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Bush Wars Title: Boy Blunder/Bumstead Said "Nyet" To 86'ing AQ #2 in 2005. On several occasions, senior CIA officials at agency headquarters had to intervene to dampen tensions between the dueling CIA outposts. Other intragovernmental battles raged at higher altitudes, most notably over the plan in early 2005 for a Special Operations mission intended to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Bin Laden’s top deputy, in what would have been the most aggressive use of American ground troops inside Pakistan. The New York Times disclosed the aborted operation in a 2007 article, but interviews since then have produced new details about the episode. As described by current and former government officials, Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting at a compound in Bajaur, a tribal area, and the plan to send commandos to capture him had the support of Porter Goss, the CIA director, and the Special Operations commander, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. But even as Navy Seals and Army Rangers in parachute gear were boarding C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan, there were frenzied exchanges between officials at the Pentagon, Central Command and the CIA about whether the mission was too risky. Some complained that the American commando force was too large, numbering more than 100, while others argued that the intelligence was from a single source and unreliable. [Then CIA Director Porter] Goss urged the military to carry out the mission, and some CIA officials in Washington even tried to give orders to execute the raid without informing Ryan Crocker, then the American ambassador in Islamabad. But other CIA officials were opposed to the raid, including a former officer who said in an interview that he had “told the military guys that this thing was going to be the biggest folly since the Bay of Pigs.” In the end, the mission was aborted after Rumsfeld refused to give his approval for it. The decision remains controversial, with some former officials seeing the episode as a squandered opportunity to capture a figure who might have led the United States to Bin Laden, while others dismiss its significance, saying that there had been previous false alarms and that there remained no solid evidence that Zawahri was present. By late 2005, many inside the CIA headquarters in Virginia had reached the conclusion that their hunt for Bin Laden had reached a dead end. Keep in mind that 2005 is also the year U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden’s trusted courier began construction on the house in Abbottabad where bin Laden (and the courier and his brother were killed last Sunday. The Times story went on to describe how people inside the CIA tried to continue the hunt for bin Laden, in Pakistan: Jose Rodriguez Jr., who at the time ran the CIA’s clandestine operations branch, decided in late 2005 to make a series of swift changes to the agency’s counterterrorism operations. He fired Grenier, the former Islamabad station chief who in late 2004 took over as head of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center. The two men had barely spoken for months, as each saw the other as having a misguided approach to the C.I.A’s mission against Al Qaeda. Many inside the agency believed this personality clash was beginning to affect CIA operations. Grenier had worked to expand the agency’s counterterrorism focus, reinforcing operations in places like the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia and North Africa. He also reorganized and renamed Alec Station, the secret CIA unit formed in the 1990s to hunt Bin Laden at a time when Al Qaeda was in its infancy. Grenier believed that the unit, in addition to focusing on Bin Laden, needed to act in other parts of the world, given the spread of Qaeda-affiliated groups since the Sept. 11 attacks. But Rodriguez believed that the Qaeda hunt had lost its focus on Bin Laden and the militant threat in Pakistan. So he appointed a new head of the Counterterrorism Center, who has not been publicly identified, and sent dozens more CIA operatives to Pakistan. The new push was dubbed Operation Cannonball, and Rodriguez demanded urgency, but the response had a makeshift air. There was nowhere to house an expanding headquarters staff, so giant Quonset huts were erected outside the cafeteria on the CIA’s leafy Virginia campus, to house a new team assigned to the Bin Laden mission. In Pakistan, the new operation was staffed not only with CIA operatives drawn from around the world, but also with recent graduates of “The Farm,” the agency’s training center at Camp Peary in Virginia. “We had to put people out in the field who had less than ideal levels of experience,” one former senior CIA official said. “But there wasn’t much to choose from.” Why not? One reason for this, according to two former intelligence officials directly involved in the Qaeda hunt, was that by 2006 the Iraq war had drained away most of the CIA officers with field experience in the Islamic world. “You had a very finite number” of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. “Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.” The Bush administration would largely outsource the bin Laden mission to the Pakistani military, which after taking heavy casualties in the remote border region with Afghanistan, began pushing for a peace deal with the Taliban — something then-president Pervez Musharraf favored. That peace deal would ultimately happen, and the Bush administration would close its bin Laden unit down in July of 2006. One more paragraph explains where the Bush team’s heads were, as of 2008, when the Times story was written, and the fundamental change that the Obama administration’s willingness to act without regard to Pakistani sensibilities represents: The decision last year to draw up the Pentagon order authorizing for a Special Operations campaign in the tribal areas was part of that effort. But the fact that the order remains unsigned reflects the infighting that persists. Administration lawyers and State Department officials are concerned about any new authorities that would allow military missions to be launched without the approval of the American ambassador in Islamabad. With Qaeda operatives now described in intelligence reports as deeply entrenched in the tribal areas and immersed in the civilian population, there is also a view among some military and CIA officials that the opportunity for decisive American action against the militants may have been lost. Until of course, there was a change of administration, and mindset, in Washington.
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#1. To: war (#0)
Boy, you're shoveling with both hands today, aren't you? Was killing bin Laden such a cathartic event for the left to cause them to become a sabre-rattling warmongers? Bwahahahahahahaha!
#3. To: Rudgear (#1)
He had a very bad weekend (laughing)
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