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You couldn't have done this without killing an Arab prince.

Michael Scheuer

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Michael Scheuer
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 1
Author
Blogger
Intelligence Analyst
Buffalo
New York
Without
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Arab
Prince
Killing
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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.
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One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.
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Our leaders continue to say that we're making strong headway against this problem. And I think we are not.
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We [Americans] continue to be harangued by politicians about how Americans must fight this war because we're being attacked because we have freedoms and liberties and women in the workplace and a whole list of ephemera that have nothing to do with this war at all.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In an odd way, we have really destroyed two of our strongest allies against the Islamists. Saddam Hussein, and we've probably fatally undermined Bashir al Assad in Syria.
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I think Mr. Clarke had a tendency to interfere too much with the activities of the CIA, and our leadership at the senior level let him interfere too much. So criticism from him I kind of wear as a badge of honor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think the world is more perilous and America is basically undefended. For me the two touchstones after 9/11 for domestic security were our borders. Not for discriminatory reasons or to stop immigration, but simply to allow law enforcement to find out who is in our country without facing an undocumented pool of aliens that increases by the hour.
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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.
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I think we'll see it mostly in the United States. We're getting to the point where al Qaeda is ready to again attack us inside America. I think we're basically defenseless.
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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.
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Every mujahadeen who comes in from outside the country finds an environment where Arabic is spoken. So in that sense, it's a tremendous come-on for the young in Islam. But I think much more important is, it just validates so much of what the Muslim world is predisposed to believe.
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I've said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden's rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.
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