Stardate 20011120.2300 (On Screen): I think it's important to note that even if bin Laden does get killed in this war, we may never know it. One of the things that our guys on the ground in Afghanistan have been doing is to locate caves and to call in airstrikes to destroy them. No-one is going in to dig out all the bodies; that isn't practical -- and in any case, some of the people in those caves will be disintegrated by the bombs, leaving nothing. I think that most people are assuming that the Special Forces or Marines will bring back either a corpse or a prisoner, but we can't rely on that. It's entirely possible that bin Laden is already dead, in fact. But the fact that we never do locate him won't necessarily mean he escaped.
Which may mean he becomes a creature of legend. There have been many. Marshall Michel Ney was one of Napoleon's top generals; after the Waterloo defeat he was tried for treason in Paris and shot. But there were rumors that he had actually escaped to America and lived out his life. John Dillinger was one of the smartest and craftiest of the gangsters, responsible for a jailbreak where he used a gun carved from wood to fake out the guards. He also at one point had a plastic surgeon change his face and fingerprints. Nonetheless, he was betrayed to the FBI by the legendary "woman in the red dress", and they shot and killed him. But many think that he set someone else up and that he himself was not actually the one shot -- and that he, too, lived out his life and died of old age. And then there's Elvis.
So we may be hearing about bin Laden sightings for the next fifty years, if no real proof of his fate is ever found. That's just the way it is; war is messy and there are always MIAs. There's a decent chance that bin Laden will turn out to be one of them. (discussion in progress)
