UPDATE: The NY times will soon have this online:
WASHINGTON -- The CIA has closed down a secret unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials said Monday.
The terrorist tracking unit, known inside the spy agency as "Alec station," was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned to other offices within the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.
So much for the hunt to bin laden
More from the NY Times:
CIA officials said that tracking bin Laden and his deputies remains a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit is not a sign that the effort has slackened. Instead, the officials said, the realignment 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.
In his book "Ghost Wars," which chronicles the CIA's efforts to hunt bin Laden in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the author and journalist Steve Coll wrote, "The bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their CIA colleagues uncomfortable."
Members of Alec station "called themselves 'the Manson Family' because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising al-Qaida threat," Coll wrote.
And, as promised, attempted humor:
Then there was the time Bush and Cheney were watching TV news.
A guy was standing on the ledge of the 30th floor of a building in Chicago.
Bush said, I don't think he will really jump.
Cheney said, no, I think he WILL jump. Wanna bet?
So they bet 50 bucks.
Sure enough, the guy jumps.
Bush forks over the 50 bucks to Cheney.
Cheney says, no, this really isn't fair, I saw this an hour ago on the news. It was a replay.
Bush says, that's OK Dick, I saw it an hour ago too, but I didn't think he'd do it THIS TIME.
Please add your own bush/cheney jokes.
Let's lighten up a bit.
Humor and ridicule is effective politics.
Just ask Rush Limbaugh.
Bring it on!
