Osama bin Laden may very well be dead, despite the videotape of him that was aired on Al-Jazeera television. But – dead or alive – he doesn’t seem any closer to being caught than he was when we set out to find him two months ago.
His ability to keep his whereabouts secret is a feat perhaps more mind-boggling than invading and attacking impenetrable America.
Sure, the network of caves in the Afghanistan mountains is as intricate as the pathways in hand-stitched lace. But it still seems surreal that something as primitive as a cave can offer protection from our highly sophisticated methods of surveillance, much less from hundreds of soldiers breathing down your neck.
Think about it. Osama bin Laden has evaded detection in a world in which:
? Our every move is tracked by databases, monitors, cameras, microphones and paperwork trails, and our every thought endures in the e-mail afterlife.
? Our every identifiable idiosyncrasy, from our choice of video rentals to our medical profiles, is afloat in the information ether, ripe for exploiting by credit-card companies, catalog distributors and other commercial predators.
? We’re so detectable that machines can recognize us by voice, touch, heat or our mother’s maiden name (even our telephone can tell another telephone that we’re on the line).
? We’re such a part of the public domain that not only can’t we hide but we can be stolen. Someone else can steal our identity and have more fun than we’re having by buying things we’d never buy for ourselves.
But bin Laden manages to evade us still. Maybe we should be more creative in our mission. Maybe we should put telemarketers on bin Laden’s trail.
I’m sure they’d find him the minute he sat down to dinner. Or maybe we could hire little children, who’d burst in on him the minute he decided to have sex with his spouse.
Sure, other heinous criminals have avoided capture and arrest over the years. Everyone on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, for instance, is the object of an intense manhunt. One fugitive has been on the list for 20 years, another for almost that long.
But most long-sought fugitives are known only to their would-be captors. They could live next door to us for years without having their cover blown. And they could be anywhere in the world at any time, making an intense manhunt problematic.
