"WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.
The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.
The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."
The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.
"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."
The decision to close the unit was first reported Monday by National Public Radio.
Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was.
Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken."
Scheuer (who incidently is a paid CB-S analyst) has an axe to grind being the anti-Isreal, ultra-leftist as he is, but the fact is that in spite of lefty blogs again blaming Bush, the fact is that Scheuer's unit was a dismal failure, faling America when it counted most, stopping 9/11. His jive is old and he's been yaking it up since 2004. Expect the drive-by media to parade Richard Clarke any time now.
More from the tripe.
"In his book "Ghost Wars," which chronicles the agency's efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Coll wrote that some inside the agency likened Alec Station to a cult that became obsessed with Al Qaeda.
"The bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their C.I.A. colleagues uncomfortable," Mr. Coll wrote. Members of Alec Station "called themselves 'the Manson Family' because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising Al Qaeda threat."
The fact is that the CIA has never been the "right unit" to hunt Bin Laden and history has shown that they sucked royally at it. The units that are tracking him now are much better funded and equipped and don't have a political axe to grind to let him "slip away".
Fact is that Scheuer is a disgruntled and ineffective former op who stands in the same line of dolts as we have seen over the last three years or so. and especially the pre 9/11 type of op like former analysts Larry C. Johnson who thought all this "terrorism talk" was too alarmist!
More about Scheuer from Wikepedia, including this note:
"Thomas Joscelyn of Weekly Standard wrote a highly critical piece on Scheuer and an interview Scheuer did on Chris Matthews Hardball. Joscelyn wrote:
"When Michael Scheuer, the first head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, first emerged into public view almost a year ago, it was a curiosity how he could appear in the media--time after time--claiming that there was no evidence of a relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda. It was curious because, in 2002, Scheuer wrote the book Through Our Enemies' Eyes, in which he cited numerous pieces of evidence showing that there was, in fact, a working relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. That evidence directly contradicted his criticism of the intelligence that led this nation into the Iraq war, which he called a 'Christmas present' for bin Laden."
Scheuer wrote about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in his 2002 book (see above, 2002). Yet when interviewed in 2004 he stated that he had found no evidence of a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection. Tim Russert asked Scheuer to explain the seeming contradiction on Meet the Press (30 November 2004). Scheuer replied:
"I certainly saw a link when I was writing the books in terms of the open-source literature, unclassified literature, but I had nothing to do with Iraq during my professional career until the run-up to the war. What I was talking about on "Hardball" was I was assigned the duty of going back about nine or 10 years in the classified archives of the CIA. I went through roughly 19,000 documents, probably totaling 50,000 to 60,000 pages, and within that corpus of material, there was absolutely no connection in the terms of a--in terms of a relationship--in the terms of a relationship.
Yeah.....it depends on what you mean when you say "sex"....
Whatever! Waiter check!
UPDATE: NRO's James S. Robbins writes:
"So CIA analysts concluded that Osama bin Laden wanted George Bush to win the 2004 election, and this is why he released a video tape just days before the election? If true, this is just more evidence that the spy agency needs a thorough cleaning. There is no doubt that had Bush been defeated in 2004 it would have been seen as a resounding repudiation of his war leadership, and a humiliation of the United States, which are principal objectives being sought by Al Qaeda. The convoluted theory that somehow a Bush victory would sustain bin Laden's leadership against a Zarqawi challenge is simply nonsense. Yet, it apparently had a great deal of traction in the Agency. One might more straightforwardly conclude that a Bush victory would be viewed as a defeat in Al Qaeda — and might explain why bin Laden went silent for a whole year. There is no doubt that bin Laden helped the President win re-election, but that does not mean he intended to — the enemy have consistently shown they have a poor understanding of our society and what is important to us. In his video Osama said it didn't matter who won, but he spent much of his time blaming the President for all the world's troubles. We really should take it at face value. Analysts who warp this into a pro-Bush strategic move are working at about the same level as Zarqawi's wife saying OBL sold him out to the Americans. It is no wonder we have not been able to apprehend bin Laden with folks like that on the case. And now word comes that the Agency is disbanding the dedicated bin Laden team? Under circumstances that sounds like a very good move. "
Agreed.
Note: For those of you who thought that the house-cleaning was done, think again. It's continuing, thus the "push back". Look for more of this nonsense to come.
UPDATE II: H/t to Tom McGuire, who notes that Richard Clarke has been up and around already. Danke Minuteman, missed the sighting.
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