I lean towards alive due to the mulitple voice matched audio tapes that reference current events. I think it’s good policy to say he’s dead, because then they have another round of wailing in e-jihadi camps, and new tapes have to be produced as “proof of life”. That gives us another shot at tracking him down if alive, or tracking down the AQ techno-genius’ producing the fake tapes, whichever you would have it.

So if you think he’s dead, then you are either positing that someone in AQ is a technowiz and is faking tapes, or someone in our gov’t is lieing about the voiceprint authentication of the tapes.