Quote

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.

Michael Scheuer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Scheuer
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 1
Author
Blogger
Intelligence Analyst
Buffalo
New York
Thinking
Activity
Badges
Honor
Senior
Leadership
Interfere
Level
Activities
Levels
Tendency
Much
Tendencies
Clarke
Kind
Criticism
Badge
Think
Wear
Cia

More quotes by Michael Scheuer

Image
And so to dismiss these homegrown terrorists as boobs, which is one of the terms that was used in one of the New York newspapers after the Miami raid, is true now, but to bet on that is I think a sure way to lose your bank account.
Michael Scheuer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Michael Scheuer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Michael Scheuer
Image
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
Image
Our leaders continue to say that we're making strong headway against this problem. And I think we are not.
Michael Scheuer
Image
When you cut down to the micro-level in the West, I think we have a great deal to be worried about. And it's odd because the American leadership, again in both parties, tends to take comfort in the idea that bin Laden is just an inspirational symbol now.
Michael Scheuer
Image
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
Image
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.
Michael Scheuer
Image
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.
Michael Scheuer
Image
I think one of the most destructive things in terms of American security has been for all of our leaders, without exception in both parties, to identify Osama bin Laden as a gangster or as a madman, as an apocalyptic character who's out to destroy our civilization.
Michael Scheuer
Image
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
Image
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