Miniter's Notebook

1) To state the obvious, no one has produced bin Laden’s body or offered reliable eyewitness testimony of death. What we have instead is a fourth hand account: a French newspaper writing about a French intelligence report that is writing about a Saudi intelligence officer who said he heard from a colleague about bin Laden being dead.

2) The leaked French intelligence memo is based on a single Saudi intelligence source – neither the French nor CIA have been able to confirm that the Saudis actually believe bin Laden is dead, let alone is actually dead. And, of course, Saudi beliefs about bin Laden are meaningless – absent evidence.

3) Jihadi websites that post messages from al Qaeda figures have not even mentioned that bin Laden is ailing, let alone dead. Given al Qaeda’s proven desire manage the news about itself, it is extremely unlikely that there would be no sign of bin Laden’s passing on the web.

4) If bin Laden were dead, there would be an internal power struggle to see who runs al Qaeda. There is no sign of any such struggle. One obvious sign that has not appeared: Zawahiri issuing a tape that he is in control of al Qaeda.

5) This past week, Pakistan released some 2,500 al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. It is unlikely that it would have cut a deal with that terrorist network to release those prisoners if Pakistan intelligence service believed bin Laden was dancing with his 72 virgins. (The French newspaper story said bin Laden had died in Pakistan.)

6) The French newspaper that published the story is a regional daily, not one of the national Paris-based newspaper that usually gets leaks from French intelligence. As far as I am aware, this newspaper before has never received a leak from French intelligence. If this story was an “official leak”—a specialty of France’s intelligence apparatus -- then it would have been given to a major newspaper.