Bin Laden was intelligent, well-informed, and low key. The people around him treated him with great deference, calling him 'sheikh,' a term of respect.

After all, the chain of custody of these tapes is the one way to find bin Laden. He obviously feels secure enough that he can release a number of these tapes.

A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Air Force dropped massive 15,000-pound 'Daisy Cutter' bombs on the Tora Bora complex where Osama bin Laden was hiding in December 2001.

Bin Laden had come to the delusional conclusion that the United States was as weak as the Soviet Union had once been.

Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders, he was able to indulge in his hobbies... and he was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes to the wider world.

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it.