The Discerning Texan

We've asked this before, but there is some buzz that it might be true this time. From the World Tribune:

Bin Laden may be dead, but living on through old sound bites

U.S. intelligence agencies are beginning to suspect that Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden is dead after all, despite a recent audio tape exhorting Al Qaida terrorists in Iraq.

The Al Qaida leader who was the main force behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, was last heard on an audio tape released Dec. 30. The tape mentioned Iraqis who are opposing Al Qaida, but there has been no specific time referenced from his last two messages. An earlier message in October also exhorted Al Qaida to fight in Iraq.

Questions about Bin Laden are being raised by intelligence officials who say that without a specific time mark with a photo of Bin Laden, his presence cannot be confirmed and the most recent statements could have been put together from older audio.

[....]

The new analysis of Bin Laden follows the death of No. 3 Al Qaida leader Abu Laith Al Libi, who was killed last week in a CIA-led operation in Pakistan that involved an armed unmanned aerial vehicle attack.

Asked about U.S. military or intelligence involving in the terrorist killing, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters: “I’m not going to talk any more about the operational side of this, of how that in fact occurred.”

Mullen called al Libi a key figure in Al Qaida and said “elimination of someone like that is a very important outcome in terms of this long war.”

More from A.J. Strata:

Tea-leaf-reading time. I had suspected initially that the recent attack on al-Qaeda’s leadership was aimed at Bin Laden. I did so because we would only do this kind of over the border attack under rare circumstances (and I believe it was done with Pakistani permission).

We ended up with Al Libi instead (Al Libi is a Libyan), who was AQ’s number 3. What this story hints at is the intel must have indicated the top dog in AQ, but since Bin Laden was not there it may be reasonable to assume Al Libi became number one operationally and that is why there is speculation Bin Laden has been dead for some time. Anyway, some interesting speculation I thought worth sharing.

Indeed.

Meanwhile in Iraq, Al Qaeda is not having a lot of fun, to put it mildly:

Documents discovered in al Qaeda safe houses in Iraq lament how poorly the war in Iraq is going for the terrorists:

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year's mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group's security structure suffered “total collapse”.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda's enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group's stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.

That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.

The last holdouts who still believe the surge hasn't worked are mostly Democratic office-holders.

And even they do know it has worked; they are just lying to the American people about it.

In other war news: The director of a psychiatric hospital in Iraq is the depraved monster who supplied the two Down's Syndrome women to Al Qaeda for their heinous bombing this weekend. Egyptian doctors. Scottish doctors. Iraqi hospital directors. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Men of "medicine" murduring children and women with mental incapacities for their religion, and for "jihad". Once again, a potent illustration of what we have been up against for about 12 centuries now: when will the world finally understand the threat. The Muslims started World War I. A Bosnian Muslim slays the Austrian Franz Ferdinand, who had been in Sarajevo trying to offer the olive branch of peace. Gallipoli. Iraq. Lawrence of Arabia. And the aftermath of World War I--which shaped the entire makeup of the Middle East today--and all the tensions therein. The boundaries of the Middle East. The Muslims who became collaborators with the occupying Nazis. And now it is all happening again.

Again, in the Balkans, the instability starts. Again, it spreads from the Balkans to the Middle East. Again it is the West: the rule of law and the rights of nations--up against Islamic Radicals much the same as those who started the Fourth World War. And again we seem to repeat the mistakes of the past in not understanding how much of what is happening today is completely part and parcel of over 12 centuries of Islamic Jihad.

And again, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

But not in Iraq--no matter what the imbecilic Democrats try and "make believe" is happening there--and that's a start.