"'He has injected a political element into his work, and has tried to appeal almost on an intellectual level,' said Cressey, now a counter-terrorism consultant. 'He's saying, 'I'm here and you better factor me into your calculations, political and otherwise.' '

'If people are concerned that he is evolving into more of a political figure, to a certain extent he already has,' Cressey said of bin Laden. U.S. authorities, he added, 'should be concerned if (bin Laden's) message resonates with a broader portion of the Muslim world than his narrower messages of the past, in that he was declaring war. And only time will tell if that's the case.'"