Posted on 07/06/2006 5:49:40 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Thursday sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte urging him to reconstitute immediately a Central Intelligence Agency unit responsible for hunting down Osama bin Laden.
Kerry, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a presidential hopeful, was reacting to a story published by The New York Times on Tuesday that reported that the CIA unit known as Alec Station was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the CIA Counterterrorist Center.
"This unit should be reconstituted immediately and given all resources necessary to finish the job of holding bin Laden accountable and preventing him from organizing or inspiring future attacks against the United States and our allies," Kerry wrote to Negroponte.
"The decision to divert resources from the crucial fight against bin Laden and al Qaeda to wage war on Iraq has made the task of eradicating this increasingly diffuse threat more difficult. We now face a long, difficult and multi-faceted struggle against global terrorism and the hateful ideology that inspires it," wrote Kerry, who has become an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq.
He argued that the United States cannot ignore the fact that "eliminating bin Laden would still strike a key blow" against al Qaeda and represent a significant step forward in the war on terror. He urged Negroponte to give the intelligence community the resources both to pursue bin Laden and to fight the broader war on terrorism.
"Disbanding the bin Laden unit sends the message to the terrorists that they can kill thousands of Americans without being held to account," Kerry wrote. "Given that Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz was quoted this week as saying that ‘nobody has any idea’ where bin Laden is, it is especially important that we send a clear message now that we have not given up the hunt."
According to the Times, agency officials said that tracking bin Laden and his deputies remains 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.
But the so-called bin Laden unit was not without controversy. In 2004, Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the unit from 1996 to 1999, said the unit was staffed with inexperienced people who would only do short stints of 60 to 90 days. Scheuer said then that the unit was slated for elimination in the spring of 1998 but that then-CIA Director George Tenet blocked the move.
The entire CIA urges Kerry to focus efforts on STFU.
WHERE'S THE BARF ALERT???????????
Wonder if he was wearing... 'the hat'... when he wrote the letter.
What is this, Kerry's 1000th press release concerning the War on Terrorism? Not one of them has made sense yet. Why should we expect anything different?
John isn't happy that Bin Laden is holed up, relegated to making low grade video tapes once per quarter. No, he want's the press to focus on the fact that Laden hasn't been caught yet, as if it mattered.
Nice try John. Say, weren't you in Vietnam?
Did Ta-reeee-za's last facelift make her look too much like OBL?
Oh, wait a sec...
Just trying to sucker the administration into revealing its current Bin Ladin unit so it can be exposed to the New York Times.
I am really wondering who the heck cares what Kerry says..
Reconstitute that unit, and everything it knows will be leaked to the New York Times.
It's pathetic and embarrassing.
Hey we should focus on catching not killing Bin Hiding, what genius!! Sorry, the CIA is too busy running a coup against the President.
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
I wrote for all resources necessary, before I wrote against them...
If a headline starts with "Kerry says" or "Kerry urges" or "Kerry whatevers"...a Barf Alert would be redundant.
And once we get Bin Laden, Senator Kerry will say that it doesn't mean a thing, that Bin Laden was just an impotent figurehead, and that it took too long, anyway.
The Dems are so specious, so duplicitous, that it's not even worth listening to them.
Their idea of deep thinking is reading the daily newspaper and blaming everything bad on President Bush; portraying every U.S. action as bad; claiming "unilateralism" is bad re: Iraq, but that "multi-lateralism" is bad re: North Korea.
That's not analysis, that's surface-level reactionism.
When was the first time that Senator Kerry ever mentioned this CIA group, for instance? It's not as though he's been talking about that group for years and years.
His staff saw the CIA group mentioned in yesterday's newspaper, so today he acts as though that CIA group was important (even though he's never talked about it before).
That's enormously superficial. The *left* fails to display long term thinking or deep analysis...just reactionism.
Kerry belongs in jail for treason, not in the U.S. Senate.
LOL
If only...
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