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Our leaders continue to say that we're making strong headway against this problem. And I think we are not.
Michael Scheuer
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Michael Scheuer
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 1
Author
Blogger
Intelligence Analyst
Buffalo
New York
Strong
Problem
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More quotes by Michael Scheuer
One of the problems of not allowing the American people to read what bin Laden has said is that in October 2001 just after the war began in Afghanistan, he gave a speech that had two parts to it.
Michael Scheuer
I think it's very instructive to look at a man like Ramsey Ahmad Yousef, who almost brought down the World Trade Center in 1993. He's short some fingers, his body is scarred, he's missing an eye - because he was practicing and not getting it right. But eventually they get it right.
Michael Scheuer
We have not destroyed al Qaeda, so we still have that to worry about. We have its traditional allies, the Kashmiri groups, the groups that are operating now in Iraq, and now we have a third tier of threat amongst the Muslims that live in the West and who are inspired to do something against the West by the example of the other two tiers.
Michael Scheuer
Well, the next attack in the United States will be larger than 9/11. And there's no doubt that if they have a weapon of mass destruction, they'll use it.
Michael Scheuer
And we're being attacked because of what we do, not because of who we are. And by refusing to talk about that, I'm afraid the American people, at least, don't have a good idea of just how dangerous the threat is that we face.
Michael Scheuer
If you look at groups in the Palestine region, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic jihad, more often than not in their first operations they would accidentally blow themselves up on the way to the target or the bomb wouldn't go off.
Michael Scheuer
Our relationship with Israel is another reason we're being attacked. But an American politician - whether Muslim or not - who criticizes Israel as a martyrdom operation in American politics cannot survive as an official or as a politician.
Michael Scheuer
If the Americans attack Iran for the first time in 1,400 years, we may unite Sunnis and Shias against us. So I guess there is room for accomplishment everywhere.
Michael Scheuer
You become an anti-Semite. And as powerful as the Israeli lobby is, the Saudi lobby is just as powerful. In fact, the Saudis probably have more money to throw around, and they suborn former U.S. intelligence officials, former ambassadors, former generals to support them from within by lobbying the Congress and other American institutions.
Michael Scheuer
I know these days it sounds a little odd, but American governments are very fearful of European reaction. They were afraid we would be considered gunslingers.
Michael Scheuer
I don't know what our capabilities are. If I were there, I think it would be nutty to do that. The only country on Earth more containable than Iran is Iraq. And we've certainly made a mistake there. We could have continued Saddam.
Michael Scheuer
What I tried to do is to present the evidence that's available and that no one has been able to refute. Not even the Arab governments who own their media have been able to denigrate bin Laden as a man.
Michael Scheuer
There is no way to avoid the reality that the American government in the past years has been the most spectacularly hypocrisy-driven government in the world. We rival the Soviet Union in some stages, in some ways, in hypocrisy.
Michael Scheuer
I think clearly Europe has a lot to worry about. When I was working at the CIA - and I always worked with a lot of European services - they always were very condescending toward the United States, saying that we are so racist vis-à-vis blacks and other people.
Michael Scheuer
So what we have is an American foreign policy that is inextricably linked to domestic matters. It is very dangerous for a politician who desires nothing more than to stay in office to address the mindset that any change in policy is appeasement. And Americans will accept that for a certain amount of time.
Michael Scheuer
You can forgive your leaders for not knowing the intricacies of Islamic history. You cannot forgive them for not knowing their own. And when you look at American democracy, where did it start? It started, if you need to pick a point, at Runnymede in 1215. We have now been at this process, we and our English-speaking allies, for 800 years.
Michael Scheuer
Iraq broke our back in terms of counterterrorism. There's no doubt about it. The first thing, though, that hurt us was the fact that the U.S. military was absolutely unprepared to do anything on 9/11 - or 9/12 or 9/13. And by the time we actually attacked Afghanistan, al Qaeda and the Taliban had dispersed.
Michael Scheuer
The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.
Michael Scheuer
You just have to come to grips with the fact that people don't like to be invaded or bombed by anybody. And America has been engaged in that.
Michael Scheuer
Initial incompetence is not a reason to be dismissive of capabilities. Al Qaeda itself was incompetent when it started as a terrorist organization. And clearly it's gone from blowing themselves up to knocking down the World Trade Center.
Michael Scheuer
