Via the Blotter: New Videotape From Bin Laden; Al Qaeda’s No. 1 Still Alive
The jihadist Web site announced the tape with a banner, showing a still picture of bin Laden, now 50 years old, looking fit with a full beard of dark black hair, no gray at all.
“It does look oddly like he is wearing a false beard,” Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official and now ABC News consultant, said. “If we go back to the tape three years, he had a very white beard. This looks like a phony beard that has been passed on.”
The “phony beard” may be an important clue as to where bin Laden is hiding, according to Clarke.
“One place where a beard would stand out would be southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia,” Clarke told ABC News. “No one’s thought he was there, but that is an environment where most men, Muslim men don’t have beards.”
An interesting theory, and one that would make US intelligence and its Waziristan/”hiding in a cave” theory look a bit silly.
I will say it would have been funnier if he had been wearing a glasses with a fake nose and mustache…
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September 8th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
I think Clarke may have been speaking off the cuff on the SE Asia part. Seriously, does a 6′6″ Arab guy with a big nose need a beard to look out of place in SE Asia?
It actually looked to me more like he may have colored his beard instead of wearing a fake one. Maybe we should be looking near stores that sell Clairol for Men products.
September 8th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Maybe he saw one of those “Just for Men” commercials and realized he couldn’t score the really hot chicks with a white beard.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
The beard isn’t the only thing that’s fake. The Osama is fake as well. Ever wonder why these tapes always appear when it most benefits the Cheney regime? Ever wonder why “Osama” reiterates left-wing talking points, enabling the Bushites to tell anyone who is dumb enough to listen that the Dems are on the same page as “Al Qaeda”? At what point did Osama bin Laden STOP working for the C.I.A.? Answer: When he died in December 2001.