Sad. I e-mailed Fox using their tips interface on Saturday afternoon after Jim Hoft and I figured it out, but between the spam and the nutroots death threats I guess they don’t check their inbox much anymore. They had on a former FBI counterintel bigwig about 15 minutes ago who declared that it “probably” is an old tape. Whew! Just further proof of what I’ve been saying about how little influence blogs have.

This turned up on the Fox News website this morning. I’m pretty sure it was written Saturday but it’s dated today, so no excuses:

Though U.S. sources tell FOX News there has never been a fake tape from Bin Laden in the past, they contend that the analysis is not complete and there does not appear to be any time specific references so there is no way to know when the tape was made.

FOX News Baghdad reports that the clip may be from a previous unseen portion of a video released five or six years ago.

Evidently Newsbusters has better “U.S. sources” than the media because not only did they get someone to pin down a date for them yesterday morning, they broke the news that the actual clip itself has aired before. Ali Eteraz has the first interesting read on the tape that I’ve seen too, suggesting that it may be AQ’s way of laying the groundwork for an announcement that Bin Laden’s dead. The clip, which has to do with martyrdom, would make him look prophetic — but if that’s the plan, why use footage which they know can be dated to 2002 and puts the lie to the “prophesy”?

Exit question: Will MM get to do a little crowing about this tonight on O’R or will she be too busy tearing Geraldo a new one?