Posted on 02/19/2006 2:29:50 AM PST by ex-Texan
Most officials thought last month's Osama bin Laden tape was no big deal—maybe even a gesture of weakness. Author and ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who founded the Agency's bin Laden unit 10 years ago, thinks they're dead wrong.
When the latest Osama bin Laden tape aired on al Jazeera last month, Michael Scheuer's phone was one of the first to start ringing off the hook with calls from journalists seeking a quick soundbite for that day's news cycle. Scheuer has credentials on the subject that few can match: By the time September 11 happened, he had been studying and trailing bin Laden for five years, as the creator and chief analyst of the CIA's bin Laden unit. Later on, writing as "Anonymous," Scheuer put out two books about bin Laden and his group, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America (published in 2002, but largely written in 1999 as an unclassified manual for CIA personnel joining the bin Laden unit) and the bestseller Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, which appeared in 2004 shortly before Scheuer resigned the CIA to go public about his views.
Appearing on CBS Evening News the day the tape surfaced, January 19, Scheuer told anchor Bob Schieffer that "it would be foolish not to take this very seriously as a threat to the United States." He discussed the Islamic custom of offering one's enemies an out before attacking them, and made reference to bin Laden's long-standing wish to obtain a nuclear weapon, and to the still-unsecured stockpile of nukes in the former Soviet Union. "It sounds pretty scary, what you're saying here," Schieffer offered near the end of the two-minute segment. "This is not a threat that should be defined as criminals, gangsters, and deviants," Scheuer replied. "These are very serious people, they are our deadly enemies, and they are extraordinarily talented. We can worry about Saddam and we can worry about the Iranians," Scheuer answered, "but the only people capable of attacking us inside the United States in the world today is al Qaeda."
Scheuer's sense of alarm was soon forgotten, swallowed up by the official line about the bin Laden tape, which also became the conventional media wisdom: As ex-FBI terrorism hand Christopher Whitcomb put it to a different CBS anchor the next morning, "I don't think there's very much significance in this tape at all. And the reason is, we've seen so many of these in the past four-and-a-half years. Osama bin Laden is trying to show the world he's still relevant. I think he's not still relevant, and I think he is trying just to say, 'I'm out here, look at me.'"
I phoned Scheuer recently to ask him more about his views of the tape and the status of the U.S.'s anti-terror efforts.
City Pages: You've dissented strongly from the Bush administration line that says bin Laden and other Islamic radicals "hate us for our freedoms." What's the real root of their opposition?
Michael Scheuer: The real root of their opposition is what we do in the Islamic world. If they were hating us because we had elections, or gender equality, or liberty, they would be a lethal nuisance, but they wouldn't be a threat to our security. If you remember, the Ayatollah tried waging a jihad against Americans because we were degenerate—we had X-rated movies, we drank liquor, women were in workplaces. Very, very few people were willing to die for that kind of thing. Bin Laden, I think, took a lesson from that and instead focused on the impact of our policies in the Islamic world—our support for the Arab tyrannies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our presence in the holy lands on the Arabian Peninsula, our invasion of Iraq, our support for countries like Russia that are deemed to repress Islamic people. He's focused on things that are visible to the Islamic world every day, and quite frankly there's a direct correlation between what he says and what all the Western polling firms are finding, that there is a huge majority in Islamic countries that hate our foreign policy. And yet generally, every one of the same countries has a majority, sometimes a large one, that admires the way Americans live, the basic equity of our society.
We should be so lucky as to have him hate us only for our freedoms. He's never even discussed that kind of thing.
CP: After the latest bin Laden tape aired, the official spin was to call it a political bluff, or even a call for truce out of weakness on his part. But you've written and spoken about seeing a different aim behind these bin Laden warnings, one that has more to do with meeting the expectations of a Muslim audience than a Western one.
Scheuer: I think that's very much the case. He's very conscious of the tradition from which he comes and how that history works. It's the tradition of the prophet that you warn your enemy and you offer a truce before the fighting starts. Saladin followed the same tradition against the Crusaders in medieval times, and bin Laden has been very careful to follow that in his time. He's offered us warnings numerous times, but this is the first time he's offered a truce in addition. In the early summer of 2004, he offered the Europeans an almost identical truce or cease-fire. They refused him much like we did, and he attacked them in July of '05 in London.
CP: Getting back to what you said a moment ago about the importance to bin Laden of offering the U.S. a warning, didn't he in fact get in trouble in a lot of Islamic circles after 9/11 for failing to provide a warning?
Scheuer: Yes—that is, for failing to provide enough of a warning. The prophet's guidance is that you go the extra mile to warn your enemy. Bin Laden was called on the carpet by his peers in the Islamic militant movement for three things. One was that he didn't give us enough warning. He's now addressed the American people on five separate occasions since 2002. So he's taken care of that one. He was also called on the carpet for not offering us a chance to convert to Islam. He's now done that three separate times, and Zawahiri has done it once. So they've covered that angle. The other thing they were taken to task for was that they didn't have the religious authority to kill as many Americans as they did. In the summer of 2003, he got a religious judgment from a very reputable Saudi cleric that he could use weapons of mass destruction, specifically nuclear weapons, to kill up to 10 million Americans.
After 9/11, he had several very important loose ends to tie up, in religious terms, before he could attack us again. He's done all of those things. It's interesting, because he spoke on the eve of our presidential election, and he said, This is the last time I'm going to warn you. In his speech last week, he said, I was not going to talk to you again, but your president is lying to you. I wanted to give you one more opportunity to hear the truth. He again warned us about the impact of our policies, and then offered us the truce. But you were right at the beginning. He's very much speaking to an Islamic audience as much as to an American [one].
CP: How do you read the offer of truce, that being the unique element in this communiqué?
Scheuer: I think he's very serious about it. I don't think for a second he believes we'll take him up on it. But he's kind of done as much as he can do to make sure there's no further bloodshed between us and the forces he represents. It was very common, you know, in the era of the prophet—truces came about fairly regularly. There were truces between Saladin and Richard the Lionhearted in the Third Crusade. One of them was as specific as three years and some odd months before the fighting was to resume. From his culture, from his history, this is a very serious offer. I think he expected the kind of curt response he got from Scott McClellan and then from the president and vice president.
This is a very difficult problem for a world that's run on the basis of nation-states. How do you respond to something like this?
CP: The competing popular images of bin Laden in the U.S. seem to run to opposite extremes—he's either the supreme commander of anti-U.S. forces or an isolated, mostly ceremonial figure. Can you describe his place in the firmament of radical Muslim forces aligning against the U.S.?
Scheuer: I think he is the hero and the leader in the Islamic world. But that's not to say that he controls very much beyond his own group. The two things I would point out are that, one, for a man of his stature in the world, he probably has as little ego as I've ever seen in a leader. He's a man who clearly wants to control his own organization, but outside of that he's never really shown much interest in controlling other groups.
The other thing people tend to forget, or to lose in the rhetoric, is that when he outlined his aims in 1996, the first one—and it still is the first one—was to incite jihad around the world. He regarded al Qaeda and his role not as an instrument of American defeat, but as an instrument that would incite the jihad that would spur America's defeat. He saw his job as encouraging other groups to join in. Picking a number is kind of a mug's game, but now we have 40 or 50 groups around the world that fight, sometimes locally, but also have an intention of attacking the United States. So in his main goal, of incitement, he's been singularly successful.
No he doesn't; he's just a mediocrity!
Look at this excrement Scheur says. Is he analyzing Bin Laden or falling in love with him?
This guy is supposed to be so smart...but he doesn't know how to deal with Bin Laden. I don't claim to be so smart, but I know this, to win we have to utterly destroy any group, community, or nation that supports him and his kind completely. Whatever it takes. Unfortunately, Bin Laden is that smart too and knows the current crop of Americans doesn't have the will to do that.
Good article, thanks....
First and foremost, Bin Laden is not the Islamist intellectual that Scheuer makes him out to be. As a youth he was educated by Shaykh Azzam and Muhammad Qutb, two real intellectuals. He joined Azzam in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1998 where he funded Azzam's Maktab al-Quidemat, the base of the Jihadist movement. It was in Pakistan where he fell under the influence of Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it was the influence of Azzam and Zawahiri that the Al-Qaeda organization was formed. At the meeting of the forty founders the organization and its aims to destroy the west was approved by Shaykh Abu al-Iragi, who was involved in the Sudan in the issuance of a number of Fatwa.
In July 1996 Bin Laden issued his famous fatwa which declared war on the USA. When someone in the West claimed that Bin Laden had not written the Fatwa, and that he was neither an intellectual nor trained in the Quran and Sharia, as AQaeda claimed, the AQ organization was forced to back down and admit it was written by clerics close to the organization.
Beginning with Robert Fisk in 1993, to the period just before 9/11, the journalists who interviewed OBL found him to be a purposeful jihadist. He was wealthy, but he really needed the organizational skills that Zawahiri brought when Egypt Islamic Jihad merged with AQ in 1998. OBL's credentials derived from his action in Afghanistan, his support of the Jihadists in the Balkans and Somalia, his own fortune, and his ability to extort or win money from Saudi and Gulf patrons. Whether he is still alive, and how many of his tapes have been cobbled from previous works, the CIA will not address.
In sum, Scheuer was part of a failed effort to follow the Bin Laden trail, and one the CIA only really began AFTER he left the Sudan. His "credentials" are suspect indeed.
I have no way of knowing what this guy knows, but I wonder if he is attemppting to de-outsource(I like it) the scary story concession from Bodansky. There's money to be made in many a niche.
attempting.
He also said that one problem w/our intell/defense complex is career underlings who say only what they believe those above them want to hear.
He is not alone in that evaluation. Weldon said during his press conference the other day:
"I'm convinced there are bureaucrats within agencies who have been there, who are fearful when this comes out they are going to be embarrassed... career underlings that were holdovers from the previous administration who are fearful they're going to be embarrassed when the story is told. They're more concerned about their careers than the safety of the country. They're more concerned with their careers and their little fiefdoms than they are about what really happened in the run-up to 9/11."
After a nuke explodes in America, attempts will made to secure our borders. I don't see how that is possible, given the nature and volume of global commerce and the amount of border we have. But it may require enough force that other force will be limited when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over in Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc.
One nuke in the US will be enough to tip this nation into a 1945 Japan scenario in which we weigh the consequences of a conventional war approach with simply getting it over with - us v. them. If OBL is such a genius, he'll never use WMD on us.
Stockholm Syndrone
it would be simple to secure borders. armed drones flying back and forth could do it cheap.
Sure. They could take photos of ships laden with containers, thousands of them, entering our harbors in major metropolitan areas. And maybe they could pick up the trail of terrorists who entered the country sometime during the last 10 years.
We have assumed - we have built an economic world system based upon - the idea that our values and our behavior would travel with our dollars, and that the latter would make the former welcome.
This is not true - it's not true in China, it's not true in SE Asia, and it most assuredly is not true in Araby.
Now, we face a choice, or a series of choices - Bring the money home and make stuff ourselves again, conquer our economic "partners" and impose our society on them, or fight terrorism for a thousand years.
I'm not so sure that any one has 'written off' the man's views. These 'views' simply do not provide the basis to deal with the man. As pointed out down-thread, there are two choices in dealing with the man, all out war or appeasement.
I do believe we do have a nuclear strike in our future. I do not know how we will respond. There will be considerable agitation for a response similar to our response to Pearl Harbor, ie, all out war. There will also be the calls for negotiations. "The we've tried war now let's try negotiation and appeasement" and the 'war never solves anything" crowd will be out in force. They will be joined by the 'if we strike back with nukes, then we're no better than they are' crowd.
I respectfully disagree with your contention that the best approach is to 'seal our borders'. I simply do not believe that we can do that in a manner that would be effective. We could make it harder, but not impossible to sneak WMD into this country. We simply have too much border to seal in an effective manner.
While I too would like to see an effective solution to illegal immigration. I support a wall. I support rounding up those already here. But the means to do that would be ineffective in stopping WMD.
Scheuer: Appease bin Laden. Do what he asks. Get out of Iraq. Stop supporting Israel. Let terrorists dictate our foreign policy.
Me: If the fact that we're in Iraq irks bin Laden, I'm glad we're there. Whatever bin Laden hates, that's what we should do. That's what you get for your terrorism, pinhead. Oh, and hey bin Laden, your skanky little niece looks like a ho.
Now let's see. Scheuer left the CIA, because... Having been discredited there, we should hang on every word, now?
Bin Laden will be dead soon.
He will either be taken out by a JDAM or he will die for health reasons.
His last thought will be knowing that he has failed, cause he has. Al-Qaeda has already lost the WWIV that they tried to start (or did start and lost).
I say we nuke the dar al islam first with 300 warheads. I don't mind being thought of as promoting mass murder. The simple fact is that the planet is not big enough for the both of us. Its a matter of survival.
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