For weeks now, every news story that mentions the Navy Sealsí wildly successful raid on Osamaís house says that the terrorist mastermind had been hiding with his three wives in a ěmillion-dollar complexî for five years.
Iím no real estate expert, but if that crappy-looking house cost a million dollars, I will eat my shoe. No pool, no granite counters in the kitchen, no double-height entrance hall. We are told that Abbottabad, Pakistan, is one of the ritziest places in Pakistan. If thatís ritzy, what do the unritzy places look like? Would anybody be surprised at all to find out that after Osama had been cooped up in that dumpy ěmillion-dollar complexî for five years with three wives that he dropped the dime on himself?
Some people say thereís no way bin Laden could have been living in Pakistan without someone in the Pakistani government knowing about it. Really? Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped near Lake Tahoe in front of many witnesses when she was 11 years old, and was only discovered 18 years later. No one noticed she had been forced to live in a tent in her kidnapper/rapistís back yard in a suburban California neighborhood. Police and social services visited the house many times over the years because her abductor was already a convicted sex criminal, yet they didnít seem to know he had a child permanently camping out around back. She remained missing in plain sight.
A guy in Manhattan kept a full-grown tiger and an alligator in his rent-subsidized apartment for years, and none of his neighbors, who lived all the way across a 5 foot-wide hall, knew about it. It wasnít until someone started to complain about the zoo-like stench that the outsize menagerie was discovered.
If his Pakistani neighbors knew it was bin Laden living behind the charming 20-foot fence topped with razor wire, do you think they would have hung around? If you lived next door to the most wanted man in the world, knowing that he would probably be carpet bombed into oblivion the minute the Americans found out where he lived (and that was discussed), would you want to live close by? Thatís like asking the waiter if you can get a table close to the mafia don who just testified against a rival family.
I love this idea that news people have that everybody in Pakistan must know each other. This from people who have no idea who lives in the apartment two floors below them, much less who lives two blocks or two miles away. You wonít be surprised to learn that it wasnít a reporter who found the long-missing Dugard or the tiger in the apartment. It wasnít like bin Laden was inviting people to block parties every weekend like John Gotti, and I doubt his name was on the deed to the ěmillion-dollar complex.î The White House has just announced that no one was going to get the $25 million reward for busting bin Laden. Itís hard to believe that if the corrupt, double-dealing, bribe-taking politicians and generals in Pakistan knew where Osama was, theyíd pass up that kind of scratch.
Right now Iím wearing a shirt from an American company that says, ěMade in Pakistan.î This means that the guy who made the shirt must be getting paid less than the guy in Malaysia who used to make their shirts, who got paid less than the guy in China who made them before that. What had bin Laden ever done for him? If he knew, heíd take the money.

Jim Mullen writes for United Feature Syndicate.