It's worth a try

After all this time, the Defense Department is getting desperate to find Osama bin Laden. While so many of our troops are tied up in Iraq this new approach sounds pretty good to me. Let's hope it works and that any capture of bin Laden, even after he has now had 5 years to set up future attacks against us, will somehow make us safer. I'm not sure any of that will actually happen, but it is worth a try.

An elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan's borders. The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units. The Pentagon has been alarmed at the ease with which Taliban and al-Qa'ida fighters have been slipping in and out of Afghanistan. Defence officials are convinced their movements can be curtailed by the Shadow Wolves. Harold Thompson, a Navajo Indian, and Gary Ortega, from the Tohono reservation, are experts at "cutting sign", the traditional Indian method of finding and following minute clues from a barren landscape. They can detect twigs snapped by passing humans or hair snagged on a branch and tell how long a sliver of food may have lain in the dirt.