And I still have a gut feeling that this phoned-in tape is just a clever fake.
Someone mentioned the legend of El Cid, how as he was dying he instructed his aides de camp to tie him on his horse with his sword, and the horse carried the corpse of El Cid into his last battle against the Moors in Spain, which was won, although the Moors were not completely defeated in Spain for another couple centuries.
People who have followed the career of OBL (or UBL as he was first called, for Usamaa) know that over two decades he issued scores of tapes that were played in mosques and were the subject of Friday sermons all over Saudi Arabia and the Arabian peninsula. He sent out thousands of phone messages, some of which were taped. Thus, the fact that the voice on the recent tape is OBL should mean very little to a good sound analyst. To think that Al Qaida and it allies are incapable of fabricating a OBL tape is to misjudge their abilities. The fact that the most recent missive is a phone message copied on tape further confounds the sound quality.
The fact that the Al Qaida might want to maintain the fiction that OBL is alive is understandable, but why are so many Americans bent on proving what is presently unprovable?