

Do yourself a favor. Have something ready to throw against the wall, hard, before you read this* Times story on the botched hunt for Bin Laden. Or pour yourself a stiff drink, at least. Yeah, yeah, it's early in the morning. But trust me, you'll need it. Because our Special Forces are "still waiting for the green light" to go get Al Qaeda bigs in their mostly likely hiding places, in Pakistan. And the renewed CIA push to attack Bin Laden, "Operation Cannonball," is still being treated like a second-tier priority in the Agency, two years after its creation.

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[G]iant 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 agency's training center…

"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."

One reason for this… was that by 2006 the Iraq war had drained away most of the CIA officers with field experience in the Islamic world… "We were all hurting because of Iraq."