When someone says one thing but does another, always believe what they do: The CIA disbanded their Bin Laden unit (Alec Station) in 2005. If they truly believed he was still alive, they wouldn't have decided that those resources were better used elsewhere.
Secondly, I've yet to see a tape that is in any way convincing. A 12 minute freeze up? Why not just re-shoot the tape if it wasn't impossible?
Why not have a tape of OBL holding up a copy of yesterday's Hyderabad Times saying "I'd like to congratulate the Pittsburgh Penguins on their 5-4 shoot out victory over the Philadelphia Flyers. We may or may not be about to unleash a wave of suicide bombings in U.S. shopping malls during the Christmas shopping season."
So long as you don't have absolute proof that he's dead, it makes sense to continue to function (at least publicly) as if he's still alive, but I believe they pretty well know he's dead.
Owl_Eagle
“When the stock market crashed,
Franklin Roosevelt got on the television
and didn’t just talk about
the princes of greed, he said,
‘Look, here’s what happened.’"
-Slow Joe Biden
I agree with your assessment. Tora Bora.
Hey Owl_Eagle, I hope all is well. I so hope you’re right!
I have no idea if he is dead or alive, and I am not sure it makes that much difference. Al Qaida was initially an Afgan and Arab group, but now it has spread throughout the Islamic world. It is not clear that there is a central head, but rather a group of empowered cells. My real concern is that they have spread to East Africa, especially in Somalia. We have numerous East African populations in the US that probably contain many sleeper cells. Without a central head calling the shots, it makes it much more difficult to detect (through chatter) when these cells may decide to become "active".
OBL is a hockey fan? Who woulda guessed.
I think I agree with you. How does the CIA know that OBL is spending a lot of resources on his own security? This would certainly suggest that they know his location...in which case he would be dead.
I have beating the same drum as you for more than six years — ever since 2002 when a Bin Laden tape was found to be bogus by a reputable firm. Bin Laden alive means much more to CIA funding than Bin Laden dead.
I completely agree with you that Osama Bin BoogieMan now exists as a very thin glass smear on the inside of some cave somewhere on the Paki-Afghan border.
The big question in my mind is why Bush and the Republicans never said as much, while all those commie bass-turds like Obama bin Lyin’ strutted and preened about “you guys couldn’t even kill Bin Laden”.
I hate Obama for saying that. But I hate Bush and McCain even more for not answering with the obvious:
MAYBE WE ALREADY DID, DORK!
And you “knew” he was killed at Tora Bora, I’m guessing.
“Believe” all you want.