away from Terrorism: Accounts of Disengagement from Radical and Extremist Movements:

"Critical to the success of any counter-terrorism initiative is a clearer understanding of the role of community and how the individual terrorist engages with their community."

That's part of what Flagg Miller is attempting to do in his research: to understand how terrorist communities work. Some of the tapes in the collection include everyday conversation among jihadis and from them you do get a somewhat clearer picture of how they relate to one another, how they form connections, how they see themselves. And that seems of more than just academic interest.

I should note that Miller and Horgan take very different scholarly approaches. Miller comes to the topic as an anthropologist: He's not explicitly offering strategies for combatting terrorism. Meanwhile, Horgan, who is director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State, is doing exactly that.  Both, though, are trying to get inside the mind of the average jihadi.

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