For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright folks, welcome to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin.
Streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And we're going to go ahead and get started on the show today with our first guest, Michael Shoyer.
But first, a clip from the Glenn Beck show, I guess, last night or a couple of nights ago, maybe last night.
The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.
Because it's going to take a grassroots, bottom-up pressure, because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans.
It's an absurd situation again.
Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.
Which is why I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.
Yeah, alright.
Alright, so Michael Shoyer is the former chief of Alec Station, the CIA's bin Laden unit.
He's the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism, and also Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing okay.
What the hell are you talking about, man?
We need Osama bin Laden to detonate a device in this country?
It sounds like you're talking about a mushroom cloud there.
Well, that's probably what's going to happen.
But of course, what we were talking about last night, aside in the middle of the beginning of that clip, was the absurd situation America is in at the moment.
First, we're going to send 1,500 unarmed National Guardsmen to the border to stop the drug war, but let the immigrants in.
That was the first thing in this litany.
Second, I said it was absurd that American military people without guns probably were going to be defended by the minutemen who are armed in some cases.
And the third thing I said was what you played, was how absurd it was that we can't get a change in policy unless Osama bin Laden deploys a weapon in this country and blows it up and alerts the American people to the fact that their government is not defending them.
I don't know, that's no different than what I've written in the last two books that I've published.
This is the ultimate absurd position where our enemies really call the shots.
So what you're saying is basically not that you want there to be another attack, but that you're basically resigned to the fact that the American government isn't going to do the right thing until we lose a city.
Scott, anyone who's ever listened to me has to be an idiot if they don't realize that I'm much more of a hawk and much more eager to defend America than virtually any other commentator that certainly you have on.
And exactly what I'm saying, in Marching Toward Hell, I wrote, you know, after we were attacked in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 6, I thought for sure the American government's not going to put up with this anymore, we're going to take them out.
I thought the same thing after they destroyed our embassies in East Africa.
I thought the same thing after they destroyed the coal.
I thought the same thing after 9-11.
Now I don't think the American government, the American political elite, is ever going to wake up.
And who's going to pay the price for it?
It's going to be the guys in Texas and the guys in New York City and the guys in California who are out thinking, working every day and thinking that their government's protecting them, and it's not.
That's what I said last night.
Well, what's happened here is that September 11th happened.
You mentioned all those attacks going back to 1995.
And, in fact, just recorded an interview with Gareth Porter about the Cobar Towers attack, which I know you were a source.
I think I talked to Gareth about that, but I'm not sure.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you're cited in there.
And so, you know, your point is taken, that they really, throughout the 1990s, attack after attack after attack, they refused to really do anything about it except bomb an antibiotics factory in Sudan and that kind of thing.
And then even when 3,000 people died in New York and at the Pentagon there in Northern Virginia, they really didn't even go after Osama Bin Laden.
They went to regime change the Taliban in Kabul and then move on to Iraq.
They used it as an excuse to kill everybody but Osama.
Scott, that's exactly the point I was trying to make.
You know, if you had seen the whole clip, maybe, maybe I was inarticulate.
But this is not a new point that I've made, that how absurd can it be for the greatest power on Earth to depend on armed citizens rather than its military to defend its border?
And why should we have to wait to be attacked again before our government does something to protect us?
That's all I was saying last night.
Yeah, well, and, you know, you said before that, well, in fact, I think the very first time I talked with you back in 2005 when you had just finally been able to shed the name Anonymous, you said our choice was between war and total war.
We have to, on one hand, go after the bad guys while, on the other hand, disengaging from the Muslim world or we're going to end up having to fight all of them.
And, you know, sometimes, Michael, I've got to tell you, it sounds like you choose some of this extremely hawkish language almost just to make the point that you're willing to use it.
You know, we've got to go in there and annihilate them.
And if we've got to kill women and children, too, well, that's just the way it is.
And that kind of thing.
What's the point of that?
Because that's clearly not the way to defeat a terrorist enemy by killing a bunch of women and children.
That only makes them more powerful, which is the rest of your point.
Well, that's exactly my point, Scott.
But the rest of the point is that because our politicians in both parties will not do anything about changing the status quo and the policy that motivates our enemy, we are becoming one huge Israel.
And all we have left to do to defend ourselves in the world, at least in the Muslim world, is military and intelligence people.
And that's a plain, hard fact, Scott.
And for myself, it's not a macho statement.
It's not a wish statement.
What I want it to be is a hard-nosed kind of reality.
If you don't disengage, if you don't stop letting the Israelis do whatever they want, if you don't stop supporting dictatorship in the Muslim world, America, here is what your sons and daughters are going to have to do.
That's the point.
We get so much sugar-coated talk from everybody else that I try not to let anybody have to wonder what I think.
Well, so what do you think about, for example, the war going on in Pakistan right now?
Hillary Clinton went over there and told Zardari to invade the tribal territories.
I don't know if they're even hunting Osama or not, but they're certainly bringing war to those so-called ungoverned areas there.
Well, they're certainly not helping anything.
You know, people always talk about is it moral for America to defend itself?
Well, here we are, this nice Yale-educated Mrs. Clinton, who is safe and sound every night behind millions or hundreds of security people, urging the Pakistanis to create a civil war in their own country.
You know, does anybody remember what a civil war did in our country in terms of death and destruction?
But here we are, we're urging the Pakistanis to do the same thing.
And at the end of the day, why is that?
Because it's less embarrassing for this leadership in both parties, for Pakistanis to do the dirty work, than for us to do the dirty work and get out.
That's the real problem, Scott.
This problem was about a 12-month problem in Afghanistan.
Get in, kill them, and get out.
And that didn't happen.
Where do you think Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are now?
Because they're the excuse for keeping this thing going forever, whether they're even trying to really get them or not.
Well, first let me say, the media, I think, does not do a good job.
The Pakistanis are not fighting either the Afghan Taliban or Al-Qaeda.
They're fighting their own people.
So all of this so-called progress by the Pakistanis has nothing to do with progress against the enemy that threatens America.
Second, for your question, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden are probably in the northern part of Afghanistan and Pakistan, either moving once in a while or not moving at all.
And they're in tribal areas and mountains that we don't have enough troops to go into.
And we're not willing to take the casualties if we did.
So, you know, it's getting so that American leaders like lots of noise and lots of motion, but we have a lot of motion without any movement, Scott.
Well, I wonder, if you were on the National Security Council, would you be advising, do the dirty work, go in there and find those last of the Arab-Afghan army hiding in those mountains, or would you advocate just going ahead and getting the hell out of there right now?
I'd get out right now.
Our generals keep talking about there being remnants of these people left.
Just as we're reinforcing al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban have been reinforcing since at least 2006, with new fighters coming from around the world, with Mujahideen coming over from Iraq, they have so many fighters there now that they've been able to send reinforcements to Yemen and Somalia in the last six or eight weeks.
So these boys aren't serious.
Obama's not serious.
He doesn't know what he's doing, really, I think.
And I would suggest that we get out of there tomorrow before we lose one more kid.
You know, there was an article last week, I forget the guy who wrote it, but it was called The Other Sons of Iraq, and it wasn't about the bought-off former Sunni insurgency.
It was about all the terrorists who used Iraq.
It was their gladiator academy for years and years and years.
And just like at the end of the Afghan war where we had all these veterans, many of them which became al-Qaeda later, we have the same thing now with all these veteran jihadists going back home or going wherever they go after they leave Iraq.
Well, a lot of them are going to go either into the Levant toward Israel or into Afghanistan, and you make a very good point because the foreign Mujahideen who came to fight against the Soviets, they all had to be trained.
Many of the people that are coming to fight us and NATO at the moment are already well-trained and combat-savvy, and all that will have to be done is have them allocated to different units.
This is an unfolding nightmare.
And, you know, Scott, you don't ever want to be in a position where you have only one option, but that's what we have at the moment.
The only option we have in Afghanistan is however long it takes to get out, do your best to kill bin Laden and Zawahiri and Mullah Omar while you're there, but get the hell out of there.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm looking at this clip, and the clip I played was from YouTube.
Someone had just sent me the link.
I did not get to see the whole thing.
I don't watch the Glenn Beck show.
But, you know, it's titled Treasonous Glenn Beck and Michael Sawyer Want and Wish for Another Terrorist Attack in the United States.
But that doesn't seem to quite be your angle here.
Well, if you listen to the whole thing and that's what you decide, Scott, you know, that's what you decide.
But clearly we were talking about a whole series of absurd situations in terms of is America well-defended or not.
All right.
Now I want to pick a fight with you about torture, too.
Okay.
That's right.
You got this post, this article in the Washington Post, say it's Osama, what if he won't talk?
And basically criticizing Barack Obama from banning torture.
And I just, you know, I got this real cognitive dissonance thing going on here because when I explain to people why it is that we're in this war, I say, you know, there's a guy named Mike Shawryer who is the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, and he gives this list of six reasons.
And number two on that list, I think, or maybe it's three behind Israel and the occupation of Saudi Arabia, is the support for totalitarian dictatorships, specifically in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
Totalitarian dictatorships that torture people.
And you look at the Looming Tower, I don't even got to tell you, but I read the Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright.
He says that Ayman al-Zawahiri was a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who was involved in the assassination of Sadat.
Then they tortured him.
Now he's Ayman al-Zawahiri, our enemy.
The same thing with Zarqawi, who was the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq from the end of 2004 through the beginning of 2006 there.
He was a two-bit rapist nobody until the Jordanians tortured him and turned him into a terrorist.
So how can you, and you know, Matthew Alexander, who was the guy who actually got, you know, killed Zarqawi, because he didn't torture people when he interrogated them.
He said 90-something percent of the jihadists that he interrogated in Iraq were there because of the torture.
They were there because of Abu Ghraib, because of Guantanamo Bay.
So is that not reason number seven on the list?
Torture, Michael Sawyer?
No.
It pales, if we were doing torture, which we're not, but it would pale before the other six.
And you and I have talked about this point repeatedly, Scott.
And what I have said to you, if you will recall, is that neither rendition, air drones, special forces, or enhanced interrogations adequately protect America.
But that's what our leaders have decided to use because they will not use the U.S. military and then leave a country behind.
They want to occupy and intervene everywhere.
There's no one on Earth who would be more delighted to see no interrogations, no renditions, and have all of that stuff done by who it should be done, and that's the U.S. military through military means.
But the bottom line is, how do you defend America?
And you defend America in the manner in which the elected political leadership of this country orders you to defend it.
Now, is it right?
Is it wrong?
I don't know, and I don't care, simply because my job was to defend the United States.
But what I said when I was working, and what I think my successors have said all along, is that this is not enough.
This will not be a war winner.
This will not turn the tide.
But as long as an elected leadership orders it, as long as the Congress continues to fund it, and it takes both parties to fund it, it's going to go on.
Well, I don't really get the point.
As long as the government says to do it, then keep doing it.
But you're arguing that the government should not have said to stop.
I absolutely say, because what if he got to replace?
You know, the beautiful thing about Obama is he's half a horseman.
He knows how to get off of horses, but he doesn't have a horse to get onto.
Anything that weakens the already terribly weak defense of the United States, I oppose doing that.
I don't want to see us any weaker and any less well-protected than we are.
Did Obama have something to replace Guantanamo?
No.
Did he have something to replace rendition?
No.
Did he have something to replace interrogation?
No.
What did he replace it with?
With a speech to the Muslim world that basically said, we mean well toward you, we're not going to change our policies, but you have to understand, we know better.
We're your big Western brothers.
You're just kind of the unwashed Muslims.
What I've seen over the course of my career, and it's been over now for a while, was a continual shift away from defending America with those tools that are meant to be defending America, which is the U.S. military for the most part, and a greater emphasis on covert action, intelligence work, unmanned spy drones, and the rest of that, because our leaders do not want to be criticized by either the media and the left in this country or the Europeans, Scott.
If you think that the United States of America, if you step back and think of the world's greatest superpower, being defended primarily by CIA covert operations, you would think that the first thing you would do is get the last four presidents and have their heads examined.
Well, and certainly when they use the military to go around creating enemies everywhere, but then only the CIA left to actually defend the country, yeah, that's certainly a bad idea.
September 11th proves that.
Yeah, well, you and I have, you know, you and Anthony were, and I have a different opinion.
I'm a conservative in the sense that you should always use the military as a very last resort, and when it's necessary, I have no objections or qualms to using it as rigorously as needs to be done, but you almost never have to do that.
But because the government has defaulted to the CIA and to covert action, which is supposed to complement the military, not replace it, we're in a hell of a mess, Scott.
We're in a hell of a mess.
The violence is going to have to be much greater than it has been so far.
Well, and if there's another major attack in this country, or I guess when there's another major attack in this country, they're just going to use it as an excuse to attack Osama bin Laden's enemies in Iran.
Oh, I think that's exactly right.
I don't even know if it'll wait that long.
You know, 300 million Americans are held hostage by Netanyahu.
If he goes to war, we go to war.
And people say, well, Obama will never do that.
Obama is just as owned by IPAC as the Congress is.
You know, this is what should be talked about in the United States, is why is our national security dependent on a two-bit, third-world country like Israel, whether or not it wants to go to war?
Why does our debt have to be held by our enemies in Saudi Arabia and China?
Well, you know, and this goes back to what you're saying, though, about how the United States is becoming just a big Israel, where basically everybody hates us and is against us because of all the fights we pick, and we have nothing left but violence to keep ourselves going.
It seems to me like torture is a big part of that.
I mean, you know, when you talk about, you know, defending the United States of America, I mean, for me, the question always is, it's not just the place, Michael.
You know, it's what's to defend.
And it's the principles of liberty that this country was based on, the Scottish Enlightenment.
Everybody's an individual, and that includes Dilawar the taxi driver, who was innocent and was beaten to death in his cell in Afghanistan.
More than 100 other people were tortured to death in the custody of the CIA and the military during these various things.
And it seems like if, you know, to go along with that disengagement that you recommend from the Muslim world, what we ought to be doing is practicing what we preach and treating people like individuals, i.e. not torturing them to death.
Well, you know, you and I disagree on whether anyone was tortured to death by the CIA.
I think that's probably not true.
Well, we've all seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib of the Iceman, they call him, because they hooked him up to an IV to pretend he was still alive.
They hung him from the ceiling until he was dead.
That was a military prison, correct?
That was not the CIA.
You know, we conflate all these things.
But let me say, I don't disagree with you, Scott.
I don't think I disagree with anything you say.
My question is, how do you defend the United States?
What if you have elected governments, term after term, party alternating with party, and they refuse to defend you, whether it's your border, whether it's an enemy overseas, whether it's the simple business of defending you by letting you know honestly what the war is about, then what do you do?
Do you just throw in all the towels and not do anything?
I don't think that's the answer.
But surely the answer is something other than covert action.
As I said, covert action and special forces are meant to complement national defense, not to be national defense.
Well, now tell me this, because you worked in the CIA for all these years, part of the imperial court up there in what's Yankee land to me, but I'm from Texas, I know that's not really true, but Mason-Dixon line and all that.
But as part of the former part of the imperial court up there, please explain to me how it could possibly be that the Sandy Burgers and Condoleezza Rices and Jim Joneses of the world really would rather let these guys continue to run around free and do nothing about them while picking a fight with everybody else in the world when according to what you're saying, which I think is plausible, these guys would very much like to nuke an American city.
They would very much like to take what ultimately was not September 11th, as horrific as it was on TV and 3,000 deaths and all that.
That didn't threaten the future of this country to survive, whereas nuclear bombs and things going off, we're talking about serious problems here.
And what you're telling me is that since 1995 or whatever, nobody in the government gives a shit about this.
I think that's right.
I think they don't regard this problem as a problem anywhere close to a nation-state.
I think that's a huge problem for us.
And the last election was just a reflection of American Idol America.
What's most important to these politicians, whether it's the first Bush or Clinton or the second Bush or Obama, is how many people text message their vote in from Europe, from the media, from around the United States.
And that's what's important to them.
You know, this is a problem, Scott, that began in the early 90s, and it was about a six-inch tall problem.
Then by 96, it was maybe three feet tall.
At the time of 9-11, it was five feet tall.
Now we've made it into about a seven-foot tall giant, and it's going to keep growing.
Why?
Because they think they're going to talk their way out of this without either killing an awful lot of people more than they have or saying, listen, the enemy is motivated by what we do.
Maybe it's best for America, for the peace of America and for the interest of our kids, to stop doing the things we've been doing over the past 30 years and stop intervening.
But they're never going to do that because they want to be citizens of the world.
They don't give a shit.
I'm sorry.
They don't give a damn about being citizens of America anymore.
That's for you and I in the riffraff.
Did you think that George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Thomas Franks deliberately decided to let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora?
I don't think so.
I think they're incompetent.
I also think the entire government is paralyzed by lawyers.
You saw that when Franks let Mullah Omar get away, it was because he was supposed to be this big, tough, gunnery general, and a lawyer told him he better not shoot, he might get in trouble, and so he didn't shoot.
Everybody's afraid of their position, Scott.
I don't have any claim to fame at all, but at least when I got to the position when I couldn't book any more of it, I resigned.
And if you're afraid to get in trouble for killing Mullah Omar, then why shouldn't you be a general in the first place?
If your stars are more important than protecting America, then you ought to have your ass kicked right out of there.
Well, see, here's my problem too.
It was just, you know, I was a year out of high school or something when the CNN guys went and interviewed Osama bin Laden, and it was all in Newsweek, and I remember sitting in my parents' house reading the Newsweek about this guy who's declared war on the United States.
This was a serious thing.
I think it's perfectly true to say that we've been aware of the threat he posed since at least 1995-1996, and that even today, the United States government has never taken this seriously enough to apply all of the talents and power that's in its possession.
And not because they don't know he's a threat, but because they're afraid of what people will say and what their poll ratings will do.
That's the point I was trying to make on Beck last night, that until the American people, who have a lot to do.
The economy's bad, they've got to raise families, and they're pretty insular people anyway, and trusting.
They trust the government to do things.
Well, the government's not protecting them.
And I don't know what's going to get their attention.
Mr. Paul tried during the last election, and he was called a traitor.
Maybe it is going to take some kind of an outside event to do it.
No one wishes for that.
But the reality of being unprotected is that we're open to that kind of an attack.
Oh, wait, let me ask you one more thing.
How many chances did Bill Clinton have to kill bin Laden before the Bush administration?
My count was ten.
The U.S. military had eight that the agency gave them, and the agency had two opportunities to capture them.
The former chief of station in Islamabad counted 13, which I think included three after I was fired.
So between ten and 13.
Now, that wasn't after you quit in 2005.
You're talking about when you were fired from Alex station.
Yes.
And now, well, tell me, what's your position on the first nine months of the Bush administration?
Were they just so distracted by nonsense, you know, breaking a treaty with Russia over missile testing and so forth?
Yes, they were cold warriors.
They were a good example of not taking anything but nation-state seriously.
But having said that, and you know I have no brief for Bush, but he had no chances to kill Osama bin Laden because we didn't know where he was.
After the attack on the coal, al-Qaeda was so sure and confident that we were going to smash the hell out of them that they took up new security procedures.
And so while we knew what they intended through human intelligence, we couldn't pinpoint them.
But the only real opportunity I know Mr. Bush had to get bin Laden was at Tora Bora, and he chose not to do it then.
So he's no better than Clinton.
Well, you know, there's an entire giant cottage industry, and I guess there's really no point in asking a CIA guy this because we all know that you're a CIA agent.
Why would you tell the truth about this?
But there's a giant industry that says that the thing was an inside job or at least that a deliberate blind eye was turned, that they wanted the attack to happen and let it happen.
Well, then you have to think that I and another 200 or 300 people are such traitors to America that no one would have resigned.
Maybe that was true of somebody in the Congress or in the White House, but I guarantee you if it was true and somebody knew about it in the agency or a lot of people knew about it, they would be going immediately public on that.
So this really isn't something that you're suspicious about at all, though, is it?
On the basis of what I know, no.
I know what I've seen in terms of evidence from the early 90s until when I resigned in November 2004, and I don't put any credence into it at all.
Would I say never and say never?
No, because an intelligence officer knows he never knows anything, everything, about even his own area, Scott.
But what you saw for years and years was basically a bunch of emperor-wears-no-clothes garbage in an imperial court and nobody willing to do what they were supposed to do.
The moral cowardice rife in the Congress of the United States and in the White House under both administrations is abominable, Scott.
It is the kind of cowardice that earns a country enormous pain down the road, because the problems you don't solve grow and fester and become worse and worse.
Well, at least it ain't John McCain, right?
What a choice!
You know, we come from George Washington to a choice between McCain and Obama.
You would have had a better choice between Bud Abbot and Lucas Bellow.
Oh, man.
All right, folks, that's Michael Scheuer.
The book is Imperial Hubris and also Marching Toward Hell.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye-bye.
