It's Alive (updated)

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." U.S. officials say there is little doubt the al Qaeda leader timed his latest message to the 9/11 anniversary.

in that part of the world than you can shake a stick at.

No doubt he will reference some fairly recent event to prove that he's still above ground. But anything he says will be taken with a grain of salt. He or his stand ins have issued dozens of threats over the years and very little has come of them. Al-Qaeda is on the run worldwide. We have captured or killed dozens of their leaders, dried up their sources of money, rooted them out of country after country until they have largely become a figurehead organization that other, smaller terrorist groups look to for inspiration and ideology.

They may still be dangerous. But most experts believe them incapable of mounting the kind of attack they carried out on September 11. For that, we can be grateful.

Update from Thomas Lifson:

Only his hairdresser knows for sure: