In Plain Sight: Osama Bin Laden vs. Whitey Bulger

This week, the FBI arrested another on its Top 10 Most Wanted List - notorious gangster Whitey Bulger. He was charged in connection with 19 murders, racketeering, extortion and a host of other mob-like crimes. His story was the motivation behind Jack Nicholson's character in Martin Scorsese's The Departed. The man was living in Santa Monica since he evaded Boston police in 1994.

The LATimes released an editorial comparing Bulger's capture to the capture of Osama Bin Laden, as they were both "living in plain sight" and evaded capture. The article pointed to the fact that Pakistan might leverage Bulger's capture as a way to deflect criticism that Pakistani officials knew of Bin Laden's whereabouts and did not catch him because of corruption.

I will admit that there are some similarities between the two. Both were on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted List, both were wanted for orchestrating mass murder, both men were captured after multi-year investigations, and both were hiding in plain sight. But, leveraging Bulger's capture as an example that a highly wanted fugitive could hide in the plain sight ignores a serious and glaringly obvious problem: corruption.

There have been a couple events in the 10-yr search for Osama Bin Laden that have shown obvious corruption amongst the ranks of the Pakistani intelligence. In 2008, militants from a Pakistani arm of the Taliban attacked Mumbai, killing hundreds with AK-47s and explosives. After pressure was put on the ISI (Pakistani intelligence), it was revealed that they provided support and weapons to the terrorists who staged the attack. At the beginning of the War in Afghanistan, US intelligence pinpointed the exact location of OBL and allowed for a joint Pakistani-Afghan force to carry out the assault on his compound. Without US intelligence or military oversight, the force "let him go." The ISI has worked with militants in attacks on India and western forces in Afghanistan while helping the NATO alliance track down Taliban insurgents. There has been convincing proof that Pakistani intelligence is working both sides.

These allegations provide a compelling reason to doubt the veracity of the Pakistani's claim that OBL could live in plain sight and that the ISI and any other Pakistani military force was not in cahoots with him. The evidence also negates any comparison to Bulger that might attempt to exculpate Pakistan.