Taint wrote:

Bin Laden can't be dead; I've invited him to attack a dinner party I'm throwing this weekend and he said he'd be there.

Are you sure you have the correct bin Laden, rather could it be one of his 37 odd siblings you've invited?

The time to kill bin Laden was right after 9/11, and even then it would have been more of a psych victory than anything else, eliminating a jihadists' hero.  The man may have "masterminded" the 9/11 attacks but I have not heard of any other terrorist activities being credited to him in the years since.  It's ridiculous to pretend that eliminating this one man would make any difference to the world situation.

He was reported to be on dialysis back in 2001.  I very much doubt that he is still alive today.

Audio only. Delivered by telephone call of a casette recording.

Bigcat wrote:

Surely the technology exists that he can be identified by voice, no?

I'm no expert but I think that playing a tape cassette into a telephone, recording it, and then trying to do voice analysis on the result would yield "inconclusive" results, to put it mildly.  And I suspect that's the reason it's done that way.  Whether he's alive or dead, I'm pretty sure OBL isn't a player any more.

Too much noise to signal. Casettes aren't real good to begin with which adds noise, played into the reciever of an old landline phone in the tribal zone of Pakistan, converted to digital for the transmission either to satellite or more likely along one of the big trunk cables, dropped into the phone system of Qatar then to Al Jazeera's internal phone system, I assume they can record straight digital off the line probably all IP based anyways. That is then broadcast over television and recorded, or if the alphabet agencies get lucky, AlJ posts the file of the original recording on their website or someone in AlJ sends a copy to them, or to someone else and they intercept. The CIA always immediately releases a press release saying they've done their super high tech analysis and says that was him, almost always within 24 hours of the public release of the recording. I would say it's in the best interest of the analysts to say it is. If they say it's him and it turns out later it's not, it's a bad call. If they say it's not him and we're pretty sure he's dead, and it turns out he's not, it's a different order of error.

If you have the chance go back and find the videos he's released. They are enlightening. A voice which, I suppose, sounds like Bin Laden will talk about current things and the video will be slogans or images of BL walking on a mountainside, inside an extremely nondescript little room, handling a weapon. Sometimes the video will include him talking, but when you can see him speaking it's generalities about Jihad and invitations for the infidels to convert before Allah comes for their children. Never, and I've seen them all and would love to be proved wrong on it, does he speak about current events while you can see him talking. When you look for it, it's obvious.

That doesn't mean he's dead. One could look at that as a result of extreme operational security measures. That's reasonable. My thinking that he's dead is based on the idea that his own vanity wouldn't allow it. His being alive is a good deal too convienent for eveybody's programs to waste the corpus. Particularly if you cannot produce it.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6653678&page=1

Official Media Sez Alive!

orangeplus wrote:

Dmtdust wrote:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6653678&page=1

Official Media Sez Alive!

I guess the experiments with the DC2 gas is starting to pay off.

All that's left is to call Bruce Willis to lead his troops in.

Planet Terror?  Never saw it.

bin Laden = Emanuel Goldstein

I believe Bin Laden underwent a "negroplasty" and went on to play for the Chicago Bulls during their championship run. Proof?



Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs