Ask the Experts: Does Bin Laden's Death Add Fuel to Conspiracy Theorists?
The raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan was planned and conducted in secret. Only a handful of U.S. officials knew about it beforehand, and the international community was kept in the dark. This stealth contributed to the operation's success, but it may also have sowed suspicion in some quarters--particularly in places like Islamabad, about 60 kilometers from the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden was killed, where some people are already prone to conspiracy theories.To find out how the news of Bin Laden’s death is being received in Islamabad, Scientific American spoke with retail management professor Murtaza Haider of Ryerson University in Toronto, who returned to his native Pakistan last week to conduct research on country's rehabilitation after the devastating magnitude 7.6 earthquake in 2005 . Haider, who grew up in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province before immigrating to Canada at the age of 23,...