Aug. 24 - The White House claimed a major victory in the war on terror today when Al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden revealed that he no longer knows where he is.
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Bin Laden, appearing on a tape broadcast by the Arabic-language Al Jazeera network, said that he had not known his location for months and blamed his current predicament on the Internet mapping site Mapquest.com. "Those Mapquest fools provided me with a map that is next to useless," a visibly angry bin Laden says on the tape. "All it tells me is where the nearest Applebee's is."
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Bin Laden says that everywhere he looks there are rocks and caves but "none of them look familiar." At the tape's conclusion, he makes a desperate plea to his followers in Al Qaeda: "If you have any idea where I am right now, please let me know at once."
The bombshell tape served as a morale-booster for many in the U.S. intelligence community since, in the words of one CIA source, "The fact that we don't know where Osama is isn't so embarrassing when you consider that he doesn't know either."
At the White House, President George W. Bush said that bin Laden's current status was the inevitable result of the United States' successful war on terror: "I said I wanted him dead or alive, but I'll settle for lost."
Bush added that 70,000 troops withdrawn from Europe and Asia would be used at the end of this month to keep protesters away from the Republican National Convention.
Andy Borowitz is the author of The Borowitz Report, and the winner of the National Press Club's humor award. For more, go to www.borowitzreport.com.
