Following the admission this week by Pakistan Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf  that troops searching for Osama Bin Laden along the border with Afghanistan have no idea where he is and that the trail has 'gone stone cold' , President George W Bush today declared mission accomplished, saying that while bin Laden remained at large "Americans can relax knowing that we have every excuse to do whatever the hell we like in the world." "As long as bin Laden is alive and well, we can invade countries, bomb civilians, arrest and detain without trial, emasculate the press, flush human rights down the toilet," said Pentagon spokesman Ollie South. "And the minute anyone complains, all we have to say is 'Boooo! War on terror …. Booo! Bin Laden ….' and everybody pisses in their pants and shuts the fuck up." "I'd call that Mission Accomplished, wouldn't you?" South said.

"In the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attack, President Bush declared that there was "no hiding place" for the al-Qaeda leader who was "wanted, dead or alive". "We're going to hunt them down and  kill them," Bush said of the al Qaeda leadership. However, White House officials have more recently sought to play down Bin Laden's significance in the wider War on Terror. When asked about developments in the search for Osama bin laden, a White House aide said "Osama who? Errr, excuse me, I have to take a call from Baghdad …."

"Did we really say hunt them down?" said another aide. "Surely we meant hunt them down after we invade Iraq …. and Iran… and Syria … and France …..."

Another Pentagon official denied that the efforts to apprehend bin Laden were unsuccessful. "We have a dozen spy satellites orbitting the planet tracking his every move - in fact, we're using the very same spy satellites that found all those Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq .... "
 

Ali Kapala Bhutto, a spokesman for Musharraf, a key ally in the War on Terror, said that recent intelligence proved that bin Laden leader was indeed alive and well. "We know he recently visited the Quetta Library and took out their only copy of 'Improvised Explosive Devices For Dummies' - and its already three weeks overdue. He also has a suit and some pants still waiting for collection at the Al-Dhoby Drycleaners in Peshawar. We also have a few traffic citations for a camel registered to his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri being double parked in various parts of Baluchistan. But aside from that, there are no active leads on the whereabouts of the al-Qaeda leader and we don't know where he is."  But Bhutto said the US shared responsibility for the failure to find bin Laden. Thousands of Pakistani troops have been deployed in the border areas but he stressed that the US-led coalition does not have sufficient troops on the other side of the border in Afghanistan. "This has left voids," he stressed, "And how do you solve the problem? By sending 150,000 troops 7,000 miles away to Iraq! Brilliant. Marvellous. And they call us stupid." In the US itself, the search for bin Laden received a much needed boost when the Dairy Association of America distributed over 25 million cartons of goat milk with photographs of the missing bin Laden. "We are also offering a handsome reward for information leading to the safe return of little Osama," a spokesman said. "We also hope that seeing the photographs will help jog the memories of Americans .... especially Administration officials, who may be reminded of the fact that he is actually in Afghanistan or Pakistan and not Iraq." For a printable version of this article in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, CLICK HERE

A dispatch from our Embedded Satirist in Cambridge, Sabri Zain. For the real story, click here.