PITTSBURGH - This news source last week photgraphed an older, balder Osama bin Laden in a suburban Pittsburgh convenience store that we have learned he uses as his world-wide terrorist headquarters. (In the photograph, bin Laden was brazenly clutching an American teenager he was trying to recruit for an upcoming suicide mission. Fortunately the child escaped.) By day, Bin Laden is a cashier at the Baldwin, Pennsylvania convenience store, selling milk and lottery tickets. By night, he conducts his international terror network from the back room by meeting with scores of disciples, plotting all manner of mayhem. The U.S. Justice Department is unable capture bin Laden since he never leaves the convenience store. The Federal 1995 Extraterritorial Convenience Store Act affords all U.S.-based convenience stores extraterritorial status and treats them as if they are situated on Pakistani soil, much the same as the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C. Under the Act, convenience stores are exempted from U.S. laws, and their owners and the personnel employed by them can neither be sued nor prosecuted here. If Federal agents were to charge into the store and forcibly remove bin Laden, it would be deemed a U.S. invasion of Pakistan under International Law.
For now, Federal agents are content to wait for bin Laden in the parking lot, confident that he'll eventually come out. Sometimes they venture inside the store to purchase cigarettes and milk from cashier bin Laden. And once in a while, if the mood strikes them, they'll pick numbers for the daily lottery. The numbers, of course, are always the same: "9-1-1."
