Michael Scheuer: Obama and McCain Are Both Clueless On Terrorism

Michael Scheuer - "Both front-runner Candidates need to tell the
American people the truth about what motivates terrorism against
America."

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Michael F. Scheuer is a former CIA employee. In his 22-year career, he served as the Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station (aka "Alec Station"), from 1996 to 1999, the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center. He then worked again as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit from September 2001 to November 2004.

Scheuer resigned in 2004. He is currently a news analyst for CBS News and a terrorism analyst for The Jamestown Foundation's online publication Global Terrorism Analysis.^[1] He also makes radio and television appearances and teaches a graduate-level course on Al-Qaeda at Georgetown University. He also participates in conferences on terrorism and national security issues, such as the New America Foundation's December 2004 conference, "Al Qaeda 2.0: Transnational Terrorism After 9/11." [3]

Scheuer is now known to be the anonymous author of both Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and the earlier anonymous work, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.^[2]

Osama bin Laden stated in his September 7, 2007 message:

"If you want to understand what's going on and if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing the war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer." [4][5]

Scheuer's latest book, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq was released on February 12, 2008.

Not much is known about his personal history, though Scheuer was an analyst at the CIA and not a covert field operations officer. During a recent C-SPAN interview, he mentioned that he is a graduate of Canisius College. He also received a Ph.D. in British Empire-U.S.-Canada-U.K. relations from the University of Manitoba.^[3] Scheuer a 1974 graduate from Canisius university master’s degrees from Niagara University (1976) and Carleton University (1981).^[4]

In the 9/11 Commission Report, Scheuer is featured in Chapter 4, where his name is given only as "Mike". He is portrayed as being occasionally frustrated with his superiors' failure to aggressively target bin Laden.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Michael F. Scheuer is a former CIA employee. In his 22-year career, he served as the Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station (aka "Alec Station"), from 1996 to 1999, the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center. He then worked again as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit from September 2001 to November 2004.

Scheuer resigned in 2004. He is currently a news analyst for CBS News and a terrorism analyst for The Jamestown Foundation's online publication Global Terrorism Analysis.^[1] He also makes radio and television appearances and teaches a graduate-level course on Al-Qaeda at Georgetown University. He also participates in conferences on terrorism and national security issues, such as the New America Foundation's December 2004 conference, "Al Qaeda 2.0: Transnational Terrorism After 9/11." [3]

Scheuer is now known to be the anonymous author of both Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and the earlier anonymous work, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.^[2]

Osama bin Laden stated in his September 7, 2007 message:

"If you want to understand what's going on and if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing the war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer." [4][5]

Scheuer's latest book, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq was released on February 12, 2008.

Not much is known about his personal history, though Scheuer was an analyst at the CIA and not a covert field operations officer. During a recent C-SPAN interview, he mentioned that he is a graduate of Canisius College. He also received a Ph.D. in British Empire-U.S.-Canada-U.K. relations from the University of Manitoba.^[3] Scheuer a 1974 graduate from Canisius university master’s degrees from Niagara University (1976) and Carleton University (1981).^[4]

In the 9/11 Commission Report, Scheuer is featured in Chapter 4, where his name is given only as "Mike". He is portrayed as being occasionally frustrated with his superiors' failure to aggressively target bin Laden.

Israel and the Lobby

Michael Scheuer entered into the controversy surrounding the Mearsheimer and Walt paper on the "Israel Lobby". He said to NPR that Mearsheimer and Walt are basically right. Israel, according to Scheuer, has engaged in one of the most successful campaigns to influence public opinion in the United States ever conducted by a foreign government. Scheuer said to NPR that "They [Mearsheimer and Walt] should be credited for the courage they have had to actually present a paper on the subject. I hope they move on and do the Saudi lobby, which is probably more dangerous to the United States than the Israeli lobby."^[6]

In February, 2005, Scheuer gave an interview in which he discussed, among other things, Israeli lobbying in the United States.^[7] In the interview, the following exchange took place:

"QUESTIONER: I'm curious — Gary Rosen from Commentary magazine. If you could just elaborate a little bit on the clandestine ways in which Israel and presumably Jews have managed to so control debate over this fundamental foreign policy question.

SCHEUER: Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress — that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find — I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries."

Ron Paul

In the Republican Presidential Debate on May 15, 2007, presidential candidate Ron Paul stated that American foreign policy was a "contributing factor" in anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani denounced this as "absurd" and that he'd never heard such a thing before. In an interview on May 18, Michael Scheuer defended Paul, stating: "I thought Mr. Paul captured it the other night exactly correctly. This war is dangerous to America because it's based, not on gender equality, as Mr. Giuliani suggested, or any other kind of freedom, but simply because of what we do in the Islamic World – because "we're over there," basically, as Mr. Paul said in the debate."^[10]

On May 24, 2007, Ron Paul and Scheuer held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. about the causes that led up to 9/11, American foreign policy and its implications on terrorism, security and Iraq.^[11] Paul and Scheuer argued that Rudy Giuliani is wrong on security and foreign policy and provided documentation about the unintended consequences of interventionism - known to many in the intelligence world as blowback - and assigned Giuliani a reading list of foreign policy books, including Dying to Win, Blowback, Imperial Hubris and the 9/11 Commission Report.^[12]

On Larry King Live, September 7, 2007, Scheuer alluded to the Fox News Republican Debate of September 5, 2007, where a Fox News moderator accused Ron Paul of taking "marching orders" from Al Qaeda. Scheuer said, "The truth of the matter is that it is all of the Democrats and the Republicans, except perhaps for Mr. Paul and Mr. Kucinich, who are marching to Osama Bin Laden's drum." Larry King Live Transcript

[edit] Iraq and al-Qaeda

Thomas Joscelyn of Weekly Standard wrote a highly critical piece on Scheuer and an interview Scheuer did on Chris Matthews Hardball. [11] Joscelyn wrote:

"When Michael Scheuer, the first head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, first emerged into public view almost a year ago, it was a curiosity how he could appear in the media--time after time--claiming that there was no evidence of a relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda. It was curious because, in 2002, Scheuer wrote the book Through Our Enemies' Eyes, in which he cited numerous pieces of evidence showing that there was, in fact, a working relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. That evidence directly contradicted his criticism of the intelligence that led this nation into the Iraq war, which he called a 'Christmas present' for bin Laden."

Scheuer wrote about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in his 2002 book (see above, 2002). Yet when interviewed in 2004 he stated that he had found no evidence of a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection. Tim Russert asked Scheuer to explain the seeming contradiction on Meet the Press (30 November 2004):

MR. SCHEUER: I certainly saw a link when I was writing the books in terms of the open-source literature, unclassified literature, but I had nothing to do with Iraq during my professional career until the run-up to the war. What I was talking about on "Hardball" was, I was assigned the duty of going back about nine or 10 years in the classified archives of the CIA. I went through roughly 19,000 documents, probably totaling 50,000 to 60,000 pages, and within that corpus of material, there was absolutely no connection in the terms of a--in the terms of a relationship.

MR. RUSSERT: But your [2002] book did point out some contacts?

MR. SCHEUER: Certainly it was available in the open-source material, yes, sir.[12]

Scheuer explains more fully in the revised edition of his 2002 book the exhaustive study of the evidence of Iraq-al-Qaeda cooperation that eventually led him to the conclusion that there was no relationship between the two forces:

For a number of reasons, I was available to perform the review of Agency files on Iraq and al Qaeda, and the chief of the bin Laden unit handed me the assignment. I was delighted with the task, eager to begin, and sure that my research would support the analysis I had presented in Through Our Enemies' Eyes. For about four weeks in late 2002 and early 2003, I and several others were engaged full time in searching CIA files -- seven days a week, often far more than eight hours a day. At the end of the effort, we had gone back ten years in the files and had reviewed nearly twenty thousand documents that amounted to well over fifty thousand pages of materials. I was both pleased and embarrassed by the results of the research. I was pleased because CIA's position was reaffirmed and the analysis of Mr. Feith's unit was discredited. There was no information that remotely supported the analysis that claimed there was a strong working relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. I was embarrassed because this reality invalidated the analysis I had presented on the subject in my book.^[13]

Bibliography

[edit] Books

• Scheuer, Michael (2003). Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & the Future of America. Brassey's Inc. ISBN 1-57488-553-7.
• Scheuer, Michael (2004). Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. Brassey's Inc. ISBN 1-57488-849-8.
• Scheuer, Michael (2008). Marching Towards Hell: America and Islam After Iraq. Free Press, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-74329-969-8.

[edit] Articles

• "Battling the terrorists" Washington Times December 26, 2004.
• "Unraveling the Saga of Zarqawi's Injury" Terrorism Focus 2:11 10 June 2005.
• "Embracing a Lethal Tar Baby." Antiwar.com February 27, 2006.
• "How Bush Helps Jihadists." Washington Times 13 March 2006.
• "Al-Qaeda Doctrine: Training the Individual Warrior." Terrorism Focus 3:12 28 March 2006.
• "Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America? You Bet it Does." Antiwar.com 8 April 2006.
• "Tenet Tries to Shift the Blame. Don't Buy It." Washington Post 29 April 2007.
• "Reading Bin Laden's Mind: The State of the Jihad, As He Might See It." Washington Post 17 February 2008.
• "Why Doesn't al-Qaeda Attack the US?" Antiwar.com May 29, 2008
• "Turning the Tables on the Israel-Firsters" Antiwar.com July 16, 2008

[edit] External links

• The latest Michael Scheuer articles at AntiWar.com [13]
• The latest Michael Scheuer articles at Jamestown Foundation [14]

[edit] Other

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Michael Scheuer

• Michael Scheuer Young Turks Interview on Video
• Bin Laden Expert Steps Forward - CBS News, November 14, 2004
• Interview in 2004-08-02 The American Conservative [15]
• Goss pushes change at CIA - Bill Gertz of The Washington Times, November 19, 2004
• C-Span discussion (requires RealPlayer) (current file -needs updating)
• 12-02-04 C-Span panel appearance on the War on Terror (no link yet)
• Why I resigned from the CIA, 2004-12-05 LA Times [16]
• “How Not to Catch a Terrorist”, The Atlantic Monthly, 2004-12
• BuzzFlash interview on January 5, 2005 [17]
• PBS Frontline interview on January 25, 2005 [18]
• Speech at Council on Foreign Relations on February 3, 2005 [19]
• BBC Radio 4, February 8, 2005 [20]
• Charles Goyette show, February 9, 2005: Part I / Part II
• CBC Radio 1, The Current, April 12, 2005 [21]
• Charles Goyette show, February 25, 2005: [22]
• Michael Scheuer's interview with Scott Horton [23]
• On NPR's Morning Edition, July 7, 2005 [24]
• A photograph! [25]
• 34 (or more) quotations from Scheuer [26]
• Leaking at All Costs Weekly Standard, November 30, 2005
• Scheuer's Response to "Leaking At All Costs" Powelineblog.com December 7, 2005
• "Hayden Seek" May 9, 2006 The Brian Lehrer Show
• Michael Scheuer's articles at The Jamestown Foundation [27]
• After a Decade at War With West, Al-Qaeda Still Impervious to Spies by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post March 20, 2008
• CIA Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette interview Michael Scheuer, Antiwar.com April 17, 2008 41 minute audio.

[edit] Notes and references

1. ^ Global Terrorism Analysis.
2. ^ The authorship of these books is now widely known, and advertised as such. See [1] Council on Foreign Relations, Transcript of Interview Winning or Losing? An Inside Look at the War on Terror by Nicholas Lemann Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, February 3, 2005. Also see: The Phoenix
3. ^ Georgetown Bio
4. ^ Canisius school News Story
5. ^ Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: Fixing U.S. Intelligence - May 16, 2006 (free registration needed to view the article)
6. ^ Paper on Israel Lobby Sparks Heated Debate, Deborah Amos, National Public Radio, April 21, 2006
7. ^ Council on Foreign Relations,[2], February 3, 2005
8. ^ Michael F. Scheuer, "Bill and Dick, Osama and Sandy," Washington Times (5 July 2006).
9. ^ "Transcript: Counterterror Experts Debate Clinton Claims on 'FNS'", Fox News (October 1, 2006).
10. ^ Antiwar.com Blog · Michael Scheuer
11. ^ Venue: National Press Club - Upcoming
12. ^ Reuters: N24342743.htm U.S. candidate Paul assigns reading to Giuliani. May 24, 2007.
13. ^ Michael Scheuer, Through Our Enemies' Eyes (revised edition). Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006) p. 136.