Well, here’s a big, juicy DUH! for whoever wrote this story and headline.

What really bothers me about this is the apparent inability to exercise the faculty of logic, whether on the part of the intelligence agency spokesman, or the reporter:

The officials all cautioned that it’s impossible to draw any firm conclusions from the tapes, but they said the new material has strengthened the belief that bin Laden is ailing and that Zawahri may now be running al-Qaida or preparing to succeed a weakened bin Laden.

“I think there’s a pretty broad consensus that bin Laden’s probably alive but not well,” said one senior official.

And the basis for such a “consensus” would be? There’s certainly no evidence in this story that he’s alive. None, zero, nada. Is this consensus based on some other evidence that isn’t revealed here? I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that he’s alive. I know that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but in his case, considering what a camera hog he was prior to the Afghan liberation, and how important it would be to demonstrate to his followers that he was at a temperature warmer than ambient, I can’t believe that if he were able to do so, he wouldn’t.

I think that he’s been fertilizing a cave in the Afghan mountains for almost two years. I wish that these dumb stories implying otherwise would tell us why they do so.