The Hunt for Bin Laden

Originally aired on the Smithsonian Channel, Leslie Woodhead's documentary details the extensive and expensive efforts by the U.S. government to locate and assassinate Osama Bin Laden. For many years, Bin Laden's operations were unknown to American intelligence; the founding of al-Qaeda in the mid-1980s initially warranted little notice from the CIA. But by 1993, al-Qaeda's involvement in a pair of audacious attacks—the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia—clearly demonstrated Bin Laden's power as the most dangerous foe to American interests in the post-Cold War world. Yet the U.S. government constantly bumbled its handling of Bin Laden: an inadequate American spy network failed to apprehend him, while the CIA's refusal to share information with the FBI helped enable al-Qaeda operatives to begin American-based operations that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. When the Bush Administration began its war in Iraq, the White House eventually tried to downplay the importance of capturing Bin Laden. The Hunt for Bin Laden paints a somewhat sketchy portrait of how the elusive terrorist managed to evade pursuers from the time he escaped across the Afghan border in December 2001 until his assassination in May 2011. Overall, the hunt for Bin Laden is estimated to have ultimately cost $1 trillion—a figure that was tragically bloated by remarkably bad planning and incompetent intelligence gathering. A solid nonfiction counterpart to the Oscar-nominated film Zero Dark Thirty, this is recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (P. Hall)