05/30/14 – Michael Scheuer – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by ScottHorton.org first.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
And it's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world, except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM, noon to three weekdays.
And our next guest on the show today is Michael Scheuer.
He's the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alex Station.
And he resigned in protest over the 9-11 Commission report back in 2004, 2005.
He's the author of the books, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism, Marching Toward Hell, the US and Islam, After Iraq, and a biography, Osama bin Laden.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
How are you doing?
I'm doing very well, Scott.
Thank you for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And I've been thinking a lot of you lately with all the reports of, well, bin Ladenism spreading across the Middle East.
And particularly, I remember you complaining about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that what it meant was moving al-Qaeda's frontier approximately 1,500 miles to the West and giving them direct access to the Levant.
And I suppose it, I don't know if we ever talked about this back in 05 or whatever, but I suppose there may be something to the Bush administration's propaganda that Assad was at least allowing his al-Qaeda-type enemies, sort of free reign, to go into Iraq to fight the Americans, to keep the Americans bogged down, to prevent us from moving on to Syria.
It seems plausible enough to me.
But now our enemies in al-Qaeda in Iraq, the US Army's enemies in al-Qaeda in Iraq, are now the guys that the Barack Obama administration is funding and backing in cooperation with the Saudis in Syria in attempting to overthrow Assad.
And, of course, there's been the regime change in Libya, which you clearly warned against on TV, on the record, before they did it, and said, in any other circumstance, we would call these men the Mujahideen.
That's what you said on CNN.
And Patrick Coburn, one more thing here before I turn it over to some kind of real question here.
Patrick Coburn, a journalist that I respect about more than any other, writing for The Independent, has done a five-part series on the new generation of al-Qaeda.
I might even call him the third or the fourth, I don't know, generation of al-Qaeda now that are spread all the way down into, actually really kind of could include Boko Haram even, and into Mali, and all the way through.
And so I just wonder, after all we've been through and all you've seen of the morphing of this al-Qaeda unit, this group from a couple of hundred friends of Osama into this, you know, movement across the Middle East, you know, where are we really?
What does this look like to you when you try to wrap your head around it?
And where are we going from halfway through 2014 here?
I admit, I'm kind of worried.
Well, it's a good thing to worry about, Scott, because it's, once we took the cork out of the neck of the bottle, which was Saddam Hussein, the world was their oyster in many ways, moving west and then into Africa, and then south and into Southern Africa.
I don't know what to think anymore.
You know, this is not rocket science.
If it was rocket science, I would have never written a word.
But this is clearly what they had in mind, and they clearly told us that we need you, United States, as a foil.
We need you to play the fool.
And we've played the fool.
We should have three Oscars every year for the role we've played in helping them do this.
And we flew air support for al-Qaeda and the mujahideen in Libya.
Now Obama's training al-Qaeda and arming them in Syria.
Where it ends, you know, I don't know.
But the problem today is enormously bigger than it was at 9-11.
And to top it all off, we're about to give Afghanistan back to the mujahideen, and it will become what it was in spades, though, before 9-11.
It is a tragedy for America, and it's opened the gate to an absolutely unending war.
All right, well, on that last point, what are we supposed to do in Afghanistan?
Because how do you keep there from being a single Arab to say, I'm friends with Ayman, and so bring the whole damn war back on again forever, or what?
Well, you don't, but, you know, my libertarian and conservative friends don't like to hear it, but war is about killing.
All we needed to do in Afghanistan was to go there and stay for about 15 months and kill everything that moved.
And let them think the Americans are not only powerful, but a little crazy.
We have gone so far down the road of this multiculturalism that we're all the same, that we all have the same needs and beliefs and desires, that we miss the point that in most of the Muslim world, and certainly in all of the Arab world, force is a lingua franca.
And they live in a system where they're threatened by their government, by the police, by other organizations every day, and they have a respect for force.
We went there and played the Patsy, and now we're going to retreat.
You know, we've lost less than 3,000 men in Iraq, and I don't mean that to sound callous.
Every man and woman we lose is a tragedy for some family and for the nation as a whole.
But the Mujahideen are looking at us and they're saying, this is the greatest power on earth.
They're running, they lost less than 300 people a year for 13 years, and they're running from us.
You know, if anything is going to promote mission growth or mission creep amongst the Islamists, it's the cowardly behavior of the United States political system.
Well, we sure could at least stop directly supporting them, like in Libya and Syria.
I'd certainly go that far.
But, you know, I wonder, well, so what about if, you know, forget Tenet, I was the president, I promoted you after 9-11, and the deal was that you and Rumsfeld are going to get along, and you're going to kill Osama and his 250 closest friends.
None of them are going to escape into Pakistan.
And then that's going to be the end of that, because we're going to tell the Israelis, you're on your own.
We are going to tell the Saudis, you're on your own.
We're going to pull our troops and our navy away and out of Arabia, and quit with the war crimes, and quit with the world empire.
And not that that would be perfect utopia or anything, but that would at least be drying up.
That would dry up the ongoing motivation for this continuing war, at least against us, which is the continued killing by us.
And when you say anything that moves in Afghanistan, hell, it wasn't anything that moves that did it.
It was bin Laden and his couple of dozen friends, and even the Taliban tried to give his ass up.
They even said, you know what, don't even bother proving it.
Here, just take him.
And Bush said, not good enough.
Right?
Or not?
Well, something close to that.
And also, Clinton did the same thing, because his wife and her coterie of feminists got the Senate to pass a motion in 1997 that we shouldn't deal with the Taliban until they install women's rights in Afghanistan.
So that slammed that door, too.
Scott, I think if you're only going to fight this war with the tools that have been used by the last three presidents, which are the military in a half-hearted way and the intelligence community, we're going to lose.
And what the problem is at this moment is that the Mujahideen have expanded so far and so fast geographically that they're now approaching an area where we will have to fight.
The danger of this idiot Obama sending people to Nigeria is Nigeria is a place where if things go wrong, we will have to fight there.
Because West Africa, Nigeria, we get about 20% of our crude from there every day.
It's full of uranium.
It's full of rare earth minerals that the Chinese are hoarding of their own, but we need them desperately.
So for the first time, as they expand into southern and western Africa, we suddenly have a genuine national interest at stake.
And so we're going to have to fight them there, just for national survival reasons.
It will become, for the first time, a necessary war.
Yeah, making it that way.
Well, and this is what you said back years ago.
It's been, what, nine years since we started talking?
And you said, look, our choice is either war or total war.
And I'm not certain I'm convinced by this, but I do understand what you mean, that we keep making this so bad, we're going to have so many enemies, we are going to have to really fight the kind of thing that George Bush, you know, the size of war that George Bush unnecessarily fought in Iraq when he invaded there, a real mission.
And I, you know, I'm not going to get on board for this empire doing anything to anyone at this point anymore, Mike, but I do, I am looking at a state, a new state being formed, basically, between, you know, Homs and Anbar province here.
The Islamo-fascist caliphate that was always make pretend with the neocons talked about it, is really forming between Iraq and Syria right now.
And it seems like it really will be dominated, not by, like, the Anbar tribes, but by ISIS and Nusra.
And I could definitely see this being the cause of spelling for Obama or Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton or for whoever to be a whole new reinvasion of Iraq and Syria to fight against this Mujahideen army that, again, our policy has created there.
Yeah, I can't disagree with that, Scott.
You know, the thing that I'm writing about at the moment, or trying to write about, is that Syria, look at what's happened in Syria because we did not intervene.
The Mujahideen, the Nusra people, the people from Iraq, are eating each other, or were until recently.
They didn't have a patsy to play against in the terms of the United States.
And now Obama's going to get us back into that mess.
And there'll be people coming to Syria from all over the world, not only to attack Assad, but to attack whatever trainers we have there, whatever other kind of people we have there.
So, you know, there's such a great discrepancy, which is going on between Syria and Libya.
We've stayed out of Libya, and Libya hasn't cost an American life or an American dollar.
And it hasn't reinvigorated the Mujahideen movement in the area.
Obama's going to go there, and it's going to do it again.
And how many times do you have to have your hand burned before you stop putting it into the fire?
I don't know the answer to that.
Okay, well, now, so what do you think about, then, support for the Kings Abdullah, support for Field Marshal Sisi in Egypt now?
That, you know, I know you've said before that, you know, not only should we have not overthrown Saddam Hussein, we should have put him back on the payroll and said, listen, pal, your job is keeping al-Qaeda down, you understand?
And so I wonder whether that's how you feel.
And I know that above all people on Earth, other than bin Laden himself, you have done the most to explain that that's what really got us into this mess in the first place, but here we are.
So now what?
Well, I don't know, but I think you're exactly right.
I think the first thing we should have done after 9-11 is to tell Saddam, you have carte blanche, do whatever you want, we're going to stop cocking around with you, but stop these guys from coming west.
And instead of that, we pulled the plug on Saddam.
What are we going to do now, Scott?
You know, we are exactly where we were in 1996 and 1995 and 2001.
The political establishment in this country will not accept the fact that it's our actions that motivate these people and not how we live in North America.
And until we get to the point, and I really begin to wonder, I saw Rand Paul, for example, put up a bill to chastise the Palestinians as terrorists or some other damn thing.
He apparently is one of those conservatives that thinks that being opposed to Israel means you support the Palestinians, which is insane, a pox on both of them.
But until we come to grips with the fact that we are motivating the growth that we've seen, as you said, since 2001, I don't know what we do except continue to, well, now Obama wants to spend $5 billion to pay other people to do what we should be doing ourselves if it needs to be done.
It is a world of demented people, and it's either me that's demented or it's these politicians who can't seem to see beyond the people who pay them off, whether it's the Israelis or the Saudis.
Yeah, or their own just short-sighted, narrow-minded idiocy, like when they overthrew Gaddafi for what, at best I can tell from all information, was simply just a PR stunt to try to confuse the issue after it was so obvious that Uncle Sam is behind all the kings and dictators being overthrown in the Arab Spring.
And they wanted to make it look like, no, we're on the side of the little guy, like that time we saved France from the Nazis and all that kind of thing.
And so they went and took the side of these rebels against your direct advice on CNN, again, that you don't know who you're backing here, guys, but that was why they did it.
And they overthrew Gaddafi, who, just like Saddam, should have been kept on the payroll with one mission, keeping the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia from really digging in a foothold here.
And those are the exact guys that we backed against him.
It's madness.
It is madness, Scott.
But, you know, you try to tell that to the American people, and what happens is you don't get invited back to CNN or Fox or anywhere else.
Because they're all desperately afraid that the truth about our relationship with the Saudis and the Israelis is going to become accepted among the American people.
And until that happens, they're safe.
And Americans will bleed and die, and our servicemen and women will bleed and die for the payoffs they get from AIPAC and the rest of the, you know, fifth column Israelis in the United States.
All right, now, here's the thing I've learned about al-Qaeda over the years, Mike, is that these guys are the scum of the earth.
And everywhere they go, they butcher innocent people.
And decent people everywhere hate their sorry guts.
And they never were more than a couple percent, I don't think, of the real insurgency, the Sunni-based tribal insurgency during the Iraq war.
And when they go to Syria, people hate them.
Everywhere they establish dominance, they start conscripting people and cutting people's fingers off for smoking cigarettes and this kind of madness.
And so it seems like the kind of movement that really could sort of peter itself out.
And after all, they don't really have a state anywhere in the world.
They've got some Saudi princes that finance them, but the Americans could put an end to that with a stern look if they really meant it.
And these guys had to steal our planes to crash them into our buildings because they're nobodies.
They're the lowest scum of the earth in the world.
So what threat could they really be?
I mean, I don't mean to downplay September 11th.
It was a big deal.
But it didn't bring down the United States of America.
We got a whatever trillion-dollar economy a year.
And we're going to be all right if, you know, we can keep us— The way they'll bring us down is the way they plan to do it all along.
You know, 9-11 was just a lure to get us involved in Afghanistan.
The Boko Haram thing we're looking at now, that's one of the biggest, brightest, most clearly delineated lures in the world.
They want the United States and Britain and NATO to come in after them because then they become an international movement.
Then we have an intervention, money flows in from the Gulf to their coffers, and volunteers will come from all over the Muslim world.
And we're playing, again, right into their hands.
The other thing I would say about what you just said, I'm not sure I would agree that they're kind of the scum of the earth.
They're very tough in terms of government.
That's clearly the case.
But they're also the best and the brightest in the Muslim world.
They're the engineers.
They're the doctors.
They're the accountants.
They're—one of the reasons they've been able to do what they've done is they're tremendously effective with logisticians and organization people, admin people.
And whatever they do on the ground, fine.
You can identify that as scum or as whatever you want, but we're fighting a very talented enemy.
One of the problems we have is we have a government that regards them as stupid.
In fact, they regard all Muslims as stupid.
And until we come to grips with the fact that we're fighting an enemy that's quite a smart enemy, it's just defeated the United States twice with weapons from the Korean War.
We got beaten in Afghanistan and we got beaten in Iraq.
But again, you know, Zawahiri's podcasting from somebody's basement where he's cowardly hiding in Pakistan, right?
So— Well, you know, why is it cowardly for them to hide when—you know, how many American general officers or field officers have been killed on the ground?
They're hiding in gutter.
They're hiding somewhere else.
They're hiding in Tampa.
Well, I'd agree with that.
I think they're cowards, too.
You know, lead a man into battle, lead him then.
That's what I think.
Well, exactly.
One of the things I think about the al-Qaeda and its allies is one of the reasons we kill so many of their leaders is because they lead from the front.
They have a body of soldiery that's not unlike what the Confederacy had.
The Confederate soldiers would fight anybody, anytime, but they had to be led by their officers.
They were going to fight for anybody that stayed behind and told them, go get them, boys, and I'll join up with you later.
Right.
Well, now, okay, so here's the mistake that I just made that you corrected, I think, is that when somebody says, you know, ISIS, I picture angry young suicide bombers, but you're not distracted.
You're looking at who's putting them out there, and these are middle-aged professionals.
Now, when you say engineer, I think, well, yeah, Mohammed Atta was a graduate student from Cairo in Hamburg, Germany, and all of that, but you're telling me that really the ranks, the strength of the organization of al-Qaeda are middle-aged professionals, not angry young men with suicide belts at all, dummy.
Right, and I wouldn't even say that they're middle-aged now.
I think the next generation, you were talking about how to count generations.
I think we're probably in at least the third.
Every generation, they get more intelligent.
A lot of them were trained in the West.
They were trained in Britain or France or the United States in the sciences, in economics, in logistics.
My God, you know, I would hate to think that not only did we get beat in two wars by guys with weapons from Korea, but we got beat by ignoramuses.
They're not, Scott.
It's a very well-built organization.
It's very resilient, and it attracts people who are not only religiously motivated, but Salafism is an extremely elegant and thoughtful way to look at the world from the Muslim point of view.
And the kind of people who study hard sciences, who study psychiatry, who study engineering, are very much attracted to it.
But again, that's another message that I have tried in four books to talk about and talk about it to the Congress, and you get hooted off the stage.
Well, I mean, what they try to do, I think, is spin that and say, well, yes, Salafism then is a doctrine based on the conquest of all non-Muslims in the world, and that's what's going on here is we're fighting the defensive war.
But I guess my understanding is that their interpretation is that Islam mandates defensive war, but not aggressive conquest of war.
Yes.
The real problem we suffered, the disaster we suffered with killing Osama bin Laden was first that we had not done it a decade earlier.
But second is that under Zawahiri, it's a much more offensive organization in the sense that it intends to force the domination of Islam on areas of the world that never have been.
Osama was a very devout Salafist Sunni Muslim, but he was only intent, according to his words, on recapturing those areas that had been Islamic and taken from Islam.
Southern Spain, parts of the Balkans, a few other places around the world.
But we've changed that now.
It's kind of out of control.
I would almost argue, Scott, that al-Qaeda is no longer even essential.
After our invasion of Iraq, the jihad became self-perpetuating because we gave the Islamic world the perfect predicate for a defensive jihad.
A Christian country invading a Muslim country without provocation, and then establishing a government under the rule of man rather than the rule of God.
And once we were in Iraq, Osama, his mission was complete.
And that's just where we are.
Yeah, I remember at least some of the stories.
I don't know if this was part of the story or what really happened or what, but I think that they said after they killed him that they found intelligence in that attic where he was hiding or in that house, that he was actually really disappointed with the results of the Arab Spring and that it looked like democracy was winning the day rather than his way.
And what I thought was if that was true, it was only because of how short-sighted, maybe how selfish he was looking at it, because it seemed to me like he had achieved every one of his goals as outlined in your book, Imperial Hubris, about what he was really trying to do as far as sucking us in to bleed us dry and get as many bonus regime changes as he could in the region to radicalize the new generation and all these things.
The only thing that didn't happen was he didn't get to become the new Emir of Arabia, right?
He still had to hide in his attic, but every other one of his goals, even if, I mean, I guess he died before the Muslim Brotherhood got elected, but it seems like he would have seen, and in fact they even got such a great PR stunt out of the military canceling the results of the elections in Egypt, that, see, we told you democracy, that the West will never let you win and stay in power there, and now you should be more like us.
It seemed like he didn't really realize, maybe, according to them, he didn't really realize, but he had accomplished just about everything he was trying to do with that entire jihad against America throughout the 1990s and September 11th.
Yeah, he died a completely successful man.
Jeff Huber wrote an article called Osama Bin Laden, Dead and Loving It.
Called him the most successful general never before in human history has one man, outside of actual power, moved so many troops around the world where he wanted them to go, at his command, like this.
That's a very good point.
And, you know, what you heard about the intelligence they found was a spin that was put on by the Obama administration in how desperately incompetent the Obama administration is.
In May of 2013, two years after Osama was killed, they needed some juice, and so they released some of the documents that they really did capture there in his home.
And they apparently never read what they said, because there was three letters from him to his major military field commanders.
And he said, in modern history, Islam has never had a greater opportunity than that presented by the Arab Spring.
Because the people will be able to speak, and when the people speak, it won't be about democracy, it'll be about Islam.
And what you saw happen in Egypt, what you saw happen in other places, is exactly right.
If it's okay to do the happy dance in Islam, when Osama saw the Arab Spring going on, he was doing the happy dance, Scott.
All right, now, so just to sum up here about possible futures here, if I understand you right, Mike, do you think if we just went ahead somehow, I don't know, Ron Paul ran one more time, despite all odds, and got elected and adopted an absolutely peaceful foreign policy toward the Middle East, a non-interventionist policy toward the Middle East, that enough of this would dry up, that maybe if they had democracy over there and they elected Islamic governments, that that wouldn't necessarily be a threat to us, as long as we're not over there continually poking the hornet's nest.
I mean, is it a threat to U.S. national security if the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt, or if Islamists rule Arabia or Jordan or Iraq or anywhere else?
What exactly do you think about all that?
I think it's a threat to the United States, so long as we continue our process of intervening in their world.
You know, there's every possibility that the Islamist government in Egypt may have not been able to rule, and may not have been able to create a government that was effective, and through the course of time they may have been thrown out, even if they had become a dictatorship.
My own view is, the United States of America can be extraordinarily powerful, but people have to believe in that power.
We haven't won a war.
We haven't been in a war that was constitutional since 1945 in the first instance, but we also have not won a war.
At some point you have to demonstrate that not only are you powerful, but you have the resolve to do whatever is necessary to win a war, Scott.
We haven't done that.
And the tragedy of Afghanistan is now we don't have a spot to focus forces.
There's no place where we can put 300,000 or 500,000 troops into the field and demonstrate that the last thing you want to do is to screw with those crazy Americans.
So now they're going to nickel and dime us.
They're going to start working here in the United States.
They'll start attacking here because the borders have been open for so long.
The Europeans are seeing the same thing in their country.
Really, the whip is in their hand, and we don't even think about that possibility, Scott.
Yeah, I think this has been your bottom line all along.
This is why you resigned from the 9-11 Commission, or resigned from the CIA, in protest over the 9-11 Commission report in the first place, right?
That these people aren't even being honest with themselves, much less the American people.
Americans are being played for fools, Scott.
The lying that comes out of both parties, again, I wonder what black Rand Paul is a chip off of.
Is it his father's black, or is it the interventionist's black?
I didn't like the idea of him spending Derby Day with Rupert Murdoch, for example.
Next, he'll be having a conference with Roger Ailes at Fox.
Both of them checking him out on what his position on Israel is.
Well, and that ain't the beginning of his compromises, or the end, either.
I think that's right, sir.
There's so much I agree with him with.
He's a young man with a lot of brains, but it looks to me like he's just, if he's not in the establishment, he's about a half step away.
Well, here's what's 100% safe bet, is he knows of all of your work if he hasn't read it all.
And I know that I can't find this YouTube anymore, but there's one of him citing you and citing Robert Pape and others to explain the war on terrorism to a crowd back in 2007, 2008.
So here's a guy who really does understand.
Wasn't it Rand?
I'm sorry?
I thought it was Rand Paul that did that.
Well, both.
No, it was Rand giving a speech in favor of his father, who mentions you and Pape and others to explain that, look, these guys are SOBs and everything, but it was our government that got us into this problem.
And so there are, you know, basically we can end the war by ramping it down and by deciding now to stop making it worse and those kind of arguments, you know.
So it's been since he was helping campaign for his father the first time.
I see, I see.
Right?
Not since he's been a senator or anything like that.
Yeah.
Well, maybe he'll come around, but it looks disheartening at the moment.
Well, you know, I'm hoping that the bad guys will find that YouTube and start using it to smear him and then we can have a real argument about this.
Because the truth of his former position is undeniable if it's got a hearing, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, listen, I've kept you away over time.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
It's great to talk to you again, Mike.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott.
Have a good weekend and thanks for having me.
You too.
Appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
That is Michael Schor.
He's the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Alex Station.
He's the author of Through Our Enemies' Eyes, Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism, Marching Toward Hell, The United States and Islam After Iraq, and the biography, Osama Bin Laden.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, I'm Scott here.
Ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time?
Well, a friend of mine, libertarian activist Arlo Pignatti, has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all.
QR silver commodity discs.
The first ever QR code, one ounce silver pieces.
Just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price.
They're perfect for saving or spending at the market.
And anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate gets one.
That's scotthorton.org slash donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at commoditydiscs.com.
Or check them out on Facebook at slash commodity discs.
And thanks.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or war mongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.