I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for someone, anyone to wipe those self-congratulatory smirks off the faces of the revisionists seeking to bask in the reflected glory of Obama's successful completion of a task Bush and all his illegal shennanigans never accomplished. Oh well, allow me....
Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't forget important stuff. Especially when it is plastered across the face of the New York Times. For example, this New York Times headline from July 4, 2006:
C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden
That's right. In 2006, after Bush had told everyone getting Bin Laden was no big deal and he didn't really think about it, they closed Alec Station. That was the name of the unit set up during the Clinton administration with one purpose: to hunt down Osama bin Laden.
Established in 1996, when Mr. bin Laden's calls for global jihad were a source of increasing concern for officials in Washington, Alec Station operated in a similar fashion to that of other agency stations around the globe.
The two dozen staff members who worked at the station, which was named after Mr. Scheuer's son and was housed in leased offices near agency headquarters in northern Virginia, issued regular cables to the agency about Mr. bin Laden's growing abilities and his desire to strike American targets throughout the world.
But, like everything else Bush inherited, he and his minions were committed to deep-sixing it.
Intelligence officials said Alec Station was disbanded after Robert Grenier, who until February was in charge of the Counterterrorist Center, decided the agency needed to reorganize to better address constant changes in terrorist organizations.
Listening to the Bush apologists of the day, you would never know this was a mark of capitulation in the face of budgetary constraints due to fighting the wrong war in the wrong place. Pretty it up all you like:
In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials.
This wasn't a fluke, an oversight, or unheralded problem. This was a logical consequence of the Bush administration's indifference, reported in detail in the December 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, complains, “In the CIA’s core, US-based bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer [operational] officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001. There has been no systematic effort to groom al-Qaeda expertise among [operational] officers since 11 September… The excellent management team now running operations against al-Qaeda has made repeated, detailed, and on-paper pleas for more officers to work against the al-Qaeda—and have done so for years, not weeks or months—but have been ignored…”
The title of that article?
How Not To Catch A Terrorist
So spare me the self-congratulatory claptrap of Rumsfeld, Condi, Cheney and the rest of the war criminals who failed to protect this country on their watch and then compounded their dereliction of duty by failing to get the guy who attacked it. They had nothing to do with this. Obama succeeded in spite of them.
Next time these sad sacks come sniffing around for scraps all I can say is "Heckuva job, Georgie [or Rummy, or Condi, or Cheney]. Heckuva job."