Bin Laden in Iran...?

A new book claims Osama bin Laden has escaped to Iran, where he's neck-deep in current WMD efforts.

In "Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran," best-selling investigative reporter Kenneth R. Timmerman reveals the whereabouts of safe houses where bin Laden and top al-Qaida operatives have been sheltered by the Iranian regime, and describes how the regime is continuing to provide material assistance to al-Qaida even today.

Timmerman's startling revelations come from a recent defector who held a top position in Iranian intelligence. The defector provided documents and other material evidence - including a detailed description of a meeting last November between bin Laden and top Iranian government officials at a safe house in northern Iran.

Timmerman conducted extensive face-to-face debriefings with the defector in Europe and at an undisclosed location in the Middle East.

Single-sourced research should always be scrutinized and combed through. Ask US Iraqi WMD source "Curveball," who sent us to war in Iraq. Nonetheless, it goes to show that nobody really knows exactly where bin Laden is, what his ability to organize and perpetrate an attack on the US is, or how much the US knows about him. He is, still, four years later, the ultimate terror: a spector lurking in the dark, hidden away, a step ahead.

And, in a way, it doesn't matter. America will from now on always have one of these ghosts haunting the hallways of American political discourse. So long as it's in the government's interest to keep bin Laden on the forefront of our mind's fear, he will stay there.