C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden

The President once announced that he wanted to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." This is the man whom President Bush asserts is responsible for the deaths of over 3,000 American citizens on American soil.

And yet...

The CIA is closing down the unit that has been responsible for hunting him down for the past decade, long before the events of 9-11 made him a world-wide face of international terrorism.

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.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals."

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military's counter terrorism units, like the Army's Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.

This would appear to illustrate perfectly the extent to which Bush's illegal sojourn into Iraq has depleted resources in the fight against terrorism and bogged the Americans down fighting new enemies; indeed people who were not even enemies at all until the US invaded Iraq.

Of course, as a President who uses fear to manipulate Americans into allowing him to grab ever more executive power, it rather suits President Bush to have bin Laden roaming free.

To paraphrase Orwell, "It matters not whether the leaders of Eurasia are captured, it only matters that they exist as something to be feared."

Bin Laden is much more useful as a modern day Goldstein than he ever would be as a captured former terrorist in these times of Cheney's proposed perpetual war.

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Tags: CIA, bin Laden, capture, close, unit, 9-11,