Looking_glass, bin Laden's photo at top is like all those in the press and his TV videos...a long, very flat-to-his-face nose. He also has an elongated skull. If you compare skull types on both photos, which I've now printed out on our new excellent color copier that catches everything, and use a magnifying glass besides, those faces bear NO resemblance to one another, beyond the streaked middle of the beard and the white pillbox hat...period.
This second man, the one on the video has a wider brow, shorter skull, wider, lower forehead, different eyebrow, different mouth (seen with magnifier), thick "pouchy" cheeks versus sunken cheeks of bin Laden.
Unless bin Laden had magnificent recent plastic surgery, which a rumor had it Omar did, and gained an amazing amount of weight for a man who has kidney trouble and one foot in the grave, and who's been on the run, and who has always been painfully thin...then this is NOT...NOT...NOT bin Laden.
And remember: I am NOT one of the conspiracy theorists here, and have refuted them all along vehemently, for trying to divide our nation when we need to be united to survive.
I honestly have no more answers than anyone else here has on why this subterfuge, or this glaring error, but I think we've just been had, and it scares the living daylights out of me to think it.
It COULD be bin Laden's way of making fools of our leaders, but then, why wouldn't they see that as quickly as John Q. Public did, and know they'd be the subject of ridicule if we saw the differences in these two men?
I'd like to crawl under the covers now.....