[FreedomCalls]

He died in a cave at Tora Bora like we all presumed.

[Orangedog]

[Cue Doctor McCoy clip from the typical Star Trek episode] "It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim!"

[pabianice]

Great. The entire US Government has just been shown-up by a 90-year-old cuckoo clock maker in the Alps...

[Exit148]

I wish they (experts and gov't types) would all just ignore all tapes and call his bluff. If he's alive, then HE has to prove it, otherwise just go on the assumption that we killed him. Period!

[LibKill]

He died in a cave at Tora Bora like we all presumed.

That is my best guess as well.

Unfortunately even if his head was on a pike in Manhattan, there are those who would claim he was alive and the head was a fake.

[eeriegeno]

I normally don't agree with folks from Switzerland BUT... If Mr Laden was alive, he would surely be airing an audio or video once a week to further the jihad against the people he hates. For him to produce a video tape stating that he is, in fact, alive and has beaten the enemy would garner much support with the goofballs that he associates with. Maybe he has retreated to Palestine and is one of the idiots throwing rocks there?????? The BIG question is, how can a low-life from a third world country affect the world this way? With all of the wisdom from the college educated folks who lead us in Washington, London, Moscow (they are our friends now), Madrid, Rome, and many other capitals, how is it that this rich cave man can be allowed to threaten the world this way? You tell me.

[mrsmith]

All I can hear clearly on that tape is Amelia Earhart's airplane engine running in the background.

[annflounder]

fyi

The guy's dead.

[Cindy]

Opinion: Bin Laden is dead.
Fact: Everytime a "Bin Laden tape" is played attacks happen.

[Revolting cat!]

Well, even if he's dead, they can keep issuing endless greatest hits compilations like they've been doing with Elvis, Lennon, and now Nirvana. Biz is booming, I tell ya!

[WildWeasel]

I agree, a Daisy Cutter either evaporated Bin-Laden at Tora Bora or it collapsed the ground and he was smothered

Camera's are cheap. Especially for a someone worth $ 250 million dollars. If the murderer was alive, they'd have a picture of him holding a recent newspaper or on a video tape spewing his BS with a recent newspaper.

[Nogbad]

Bump

[wingnuts'nbolts]

Of course the darned tape is a fake. If this despot demented killer were alive we would be treated to video of him gloating daily. Bin Laden is blowing in the wind somewhere or smoldering moldering underground somewhere like Tora Bora. See ya Osoma! Don't let the white raisins wear you out.

[HAL9000]

Currently, the official policy of the U.S. must assume that bin Laden is alive.

[Angelus Errare]

Hardly.

I expect I'm gonna catch a lot of flack for this (hell, I was nearly E-lynched the last time I voiced this opinion), but my personal opinion is that we should wait and see before jumping to any hasty conclusion on this one. This was also my initial assessment when the audio was first released and all of FR promptly declared that it MUST be a fake.

My own assessment of the situation leads me to believe that bin Laden, or at the very least Ayman al-Zawahiri, is likely alive. Someone is coordinating al-Qaeda worldwide, so at the very least a solid chunk of the Shura Majlis remains intact. As a result, I would recommend that we all keep our wits about ourselves and thus wait until we actually have a corpse or a confession before we declared the great archvillain dead.

I would advise you all to recognize that the Russian media has been nowhere as restrained on the issue of the Chechen leadership (which are also al-Qaeda, but never mind that) as the American media have been. While I agree that most of the liberal establishment wants to keep bin Laden alive in order to chastize the Bush administration with it, I highly doubt that especially in the aftermath of the election (with terrorism being such a key Republican issue) that the media would be likely to maintain this front. But the American media need not become another version of the Russian media, where Barayev was "killed" 3 times before you actually have a corpse.

Having said that, one of the most idiotic notions that I've ever heard of is that "Well, we never caught Hitler, so we don't 'know' that he's dead." While I recognize that this is an attempt at reductio ad absurdium, many people really need to recognize that we had the confessions of top Nazi officials, people who saw the bodies, Hitler's servants, ect., to verify that he's dead. None of these conditions exist with al-Qaeda, and the last I heard, unless Ramzi Binalshibh and Abd Rahim al-Nashiri have been spilling the beans and nobody's telling us, there's no way for us to know that their boss is dead. So in the absence of a credible witness or a body, we should assume that this is indeed the case.

Moving on, a lot of people seem to indulge in either one-sided or extremely uninformed thinking about how the tape was verified. It was authenticated electronically by the CIA, MI6, the BBC, Mossad, and even the Japanese (I imagine that similar verifications were performed by the Chinese, French, Russian, and Indian intelligence agencies). They said they were roughly 90-95% sure that it was bin Laden. Now this is quite a credible array of sources for any type of recording. Perhaps, in the type of conspiracy-thinking that so frequently permeates these "bin Laden is dead" threads, they were all in on faking the recording to justify a war with Iraq.

After the tape was authenticated electronically, it was taken both to the al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay as well as to the top brass currently being held at Diego Garcia. The detainees stated that the recording was genuine and that it was likely a call to action, hence the recent spread of terror alerts. The fact that MI5 busted up a cyanide plot within several days of the recording being released combined with today's Kenyan fun tends to back this up.

Of course, this doesn't stop those on FR who believe that bin Laden MUST be dead. The various ways I've seen posted here as to how this forgery was supposedly done wouldn't last 5 minutes, let alone 5 days under NSA/CIA scrutiny. Of course, in the minds of FR, most of these people are either clueless (guess the string of arrests and captures of al-Qaeda brass have just been flukes), willing adherents of the Bush administration who care nothing about lying to the American people, or else actively participated in forging the tape.

Then again, we now have this whole Swiss thing. While I'm half-laughing to note that the institute that made this claim (and in doing so essentially said that Ari, Bush, Tenet, ect. are all wrong) is both located in Europe and affiliated with Berkley. Now if they had made a similar claim about Osama's "Caught on Tape" last December, I imagine that many Freepers would be livid with anger and that there'd be all kinds of angry post about European duplicity and some type of leftist babble because of the Berkley connection. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that one private institution is more competent than the finest intelligence agencies on the planet that, despite their constant derailment in this forum, have netted some extremely big fish over the last several months.

I also have some BIG question about how US intelligence can be 95% sure that this is bin Laden and this Swiss guy can be 90% sure that it isn't. Something tells me that if there is not that much difference of opinion concerning this tape.

But what the hell, right, who cares about logic if the Europeans are saying something that we want to hear?

I say we wait until we get the White House reaction tommorrow before making hasty judgements, but hey, that's be reason, and we can't have that here.

Moving right along, there seems to be an extremely disturbing trend that I've commented on before whereby people in this forum actually believe that Bush knows that Osama is dead and that he is keeping him around as a political tool. Ignoring the fact that this displays a total lack of ethics and principles (in terms of Really Bad Things, perjury pales in comparison to lying to the American people in order to justify a continued war) for anyone, let alone an elected leader. And yet many people see no contradiction between believing this and continuing to support Bush rather than seeking a replacement who would honestly continue to prosecute the War on Terror.

Why? Well, for starters, if you really believe that Bush is keeping definitive knowledge about bin Laden's fate from the American people, that'd be the right thing to do. If you can't trust Bush to let you know when Public Enemy #1 has assumed room temperature in order to keep war going, how the hell do you trust him to be honest when he says, well, anything. If this insinuation were true, then we would be in the exact same situation that we were in with Clinton, though the irony is not to be lost that so many Freepers believe that Bush is basically doing exactly what Clinton did yet they are still enthusiastic to support him.

Personally, I like to think that the President waits until all of the facts are in before making his decisions and informing the public about them. And I think that if he believed that bin Laden was dead, he'd tell us. Because, here again, I believe Bush to be moral and principled man and I think that that would be the right thing to do.

Apparently some people here don't share that opinion, and they come up with rationalizations to support that decision. The scary thing is that they have no idea how similar Bush and Clinton would be if any of these half-baked scenarios are true.

Ultimately, we'll have to see what the White House says tomorrow about their take on the Swiss findings. And if they say that they're legit, then they're legit. And if they point out flaws in the Swiss methodology or conclusions, I'll accept that as equally legitimate.

Okay, flame on.

[rockfish59]

Dead?

[xm177e2]

Bush-haters can't make up their minds: is it better for Osama to be dead, or alive?

If he's alive, then Bush is a nitwit whose War on Terror isn't going well at all, and he should focus on Afghanistan instead of Iraq. Bush pretends Osama is dead because he doesn't want to admit he messed up.

If he's dead, then there's no need to continue the war on terror, and Bush is trying to pretend Bin Laden is alive because he wants to keep the war going.

Which is it, already?

[arielb]

a lot of people here want to believe Osama is dead but the fact is we let al qaeda escape Tora Bora. We have the technology needed to authenticate the tape. If it was fake then we'd know right away (at the same time there was a report by Asian Times about all these secret nukes in the US-that was deemed fake and was taken off the website)

[Cacique]

bump

[CWRWinger]

The latest audiotape statement attributed to accused terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is not authentic, a Swiss research institute said.

Bush and company say the tape is the real Bin Laden. Swiss company says the tape is a fake.

The big question, who is lying? Can't have it both ways. Someone is lying.

[Toskrin]

The CIA is going to say whatever is most useful for them to say. They do their analysis of the tape and make a decision on its authenticity. I suspect they also analyze what "official" opinion on the tape's authenticity serves them the best and leak that as their conclusion. The two analyses have little to do with one another.

The NSA and CIA want to give the illusion of incompetence to al Qaeda. They want al Qaeda to distribute more tapes and become less cautious about covering their tracks. Every tape, e-mail, or phone call leaves a signature. Ramzi bin Alshibh was caught after giving an interview to al Jazeera. Daniel Pearl's killers were caught by tracing an e-mail to the Washington Post. The SUV terrorists in Yemen met the devil supposedly by talking on a cell phone.

Keep talking al Qaeda.