For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
The population seems to have already decided that it's just a distraction from the attorney firing scandal that the government released this transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's so-called confession at a hearing at Guantanamo Bay.
But I don't care about the US Attorney scandal at all, so I'm not being distracted.
This is actually what I'm interested in, the so-called confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Here to help examine and explain, Michael Scheuer, the former director, head analyst of Alex Station, the CIA's bin Laden unit.
He worked there from 96 to 99 and again from 2001 through 2004.
He's the author of Through Our Enemy's Eyes and Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you, I'm glad to be back again.
Yeah, it's good to talk to you again.
Thank you.
Now, in fact, let me start right there with your years at Alex Station.
Your Wikipedia entry says 96 through 99 and then again 2001 through 2004, so is that accurate and if so, what was going on in the meantime there?
I worked in the in between time, I worked in counter narcotics in southwest Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then after 9-11 was brought back to work on Al-Qaeda full time.
So really in the immediate run up to the attack, you were not involved in monitoring Al-Qaeda at that point?
No, I was in the sense that there's nothing that happened in Afghanistan that wasn't somehow involved with Al-Qaeda in the Taliban.
I see, you're just focused more on the drug angle.
Right.
In fact, trying to get at Al-Qaeda through the drug angle.
There was another avenue into it.
Okay, well, if it's okay with you, Mike, what I'd like to do here is talk about the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed transcript and fact and fiction and that kind of thing and then maybe we can get into, kind of in the larger sense, the run up to the September 11th attack and the various failures by the government to stop it.
I know you've told me before that it's your view that this is not a police matter, this is a war and these people have to be fought in a warlike fashion, but I trust that you don't approve of this sham Star Chamber tribunal that's going on at Guantanamo Bay?
Well, I don't see what the problem is with it.
You know, the West has encountered a situation which it refuses to do anything about and that's the fact that we're capturing prisoners of war who can never be released.
Instead of trying to kind of noodle our way through that problem, what we've done is just decided to scream at each other about due process and other kinds of legal accoutrements that are essential to life in the United States but are relevant to the conduct of this war.
Well, but these people are individuals and they're suspects basically, right?
Well, you know, it depends, Scott, where you come down on this.
I think the most important thing to do if America is to wage this war successfully is to decriminalize terrorism.
The problem is that these are not criminals, these are warriors and as long as you treat them as criminals, then a man like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed can identify 30 attacks against the United States in which he was involved either peripherally or hands-on and instead of people being impressed by that, they're condemning the United States for some kind of a lack of sensitivity toward this individual.
Well, I'm not so concerned about sensitivity towards the guy but I don't want him tortured and confessing to things that he didn't really do.
Well, you know, I'm not sure.
I think the whole torture thing is blowing out of proportion because of that windbag McCain and his lust to be president.
There was no torture that I was aware of until the time I resigned and there was nothing we ever did that wasn't approved by the lawyers throughout the federal government.
Well, we know that the Defense Department rewrote the rules for how these men are to be handled and from various testimonies at Abu Ghraib prison that there were CIA officers there involved in that, giving orders that these men are to be softened up for interrogation later, etc.
Well, certainly there was no CIA involvement to any extent at Abu Ghraib and the idea that a CIA officer could order the military to do anything is just a fundamental mistake in terms of knowing how our government works.
Well, I understand, you know, chain of command, but have we not read that at Abu Ghraib that there were intelligence officials, CIA and some private contractors and people unknown who were all sort of involved in the same thing?
What I've read were basically that what I've read about the things at Abu Ghraib, they were almost overwhelmingly military things.
The CIA has never been involved in torturing these people at all in any part of this rendition process.
I don't know, I wouldn't call what they were involved in.
Listen, torture is against the law in the United States.
Ergo, if we were doing anything regarding these prisoners, it was legal within the confines of the United States legal system.
So when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed rattles off this list of attacks that he says he was involved in, now some of these I know to be true, the plot to kill Bill Clinton and the Pope in the Philippines in 1995.
But it also kind of seems like he's going overboard and claiming credit for all kinds of attacks that I think it was pointed out that one of the banks that he says he was planning to attack wasn't even founded until after he was captured.
If you read what he said carefully, and it's surprising because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has a very big ego, he doesn't claim credit for all of those attacks.
The list also extends over 11 years, some of the operations before he joined Al-Qaeda.
So we're talking about less than three operations a year, that doesn't seem excessive to me.
And on any given day when I was at the CIA, I could have claimed something very similar to being involved in 30 or 40 different operations simply because I was responsible for them going on.
To me, it's a very common sense, unpassionate argument or presentation that he made.
Okay, well, I don't know if I can convince you, but I'd like to argue with you a little bit more.
When you say that the problem is the criminalization of terror, we have to just treat this like a war, I would just take the exact opposite stance and say that what it is is it's criminal activity.
It's very serious criminal activity, but that if we had approached the so-called war on terrorism as a criminal matter, for the most part after September 11th, perhaps sent the Special Forces and the Marine Corps to kill Al-Qaeda at Tora Bora.
But after that, it seems like this is a job for Interpol.
The Special Forces here and there may be, but for the most part, these are individuals that have to be nabbed on by one.
Well, if you're going to do that, you and I are both going to be dead before we make any dent in this business at all.
You know, the military or the government at any given time claims to have killed 4,000 to 5,000 of these people or captured them.
If you can identify in history a single terrorist group that had 4,000 or 5,000 people in it, I would be surprised.
Right, well, but isn't that because we keep making more of them?
No, I don't think so.
Well, we make more of them in the global sense, of course we do, but it has nothing really much to do with what our government says it has to do with.
It doesn't have anything to do with freedom.
It doesn't have anything to do with liberty or gender equality.
And frankly, it has nothing to do with crime.
It has to do with the weak waging war against the strong, and this is the way it works throughout history.
And what it has to do is with what our government has done over the past 35 years in the Islamic world.
And that's not to say what we've done is wrong, it's simply saying that that's the motivation.
And what we're engaged in is a very widespread war against people who will continue to fight us with any weapon they can find until our policies change.
Well, so, if, I don't know, Ron Paul was elected president and he brought our troops home and it was an end to all Wilsonian interventionism from here on out, would we be able to fight the terrorists that are left with just cops?
Probably, yes.
I think the greatest thing we can do to defend America is a couple of things.
First, close the borders.
Second, tell the American people what this is about.
It's not about gender equality and Budweiser beer.
Third, spend whatever it takes to control the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and on the bigger issue you spoke about, to begin to disengage from the Middle East.
The best thing we can do to fracture our enemy and to turn our enemy against each other is to disengage from the Middle East.
But again, withdrawing the troops is only a start.
We have to do something about oil.
Right, but if we continue to wage the war, well, I guess here's the thing.
If I say police work and you say war, George Bush sides with you but then goes and invades people that you wouldn't have wanted him to invade.
And it seems to me like the war, fighting the quote-unquote war on terrorism with the military is actually just adding one more list of grievances to the pile, like you say, these foreign policy grievances that these people have.
Well, I think to some extent that's true, and that's why I always come back to telling the truth to the American people about why we're being attacked.
But at the moment, what we're edging toward, because we won't admit that or we won't accept that reality, is we're edging toward becoming a big Israel.
The only thing we're going to have left to defend ourselves is the U.S. military and the intelligence services, because we're not an attractive commodity in any sense to Muslims at the moment because of what we do in the Islamic world.
So, you know, it's a tremendously big problem, but you have to defend yourself with the tools you make available for your use, and right now, because our governing elite outside of Mr. Paul has no contact points with reality, the only thing we have really left to us is military and intelligence.
Right, but even when it comes to that, you look at what happened at Tora Bora, they closed the place off on three sides and left one wide open, and Bin Laden and his 80 closest friends all escaped to Pakistan, where they still live free to this day.
Well, that's only because our generals let them do it.
The generals were advised, and I know this firsthand because I was at the Washington end of the operation, they were advised that the Afghans they were going to work with were friends of Bin Laden and would never catch him, but they were so desperate to avoid U.S. casualties that they went ahead and subcontracted with people who were always a day late.
Well, and that's the kind of thing that's, I think, really frustrating to me and probably to the general population at large, that Americans don't like high casualties, but you know what, we'd have taken some to get Bin Laden.
We've taken 3,000 fighting in Iraq over nothing.
That's right.
You're exactly right.
I think the greatest vulnerability Al Qaeda has is that they assume that our governing elite is representative of Americans as a whole, and I think Americans as a whole, the guy who's actually trying to make a living and send his kids to school, is much more bloody minded and much more realistic than Mr. Bush or Mr. McCain or Mrs. Clinton, and eventually that's what's going to save the country, but I'm afraid it's not going to happen until we get attacked again in a manner that's worse than 9-11.
Wow.
See, I would have said that the average American is a lot more reasonable and a lot less bloody minded than our leadership.
No, I think Americans, what they don't like is the lack of results.
I think they're willing to spend the lives of their children to protect their country if the game is worth the candle.
In Afghanistan, I think the president could have done virtually anything after 9-11 to produce results.
I don't think there would have been any qualms except maybe among the ACLU in this country, but he didn't do it.
For reasons that escaped me, but he didn't do it.
And then they went to Iraq, which has just made everything 35 times worse.
Yeah, you called it back then the hoped for but unexpected gift to bin Laden.
And Scott, that didn't take any genius on my part at all.
It was simply, you know, these guys are now trying to hide behind what they call unintended consequences.
But the more you look at all of these things, you can have unintended consequences that are not unpredictable consequences.
There's virtually nothing that's happened in Iraq or Afghanistan that couldn't have been predicted by a history student with a bachelor's degree.
Yeah, well, to be sure, it was predicted wide and far by the anti-war forces in the run up to the war.
Absolutely.
I mean, even, well, and this is kind of a good tie in, Colleen Rowley, who complained that she was not allowed by the FBI to search Zacharias Moussaoui's computer, etc., complained as part of her same complaint that if you invade Iraq, this is going to make our terrorism problem that much worse.
You know, absolutely.
And that's, I think you touch on another reason why we can't really treat this as a criminal problem is that the FBI is an utterly incompetent organization.
Not the working people at Ms. Rowley's level, but in the upper levels of the bureau, the leadership in that organization cares nothing about America, cares only about protecting the bureau's interest.
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't have any disagreement with that.
In fact, when I spoke with Peter Lantz, who's written all about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Reza Youssef and them, he was happy that there was a new Department of Homeland Security, even though he was worried about the constitutional implications for the future and that kind of thing.
He said, look, you got to have somebody other than the FBI work in this case or it's not going to get worked.
That's exactly right.
There are very courageous and intelligent individuals in the FBI at the working level, but the leadership is just a lost cause.
Even Mr. Mueller, a former Marine, hasn't been able to make them realize that there's more to life for America than simply the FBI's reputation.
Right.
And, you know, from FBI agents I've talked to in all different kinds of circumstances, even speaking with Frederick Whitehurst about Waco and Oklahoma City back in the 1990s.
That's what he said.
They cared about nothing but their own reputation, protecting themselves.
They are totally a 19th century organization except for their public relations apparatus, and that is first rate.
Yeah.
Well, so we don't have any of their PR flax here, so let's go ahead and get to how responsible the FBI is for the September 11th attack even being successful.
How could it be that 19 hijackers are wandering around this country in the weeks and months leading up to this attack and the FBI weren't following every step these guys took?
Well, I think you can lay that directly at the feet of Judge Freeh.
He was completely at fault for not being able to provide his officers with a computer system that allowed the entire Bureau to communicate with each other and to communicate with the intelligence community.
Judge Freeh was a Luddite.
And to this day, they don't have a computer system that meshes across their organization and with the intelligence community.
One of the great disasters of the 9-11 Commission was not to just simply say to Judge Freeh, you failed, you deliberately failed because you knew your organization needed a computer system.
Why could 19 people go across the country?
Because terrorism is a job that requires extraordinary detail and accumulation of bits of information and then an ability to analyze them.
And the problem is that if you can't do it electronically, it won't get done.
You can't do it on the basis of three by five note cards anymore.
And part of the reason the FBI field at home is simply they're not into the information technology age yet.
One of the things that's been in dispute, I believe between FBI and CIA agents, at least it was in dispute, was when exactly the CIA got around to telling the FBI about Midhar and al-Hamsi.
You know, Scott, this is the issue that keeps coming up and all I can tell you is what I told the 9-11 Commission under oath.
When I was the chief of the unit and under my successors, the FBI had access to every piece of information that the agency collected at the time it was collected.
The only thing FBI officers didn't read that I did were personal fitness reports for CIA officers stationed overseas.
We had three or four officers from the FBI sitting in ALEC, which was the bin Laden unit.
They got every piece of information I got and they were there for two reasons.
First, to find out whether or not there was a threat to the United States.
Second, so they could act on it because the CIA cannot act inside the United States.
So, you know, multiple officers told this to the 9-11 Commission under oath and the Commission didn't want any part of it.
Why didn't it get to the FBI?
I think the answer lies in our first bit of conversation.
There was no easy way to get it there.
They had to carry it over in hard copy because we couldn't communicate electronically with the FBI.
Now, did you see Christopher Ketchin's report in Counterpunch recently?
I did not, no.
Okay, well, he did a great investigative report about the Israeli art students and the so-called movers who it seems were Israeli intelligence officers who were following these guys around.
Do you know anything about that?
I know the Israelis are very active inside the United States and the government consistently tries to suppress any kind of publication of that information.
Yes, there were Israeli students popping up all over the country and no one, of course, wanted to report it because the White House doesn't want to hear anything bad about the Israelis or about the Saudis.
So both of those countries actually do whatever they want inside of America and no one really calls them to task on it.
Well, you know, he has an interesting sidebar to that story about Midhar and Hamzi.
And he says that the CIA's story about how they identified these guys as being al-Qaeda was because they saw him with this guy, Khalid, at the Malaysia meeting in January of 2001.
But Ketchum says that that's not true, that in fact, Khalid wasn't at that meeting.
And the CIA officers who identified Midhar and Hamzi at that meeting have said that, no, this guy, Khalid wasn't there.
They didn't observe him there, et cetera, and that there's therefore this giant hole in the CIA's story about how they learned that Midhar and Hamzi were actually al-Qaeda tied.
And he says that the FBI watchlisted them the day after or two days after a meeting with Israeli intelligence and that that was a much more reasonable explanation for how the FBI found out about these guys was not from the CIA at all, but from the Israelis.
Well, Scott, I don't know the answer to that question.
This is the first time I've ever heard anyone question whether or not Khalid was there.
So I, you know, and I no longer have access to the file.
But, you know, the whole question of what the Israelis are up to in this country is simply one that needs to be addressed at some point.
But as long as both parties are owned by by IPAC, there's not much that's going to happen.
I guess, you know, we have to always be very careful with language, but I think I've read some statements of yours before where you you nearly refer to Israel's attempt to hold American foreign policy as a covert operation itself.
Oh, it is a covert operation, of course.
It's a covert political operation.
The ability to affect politics in a foreign country does not happen willy nilly or by caprice or by chance.
It's very clear what's going on in this country.
And it's a stupendously successful Israeli covert action program.
They should be congratulated for it.
I wish the United States could do something.
That whole business this past summer over the report by or the paper by Stephen Walt and John Mersheimer.
It was a perfect example of how covert political action is supposed to work.
The Israelis didn't raise a word.
It was Americans savaging other Americans in defense of a foreign country.
OK, now more pre 9-11 questions here.
Sebelle Edmonds talks about seeing paperwork or being exposed to documents that say that there was an informant, an Iranian informant who in April of 2001 warned specifically of multiple hijacks and attacks with those planes in up to four cities, I think was the way she said it.
And the 9-11 Commission never mentioned this guy.
And as far as I know, she's the only source on this.
Do you know who she's talking about and whether that's true?
I do not.
And I frankly, you know, on the whole question of using airliners as weapons, we reported that Al Qaeda or people related to Al Qaeda were intended to do that in February, March 1995.
The government chose not to do anything about it.
This was the Bojinka plot.
Yes, this was after after Ramsey's computer had been captured in Manila after he had been debriefed.
And I think a couple of his sidekicks also were involved in that.
So, you know, it's not like this should have come as a real surprise to somebody, but I guess it did.
Well, now, I guess if I was to try to defend Bush, I would say, well, you know, Bojinka, that was way back in 95.
Bush and Cheney wouldn't have known anything about that.
But if this Iranian was warning them in the spring, then that's surely their responsibility.
Well, Scott, you know, I'm not again, I'm not familiar with Ms. Edmonds source or with the document she's talking about.
So I really you know, I really don't know what to say here, except that I don't know.
All right.
That's fine.
So let me ask you about Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.
He was reportedly the guy who sent one hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta on orders from an ISI or a Pakistani general named Mahmoud.
Is is it your understanding that that's where the financing for the attack came from?
I would doubt it very seriously.
The Pakistanis, if the Pakistanis were in a position to have stopped that operation, they would have done so.
That operation was very compartmented within Al Qaeda.
There's never a need for any money to come anywhere from anywhere except from in Al Qaeda.
They're flush with money.
And so I think that, you know, that's a good story.
But I don't I don't think that it's true.
So after the attack, when you're working at Alex Station, did you guys not go back and trace all the money and and kind of reconstruct how the attack happened, that sort of thing?
Well, we tried to do as much of that as we could.
But, you know, once an attack happens, what you want to do is to try to stop the next one.
And doing the history of it falls to either the analytics shop or to the FBI.
The FBI does history.
It's just, you know, I'm not trying to go off into, you know, missile hit the Pentagon land or anything like that.
But the story is that this guy sent one hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta.
And apparently he's also been convicted for slitting the throat of Daniel Pearl.
So it would seem to me that, you know, here's a guy who's tied to the financing and is also been convicted of murdering a Wall Street Journal reporter who seems to have been hot on his trail.
Well, you know, I'm sorry here, Scott.
I think I must have misunderstood.
I thought you said that a general named Mahmoud sent the money.
Well, it was it was Ahmed Omar Said Sheikh who sent it.
And then I guess it was the Times of India and and I believe the FBI confirmed that that he sent it, but he was on orders from General Mahmoud, his superior.
Well, I think Omar Sheikh is a Kashmiri who was involved, who was involved in that plane hijacking from India to Afghanistan back in 90s, in the 90s.
He's an independent operator.
He may have a connection to the Pakistani government, but I was not aware of a connection between Omar Sheikh and Mohammed Atta.
I would again, I would be very surprised if there was one.
And now let's go back to this Bojinka plot in 1995.
I'm really interested in in understanding the best book I've read about this so far is James Bamford's book, A Pretext for War, where he does, I think, a pretty decent job of tracing the history of Ramzi Yousef and how after the first World Trade Center bombing, he escaped to Pakistan, where he and Wali Khan Amin Shah and Abdul Hakeem Murad came up with the Bojinka plot.
But then at some point, well, I guess, as you say, the laptop Murad was captured and Amin Shah was captured.
But Yousef escaped to Pakistan.
And it was then that he and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed struck up their alliance with Osama bin Laden.
Is that right?
I think that's a little early.
There was some when we got Ramzi, I think he had just been staying or was going to stay in a safe house that was associated with Al Qaeda.
But Khalid and Ramzi were very much they were of the same mind as Al Qaeda, but they were much more interested in Palestinian things first.
And so they steered clear of Al Qaeda.
Ramzi never joined and KSM didn't join until the late 90s.
Their association with Wali Khan Amin Shah, though, is an interesting one, which was never fully explained, because Wali Khan was one of the first people that went to Afghanistan with bin Laden.
So there's a very close connection between Amin Shah and Osama.
But KSM and Ramzi, it never happened with Ramzi and KSM.It didn't happen until the late 90s.
OK.
And just to be fair, for the record, it's been a long time since I read Bamford's book, so I didn't mean to mischaracterize.
I'm sure he told the story much more accurately than I just repeated it.
You know, there's a very good book, too, on Bojinka with about 80 pages in it.
I think it was published in 2000 or 2001 by a British journalist named Simon Reeves.
It's called The New Jackal.
And there's a very good analysis of the Bojinka plot in that.
Now, it seems to me, well, I don't know, I'll go this direction.
November 2001, about a month after the attack, an investigative reporter named Greg Palast at the BBC came out with a story that said that some FBI and NSA and I believe maybe CIA as well had come to him saying, it ain't right.
What's happened is for the last year, we've had all this pressure on us to not investigate the Saudis, to not investigate bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Now, Greg Palast said that he did not believe and he had no evidence that said that this was because they wanted the attack to happen.
But instead, he said that this was because Prince Turkey, al Faisal and Prince Bandar had paid a bunch of protection money to bin Laden's bag men at a meeting at a hotel in Paris in 1996.
And that these business relationships with the Republicans basically were embarrassing enough that they wanted to put pressure on all these investigations to slow down or shut down so as to save the Bush family embarrassment.
Do you know anything about that or agree with that?
That's a very partisan story and I think it does a disservice to the bigger story, which is the American government under either party want to know nothing bad about the Saudi.
I know for a fact that there was no let up in CIA operations against al Qaeda in the period you talked about, Scott.
But there is a reluctance.
I worked for four different presidents under four different presidents and none of them want to know anything negative about Saudi Arabia or Israel.
And the claim that we don't work hard enough to find out what the Saudis are up to around the world or what the Israelis are up to in the United States, both of those are exactly true statements.
Yeah, I think the way Palast said it was that Clinton had one eye closed and Bush came and closed the other eye.
Well, it goes back, you know, it's his dad.
Even President Reagan, who I have the greatest respect for, his administration was also convinced that the Saudis are our friends.
And I think there's very little that's further from the truth.
Okay, now this is just crazy conspiracy theory land, but I figure I might as well get your take on it.
I met a guy right around the time the Baghdad was falling who, you know, he may have been blowing smoke up my ass.
I don't really know.
I guess it could have all been just been lies, but he seemed like a pretty honest guy.
And we had a pretty in-depth conversation.
And he was one or the other branch of the military intelligence and worked at the Pentagon.
And what he told me was that many people knew the day of the attack.
He said they did not know who they didn't know which airport, which plane, what time or enough to stop it.
But that many people knew that September 11th was going to be the day of the big attack, that many people were not at work that day at all.
That his wife, he said, who worked at the State Department showed up and said, boy, this is kind of weird.
Nobody's here.
I think I'm going home.
And that there was kind of a widespread knowledge, at least at some levels in Washington, D.C., that something big was going to go down that day.
Scott, I never heard that.
I was at the agency that day and it was business as usual.
And in looking back in retrospect, I never heard one person ever claim even that they knew that something was going to happen on that particular day.
The only piece of evidence I ever heard of it was the materials published by NSA two or three days after the attack.
Well, we know that the National Security Council put out a report in July that then Tenet and Black at least claimed that they went and gave these hair on fire warnings to Rice, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld in July.
You know, what gets missed there, though, and I have to say, you know, I carry no brief for this administration, but the problem we have with this particular enemy is if they went to the president on the first of August and said, this is going to happen, that's going to happen, this may happen, the question comes down to what does the president do and whether we like it or not, between the president's election and 9-11, he had no chance to kill Osama bin Laden because we couldn't find him.
The difference between Bush and Clinton in that regard is enormous.
Clinton could have ended this problem for us in 98.
He chose not to do it.
He had the chance.
He not only had the warning that people were going to attack us, but he had the location of the man who would be responsible for it.
You've said before that he blew as many as eight to ten different chances.
Yes, he could have captured bin Laden twice and the military could have killed him eight times.
Eight times?
Yes.
And that's a low estimate.
The former chief of station in Islamabad believes that they had 13 opportunities, but I've never had a chance to sit down and see how he counts the 13.
And so then you and your team at the CIA and the military as well were under orders to not kill or capture this guy?
Well, of course, any time the United States undertakes a potentially lethal action, either with the intelligence service or with the military, it has to be authorized by the president.
And on each of those occasions, the president refused to authorize activity.
Wow, so that wasn't in the 9-11 Commission report, I don't think, was it?
No, the 9-11 Commission will be as responsible, perhaps more responsible, than any other entity the next time Al Qaeda attacks us inside the United States.
For their refusal to explain what really happened this time?
Not only to explain what really happened, but to blame people and point fingers.
Right, no one was held responsible.
No one was held responsible, that's exactly right.
And so instead they focused on the kind of amorphous structure of the intelligence community.
Well, the intelligence community is run by individuals and we got to 9-11 because those individuals either were failures or negligent in their jobs.
And frankly, I think that this is a point that the 9-11 kooks have right, which is that there's been no accountability here and let's at least see some people tried for criminally negligent homicide and get them snitching on their bosses.
Well, you know, I'm not really sure what, if it's criminal or not, it's criminal in the sense that it's detestable, but I know myself and I know at least a dozen other people who testified under oath, the specific instances where senior intelligence managers didn't do what could have been done to protect the United States, and none of that came out in the 9-11 commission report.
It's going to be interesting to see when or if they ever released their archives, because all of our testimony was recorded and transcribed, so it's all in their archive, but I don't know if that's ever going to be released.
Yeah, in 75 years or so, probably.
Okay, now let me ask you about the Sudan offer real quick.
I remember back in the 1990s even, I think, that Sudan had offered to turn Bin Laden and not only him, but his guys and all their intelligence on him and his guys, and that Bill Clinton refused, is that right?
You know, Scott, I have to say that I was the chief of operations at that time against Bin Laden, and this whole episode with the Sudan, I was not aware of it.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
There's lots of things that intelligence officers are cut out of, but I was never aware of an offer like that, and the thing that I think everybody should remember is that the last thing the Saudis would have wanted was to have Bin Laden turned over to the United States, and they were in a position to stop the Sudanese from doing that.
So I think that it's a story that's interesting.
I don't know of any confirmation of it, but it's certainly something that could be looked at more closely.
Yeah, and you know, the other eight or ten is enough.
Okay, now one last question here.
I know you have to go.
You reviewed the Sudan-Bin Laden evidence for the CIA after September 11th, and you've said...
Well, not alone, but I led the effort.
That's right.
And you've said before you found nothing.
Nothing, sir.
Now, the question is, did you feel pressure from the vice president's office and he and Scooter Libby's visits to Langley to come up with connections where there were none?
No.
In fact, I don't carry a brief at all for George Tenet, but he deserves great credit on this because he took it on himself to address the claims made by Mr. Fyfe and the Department of Defense.
I think probably if there was pressure to do anything, it was not to take another look, because when we did take a look, and again, we went through about 80,000 pages of material that went back nine and a half or ten years, we found absolutely nothing that could support Mr. Fyfe's claim.
And so I think that's one moment the agency should be proud of, and certainly Tenet should be proud of it.
So they didn't give in so much on the connections to Al Qaeda as much as they did on the weapons?
Well, certainly from my level.
I know what the research turned up, and I know what the paper that the analysts wrote said, and that said there was no connection.
What eventually found its way to the White House and the Cabinet, I have no way of knowing, Scott.
All right, and I guess I'll just let you go with one more time if I can ask you to explain the motivation of our jihadist enemies.
What is it that they're trying to get us to do?
They're trying to get us out of the way.
We're not even their main enemies here, Scott.
Their main enemies are Israel, and even more than Israel, they've lived under tyrannies now for 50 years, whether it's the police state in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, or Yemen.
And they have decided, whether it's true or not is an open question, but they have decided that the only way these governments exist, as continue to exist and continue to govern them, is through the largesse of the United States, either through American diplomatic or military support, or through direct funding, as in the case of Israel and Egypt.
And their goal is to get us, to hurt us badly enough that we will withdraw to some extent from the Middle East, to the greatest extent possible, so they can take on what they feel is their real enemy, the police states that are run by the Arabs and the Israelis.
Do you believe that if America did leave, that they would be able to overthrow their local tyrannies that we've been supporting?
I think that's an open question, but I'm in favor of it first because I'm a resolute non-interventionist, but second, I can't think of a better thing than for them to be killing each other rather than killing Americans.
Yeah, or maybe, you know, just stop killing people altogether, but...
Well, there's a lot of score settling that's going to happen in the Islamic world.
You know, people tend to say, well, why can't they have a reformation like Christianity had a reformation?
But attendant to our reformation was a hundred years of religious wars, and I'm afraid that's what we're going to see as the Islamic world, if you will, works its way to its destiny.
All right, well, thank you very much again for your insight.
Michael Schoyer, he's the former head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alex Station.
He's the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism.
And if people want to read what you write nowadays, that's, we're at the Jamestown Foundation?
Jamestown Foundation, yes, jamestown.org, and the journal is called Terrorism Focus.
All right, thank you very much for your time today, Michael.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
You're very kind.
Thank you.
You're listening to Antiwar Radio on Chaos, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
