I don’t think he is, but what makes me wonder is why tthat “spokesman for al Qaeda” guy made the announcements on that tape from two days ago.
When has bin Laden ever not appeared on a tape from al Qaeda before?
For other evidence which rises to the level of “allowable in the court of conspiracy theory,” I offer:
Everyday the Taliban announces he’s alive. Why?
If the U.S. did kill him, and knew it, they might try to keep it secret for as long as they could, because of the terrorist strikes which would follow. The longer it’s kept under wraps, the more time they have to apprehend/control al Qaeda cells.
On that note, where the hell is Dick Cheney? Is he really in such danger that they can’t even allow a camera or microphone in his special VP atomic bunker, and they can’t even let him send out a written report? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was killed and the U.S. was just covering up…
It’s just as likely that he is in Somalia or North Korea by now. We have no way of knowing. Let’s just hope that those in charge of the anti-terrorism campaign have more of an inkling of what exactly is going on there on the ground.
i meant to add a comment about taking debka w/ a grain of salt & forgot.
as it is, i pass on their quote without comment. I’m aware that they’re often proven wrong. I make no claims as to its truth.
I agree, that bin Laden might be dead. However, I would say it is more likely that he is no longer in Afghanastan. He is probably stil alive, and in another country (Iraq?).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that Al-Jarzzea (or however it’s spelled) TV studio somewhere in Afghanistan, and that bin Laden’s tapes are hand-delivered by flunkies?
I mean, the tapes aren’t mailed in, 'ol Bin don’t stop in and record 'em hisself in the studio, and they won’t exactly be “timely” if he tapes 'em somewhere in Uzbekistan and some guy has to smuggle them five hundred miles and across a border currently in heavy dispute.
No, what’s going to happen is we’re going to keep a close eye on events and OBL’s propaganda tapes… as soon as there’s verifiable congruence (say, we bomb a certain building, then the next OBL tape says something like “America will pay for bombing that building”) we calculate the time difference and travel radius and come up with a target area.
If the tape is delivered by, say, jeep or truck, we know that limits things to roaded areas, and if it gets broadcast within, say, four hours, we have a radius of four hours’ travel from the TV studio, and we start up the KeyHole reconsats, ground-search radars, and load up the 500-pounders into a wings’ worth of B-52s.
