Actually... it has long seemed to me that ObL is in fact both more powerful and more dangerous as a (dead) martyr than as a living person... and therefore I figure that there is a good chance he already is dead and evidence to the contrary is a fairly carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign designed to keep at least a reasonable fraction of his followers thinking that he's alive. If he's still alive now, I don't expect to hear about it when he gets killed or otherwise dies. Several decades hence a general consensus will emerge that he must be dead (because he would otherwise be improbably old) and that will be that.