Osama bin Laden should get his own line of horror films.

Every time the United States thinks they have killed him in one of their Afghani air raids, they fail to catch him. He returns like a bad villain who just won’t die, cackling at our inability.

The problem is that Osama bin Laden and the dangerous threat he poses are both all too real. One needs only look back at the still painful footage of Sept. 11 to see that.

Osama bin Laden is a terrorist and a murderer and a criminal and he must be caught and brought before a court of law to suffer a just sentence for the crimes he perpetrated.

Which makes the government’s response to the tape somewhat puzzling.

The government seemed almost embarrassed by the fact that they hadn’t killed bin Laden. Previously, the administration took the fact that they hadn’t heard from bin Laden in over a year to be a sign that he had perished in a cave somewhere, which they had asserted on numerous Sunday morning talk shows.

While it is perhaps understandable that President Bush and his advisors would be embarrassed about feeding the American public what turned out to be bad information, it is forgivable. Everyone makes mistakes.

However, the Bush administration’s ability to immediately spin the news as further reason to pressure Iraq into accepting weapons inspectors was a bit odd.

Perhaps the Bush administration has crucial, hard evidence for the existence of a clear link between Iraq and bin Laden’s organization, al-Qaeda.

If so, they haven’t shown any of that evidence to the American public. Instead, they relentlessly beat their war drums, hoping to incite a public bloodlust that will permit them to oust Saddam Hussein.

Hussein is a bad man and a bad leader, but he has successfully been stopped from attacking his neighbors or any other country for 11 years. bin Laden is still at large and has just recently proven that his operatives can still kill people, much less launch attacks like the ones that claimed over 3,000 lives on Sept. 11.

The United States government and its allies should use the time afforded by Hussein’s willingness to allow weapons inspectors in the country to pick up the trail of Osama bin Laden anew and try to finally track him down and arrest him.

To do any less will leave a grave security threat to the free world out of jail and dangerous.

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