If that tape proves to be real then my estimation of ObL as a paragon of evil will go down a couple notches. When Hitler (a true full blown paragon of evil) ordered the Holocaust, he always did it verbally and never signed any written order that was directly related (to the intense frustration of World War II historians). Hitler knew about the importance of plausibility of denial. Of course ObL is a rank amateur compared to Hitler.

If that tape is a phoney then the issue concerning how it was made comes up. If the guys that made it were pros then they would have concerned themselves about "voice prints". There are enough tapes and videos out there known to be made by ObL that doing a voice print analysis should be straight forward. Therefore this would be an obvious concern for a forger. I wonder if it is possible to take every known recorded sound made by ObL and store digitized copies in a computer. Then have a native Arab speaker who's voice and inflection sounds like ObL impersonate a speech by him. That speech would then be scanned by a computer. The computer would take the various sounds made by the impersonater and replaced them with voice print accurate sounds from it's ObL library thus using the original impersonation as a signal envelope. If the people at the NSA and CIA don't have this capability then they need to figure it out ASAP. They also need to figure out how to detect this sort of forgery should someone else do it to us.

Gary