We used to hear plenty of tough talk about Bush’s search for Osama bin Laden, but as we all know, talk — particularly from this president — is cheap.
For a while, it seemed like catching the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks was an actual priority for the president. At one point, Bush said, “The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.” Which, a year-and-a-half later turned into, “I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.”
After bin Laden faded from Bush’s priority list, the search to capture the terrorist waned. Actions from the Bush administration suggested this was intentional, because Iraq had been identified as a more serious threat.
In 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures.
The CIA, meanwhile, was stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan. When the White House raised a new priority, it took specialists away from the Afghanistan effort to ensure Iraq was covered.
And now, as the war in Iraq deteriorates, intelligence gathering on bin Laden continues to suffer.
Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks, despite repeated pleas from the unit’s leaders for reinforcements, a senior C.I.A. officer with extensive counterterrorism experience has told Congress. (emphasis added)
The bin Laden unit is stretched so thin that it relies on inexperienced officers rotated in and out every 60 to 90 days, and they leave before they know enough to be able to perform any meaningful work, according to a letter the C.I.A. officer has written to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
So, does Bush’s leadership and decision making help you to feel any safer?
I’ll never really understand how this didn’t become a major campaign issue. Osama bin Laden orchestrates an attack that kills 3,000 Americans, but Bush says his capture “isn’t important” and “isn’t our priority.” Bush’s administration assigns five times as many Treasury Department many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to research bin Laden’s financial network. Bush’s Pentagon started implementing high-tech surveillance tactics in the search for bin Laden, but did so over 30 months after 9/11 and a year after the invasion of Iraq.
And now we learn that we’re doing less to track down bin Laden now than we were on Sept. 11, 2001. Breathtaking.
I suspect if most Americans realized how passive Bush has been in the search to bring bin Laden to justice, they’d be outraged. I know I am.