February 18, 2009
Science! Bin Laden's Lair Revealed
Osama bin Laden is in Parachinar, Pakistan. So saith science. And you can't argue with science, can you. Because, you know, it's science!
The entire paper written by Thomas W. Gillespie and John A. Agnew, Finding Osama bin Laden: An Application of Biogeographic Theories and Satellite Imagery, can be read online in PDF format here.
One problem: much of the information used by Gillespie and Agnew is, well, wrong. For instance, Osama bin Laden does not use a dialysis machine on a daily basis. It's a myth built up around faulty intelligence.
Which matters because it means that the geographical parameters of where he could feasibly be open up greatly when bin Laden is not tied to somewhere with, say, electricity.
Ed is spot on in noting that bin Laden is Saudi, so why would Afghani culture matter in any way? He also spent some years in Sudan, with no apparent cultural difficulty. In fact, his old MO was simply to move his Saudi culture to wherever he was by opening camps and surrounding himself with Arabs.
I guess we should be grateful that academics are even worried about bin Laden. But GIS modeling based on social-scientific measures are as surely wrong as they are needlessly complicated.
By Rusty at February 18, 2009 04:48 PM | | l digg this
