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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.

Michael Scheuer

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Michael Scheuer
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 1
Author
Blogger
Intelligence Analyst
Buffalo
New York
People
Gave
Speech
Problems
Laden
American
October
Read
Afghanistan
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Two
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Parts

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You couldn't have done this without killing an Arab prince.
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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.
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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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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 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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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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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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No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable.
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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.
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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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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 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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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