Word: binning
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Confronted with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, an enemy that has no army, no fixed assets and no clearly defined territory, the Bush Administration needed an unconventional military force. It wanted combatants who could match al-Qaeda for wiliness, adaptability and, up to a point, ruthlessness. It wanted its own army of James Bonds. So in the past year, hundreds of millions of additional dollars have been pumped into the CIA budget by President George W. Bush, a man who may be predisposed to believe strongly in an agency his father once headed. He has ordered SOG operatives...
...pickup team. John's team included four CIA officers fluent in Farsi or Dari who for years had been sneaking into Afghanistan, recruiting spies for the agency. Their mission now was to hook up with those contacts, collect intelligence for the impending U.S. aerial attack and hunt for bin Laden. Along with the light arms, radios and rations they had packed into the Mi-17 were two suitcases stuffed with $3 million. It was used for bribing Afghan warlords to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda...
...part of the air arm that has received the most publicity lately is the fleet of remote-controlled Predator drones, armed with 5-ft.-long Hellfire missiles, that the agency bought from the Air Force. In November 2001 the CIA deployed the drone to eliminate bin Laden's lieutenant, Mohammed Atef. Last November's Predator hit in Yemen killed an al-Qaeda commander and his entourage of five, though the strike was controversial: one of the dead men turned out to be a U.S. citizen...
...perhaps the SOG's most notable lapse in the field has been its failure to locate bin Laden. "They're still developing their capability," says a Bush Administration official who has worked with the unit. "It doesn't mean that they won't be a force to be reckoned with. But they're not there...
That is not at all to suggest that the CIA is responsible for Osama bin Laden. But the agency's covert and paramilitary enterprises have--time after time, from Cuba to Afghanistan--carried within them the seeds of profound problems later, from the missile crisis to 9/11...