CIA Shuts Down Osama Bin Laden Unit

The New York Times reports that the Central Intelligence Agency has closed its unit dedicated to capturing and/or killing Osama bin Laden. So much for Bush's 'Wanted: Dead or Alive' rhetoric.

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.

Let's face it though, Osama bin's Forgotten for quite a while. Why keep paying for a unit that had no priority any longer? We gave up on Osama and Mullah Omar when we pulled the Special Forces from Afghanistan and reassigned them to Iraq. We gave up on getting Osama when we decided to use native Afghans, for sale to the highest bidder (it appears we were outbid) to find him instead of using our own forces. We gave up on finding Osama when we only dedicated 10,000 U.S. forces to Afghanistan after September 11th. We gave up on getting Osama because deposing Saddam Hussein was a higher priority.

It scares me to think what this is going to cost us. This wasn't incompetence, it was policy. These were decisions made in the Oval Office. No one but the President would consciously make decisions to cease going after those truly responsible for those horrible attacks and, instead, go off on a historically awful invasion of a country totally unrelated to those atrocities.

This is a failure of policy, priorities and judgment. Combine that with the innumerable new enemies we're making in Iraq and the future looks bleak for our security. Every Iraqi citizen killed because of this misadventure is creating an entire new family dedicated to destroying America. People in the Middle East have long memories and a taste for revenge.