The worst thing a public enemy number one can do, is die. Hence, it is also important to make sure that when picking your public enemy number one, he is in good health. Choose badly, and you may end up in dire straits.
So, how is Osama Bin Laden? Since 9/11, there have been numerous reports that he in fact has died, and it is not altogether impossible that one of these reports is indeed true.

Osama Bin Laden will turn 50 on March 10, 2007 - if he of course is still alive. Whereas on the surface, at the age of 50, this is a young, agile leader of  Al Qaeda, as early as 2001, it was widely reported that he was actually in poor health, according to some suffering from Hepatitis C, with a life expectance of two years - which would have seen him die in ca. 2003. According to the French magazine "Le Figaro", in 2000, Bin Laden ordered a mobile dialysis machine, which was delivered to his base at Kandahar in Afghanistan. Indeed, the story that Bin Laden was hiding somewhere in a cave in Afghanistan after 9/11 was soon questioned, because caves do not come with electricity to run a dialysis machine, nor with the sterile environment in which the medical intervention is required to occur. No doubt this was one of the main reasons why Donald Rumsfeld at the time claimed that Bin Laden had a "high tech cave" - echoes of James Bond! - which smoothed out the problem. Over the past five years, US troops have of course failed to find such a "high tech cave" anywhere in Afghanistan, with or without Bin Laden inside.

Bin Laden's medical condition is therefore serious enough that he could have died, with his death perhaps kept a secret by his closest circle of friends and supporters. For not only the US, but also those intent on bringing terror to the Western world require that Bin Laden is active and deemed to be alive. But, instead, there have been numerous reports of his death.
On July 11, 2002, the New York Times claimed that Public Enemy Number One had died, "almost six months ago [...] The fugitive died in December [2001] and was buried in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan. Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, echoed the information." Video footage of Bin Laden taken around November 19, 2001 did reveal a very aged man. The reason why many people think Bin Laden is far older than the 44 years he was then is precisely due to his ill health. In the video, Bin Laden had grown a very grey beard and could barely move the left side of his body, according to experts a sign of diabetes and his kidney problems.
His possible death in December 2001 was attributed to Bin Laden being on the run, with no accommodation being available for his dialysis, which has to occur every third day. Without such medical assistance, the patient is expected to die within a matter of days, a week at best. And though Public Enemy Number One, he was not superman...

Not only Pakistan's president, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's counter-terrorism chief Dale Watson, proclaimed that Bin Laden was "probably" dead. Indeed, on December 25, 2001, a prominent official in the Afghan Taliban movement stated that Bin Laden had suffered serious complications in the lungs and had died a natural and quiet death. The problem was that the official asked to remain anonymous, but stated to "The Observer" of Pakistan that he had himself attended the funeral of Bin Laden and saw his face prior to burial in Tora Bora ten days before. It would mean that the video taken around November 19 showing a very ill Bin Laden had probably been the last message he had been able to record. The official added that thirty Al Qaeda fighters attended the burial, as well as members of his family and some friends from the Taliban.
Could this be seen as proof of his death? The official stated that it was difficult to pinpoint the burial location of Bin Laden because according to the Wahhabi tradition, no mark was left by the grave. He stressed that it was unlikely that the American forces would ever discover it. So a genuine story, or disinformation? There is no clear answer, except to agree with the analysts that Bin Laden "could" if not "should" have died if he was indeed forced to flee, without the possibility of dialysis.

Could the US have known that Osama Bin Laden had died in late December 2001? A videotape purportedly showing Bin Laden confessing to the 9/11 attacks was made public on December 13, 2001. The tape bore a label indicating it was made on November 9 and the US government stated that it was found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in. Critics stated it was very "fortuitous" that a small video tape of Bin Laden confessing to 9/11 had been found in a private house, one of thousands in an Afghan city, where tens if not hundreds of thousands of video tapes would be located. Who had been watching all of them and how fortunate was it to find one - a single copy at that! - with Bin Laden making this confession - even though everywhere else he had always denied being responsible for 9/11?
President George W Bush stated that "For those who see this tape, they'll realise that not only is he guilty of incredible murder, he has no conscience and no soul, that he represents the worst of civilisation." For US Senator Ron Wyden, he hoped that it would "remove suspicions in countries such as Pakistan that the 11 September attacks were an Israeli plot aimed at drawing the US into a war with Islamic countries." The latter statement strongly suggest Wyden followed a course in NLP, whereby two independent statements are presented, even though one has no relation to the other.
Sceptics meanwhile noted that the video was very effective in diverting media attention away from the deportation of five Israelis who had been arrested on September 11, after displaying suspicious behaviour - eyewitnesses reported they were jumping up and down, as if in excitement, as well as videotaping the destruction of the Twin Towers. But could the Israeli deportation itself have been incidental? Could it be that the US knew Bin Laden had died, and hence had "carte blanche" to have him confess?

It was a German TV show that found that the White House's translation of the video was inaccurate and "manipulative". Bin Laden even praised two hijackers, Wail M. Alshehri and Salem Alhazmi, who were actually afterwards found to be alive. If Bin Laden was the mastermind, why didn't he know the names of the real hijackers he chose, instead going by the "official list" the FBI had created, and which contained several errors? (At least five of the "suicide hijackers" are now known not be involved in the 9/11 bombings at all, if only because they are still alive, working as airline pilots for e.g. Saudi Arabian airlines.)
With its authenticity contested, Bush retorted: "It is preposterous for anybody to think that this tape is doctored. That's just a feeble excuse to provide weak support for an incredibly evil man." But that the tape was doctored, is very obvious, for the man we are led to believe is Bin Laden does not even look like him. As there was an "official Bin Laden release" around the same time, where we see him very old and very thin, the "doctored Bin Laden" seemed to have put on massive amounts of weight. The person is almost obese; the real Bin Laden is largely thin as a rake. Furthermore, in the video, Bin Laden appeared to write notes with his right hand, yet Bin Laden is left-handed.

Since 2002, it is indeed the US who has kept Osama Bin Laden alive. After claims of his death in mid 2002, there were "promises" that he would send more messages, which the US media stated they would not air. In March 2002, there were stories that Bin Laden had sent an email from his AOL account! In May, there were "new messages", but they were only old tapes that had been re-edited. On November 19, 2002, the US stated that an audiotape broadcast on an Arab television network the previous week was genuine and contained the voice of Osama Bin Laden. The New York Times reported that it ended "months of debate in the government over whether the elusive terrorist leader is still alive." But on November 30, it was reported that researchers at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, in Lausanne (Switzerland) believed the message was recorded by an impostor. Researchers built a computer model of Bin Laden's voice, based on an hour of genuine recordings. Using voice recognition systems, they tested the model against twenty known recordings of Bin Laden. The system identified his voice in 19 of them, meaning there was only a 5% risk of error in their conclusion that the tape was a fake. The question is: who fabricated the tape?

Rumours of Bin Laden's death are now circulating every few months. In September 23, 2005, Bin Laden was believed to be on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. According to the Pakistani press, he had kept a low profile, with as few as ten men guarding him. In October, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit Kashmir, the region where Bin Laden was believed to be hiding. US authorities said they had no evidence of whether Bin Laden was hurt or killed, but on November 25, 2005, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said that he was informed that Bin Laden "may have died" in the earthquake.
In January 2006, Professor Clive Williams from Macquarie University, an Australian terrorism expert, stated that he was given evidence, which "could show" Bin Laden was either seriously ill or dead - though in my opinion both are mutually exclusive: evidence of one's death is not evidence of someone being alive! Williams claimed he had been provided with this evidence by an Indian colleague, to support the theory that Bin Laden died of massive organ failure in April 2005.
The latest rumour to receive any notoriety occurred in September 2006. This time, it was the French daily newspaper "L'Est Republicain" who reported Bin Laden had died of typhoid fever in Pakistan on August 23. It cited what it said was a leaked French secret service report dated September 21. The newspaper reported that unnamed Saudi secret services sources passed this information to the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE, the French secret service).

It seems that most sources are in agreement that Bin Laden is dead - with the most likely date for his demise late November or early December 2001. In fact, after the September 2006 announcement, it was left to a "Saudi source" - noting that Saudi Arabia is the US's main ally in the region - to tell CNN and Time that Bin Laden indeed had a water-borne illness, but was still alive. As Bin Laden is a Saudi national, of course, one cannot merely dismiss the Saudi claims. Still, read the official statement of the Saudi Arabia's embassy in Washington D.C. carefully: "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has no evidence to support recent media reports that Osama Bin Laden is dead. Information that has been reported otherwise is purely speculative and cannot be independently verified." In short: they have no evidence he is alive, or dead.

Though Bin Laden was originally going to be hunted down, he soon became incidental in America's war on terror. Because the US knew he had died? Also, the New York Times of July 3, 2006, reported that the CIA had closed the unit whose mission was the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. "The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the CIA Counterterrorist Center, the officials said." Evidence that Bin Laden had indeed died? Or just an internal reorganisation?
The best evidence that Bin Laden has died may come from Al Qaeda itself. Ayman al Zawahiri, Bin Laden's deputy, has been making all statements on behalf of Al Qaeda for several years. It started in September 2003, when a videotape of al Zawahiri and Bin Laden walking together was obviously released as part of a plan to show that al Zawahiri was close to Bin Laden and should be seen as his "logical successor". Specifically since September 2005, al Zawahiri has been making all Al Qaeda comments, whereas Bin Laden has made none. Even if not dead, it is clear that he is no longer the spokesman used to instil fear and terror in the citizens of the US. And at least that aspect of the man has died; if not all of him.

Appendix:

On March 1, 2007, it was reported that "Osama bin Laden [is] still alive, Taliban commander says". "We know he is still alive," Mullah Dadullah, chief of the resurgent movement's military operations, told a British television station on Wednesday February 28, 2007. "He is not yet martyred," Dadullah said at a secret location in Afghanistan. Still, "Speaking in Pashtu, he added that he had not personally seen bin Laden since the Taliban was ousted from power by US-led forces just over five years ago." In short, this trumped up headline is a little bit short of hard evidence.