Using satellites to find bin Laden

[unhappycamper]

Using satellites to find bin Laden
By Dan Vergano - Gannett News Service
Posted : Tuesday Feb 17, 2009 6:56:04 EST

Fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden is most likely hiding out in a walled compound in a Pakistani border town, according to a satellite-aided geographic analysis released today.

A research team led by geographer Thomas Gillespie of the University of California, Los Angeles, used geographic analytical tools that have been successful in locating urban criminals and endangered species.

Basing their conclusion on nighttime satellite images and other techniques, the scientists suggest that bin Laden may well be in one of three compounds in Parachinar, a town 12 miles from the Pakistan border. The research incorporates public reports of bin Laden’s habits and whereabouts since his 2001 flight from the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan.

The results, reported in the MIT International Review, are being greeted with polite, yet skeptical, interest among those involved in the hunt for bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Bin Laden’s whereabouts are considered “one of the most important political questions of our time,” the study notes.

”I’ve never really believed the sitting-in-a-cave theory. That’s the last place you would want to be bottled up,” says Gillespie. The study’s real value, he says, is in combining satellite records of geographic locations, patterns of nighttime electricity use and population detection methods to produce a technique for locating fugitives.


Rest of article at: http://armytimes.com/news/2009/02/gns_bin_laden_pakistan_021709/%2e

[xiamiam]

1. bin laden is dead...nt