Zawahiri in Black

There are two things of particular interests to me in the video that was released today (January 30, 2006) by Al-Zawahiri. Number one is the fact that it took almost 17 days from when the CIA strike occurred and the release of this video. The reason that this is a possible issue is that the August 4, 2005 video, which was possibly released because of the death two days before of King Fahd given that it was the only one of the brown background AK-74 types that was filmed outside, which indicates the film crew came to him. So why did it take them 17 days to release a video proving that Zawahiri was alive? Seems that if that was all this video was meant to do was offer proof of life than they would have rushed it or at a minimum released an audio tape proving he was alive by citing a recent world development (the tape of poetry released after the Bin Laden audio tape has yet to be dated as to when it was recorded). So than if this tape which obviously had a fairly high production quality i.e. complete black background, high quality recording and lighting as opposed to some camcorder with bad lighting. That is if the only purpose of the tape was to offer proof of life.

This brings me to the other interesting part of the video. This is the only video in which Zawahiri is in all white. This struck me because such all white clothing is not only reminiscent of the ritualistic clothes that are used in Islamic funeral rites but more importantly plain white clothing is also often used by terrorists as either preparatory or actual clothing warn when they are engaged in a suicide attack or as they like to refer to it a martyrdom operation. Basically this is analogues to the ceremonial funerals that the kamikazes engaged in before taking off. Than again all white clothing is also a common fashion in the Middle East, so the question is was this selection of clothing simply coincidence or is there something more at work here.