Just a heads up

Or maybe better said, a heads down.

Zawahiri released an extremely well produced video today, and the headline is obviously that he's alive. The second headline, at least in the American press, seems to be that he's "taunting" or "mocking" Bush. But that's not the real headline.

The real headline is that historically the pattern has been for Bin Laden to issue a statement politically framing an attack, followed by a message from Zawahiri which gives the "go" command. For this pattern to hold, this presumes that the two of them still have communications with each other and have had previous communications with the potential attackers.

Don't freak out by any means, the percentages against any one person being harmed by an attack are exceedingly slim, this is just an observation I haven't seen noted in most of the coverage of Zawahiri "mocking" Bush.