So How Is The Hunt for Osama Going?

For some reason every news outlet in the country felt the need to pounce on Bush's split-second mixing up of Saddam and Osama in his press conference Monday. He was relating how news leaks in the 90's alerted bin Laden to the danger of his using a particular cell phone, which he promptly stopped using - and momentarily said "Saddam" - I guess this was supposed to be Freudian, but a silly thing to focus on. Bush's story though does point up the difficulty of the hunt. When we can't use technology like cell phones to track him down, we're limited to human intelligence - informants, and in that part of the world, that can get awfully dicey. I imagine the search for bin Laden to be not unlike this:

I felt, almost immediately, the presence of a spell to hide [his] presence. There is not a soul in this city (I came to suspect) that doesn't know the secret, and that hasn't sworn to keep it. Most people, when I interrogated them, pleaded unbounded ignorance; they didn't know who [he] was, had never seen the man, never heard of him. Others, contrariwise, had seen him not a quarter of an hour ago talking to Such-and-such, and they would even show me the house the two men had gone into, where of course nobody knew a thing about them - or where I'd just missed them, they'd left just a minute earlier. More than once I balled my fist and hit one of those tellers of precisely detailed lies smack in the face. Bystanders would applaud the way I got my frustrations off my chest, and then make up more lies. I didn't believe them, but I didn't dare ignore them.

J.L. Borges
The Man On the Threshold
Collected Fictions