All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest, our first guest on the show today is Michael Shoyer.
He's the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit.
I think that's 96 through 99.
And then again, for a few years after September 11th, he and his team gave Bill Clinton, famously, gave Bill Clinton 10 different chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden before 9-11.
And he's the, he resigned in protest for the nine over the 9-11 commission report in 2000 and I think four or five.
He wrote the books, Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism, Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq, Through Our Enemy's Eyes, and then the new one is a biography of Osama bin Laden called Osama bin Laden.
Welcome back to the show.
Mike, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thank you very much.
Sorry about that.
I was top of my head.
I don't have a page in front of me, but anyway, so, um, well, you and I both know what we're here to talk about, but we got to lay the groundwork here a little bit, sir, are you a lifelong Republican voter or a Democratic one?
No, I've always voted for the Republican.
I don't think even a local election, I don't think I've ever voted for a Democrat.
Okay.
So you would define yourself as a political conservative then an American patriot?
Well, I don't think, you know, patriot is in the eye of the beholder.
Oftentimes I try to be a good American, but I'm, yeah, I guess I'd say it was a deeply conservative voter.
Right.
Okay.
Now, the reason I ask you this to start is because everybody knows that anti-war anything means no nothing.
Uh, granola crunch and sandal wearing hippies, uh, singing, just give peace a chance, uh, and that all conservatives who are serious, uh, know that America must wage eternal war forever because there are Muslims in the world and a certain percentage of them are extremists.
And once you're a Muslim extremist, you go to war against America to try to kill it and that now we must fight this defensive war against them, I guess, until the sun explodes, Mike.
Well, that's unfortunately that's kind of the way, um, it seems to be going.
Mr.
Perry, I heard, uh, governor Perry has, uh, Doug fighting of all people working for him, which certainly doesn't speak well of, of governor Perry's intelligence.
But, um, you know, we've talked about this before, Scott, the crux of this matter is we're at war because of what the U S government does in the Muslim world, not because of who we are as Americans or how we vote or send our girls to college or, uh, have democracy.
Um, the stuff that our presidents feed us, whether they're Republicans or Democrats have just been a lie.
And, um, the thing is this though, September 11th happened in 2001.
Yeah.
So if you're saying that it was, had anything to do with what America was doing in the middle East, you're asking people to believe that there was such a thing as the world before the 21st century.
Why would you want to go and bring up the old 20th century?
Might as well bring up the 19th.
What does that have to do with anything?
Well, it has everything to do with what we're up to and what the problems we have at the moment.
I think one of the great advantages of the people who fight us have is they have a very strong sense of their own history.
We have no sense of our own history at all.
Uh, we hear Mr.
Obama and Mr.
McCain, for example, say there's going to be secular democracy in North Africa.
And while that's a foolish thing to say on its face, uh, it's not even good history we've been at, uh, building our democracy or, or, or our Republicanism, small, our Republicanism since running meat in 1215, we've been at it 800 years and we're not perfect yet.
How do we expect the people with no separation of church and state and no inclination toward secularism to suddenly become secular Democrats just because Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Clinton tell them to.
Yeah.
Well, now, so let's talk about the start of this war on terrorism, because, uh, I don't know your view on the Kobar Towers attack.
Best I can tell that was the first real Al Qaeda attack against the United States in 96, shortly followed by the attack on the American embassy in Saudi Arabia.
And there was an attempt on a, a battleship, much like the coal that came later that failed.
There was the attacks on the embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in, uh, 98, then the USS Cole in the year 2000.
And then finally the September 11th attack.
It's not Islamic extremism.
It's something that the United States government did that got us into this mess with these crazies.
After all, they are Islamic extremists, uh, willing to kill themselves in order to kill Americans.
Well, they're certainly willing to die for their faith.
I think that's exactly right.
And I wouldn't, you know, they attacked us first.
Let me say that they started this war, but if we're going to fight a war, we might, might as well understand what motivates the enemy.
Uh, not so much to empathize with them, not to empathize with them at all, but simply to be able to defeat him, uh, through the use of military power and through the use of political power, our ability to change our own policies.
We were attacked because we were in their backyard.
As Mr.
Paul says, uh, we were in their countries.
We were in their territory.
That's what, that's what motivated them to attack us.
That doesn't mean America caused the war.
What it does mean is that people reacted to our policies and our activities by declaring war on us.
Uh, it's pretty simple and, and any, any real effort to, to try to get around that clear reality is simply a lie.
And that's what our politicians, especially our pro-Israeli politicians have been practicing for the last, well, for the last decade come Sunday.
Well, and that's what Dr.
Paul says is that if we ignore the fact that we can suffer consequences from the things that we do around the world, we ignore this at our own peril.
Well, that's exactly right, Scott.
We are, and that's kind of the crux of the argument.
I think it's the crux of what Dr.
Paul says.
You have to accept responsibility for what you do.
And well, what we did didn't cause a war.
It certainly motivated people to, to start a war against us and to, to keep ourselves immune from that reality, uh, simply makes us candidates for defeat and increasing amounts of damage to our economy, to our soldiers, to, to our society.
Well, and I think you told me before, I think it's in your book, uh, the way you explain it, that, uh, you know, yeah, who started it kind of is in the eye of the boulder here because Ayman al-Zawahiri always preached that America already was at war with Muslims everywhere, just that we were cowardly doing it by way of the puppet dictators in the region that we supported and, and things like that.
What they wanted to do was say, if you're at war with us, let's go ahead and bring it, go ahead and put your soldiers close enough where we can shoot at them and suicide bomb them.
Yeah, that's it.
Both al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, when he was alive, were, were intent on luring us onto their territory, into a Muslim country.
Attacks like the 9-11 attacks in the East Africa attacks, the bombings of the embassies are very hard to conduct and you can't do many of them.
So for the better part of a decade, they tried to lure us into Afghanistan, or at least for the better part of a half dozen years.
And the 9-11 finally turned the trick for them.
And now we're, we're retreating from Afghanistan, surely without victory, we can't even use the word victory because we don't know what it, what it means anymore.
And we're also retreating without accomplishing anything we set out to accomplish in Iraq.
Both of those, both of those will be identified in the Muslim world as defeat of the second superpower.
Well, but now our, our Afghanistan policy, if the, if the policy had simply been, you know, have the air force bomb the hell out of Al-Qaeda until there's no more than a couple of dozen left.
Now they finally got Osama bin Laden.
If that's all the policy ever was, then they'd have a victory, right?
It's only that they've decided they have to create a democracy there and abolish posh toon resistance by calling it all the Taliban and warring against it forever.
That's the war that they cannot win there, right?
Well, they certainly can't win it with the number of troops they have there at this time, or the few people that they're killing.
You know, if we were trying to defeat any other enemy, killing them one at a time, people would get left, would be left out of the white house.
But they've convinced the American people that there's so few of these folks that we can kill them one at a time.
And really, you know, bin Laden's goal while he was alive throughout his, throughout his career was not to defeat the United States militarily, but to inspire the Muslim world to attack us.
And if you look objectively at a map and mark out where there are Islamists, the military problems today, as compared to 9-11, there's, there's at least a dozen or more new ones in the past decade.
So the problem is growing.
Although the Al Qaeda problem, you can argue whether it's growing or not, but when bin Laden died, he died a success because the jihad is self-perpetuating now, and nothing does more for that than the invasion of Iraq and the maintenance of our foreign policy and the status quo condition.
Uh, well, um, you know, there's all these 9-11 conspiracy theories that have Al Qaeda working for the CIA all along and all that, but at least in a tongue and cheek way, I kind of suspect that the Republicans secretly work for the Saudis, for Osama bin Laden, and they've really done everything you wanted on the checklist, right?
Which is, uh, get us to invade with ground troops and spend, you know, send your generals racing after a flag upon which it is written Al Qaeda and spend your billions and billions of dollars till we bleed you to bankruptcy.
He's turned, helped to turn the United States into a police state, that choking life that he said that we will all lead now.
So we know what it feels like.
And he's helped to radicalize, got helped to get us to help him radicalize the entire Muslim world into this massive upheaval.
Well, certainly the, the, it's a growing movement, the movement that bin Laden did inspire, and I think Scott, for us, the reality will be, it comes to our streets in the next four or five years.
The last half, uh, six or five or six years of his life, they, they did a very good job at recruiting us citizen Muslims who, uh, now can speak to us citizen, others, us citizen Muslims in the United States in a idiom, in a vernacular that, that, uh, not Arabic, but English.
And they're clearly focused on causing, um, Hamas style attacks in the United States, in Australia, in Britain, in the English speaking countries generally.
And I think that's where we're going.
That's where we're headed.
Even before bin Laden died, uh, I think what they've leaked so far from what they've captured clearly indicates they were moving toward more domestic attacks while continuing to plan for a big attack.
Yeah.
Well, and they've successfully been able to, uh, recruit, um, what, two dozen or so Americans to go and fight in Somalia, not just Somali Americans either, but American Muslim converts to go fight in that holy war.
That's correct.
And of course the people, the person that directs their media operations in the English speaking countries is, um, uh, an American from North Carolina, a guy named Samir Khan, uh, he is by far the most popular, uh, preacher on the internet.
Um, and he is an American who speaks English perfectly.
Well, in Somalia I think is probably just the perfect microcosm of this whole thing.
Cause there's a holy war that didn't really get going until 2006.
Al Shabaab was this tiny little one of 13 groups that made up the Islamic courts union and the youngest, the youth, they were the ones with the least influence.
Then we go do a regime change over there.
Now we have an Al Shabaab and now the newspapers say, look, there's an Al Shabaab.
We have to have a war in Somalia.
Yeah.
Well, isn't that the real question, you know, about what develops now in this so called Arab spring, I tend to think that there's not going to be a secular democracy in any of the countries, but you're going to have an Islamic kind of government that may be more representative than any tyranny that, that, that they replace.
But the real question is not what they form, but what will Barack Obama and David Cameron and Sarkozy accept?
You know, your, your point is exactly on, had we accepted the Islamic courts government, Somalia wouldn't probably be not having the problems of violence, famine, and, and, um, splintering that it has now, but we couldn't stand the thought.
And we know so little about the enemy.
What do we do?
We authorize a Christian nation like Ethiopia to invade a Muslim country like Somalia.
So, uh, we are the architects of our, our destiny here.
Uh, Scott, we have our future in our hands.
Uh, we can't be defeated, but they, we can surely defeat ourselves.
And it seems like we're trying to do it.
All right.
So if a miracle of miracles, Ron Paul becomes the president of the United States and he tells all our troops to pack up all our sailors, everybody pack up your stuff and come home.
That's it.
We're going to, uh, minimize this, uh, what's left of this war on terrorism to the absolute minimum and call the rest of it off as fast as we can.
Um, is he just naive and setting us up for the Islamo-fascist caliphate to eventually come and take over North America?
No, I think that the caliphate business is just a hobby horse that's ridden by the pro-Israeli neoconservative block.
You know, I think bin Laden, all of his people that were here, he believed the caliphate coming, but only because God said one day the world would be all Muslim.
Uh, I'm very sure they believe it's just as likely as is the, in the Christian world, you wake up tomorrow to find everybody turns the other cheek and loves thy neighbor.
It's an ideal, but it's pretty far beyond reach.
I think certainly if Mr.
Paul was president, his view of the world is much more realistic in that America has certain interests that are life and death interests.
Unfortunately, one of them is energy.
Uh, another has always been freedom of the seas, but Mr.
Paul knows that no American, a Marine or, or soldier should die.
So Mrs.
Mohammed could vote and no, none of our people should die or money be expended to build a democracy where it's never going to be able to take root or at least not in anyone's lifetime.
So I would think that what you would have with Mr.
Paul is a very clear view of what America must do.
And perhaps more importantly, a very clear idea of what America must not do, and that's intervene.
This is the man that Osama bin Laden recommended his book.
He said, you want to know what I think about this stuff?
Read Michael Shoyer and his book, Imperial Hubris.
That's what, uh, Osama bin Laden said in a message a couple of years back.
And, uh, you know, I think that that's pretty, uh, a noteworthy comment because as you're making yourself very clear on this show, and as you make yourself very clear in the book, this has nothing to do with empathy for them and everything to do with how to protect America from them.
And so for him to recommend your book is not saying, look, here's, you know, I don't know some French guy saying that I'm great.
Here's my worst enemy being very realistic about what I'm trying to do here.
And if you guys want to know the truth, read what he says for crying out loud.
Well, it didn't win me a lot of friends, but, uh, you know, the truth is here, uh, Scott, we're in a fix because we're not willing to listen to what the enemy says.
Um, it's much like not listening, not reading what Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1923.
We would have been much better off to read that and, uh, take it very seriously.
But we didn't, we made the same mistake here.
Um, you know, of all the Republican candidates, Mr.
Paul clearly is the only one who has read this issue very closely and read what the enemy has said.
Of course, no one in the Democratic camp has read it because they're, they're almost Marxist Leninist in their belief that they're going to install the inevitable victory of, of democracy around the world.
So, um, in, in this morass we're in, uh, really Mr, only Mr.
Paul has a clear view.
Well, now, um, isn't it amazing in a way?
I mean, I guess I'm shocked, but not surprised or something that here we are 10 years later and still the official version on TV is that they attack us because they're Muslim extremists and Muslim extremism makes people hate freedom and beauty and democracy and good things.
And so we're left only to defend ourselves in this war that we started.
Well, yeah, you know, Scott, I don't know.
We've, we've talked about this before.
I just don't know what more to do, what more people can do to try to convince Americans that their leadership has misled them so seriously.
I tend to be very fatalistic at the moment that unless there is an enormous catastrophe in the United States, uh, it's not going to change.
Change has to come from the bottom up.
It will never come from the top down.
Change has to come from the bottom up.
It will never come from the top down.
And you know, the popular support that Mr.
Paul has been able to generate is a hopeful sign.
Whether it will be sufficient is another question.
But, um, the control of the media, uh, or at least the establishment control of the media is just so great that you're never going to hear anyone say, um, you know, we're at war because we support the Israelis.
We're at war because we support the Saudi police state because we support the Chinese persecution of Muslims in Western China.
You're never going to hear that from any, any kind of, uh, important, uh, uh, media outlet.
And so we go on fighting an enemy that doesn't exist, uh, bleeding ourselves with lives and money and civil liberties.
And, um, I don't know where I don't see an end to it.
Well, I think you do.
You mentioned it before.
It's the bankruptcy.
The, uh, when the, all this radicalism comes home to America, I think, well, I guess you were referring to, uh, you know, Muslims recruited in the United States by way of YouTube.
But there's also this whole, uh, you know, austerity measures headed our way big time here because we've spent trillions and trillions of dollars chasing snipe around the Middle East.
Yeah.
Well, that's, that's, that's exactly right.
And, uh, when they come here, uh, then, you know, if they came here today, if there was an attack in the next week, for example, they would make Barack Obama, uh, they would make George Bush Jr.
Dr.
Young George Bush rather look like an ACLU lawyer because Obama has no other choice, but to crack down on American.
Yeah.
They can only continue down the same path and never admit that they got off on the wrong foot 10 years back.
Well, I think are longer back than that, but certainly they got off on the wrong foot and they're absolutely unable to cope with the idea that, that, um, uh, the Muslim reaction to our foreign policy can be genuine or widespread.
They, they have to believe it's only held by a small number of people that we can kill one at a time.
And we've pretty much proved, I think, objectively that we can kill a lot of people one at a time and it doesn't make any difference to the cost to America.
Well now, and is that because there are so many terrorists in the world or just because they keep making 10 more every time they kill one, like Stanley McChrystal said, that's their insurgent math.
Well, I, I, I think, um, my own view is the impact of our policy generates, uh, and then, uh, an inordinate number of young Muslim men ready to pick up guns.
And do you, do you create more by killing people?
Well, I suppose that's correct too, but we are in a situation where we have to do something.
As long as our foreign policies remain the same, we have no option but to kill them, to defend ourselves.
It will never be sufficient.
It will never be victory.
But if you don't kill at least some number of them, the mass becomes greater and greater and greater just by not killing them.
Uh, you just let them grow.
And, and until you address the source of that motivation, the source of that growth, you have to continue to kill them.
Well now, okay.
So if we were talking about, let's rewind and pretend it was the winter of 01, I think you and I would have no problem agreeing that somebody needs to find this Zawahiri guy and Osama bin Laden and kill them.
And maybe, you know, they're a few dozen friends hiding out with them in Afghanistan, that kind of thing.
But it seems like if we call the whole thing off right after that, if the war had been over by the beginning of 02, then sure, there would have been a few other Al Qaeda people in the world here or there, but the motivation for any new recruit to come and join up with them would have dried up.
Like Hezbollah did suicide attacks until Israel left Lebanon.
And they haven't done a suicide attack since.
Nobody's going to support that kind of activity, uh, if, if not in the face of a significant threat right there present in their life.
Well, I think, I think there's, there's, that's partially correct, but we still would have been in Saudi Arabia.
We still would have been in other places.
My own view is very 19th century.
I think the answer to 9-11 was a punitive expedition to Afghanistan that would have taken 12 to 15 months simply because we're so slow moving, um, destroying as much of the Taliban as we could, as much of Al Qaeda, and then getting out and seeing if that worked.
You might have to go back and do it again, but what do you want to establish in the minds of this particular enemy is that you can be as brutal as they are.
And right now they see the American army packing its guns, packing its stuff and going home without winning.
And once again, the greatest military power on earth has been beaten by guys with a Korean war weapon.
Yeah.
Well, it's, it's quagmire.
It's perfect.
That's why all empires die in Afghanistan.
That's why I'm sure you saw this right about a year ago.
Osama bin Laden's son gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine saying, well, my dad always wanted was to reproduce the Russians experience in Afghanistan for the Americans.
You're exactly right.
The other thing he said, which, which, which is very, very true is that the Americans will regret not telling my father before nine 11, because the next generation is much more vicious and also much better educated in terms of using the tools of modernity.
Well, now, can you tell us about some times that Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright and Bill Clinton refused to go along with y'all's plans to get this SOB back then?
Well, you know, there were, there were two chances we had to capture Osama bin Laden, or at least to try to using CIA assets in Afghanistan and 10 different opportunities to kill him using U.S. military assets, times when we knew where he was precisely in terms of geographical coordinates.
And on, on all of those occasions, the president and Sandy Berger and Richard Clark voted no.
And most more often than not, they were concerned with what the Europeans would think about it.
They were concerned with, well, if we do this, will the Taliban let us build our pipeline from our gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through southern Afghanistan to Karachi Harbor?
One time we had a chance to kill bin Laden, but he had some princes from the United Arab Emirates around him.
So they, the White House under, or the president ordered Richard Clark to let the Emiratis know we knew where they were.
And so they moved out of the, their hunting camp where bin Laden was visiting them before we could shoot.
And we found out later that the, the father of the prince that was with bin Laden was about to buy $8 billion worth of U.S.
F-16s.
So they opted for a commercial profit rather than protecting Americans at that point.
So that's kind of the sorry litany of, of Clinton's administration.
You know, when people go through the airport and take their shoes off or get their bodies frisked, I think they think of George W.
Bush, but all of these deaths, all of these expenditures, all of this violation of civil liberties have, has occurred because Bill Clinton was more interested in suborning young, young female assistants than he was in defending the United States.
All right.
Now I know there's a story.
I don't know all about it, but I've read in Peter Lance's book, A Thousand Years for Revenge, where the FBI hostage rescue team was set to do a raid to try to capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
They finally had figured out that they let him escape from right under their nose when they arrested his nephew, Ramzi Youssef in Pakistan.
He was standing right there, even gave a quote to the Newsweek magazine reporter standing there.
They had a plan to get him, I think while he was in the UAE or something like that, but they were made to wait until morning and he was gone by morning.
Do you know about that?
Yeah, it was in gutter and the agency had located him and had verified his identity through the ability, through our ability to acquire some artifacts that had his prints, the fingerprints on them.
The FBI and the agency were ready to try to stage an operation to get him, but the White House decided that we should ask the guttery government to turn him over to us.
And of course he was there because the gutteries were friends with him in Bin Laden.
And so what happened was our ambassador went in, asked the gutteries to turn him over to us.
The gutteries said, leave it, let us think about it and see how we can arrange to do this.
And of course, somebody went and warned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
This was late September, early October, 1995, and he escaped the country and we never saw him or heard about him again until 9-11.
And then there's a piece in the Village Voice from 2007 by Wayne Barrett called Rudy's Ties to a Terror Sheik.
And it's about this sheik from Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, and how apparently the Khobar Tower's attack was run from his property on the other side of the fence, not very far away.
And that KSM and perhaps Osama Bin Laden himself had gone right through there right before that Khobar Tower's attack, which the FBI went along and blamed Saudi Hezbollah working on behalf of Iran for it, which apparently John O'Neill never bought that and always thought it was al-Qaeda that did that.
Do you have a comment about the Khobar Tower story and particularly this Al Thani guy, Giuliani's friend?
Yeah, I don't know if bin Laden was, I don't think he was there shortly before the attack, but he had always been in a good state of relations with the Al Thanis who are the royal family of Qatar.
And he had visited a couple of the princes on what they call their farms in the area.
So there was a long connection there.
They had given Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a passport.
He was working in their water ministry, in fact, when we found him and were going to try to capture him.
And at Khobar Tower, Louis Freeh, really, who was the director of the FBI, decided that he wanted it to be the Iranians.
And there were one or two pieces of pretty good data that looked like it suggested that perhaps the Iranians were somehow involved.
But the evidence that showed al-Qaeda's involvement was much stronger, but it was just ignored because they really wanted to go after the Iranians.
Amazing.
I guess I don't know enough to ask a very good question about the embassy attack, but it was later that year, right, in Saudi Arabia?
I think you've got them reversed, Scott.
They attacked the National Guard building in Saudi Arabia in November of 95, and then Khobar Towers was June of 1996.
Oh, I see.
But wasn't there an embassy, too?
There was an attack on our consulate in Jeddah later in the 90s, and there was some shots fired at our embassy in Riyadh, but after 9-11, I think.
Oh, OK.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
I'm getting us all bogged down in the weeds here.
Bottom line, though, this is the one part of the story that is certainly in your books that we haven't really touched on very specifically in this interview.
But paramount in the reasons for al-Qaeda in their declared war against us that they cite in their fatwas and whatever, is support for Israel, as you mentioned, and their occupations then in Lebanon and, of course, perpetually in Palestine.
And also the next on the list, correct me if I'm wrong, really is the American Army and Air Force bases in Saudi Arabia that were there for the purposes of blockading and bombing Iraq, which also featured prominently in those declarations of war.
Yeah, absolutely.
The occupation or what they deem the occupation of the peninsula is one of their main causes for war.
And I noticed Mr.
Paul mentioned it again as being truthful the other day.
And the Israeli first kind of flagship publication commentary went after him and really treated him with with, I think, a great deal of untruth and disdain.
I mean, that was no game, right?
I mean, there's this great book, Invisible War, by George Gordon.
I don't know if you've read it, but the effect of the American blockade on Iraq was absolutely severe.
The numbers are somewhere near a million people who died in the, you know, increased death rate, you know, during that period.
Yeah, I remember being bombed in the first Gulf War, their sewage and their waterworks bombed by Colin Powell and all that.
And they didn't have the Soviet Union to trade with.
It was the whole world blockaded them from the U.N.
And this features really prominently, doesn't it, in the declaration of war against the Americans occupying land, the two only places where you see absolutely the Iraqis are us.
Their blood is our blood and we're coming for yours.
Absolutely the case that Bin Laden was fixated really on the number of Iraqi children who died.
But, you know, sanctions are always that way.
Sanctions never hurt the countries, the governments that are sanctioned.
But it plays havoc and kills the people who are being controlled by those tyrannies.
You remember Madeleine Albright, when she was asked the question, was it worth six hundred thousand at Iraqis?
And she said, oh, yes, we believe that it was well worth the price.
Yeah, I wish someone had asked her.
How about now that we had three thousand dead Americans from September 11th, almost all of them civilians.
And what about the four thousand something American soldiers we've lost in the terror war since then?
Is that worth it?
Well, nobody asked her that and she'd dance around it.
So I have an idea and I don't know how well this will work, but maybe you can try it in a few interviews, Mike.
And this I think this could work, right?
Because saying they hate us for what we do just doesn't play.
But what if you say they hate us for what Bill Clinton did?
9-11 is Bill Clinton's fault.
And put it on him and get the conservatives to understand that.
Look, if it's not your hero, George Bush, Jr., up there in charge of all the massacres, but it's one of these dang Democrats that you can't stand.
It's possible that there's unintended consequences from terrible things that Democrats do.
How about that?
Well, we could try it.
But I think I think the reality is that neither Democrats or Republicans are going to come around to it because it always comes back to Israel.
They're on the Israeli payroll.
And so they're never going to they're never going to raise the reality of why we're at war until, unfortunately, some catastrophe happens in America.
Scott, it's we're we're going to be driven into the mountain before anything changes.
Well, now, when you say on the Israeli payroll, are you referring to Lockheed Dollars in the foundations that fund the think tanks?
And I think Apex money that goes into contributions to campaigns, their willingness to use various websites and magazines like Commentary to vilify anyone who wants to defend America first and let the Israelis and the Palestinians sort out their own problems.
I think the Congress is just a creature of of of AIPAC and of U.S. leaders of the U.S.
Jewish American community.
All right now, so for the very end of this, obviously, there's their books and your books, Imperial Hubris, Marching Toward Hell, Osama Bin Laden.
But I wonder if you can help us with a short list of recommended reading for people.
Good open source information.
Of course, I always like to cite ABC and CNN's interviews of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri back in 1996, the declarations of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places that from 96 and 98, both available at the PBS Jim Lehrer NewsHour website.
But, you know, I wonder if you can help recommend to people open source information where they can really compile this case and make it themselves.
Yeah, I think Peter Bergen wrote a book called the Osama Bin Laden I Know, which is a book of interviews with people who had known him, went to school with him, fought alongside of him.
And it's a very impressive piece of work, about 400 pages long.
And throughout the book, they talk about what caused the war and never is it mentioned how we live or what we think.
I think that's a very valuable book.
There's also a book called the Crusades Through Arab Eyes by a man named Amin Malouf, M-O-O-L-A-U-F, I think it is.
And what it does is to show the impact of foreign invasion on the Arab mind, how it reacts to foreign occupation.
And when you read it, you're reading about the 11th and 12th century, and it sounds exactly like you're reading about today.
I would also recommend to see The Power of the Israeli Lobby, a fairly new book by a fellow named Duffy, James P. Duffy, called Lindbergh vs.
Roosevelt.
And it shows the power of the U.S. Jewish American community and other people in slandering Lindbergh as an anti-Semite simply because he wanted to keep America out of the European war.
I think those are three very good books to take a look at.
Great.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time and especially for staying over with me today.
I appreciate it, Mike.
No problem, Scott.
Nice to talk to you always.
Thank you for having me.
All right, everybody.
That's Michael Schoyer.
He's the former chief of Alex Station, the CIA's Bin Laden unit, and he's the author of Imperial Hubris, Marching Toward Hell, Osama Bin Laden, and one more I'm forgetting.
I'm sorry.
You can find his website at nonintervention.com.
There's a dash in there, but it probably works either way.
Non-intervention.com.
And we'll be back with Kelly Vlahos right after this.
