The Really Big Question

Since bin Laden came up in the Miss Cleo/al Jazeera story, and I am feeling particularly surly at the moment, allow me to ask a question that has been clinging to my brain like a grapvine: Why can’t we find this asshole????

We have satellites that can do an endoscopy from space, we have night vision and heat sensors and undercover agents and remote control missiles – why can’t we find the most wanted man in the world?

It also really gripes me when the Bush administration minimizes the importance of neutralizing this human black hole. Richard Cohen has some choice words on the matter in today’s WaPo:

I have to go back to [Victoria] Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman. She and her bosses may now choose not to “personalize” the search for bin Laden, but I — and countless others — feel differently. The man is a mass murderer who took more than 3,000 lives on Sept. 11 alone. He is responsible for other terrorist attacks as well, including the bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen.

Those of us who were in New York when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were hit, who were downtown when the buildings collapsed, can never forget that day. The sound of buildings snapping and then collapsing, people plummeting to their deaths or tumbling into an inferno of jet fuel, firefighters and cops rushing up stairs that would soon be pulverized, widows, orphans, a gash in the city that endures — all this makes Sept. 11 very personal indeed. To this day, every firetruck rushing by — the names of the dead embossed on the sides — is a reminder of what happened, a blur of a memorial.

Osama bin Laden laughed at all this, his cackle caught on an earlier videotape. Now, in effect, he laughs some more. The murder of innocents in Bali, in Jordan, in Tunisia, in that Moscow theater — the terrorism he applauds, if not supports, and which was mentioned on that tape, makes it imperative that he be captured or killed, and that we know for sure. That would be good policy — and satisfying as hell.

Amen brother