{"id":7843,"date":"2006-07-04T09:10:24","date_gmt":"2006-07-04T13:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/7843.html"},"modified":"2006-07-04T09:10:24","modified_gmt":"2006-07-04T13:10:24","slug":"wanted-dead-or-alive-or-whenever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wanted-dead-or-alive-or-whenever\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanted dead or alive &#8212; or whenever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The president&#8217;s interest in capturing Osama bin Laden has evolved over time. After the al Qaeda leader orchestrated the attacks of 9\/11, Bush pledged to get bin Laden &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2001\/US\/09\/17\/bush.powell.terrorism\/\">dead or alive<\/a>.&#8221; Six months later, after bin Laden proved to be elusive, the president said, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/news\/releases\/2002\/03\/20020313-8.html\">I truly am not that concerned about him<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So it should come as no surprise that the CIA unit dedicated to getting bin Laden is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/07\/04\/washington\/04intel.html?ex=1309665600&#038;en=3779ed9b98bb9d22&#038;ei=5088&#038;partner=rssnyt&#038;emc=rss\">no more<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official who was the first head of the unit, said the move &#8220;will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The official response is that there are still plenty of officials responsible to tracking bin Laden and that the terrorist remains a &#8220;high priority.&#8221; But I&#8217;m curious, if President Kerry had allowed the CIA to disband the intelligence unit tasked with hunting bin Laden, would conservatives just shrug their shoulders?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The president&#8217;s interest in capturing Osama bin Laden has evolved over time. After the al Qaeda leader orchestrated the attacks of 9\/11, Bush pledged to get bin Laden &#8220;dead or alive.&#8221; Six months later, after bin Laden proved to be elusive, the president said, &#8220;I truly am not that concerned about him.&#8221; So it should [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}