|
|
| monkey_man |
July 4, 2006
C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden
By MARK MAZZETTI
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.
"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 counterterrorism 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.
An intelligence official who was granted anonymity to discuss classified information said the closing of the bin Laden unit reflected a greater grasp of the organization. "Our understanding of Al Qaeda has greatly evolved from where it was in the late 1990's," the official said, but added, "There are still people who wake up every day with the job of trying to find bin Laden."
Established in 1996, when Mr. bin Laden's calls for global jihad were a source of increasing concern for officials in Washington, Alec Station operated in a similar fashion to that of other agency stations around the globe.
The two dozen staff members who worked at the station, which was named after Mr. Scheuer's son and was housed in leased offices near agency headquarters in northern Virginia, issued regular cables to the agency about Mr. bin Laden's growing abilities and his desire to strike American targets throughout the world.
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."
Intelligence officials said Alec Station was disbanded after Robert Grenier, who until February was in charge of the Counterterrorist Center, decided the agency needed to reorganize to better address constant changes in terrorist organizations.
|
|
|
| jb |
I called this 100% |
|
|
| Ten Thousand Motels |
So what's new? War is the natural human condition and it always has been. Bleed on. |
|
|
| jb |
quote:
Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
So what's new? War is the natural human condition and it always has been. Bleed on.
We called this(Pug and I). |
|
|
| MrPleasant |
quote:
Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
So what's new? War is the natural human condition and it always has been. Bleed on.
You're saying that Coppola made Apocalypse Now for nothing??? That... PLANT!! |
|
|
| Zulu Fun Mix |
Washington is losing 'war on terror'
Publication time: 4 July 2006, 15:22
Experts say world has not become safer place five years after US launched its hunt for plotters of 9/11 attacks.
Despite high-profile arrests, security operations and upbeat assessments from the White House, the United States is losing its "global war on terror," experts warn.
Five years after Washington launched its hunt for those responsible for the September 11 attacks, the world has not become a safer place, and a new large-scale strike against America at some point appears likely, they say.
Even the killing last month of Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, hailed by the White House as a major blow against the terror network, has not dented its ability to recruit new militants or mount attacks.
In May the influential US magazine Foreign Policy and a Washington-based think-tank questioned 116 leading US experts -- a balanced mix of Republicans and Democrats -- on the progress of the US campaign against terrorism.
Among others, they consulted a former secretary of state, two former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and dozens of the country's top security analysts.
The result? Eighty-four percent believe the United States is losing the "war on terror", 86 percent that the world has become a more dangerous place in the past five years, and 80 percent that a major new attack on their country was likely within the next decade.
"We are losing the 'war on terror' because we are treating the symptoms and not the cause," argued Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
"Our insistence that Islamic fundamentalist ideology has replaced communist ideology as the chief enemy of our time feeds Al-Qaeda's vision of the world," boosting support for the Islamic radical cause, she said.
For Leslie Gelb, president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, the unity of views expressed by those questioned reflects a deeply critical attitude towards the administration of President George W. Bush.
"It's clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force," he said.
Other experts questioned the very nature of the US campaign.
"It was a doomed enterprise from the very start: a 'war on terror' -- it's as ridiculous as a 'war on anger'. You do not wage a war on terror, you wage a war against people," said Alain Chouet, a former senior officer of France's DGSE foreign intelligence service.
"The Americans have been stuck inside this idea of a 'war on terror' since September 11, they are not asking the right questions."
"You can always slaughter terrorists -- there are endless reserves of them. We should not be attacking the effects of terrorism but its causes: Wahhabite ideology, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood. But no one will touch any of those," Chouet argued.
Instead he said US policy in the Middle East, which had "turned Iraq into a new Afghanistan", was acting as a powerful recruiting agent for a generation of Islamic radicals.
The continued US presence in Iraq and "the atrocities committed by a campaigning army", the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and the "grotesque" US detention centre at Guantanamo in Cuba all "provide excuses" for violent radicals, he said.
The United States "have fallen into the classic terrorist trap - they're lashing out at the wrong targets," causing collateral damage that boosts the cause of their opponents, he said.
Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, agreed that Washington was acting as its own worst enemy in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
"We're clearly losing. Today, Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and their allies have only one indispensable ally: the US' foreign policy towards the Islamic world."
"The cumulative impact of several events in the past two years has gone a good way towards increasing Muslim hatred for Americans, simply because they are Americans," he said, citing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the East-West row over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
"Each of these events is unfortunate but not terribly serious for Western minds. But from the Muslim perspective they are deliberate and vicious attacks against the things that guide their lives and their faith." |
|
|
| pdog |
War is over, if you want it!
Who wants it? |
|
|
| Taptrick |
or is it just misinformation
|
|
|
| corgi37 |
Now the CIA can concentrate on spying on American citizens. And, of course, re-focussing its efforts on what it was originally designed to do.
Fuck up the FBI. |
|
