News slipped out a few weeks ago through blogs that the FBI doesn't list the September 11, 2001 attacks on Osama Bin Laden's 'Most Wanted' charge sheet.
When an investigator contacted the agency, he was told the FBI has no hard evidence to pin the terrorist attacks on Bin Laden.
Bizarre enough news. But last week, mainstream media reported that the CIA unit charged with tracking down Bin Laden over the past decade was dismantled and then shut down completely by Bush Co late last year.
From the Guardian :
The man who led America's hunt for Osama bin Laden has said the CIA was wrong to disband the only unit devoted entirely to the terrorist leader's pursuit - just at a time when al-Qaida is reasserting its influence over global jihad.Mr Scheuer disagress with the argument that Bin Laden is now mostly a figurehead to Al Qaeda and is isolated from making 'on the ground' decision in Al Qaeda's terror war.
Shutting down the Bin Laden unit squandered 10 years of expertise in the war on terror, said Michael Scheuer, who founded the unit in 1995 and arguably knows more about Bin Laden than any other western intelligence official.
"What (this closure) robs you of is a critical mass of officers who have been working on this together for a decade," he told the Guardian.
"We had a breed of specialists rare in an intelligence community that prides itself on generalists. It provided a base from which to build a cadre of people specialising in attacking Sunni extremist operations, who sacrificed promotions and other emoluments in their employment in the clandestine service, where specialists were looked on as nerds."
"How do you explain the fact that he is able to dominate international media whenever he wants to?"So what's going on?
"Bin Laden has always said the main activity of al-Qaida is the instigation ... of Muslims to jihad," Mr Scheuer said.
"All of the people who have been picked up have said they were inspired by Bin Laden, that they trained in their own countries and used information picked up on the internet. So the fire that Bin Laden was trying to set is what we are beginning to see around the world and, unfortunately, nowhere more than in the west."
It seems almost impossible to believe that US intelligence agents are not hunting down Bin Laden with the same zeal that they have over the past four years, despite the closing of the internal agency devoted to that task.
This is either an attempt to convince Bin Laden that he is not being watched as closely as he once was, in the hope that he will expose himself in some way, or the closure of the inside agency reveals the truly incredible possibility that Bush Co no longer regard Bin Laden as being chiefly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, nor a substantial part of Al Qaeda, at least, not any longer.
That, however, would not explain why there is not a significant number of agents devoted to bringing Bin Laden to justice for the terrorist attacks on US ships and embassies in the late 1990s.
It's not like either the CIA or the FBI are short of resources.
The intelligence budgets for these agents have grown by a factor of three or four times what they were before 9/11, and continue to grow as the true capacity of Al Qaeda grows to organise and influence international terrorism as a method of warfare grows more pronounced.
Go To The 'Your New Reality' Blog For The Full Story On The Dramatic Changes In The Hunt For Bin Laden
