Jul 03 2006
CIA Closes Failed Bin Laden Unit
What do you do when an intelligence unit has five+ years to do a job and fails in its mission? You shut it down. How does this failure of the CIA (which seems more than capable of leaking the nation’s most important secrets to the press, and from there our enemies)? You spin it, of course:
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.
Got that? It was not that it was a failure (according to intelligence leakers), it was because Bin Laden is not a threat. Does anyone think this is an accurate report given how the NY Times has been duped by partisan hacks inside the government so many times already? Is this a CYA move to have liberal media sources cover up their failures? Well look at one source:
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.”
Scheuer was responsible for Bin Laden pre 9-11, so of course he has no ax to grind (or new book to sell!). Scheuer was the first to let Bin Laden slip through his hands. My guess – the CIA has been usurped as the lead agency to get Bin Laden. You do that when the bottom line result is failure. The media are still dupes listening to people who have every reason to rewrite their personal failures out of the history books.
CIA Closed Special Bin Laden Unit…
One could argue that the administration made a mistake by not making this news public itself; so they could explain to the (American) public how they came to the conclusion that closing the unit was the best option in their opinion. By making stuff lik…
New American Gothic…
Good morning, sunshine! So I thought as I awoke on this most American of mornings until I could feel my dear sweet wife’s eyes burning into me and turning me into the spousal equivalent of French Toast. The most sweet and dulcet one was holding…
In today’s go go society, most tend to rely on the headlines and the “sound bite” to define their view of the world. Few wish to look at the source documents if they are available.
I will link here one of the bits of testimony before the 9/11 commission that is a very interesting read.
Amazing the stuff you can find that has been “less than importantly aired” by the MSM.
http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing3/witness_mylroie.htm
In view of the MSM, ie. NYT repeated damage control positioning over the last week or so, this particular account can be chalked up to their not wishing to examine all possibilities.
It is a shame that the NYT has decided they are the arbiter of national security position in the GWOT and have decided that they have the perview to determine that the war is over and we should now be given to unilateral disarment, or by damn they will enforce it because we are not a enlightend as they are to have yet recognized that universal axiom.
Didn’t go far enough in my opinion. The entire worthless CIA should have been disbanded. Think of it, that would be the end of CIA leak since the useless traitors would no longer have access to classified material.
C.I.A. Shuts Down Bin Laden Hunting Unit…
The NY Times reveals….
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 disban…
I wonder if the CIA has ever, in fact, actually worked for the best interests of the USA. I’m sure some of their projects must have turned out well and actually been beneficial to the US. But I feel like they have almost always been rogue groups within the agency that have worked in the interest of the agency and NOT the US.
Had they not been so intensely interested in killing Castro back in ’63, it is very likely they would have discovered the Mob plot to kill Kennedy and have prevented it. but then, I’m not sure they didn’t know and didn’t want to prevent it. Just for the record Lee Harvey Oswald was only the patsy, not the shooter.
F.E., it is possible, but not necessarily probable, that “the mob” had a plot to kill JFK. If that is the case, however, it would pretty well establish that JFK made a deal WITH the mob, and welched.
During that post-JFK time frame, Helms had a KGB defector here who he interrogated about what the Soviets believed about the “who” and “why” of the assassination (Nosenko). He responded that their inquiries or investigation indicated it was extreme right wing (Americans) behind the killing (that was a growth period of the John Birch Society, but there were also some very reactionary figures, far to the right of the Birchers, and at least one of those, from Florida, was known to be in Dallas on 11/22); this caused Helms to believe the defector was a “plant,” not a legitimate defector, and the description of what Helms put the Soviet through to try to break him was torturous to read about, let alone imagine the reality (Gordon Thomas, “Journey into Madness,” about 1989).
Nosenko never changed his story, and it was apparently what he believed to be true.
Lyndon Johnson reportedly believed, and was nearly frightened to death by the belief, that the JFK assassination was retaliation for the assassination of the South Vietnam president — in fact, his very bitter widow sent about the nastiest message you could imagine to Jacqueline Kennedy immediately after JFK’s death, including the implicit sentiment of “how do YOU like it?”
It was widely believed that JFK gave, if not an order, at least a wink and nod to the S. Viet’s killing.
Right or wrong, Castro certainly had a beef with JFK (it was HIS CIA), so Castro’s hand cannot be dismissed out of hand. Nor can some group of Bay of Pigs Cuban patriots who were betrayed, out and out, by JFK’s pulling of the promised air cover — which followed his thumbs-down on the originally-planned invasion site which had a much greater chance of success than Bay of Pigs.
And then there was the JFK decision regarding the Penn-Central Railroad merger — cost some folks a ton of money. One of the board members, I don’t recall off-hand if it was Penn or Central, but one of the members was Maurice Stans. Remember that name? He was later a “bagman” for Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), 1972.
And, there was another figure with a big interest in Penn-Central: Chicago’s Cardinal Cody, oft-described by Greeley as “the most truly evil man I’ve ever known.” Oh, but a Catholic cardinal and murder? My inclination says “No way,” but that same allegation is made by Yallop about the death of a pope in his book, “In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Assassination of Pope John Paul I.” He named as prime suspects, Cody and Marcincus (the Vatican Treasurer, a former bishop from Cicero, Illinois; when Marcincus could still leave the Vatican without legal servers waiting, on his visits “back home,” he’d now and then stop in at Cicero Town Hall to visit old buds), along with a major player in the Franklin Bank debacle, and a shadowy Vatican politician named Geli or Gelli.
And, the stamp misprint. When a run of US Postage stamps was discovered to have an error, those holding the limited number of stamps printed had a fortune in their hot little hands. JFK ordered a full run of the misprint. Ooops! Oh, well, easy come, easy go. But I can see where someone whose sudden fortune just as suddenly turned to crap, might get a little testy.
I don’t know whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter or a patsy, but it seems pretty clear that he was now and then at least “used” for very low level intrigues. And, he was a nut case: One of the “benign cover-up” incidents was a Dallas FBI agent’s destruction of a note left for him from Oswald, threatening the agent if he ever again tried to talk to Oswald’s wife when Oswald wasn’t present. A President gets shot and everyone goes into CYA mode.
Two bits of evidence in the Garrison case against Clay Shaw had to do with (1) Shaw’s pilot, David Ferrie, frequently flying Shaw to Montreal; and (2) Shaw arranging a job interview for Oswald at a mental hospital in Louisiana, which Garrison theorized, rather foolishly, was a set up to later “switch records” to make it look as though Oswald had been a mental patient there (it would be no more difficult to simply place forged Oswald-as-patient records in the files; and it would avoid the hazard of other employees remembering Oswald as a former co-worker, and swearing under oath that he’d never been a patient).
But Montreal was the location of the psychiatric facility which contained part of the CIA’s “family jewels” — Dr. Cameron’s so-called “psychic driving” research and experiments (sub-program to M.K. Ultra), failures that sometimes ended with Cameron lobotomizing a patient. Attorney General Robert Kennedy was very enthusiastic about this project (not the lobotomies, the “mind control” possibilities), but the grant funding was jerked on November 22, 1963 (probably a complete coincidence).
That “coincidence” remark was snarky of me, sorry. But my theory makes more sense than Garrison’s, to me at least. And if I can figure out the usefulness of arranging for some bit of experience or ostensible “credentials” to get Oswald or someone like him hired into the Montreal hospital, to try to get a handle on whether Cameron was a ticking time bomb, or a scientist doing plausible research — then I have to think someone at CIA would’ve grasped that also (even if they’d already dithered with it for a decade).
This post was quite lengthy, but I’m making a point: There is such a vast array of unrelated things going on in the President’s domain at any given time, that even if we were aware of all of the subject matter, we wouldn’t likely be privy to enough necessary information to draw firm conclusions.
In the Kennedy case, so much misinformation is in print and used as source material — some of it doubtless deliberate, some of it just slipshod research — that there’s something so incongruous it’s almost satisfying, about Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone-nut assassin.
Who’s Afraid of Osama Bin Laden?…
Some liberals are saying that our failure to get Osama Bin Laden shows that the President is not that serious about the War on Terror. But I think that this is actually part of a brilliant strategy to win the War on Terror once and for all by making hi…