Shutting Down OBL Search At CIA

Should this really surprise anyone? Well, it's a typical newsdump story that is released over a holiday to lessen its perceived impact.

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.

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

After all, the CIA has had a decade to track down Osama and has failed. Instead of trying to do the same thing over and over, another approach has to be taken.

I've got to believe one or more of the following is going on:

1) The CIA isn't actually shutting down the program, but is reconstituting it under a different program. The CIA is still looking for Osama, but the original program is being shutdown.

2) The CIA search team is being shut down and replaced by a search operated out of the NSA or DoD. Of the NSA or DoD, the Defense Department is the more likely scenario as they already have a task force designed to go after high value terrorist targets. Task Force 77 took out Zarqawi, and they've been tasked with the Osama mission as well. It's a joint forces operation, and they operate with their own intel gathering operations as well.

Others have found a couple of different rationales behind the shutdown. AJ Strata notes that the folks the Times spoke with aren't necessarily honest actors - they've got books and ulterior motives. Michael Scheuer for example. Blue Crab Boulevard thinks that this reorganization might be due to tunnel vision that developed within the group, and that meant the group lost focus of the big picture.

Security Watchtower sees this as a recognition that al Qaeda doesn't have the same capabilities that it once did.

The Sundries Shack finds that this makes sense because there's little use for yet another secret program that can be disclosed to the terrorists reading the New York Times.

Expect the usual suspects to scream and shout about the loss of focus, Bush lied, the war on terror is a sham, and the usual rhetoric that passes as fact with this news.