Saturday's Guardian reports that Michael Scheuer, "[t]he man who led America's hunt for Osama bin Laden has said the CIA was wrong to disband the only unit devoted entirely to the terrorist leader's pursuit - just at a time when al-Qaida is reasserting its influence over global jihad."
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Shutting down the Bin Laden unit squandered 10 years of expertise in the war on terror, said Michael Scheuer, who founded the unit in 1995 and arguably knows more about Bin Laden than any other western intelligence official. He believes the unit was dismantled because of bureaucratic jealousies within the CIA, and that the closure delivers a further setback to a pursuit that has been squeezed for resources for the past two years.
The Guardian adds: "During the past two years the hunt for Bin Laden came second to fighting the insurgency in Iraq. With the worsening security situation in Afghanistan, more intelligence resources are being diverted towards propping up the government of Hamid Karzai in Kabul than to tracking down leads on Bin Laden."
And so we see once again how the Bush administration's fixation on Saddam Hussein has harmed both the anti-terrorist effort, in general, and the hunt for bin Laden, in particular, as well as the original, and justified, action in Afghanistan.