On July 5 the media reported that a special CIA unit set up 10 years ago to hunt down Osama bin Laden had been disbanded. But President Bush says that’s wrong. “It’s just an incorrect story. We have a lot of assets looking for Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Bush announced on July 7.

But if this unit hasn’t been shut down, it’s fair to ask, “Why not?”

The CIA’s been looking for bin Laden for a decade and hasn’t been able to take him out. The closest it came was eight years ago. During the heart of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, President Clinton ordered a series of attacks on sites linked to bin Laden in Afghanistan. That attack failed to kill bin Laden, and we haven’t been able to track him down since. That’s a pretty long losing streak.

Michael Scheuer, the man who founded the bin Laden unit, is now “a trenchant critic of America’s counter-terrorist strategy,” according to the London Telegraph. One can’t help thinking that if only the CIA group Scheuer started had been as “trenchant,” it would have taken out Osama years ago. We must keep hunting for bin Laden, but maybe it’s time to give another group a chance.

At the Navy memorial in Washington there’s a plaque that says “failure is not an option.” Sadly, in today’s federal bureaucracy the motto seems to be, “punishment for failure is not an option.” And that’s true not only at the CIA, but at other agencies that are supposed to protect us.

Consider everybody’s favorite, the Transportation Security Administration.

TSA was born out of failure. After the federal government dropped the ball on 9/11, the answer was clear: Federalize airport security! Airports got an influx of new federal employees and air travelers found themselves subject to a series of rules they couldn’t understand.

“Airport security is an increasingly sad joke,” as Peggy Noonan wrote in The Wall Street Journal in February. “TSA itself often appears to have forgotten its mission, if it ever knew it, and taken on a new one -- the ritual abuse of passengers.”

For example, on its Web site TSA announces, “You are NOT REQUIRED to remove your shoes before you enter the walk-through metal detector.” Really? Ask anyone who’s flown recently. Continued...