Alright y'all, next guest on the show today is Michael Shoyer.
He is the former head analyst at Alex Station, the CIA's bin Laden unit, and he's the author of the book Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism and Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq.
You can oftentimes find what he writes at Antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, sir.
Thank you.
Alright, now listen.
First of all, thank you for joining us today.
Really appreciate it.
I have some conflict, I think, some fight I need to pick with you a little bit here, but mostly I just want to pick your brain about what you know.
But before we get into any of that, I want to give you a chance to defend yourself, because when I went to Google News to search for Michael Shoyer this morning, what I found was a bunch of people calling you an anti-Semite, based on some conversation from C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
A caller called in and said, the Jews this, the Jews that, and apparently instead of correcting him, you had something to say about Israel, and so that must mean that you're an anti-Semite.
So let me ask you, are you some sort of racial collectivist who condemns people based on their religion, who their mom and dad are?
Are you an anti-Semite, Michael Shoyer?
You know, I don't think so.
I don't think I ever used the word Jewish in the thing.
The guy was clearly asked a bigoted question, or at least a flangy question, and I took the occasion to say that I thought one of the things lacking in American politics over the last 30 years was an ability to discuss Israel without being called an anti-Semite.
And the stuff on the Google is their typical operation of the Israeli firsters.
They cut and paste different quotations, and that's what they did.
It's just more of the same, Scott.
They don't have any ideas.
All they have is abuse.
Well, and you know, this is the thing, too.
This is why you're so frustrated, and you say these things like, oh gosh darn it, and come out and say something really strong about Israel.
Maybe even stronger than you might on a regular day, it's because of the fact that the entire debate is shut down by accusations of anti-Semitism, and around and around we go.
Yeah, and you know what, I haven't changed, I've been saying the same thing since I resigned from the agency.
I don't think that Israel's worth another American life or another American dollar.
And I feel the same way about Palestine.
Let them both fight to the death.
Now, how you can turn that into some sort of a religious slur or bigotry, I'm not sure.
You know, at least with Israel and the United States, we're talking about sovereign nation-states.
All right, now, well, jeez, but you know, without American help, Israel would cease to exist within a year or something, I guess they say.
Yeah, well, you know, if it does, it does, if it doesn't, it doesn't.
You know, kids eventually get pushed out of the nest.
But you know, that's right there is where the problem comes in, right?
I mean, do you really not care at all what happens to the people who live there?
No, I don't.
I care what happens to Americans.
If the Palestinians and the Israelis want to fight over a worthless piece of land until they're all dead or one or the other is dead, that's not my business.
You know, Shoyer the Christian would say, oh, that's too bad, I hope they don't fight, but I'm not willing to commit my children or someone else's children to fight other people's wars.
And well, so to what degree do you think what's going on in the Middle East is really America fighting Israel's wars?
I mean, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, are those guys Israel firsters?
Those guys, you know, religious zealots or something?
They had their own agenda, right?
They had their own agenda.
Part of it, I think, was a misguided idea that getting rid of Saddam would increase Israel's security, but, you know, it's obvious that it's done exactly the opposite of that.
And now we have Senator Lieberman screaming for war in Yemen.
For what particular reason, I'm not sure, but he seems to be another one who wants to go to war for reasons that really have little to do with the United States.
Well, and now, so let's go ahead and talk about that, because I'm sick of this whole anti-Semite thing.
I don't think that you're a hateful guy.
You're simply an American nationalist, former government employee, CIA guy.
You're one of them super patriots, and your interest is the American people, as you say, the American nation.
And so it is what it is, and if people don't like it, they can go ahead and call you names all they want, I figure.
They can line up and take a ticket and call names if they want.
All right, well, so let's talk about al-Qaeda, such as it exists or doesn't.
There is, as you called it before, a worldwide Islamist insurgency against the United States.
But per my best understanding, Mike, I think that that really kind of is old, right?
That was when Osama bin Laden was able to kind of forge this alliance against the far enemy, the United States.
Otherwise, without that kind of leadership, they all devolve into their own little local jihads.
And so if there are little local jihads all over the Middle East, and even in Pakistan and wherever, why should I care about that?
The problem is when enough of them agree with bin Laden that they've got to attack the United States, right?
Well, I think I would argue a little bit differently, Scott.
I think that because we are unable to bring ourselves to defend ourselves, we allowed al-Qaeda to get away.
And Bush for years lied about the ability of al-Qaeda to communicate or to get in touch with its affiliates and to do things.
And what we're seeing, quite simply, is the growth of an organization that survived 2001 because it was a strong organization.
I always worry when the social scientists take over.
And now you're seeing social scientists argue that everything from al-Qaeda is only an idea, it's not an organization, to saying that, well, it's not even the right Arabic word to use to refer to the problem.
The problem is out there, it's growing, and we have it in our hands to make sure that America is safe from it, because we're not the number one enemy.
All we need to do is to realize how negative an impact our policies have in the Muslim world and get the hell out.
Now, there's so many kind of details about that in the history that I'd like to go over with you a little bit here, how we got into this mess.
But if I can try to pick a fight with you here, is that what you say when you go on Lou Dobbs?
You know, I see you on Glenn Beck from time to time, or I guess I have seen you on Glenn Beck from time to time.
And of course, we talked before about the most controversial part of that.
So I'll leave that aside.
But you don't seem to tell, as best I can tell, you don't seem to tell these right wingers that, listen, we started it.
We have to stop intervening, and then we won't have a terrorism problem.
Instead, you emphasize the other half of your argument, which is, as long as we're a world empire, we've got to treat this like a real war, which is, of course, what they want to hear.
I don't think that's right.
I think if you listen to Lou Dobbs yesterday afternoon, I said exactly the opposite of what you just said.
It's the same thing with Beck.
Beck will tell you whenever I start a conversation with him that he does not agree with me on most things, whether it's Israel or the Iraq war or anything else.
My message is consistent.
But where I differ from you, Scott, is I don't think that we can avoid all wars.
And I think by not applying our military power to utterly destroy al-Qaeda in 2001, we have left the one enemy that can hurt us go free.
And if we're not careful, he's going to draw us into a lot of different countries because of our foreign policy.
Well, I mean, my thing is this.
If we give them permission to kill Osama and Zalahiri, they kill a million other people and invade the whole world.
They're not American.
No, that's not true.
You know, you kill Osama, you kill...
What you want to do is to kill them.
So they focus on what you were talking about at the beginning, which is their little jihad.
Right.
But what I'm saying is when we give our government permission, as the Congress did, gave them pseudo permission there on September 14th, 2001, they've waged a war against all the Muslim world, everybody except bin Laden and Zalahiri.
And so that's my thing is I give up.
I don't want this government to take care of me in any sense.
They cannot provide me security.
They have failed already.
That's an internal American problem.
That's not really a problem with the outside world.
The problem you're speaking of is a cowardice in the Congress that refuses to abide by what Mr. Paul talks about, the requirement that the Congress declare war in a specific way.
And that's our internal problem.
There's no way that's going to get fixed unless the American people fix it.
I entirely agree with you that we wage wars that shouldn't be fought.
No war should be fought without a declaration of war.
What I'm saying is, though, our carnivores loose in the world and we do indeed need to kill them before they kill us.
There's very few of them, however.
Well, and see, I mean, this is what I'm getting at, right, is because the military is a broad sword.
The military is not a laser designator.
If it's a laser designator, it's a laser designator for a 500 pound bomb.
So it's not a matter of some kind of scalpel thing where you go in and you cut a few throats and then you say, see, don't attack us.
We're not after all of y'all, just after the very few and whatever.
It's already too late for that.
We've had almost a decade now of bombing everybody all over the place and threatening even more.
Well, and the enemy hasn't been affected.
So what do you do?
You just stand by and wait for them to come and do what they want to do?
I'm not willing to do that.
I tend to think that I am conservative in most things and non-interventionist as much as I can possibly think.
I can be.
But that said, no matter what the mistakes you're talking about, the problem, the threat still exists.
And it's all been blown out of dimension, out of even recognizability by Bush and by Obama that it's hard to deal with.
But it's truly there.
Right.
Well, you know, there really is something to that, right, where I believe you or I agree with you that certainly now, after all this, there have got to be people on this planet who are willing to come here and die in order to kill some of us.
I mean, there have been enemies created.
And I think that if Ron Paul was the president and he immediately brought our troops home from all over the place, it would diffuse 99.9 percent of it.
But there's still that 0.1 percent.
And then what?
Would you agree that at that point you're dealing with such a minor threat that it can be dealt with by cops working together, different national governments and their national police forces rather than going in with this broad sword and and following this war on terrorism policy as it's been?
Well, yeah, I think that's exactly what you want to do, is you want to reduce the threat to where we can manage it.
And we want to deflect that this is basically an internal war within Islamic civilization.
They have a lot of things to sort out.
We're in the way.
Once we get out, we do two things.
First, it's almost impossible for Bin Laden to hold any kind of a coalition together after we're disengaged, because they'll go back.
The Egyptians will go back to fighting the Egyptians, the Algerians, the Algerians, the Saudis, the Saudis.
The second thing is they hate each other more than they hate us.
There'll be an internal civil war.
So the goal of our policies is not only to disengage, but to encourage them to deflect at least their animosities back to where they belong, which is in the Islamic world.
But you know, all of that said, that's all true.
But you have to make the first move first.
You have to get out.
But we can't get out, for the biggest part, because of oil.
What are we going to do about energy?
And so you would say the biggest part, I mean, that's an important thing to say, an important thing to emphasize, if that's really your view.
You think the Israel lobby takes second place to the oil lobby on this?
Yes, I do.
Because the oil business is the most important, because we're frozen in place on every other thing in the Middle East.
So you're an anti-wasp bite, right?
I don't know what that is, sir.
Oh, that means that you hate all wasps, because everybody knows that the oil establishment is a bunch of white guys, right?
I don't care who owns the oil.
I'm sorry.
It's a poor attempt at humor here.
I was trying to figure out what kind of racist it makes you if you disagree with James Baker, you know?
Anti-Texan, maybe.
Yeah, there you go.
I don't know what the answer is to that.
But you know, if we had done something in the last 40 years to get energy security, there's no reason to support any Arab state.
And at least we begin to cut into the appeal that the Islamists have against us.
The Saudis can fall, the Bahrainis can fall, the Kuwaitis can fall, who cares?
I think this is really useful, too.
You know, the way that you stake out your position on Israel that, hey, not my business, don't care either way kind of thing.
If you can stake out that claim on the lives of a bunch of Israeli civilians, what must you think about the life of Osama bin Laden and them?
It's not at all for one moment that you would ever justify in any sense or excuse any attack on American civilians in a million years when you explain that we started it.
That's just a fact.
That doesn't make him Luke Skywalker just because he's leading the rebel alliance.
He's still evil, but he is leading the rebel alliance and we are the empire.
Yeah.
I think that's a pretty good analogy, Scott.
He is a talented, vicious, effective leader.
And but all of that, except for the native talent in his in his mind, comes from us playing the perfect foil for him.
And I don't know how long we continued.
We want to continue to do that.
But it's increasingly expensive in a country that is already, well, as you know, over its head in debt.
Yes.
Well, quite over our head in debt.
Well now.
So tell me what you think of this.
This guy, the under bomber from the attempt in Detroit or over Detroit on Christmas Day.
The reaction of the American people to this has been pretty hysterical, at least according to a Rasmussen poll, 71 percent want him turned over to the military, 58 percent.
This was likely voters want him tortured.
What do you think that might do for recruiting if America was to turn this guy over to the military and torture him?
Would that be better or worse for our war on terrorism, Michael Schoer?
It wouldn't be much worse than identifying 14 Muslim countries for full body scanning.
It's another humiliation.
It's another perceived offense against Islam.
So in other words, it would be horrible.
It wouldn't.
It wouldn't be helpful, except if we got actionable intelligence.
The problem, Scott, for me, at least on the air business, is the whole issue of watch lists and no fly lists.
That is a phantom protection.
If the system worked perfectly, someone could still get through.
This guy was an amateur.
He made it all the way through and he misengaged the bomb.
He didn't quite detonate it.
If it had been a professional, it would have gone off.
This is not a cure-all for the problem.
And of course, the absolute duplicity of Obama and before him, Bush, in arguing that if we make airlines safer, America is safe, when they have multiple thousands of miles of open land and sea borders, they play the American people for fools, and unfortunately, the American people put up with it.
Well, and you know, I'm curious about which 14 nations make the list.
They wouldn't be 14 nations that have American combat forces stationed in them, would they?
A couple of them surely would be, yes.
I mean, that's the whole thing.
They talk about racial profiling.
Let's profile people from the countries we occupy, since that's why they attack us, at least.
Get our argument straight, even if the policy's wrong.
Well, you know, there's no willingness in the political establishment to even consider the fact that we're occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's clearly the case.
That's why we're eventually going to get thrown out of both places.
And what about expanding the war into Sudan?
You know, Angela, my producer, showed me an article the other day by Angelina Jolie, writing challenging Barack Obama to put his muscle where his heart is and invade the Sudan.
Is the Sudan not another Sunni Arab state?
Are we really going to expand this war into North Africa now?
Well, you know, with the Democrats, they're more than willing to have Americans killed for humanitarian purposes.
Who knows?
But you know, as long as two years ago, McCain and former Senator Dole wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that said we ought to send British and American Marines to the Sudan because they're having a civil war and we need to sort it out.
There's all kinds of people, but most of them are either rich or older, and none of their children would be called on to fight in any of these wars.
You know, Angelina Jolie, John McCain, Bob Dole, they're safe.
Their families are mostly safe.
So there's a lot of warmongers in this country, and there's a lot of them on the left in many ways more than on the right.
Well, now, what about Iran?
Because of course the Ayatollahs and Ayman al-Zawahiri are not the best of friends, and of course the war party in America certainly has Iran in their sights.
What would it do for the larger war on terrorism to bomb another of Osama bin Laden's enemies?
It will be welcome in their camp.
I still think they still have to pinch themselves to think that we invaded Iraq, but to hit the Iranians would just be a terrible business.
But ultimately that's up to Israel, not to us.
They can take all 300 million of us to war tomorrow if they want to.
But Iran, you know, Scott, we've talked before, Iran's no threat to the United States unless we attack it.
It has a very well-structured paramilitary organization in North America.
It could strike us after we hit them and cause a lot of problems in our country.
Well, so let's talk about Yemen.
I guess I should have focused more on this toward the beginning of the interview, but this is what got us in trouble, really, in the first place.
The Declaration of War from 1996 is called the Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
That doesn't mean Saudi Arabia.
That means Arabia.
That means that peninsula.
I'm looking at a map of Yemen, and I did my fingers for the map legend key there, and I measured the distance between Dallas and Austin, which is a couple of hundred miles there.
So it looks to me like from the beach of Yemen, the southern beach of Yemen to Mecca is about 400 miles.
Would it be a good or a bad idea, do you think, Michael Shorter, to put American combat forces on the ground in Yemen?
After all, this is the land where the switchboard for Al-Qaeda was in the lead-up to 9-11.
This is where the USS Cole was bombed.
And all over TV and all over everywhere, they say that these are the guys who put the Nigerian on the plane in Detroit.
Do we need to go have a war in Yemen to solve this problem now?
It would be an endlessly bad idea.
Yemen is, if anything, far more infiltrated, occupied by Al-Qaeda than Afghanistan ever will be.
It would be one hell of a fight for nothing.
Al-Qaeda is thoroughly entrenched.
Al-Qaeda helped put the current president of Yemen, President Saleh, into power back in the 90s during the civil war.
So the idea that, A, we could go there and fight, we would lose, B, that we're going to give lots of money and guns to Saleh and he's going to do it, is another foolishness.
The reality of the matter, Scott, is we have a problem in Yemen.
And soon we'll have a problem somewhere else.
And soon we'll have a problem, after that we'll have another problem.
As long as we remain where we are with our policies and our presence, this is going to grow.
And if we want to take care of America, we've got to get out.
Alright, well, it's not that we're getting away with bloody murder and it's good for us.
This is terrible for us.
This is destroying our society as well as those that we bomb.
Well wait till we get attacked again, Scott.
What will happen then, under a Democratic or Republican president, it doesn't matter.
It will make George W. Bush look like Clarence Darrow.
The attack on civil liberties after the next attack in the United States will be something to fear.
When you talk about an existential threat, it doesn't have to be the end of the world with fire and explosions.
It can simply be the end of the way of life you've lived for 200 years.
And that's the possibility that comes because we have so screwed up all of this mess.
And is that what you were going to say before I interrupted you there?
No, the only thing I wanted to say is I would really encourage you to listen to the things I say.
I try to be consistent across the board and I would appreciate people telling me if I wasn't, but I laid out for Lou Dobbs on the radio yesterday afternoon just precisely what you and I talked about tonight, so I do try to be consistent.
Well, that's good and I appreciate it and I know that everybody can't agree with me on everything and I think you're, you know, certainly I agree with the vast majority of what you say.
Have you changed your mind at all about the torture issue?
I mean, that thing you wrote in the Washington Post just sent my hackles up so bad.
I mean, we discussed this a little bit in the case of the Detroit thing, but you're the guy who says, and has always said, Bin Laden himself refers people to you and your book to say the reason they attack us is because of what we do to them.
And of course, torture is among the biggest parts of that.
I mean, I'm in Al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for example, neither of them were terrorists until after they were tortured.
Mike?
Well, I think, you know, I can't agree with you more on this, but I support it until we find a way to defend ourselves.
You cannot strip away the things that are effective to some degree until you have something to replace them.
Yeah, but I mean, are they even effective?
Doesn't the FBI always do better interrogating these guys than beating them against the wall?
You have to be a little bit careful.
The idea that Obama would say anything except that the FBI is being successful with the underwear bomber is impossible.
No, I agree with that, but I'm thinking of The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, where the FBI was doing pretty good, and then the CIA came in and started torturing them.
Well, that's of course the FBI story, isn't it?
And that's the story that always prevails, because they can't do law enforcement very well, but they do public relations very well.
Well, I certainly agree with that.
But I mean, do you really think that beating it out of some guy, well, I mean, hey, they brought you out of the library and back to Alex Station after September 11th.
I mean, were you involved in this?
Were you the head analyst while people were being tortured and you're getting information out of them?
Yes.
And were you in the room for that, or you were over the live link, or what?
Not in the room, but I was involved in providing questions and examining the evidence, or the information that was passed back to us, yes.
And you think that it works great?
I don't think that it works great.
What I'm saying is that, what are you going to do if you don't do it?
If you have a military that is incapable of winning a war and defending you, as this military has proven to be, if you have a president that is unwilling to even level with the American people about what the war is about, then what do you do?
Well, but the torture, you know, is what made the insurgency.
That's what Matthew Alexander says.
Well, you know, he's defending his one success in life.
They killed Zarqawi.
Well, good.
I'm glad they killed him.
Yeah, but he said that every insurgent that he talked to said that they were there because of the pictures of Guantanamo and of Abu Ghraib.
Well, what the hell do you think they would say?
They're taught to mislead, and they're taught to fight the war from the cell.
Scott, I would rather kill them all on the battlefield.
I wouldn't want to capture one of them, but if you capture them, you're going to have to use them.
The idea is we have chosen, as the greatest power in the world, to fight this war with renditions, interrogations, the predator, and the special forces.
Traditionally, those things are what complement a military effort.
They're not the military effort.
And right now, we're just being outclassed by the enemy across the board.
We had that idiot in Kabul yesterday say that we don't need to collect intelligence against the people who are attacking us and killing us.
We need to collect information about how the Afghan farmers live and the rest of it, so we can build a nation here.
At some point, somebody has to stand up for America.
Yeah.
Well, but see, and then that gets down to the root of things again, too, is what is America anyway?
I mean, the whole thing about America from the get-go is it's right there in Amendment No.
5 and in Amendment No.
8.
No torture.
Well, of course.
But when the people who wrote those, they never assumed that the President of the United States would be unwilling to defend his country using the military.
Never.
Do you think Washington would have blanched at wiping out whatever enemy attacked us on 9-11, or any of the other presidents?
It's a modern phenomenon.
Yeah, but what is it doing to our society?
I mean, what's worth preserving when we all become a bunch of barbarians who are willing to tie somebody up and then beat him up?
I mean, that's not America.
That's not what we're supposed to be doing.
What would Ron Paul say about that, man?
You tie a guy up and then you beat him up, Mike.
That's America?
That's a sorry excuse for national defense, isn't it?
Well, it certainly is, but I mean, damn, what's worth defending if that's what we do?
You can't have it both ways, Scott.
If you're not going to do these things, and I wish we weren't, then you're going to have to go out there and kill the enemy.
And the idea that you can do it with precision weapons and only kill one or two people is insane.
I'm sorry, because now I'm confused again.
You don't want to bomb Yemen, though, because that would be an absolute disaster, right?
You don't want to bomb.
You don't want to put boots on the ground.
You want to avoid any more engagement.
But if you can find somebody in Yemen who you think is responsible for that almost attack on Christmas Day, then let it rip.
Well, but I thought that was kind of the criticism before, was that we're willing to go after them with air power, but that doesn't ever really work, because you miss when you're at 20,000 feet.
But Yemen is not an important place, Scott, in terms of our future.
The future, the thing we need to do is located in Afghanistan.
It is where it was located at 9-11, it's where it was located in 1998.
All the rest of it is noise if we take care of that.
Okay, so you want boots, you want the Marines to do this on the Afghan-Pakistan border, and then call it quits?
Is that what you're doing?
Yeah.
Do it and get out.
And you can pull out of Yemen, and you can pull out of everywhere else if you solve the al-Qaeda problem.
Let the rest of those people kill themselves till their hearts are content.
And as long as I have you here, do you think that Osama bin Laden is still alive?
Yeah, without question.
Why without question?
Because, well, at least without question, up until the last time he spoke, which was about, what, three months ago now, we're very good, technically, on voice print.
They do a voice print, and if it didn't match, we would surely hear it.
And they match them all the time.
We also know that they don't try to hide the deaths of leaders.
They never have in the last 12 years.
In addition, they would be celebrating, as you know, because he would have embraced martyrdom.
And more than that, when we talk about the organization, the organization provides or prepares for succession, there's somebody ready to take his place.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm not sure if I picked that up from you in the first place or not, but that is what I thought, that, you know, it would have been all over TV in Pakistan, that he died and went to heaven, and you crumb bums never got him, and all that kind of thing.
Absolutely.
I think it would be as hard to keep the death of a president secret as it would be to keep the death of bin Laden secret.
Well, I guess there are those who say that there were stories back in December of 2001 that he died, and it wasn't a secret then, but everybody on the West just decided to ignore it because they wanted to pretend he was still alive.
Well, yeah, I read those stories too, Scott, but I, you know, I have, you have to, at some point, accept the evidence that seems available.
And I've listened to all of his speeches that I've been able to, and the voice sounds the same, the pictures look the same, the voice prints are the same.
You can't operate on the principle that you hope he's dead.
I do hope he's dead, but I don't think he is.
Hoping is what Obama does.
I hope thinking is what I do.
Yeah, yeah, well, I'm not too into hope myself.
All right, well, thanks very much.
I appreciate your time on the show today, Michael, as always.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's Michael Shoyer, former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alex Station, and author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism and Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq.
