For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all.
So welcome to The Show It Is, Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Keep all the archives at antiwar.com/radio.
And tonight's guest is Michael Scheuer.
He's the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Alex Station.
He and his team gave Bill Clinton ten different chances to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden before September 11.
His website is nonintervention.com and he's the author of the books Through Our Enemies' Eyes, Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing, The War on Terrorism, Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq, and the latest is a biography of Osama Bin Laden.
Welcome to the show, Mike.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, last week at the Republican debate, Ron Paul and former Senator Rick Santorum got into it over the cause of the September 11 attacks.
Let's listen to that.
We're under great threat because we occupy so many countries.
We're in 130 countries.
We have 900 bases around the world.
We're going broke.
The purpose of Al-Qaeda was to attack us, invite us over there where they can target us.
And they have been doing it.
They have more attacks against us and the American interest per month than occurred in all the years before 9-11.
But we're there occupying their land.
And if we think that we can do that and not have retaliation, we're kidding ourselves.
We have to be honest with ourselves.
What would we do if another country, say China, did to us what we do to all those countries over there?
So, I would say a policy, a foreign policy that takes care of our national defense, that we're willing to get along with people and trade with people as the founders advised.
There's no authority in the Constitution to be the policeman of the world and no nation building.
Just remember, George Bush won the presidency on that platform in the year 2000.
And I still think it's a good platform.
All right, let me let Senator Santorum respond because I know you strongly disagree.
Santorum then accused Ron Paul of, first of all, saying that we deserve to be attacked somehow.
And second of all, that the motive of our enemies is simply that they are evil and we are good.
And they hate us for being good.
And this was Dr. Paul's response to that.
Thirty seconds, Mr. Paul.
As long as this country follows that idea, we're going to be under a lot of danger.
This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this and they're attacking us because we're free and prosperous.
That is just not true.
Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have been explicit.
They have been explicit and they wrote and said that we attacked America because you had bases on our holy land in Saudi Arabia.
You do not give Palestinians a fair treatment.
And you have been bombing.
I didn't say that.
I'm trying to get you to understand what the motive was behind the bombing.
At the same time, we had been bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for 10 years.
Would you be annoyed if you're not annoyed?
There's some problem.
We're going to stay on this.
Michael Sawyer, former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit.
Your response.
Well, Dr. Paul is right.
And Santorum is a gas bag.
But they're definitely afraid of Dr. Paul on the issue of foreign policy.
They're afraid he might really provoke a debate in our country about the interventionism of the establishment in both parties.
It's an interesting thing to watch, especially from the pro-Israeli group of Americans or organizations here in the United States.
Just a week before the debate, kind of the flagship of the pro-Israeli guys, Commentary magazine, published two short pieces on Dr. Paul, really describing him as some kind of a non-American with noxious ideas because he suggested that our foreign policy motivated the Islamist enemies, whether it's al-Qaeda or anybody else.
Oh, and the two articles in Commentary praised Rick Santorum as the noble Republican who's willing to argue with Dr. Paul.
And a week later in that debate, Santorum does the bidding of the pro-Israeli U.S. community and attacks Dr. Paul.
And I don't know what you can say, Scott.
The position that Santorum, the pro-Israeli community, most of the leaders in both political parties, who argue that we're attacked because of liberty and freedom and elections and women in the workplace, there's no evidence for that assertion.
Dr. Paul is talking from specifics and from hard facts, and yet the media gives Santorum all the coverage.
All right, now, this has been a major subject of yours.
It features prominently in your book, Imperial Hubris, Marching Toward Hell.
And I haven't read Osama Bin Laden yet, but I'm sure it's in there too, that regardless of the religiosity of the charismatic terrorist group leaders or what have you, that their recruitment schtick depends entirely on citing concrete American foreign policies in the Middle East.
And we're talking back before history began on September 11th, back during the era of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and the first nine months of the George Bush Jr. administration.
Yeah, you know, Osama Bin Laden died at about age 54 or 55, and he grew up in a generation that watched the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini try to instigate a jihad against the United States because we were degenerate, we had X-rated movies and women in the workplace and we drank beer and we had democracy, and no one blew themselves up for that.
Even when they blew our embassy up in Beirut and then blew up the Marine barracks, they did it under Khomeini's rhetoric, but they did it primarily because we had put troops into their country, we had intervened in Lebanese affairs.
And so they grew up seeing that no Muslim was going to go to war and risk being killed or kill himself because of the ephemera that were named by the Ayatollah.
So when Bin Laden declared war on us in 1996, you know, 15 years ago, he was very clear in what the motivation was, and that was U.S. intervention in the Muslim world.
Our support for the Saudi tyranny, and until recently Mubarak and the rest of the dictators in the Middle East, unqualified and apparently unlimited support for the Israelis, our presence on the Arab peninsula, our presence now in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and our ability until recently to keep oil at below market prices, these were very substantive issues.
And while no one is willing to blow themselves up because we have a democracy, there's apparently an endless number of young Muslim males, both in the United States and abroad, that are willing to attack us for precisely the reason that we intervene in their world.
Now this made a footnote in the 9-11 Commission report.
As I understand it, I never bothered reading the thing.
I figured I would just read what journalists wrote instead.
But apparently the FBI did testify to the 9-11 Commission that they have long cited our support for Israel and their occupation of Palestine in their recruitment.
And yet you resign from the CIA over the 9-11 Commission report.
And I think primarily you have said because they did not make that footnote, the front and center, chapter one or the forward to the entire report.
Yeah, the report as a whole in so many ways is a whitewash.
And I think the reason they haven't released their archives, which are ready to be released, all of it was redacted to remove anything sensitive, is because they just ignored it so much.
You know, Israel is clearly one of the main reasons we're being attacked by Islamists and we're hated throughout the Muslim world.
But there's the others.
There's support for tyrannies, there's support for countries like Russia that are deemed to oppress Muslims in the North Caucasus.
This is a very solid battle.
And although numerous people told the 9-11 Commission that the motivation was the impact of our foreign policy, the only mention in the report beside the one you mentioned is one small paragraph that says something like, there are those who have argued that our foreign policy motivates these people to attack us.
And certainly that can't be true, but we really should do a better job in explaining how good our foreign policy is for the Muslim world.
So that was enough for me at least to resign and to want to talk about it a little bit.
Yeah, well, a lot.
And thank goodness for it, because at least from this point of view, this is the most important argument in America, whether history began that day or not.
And if they only hate us because of how innocent we are, then maybe we do need to change all the regimes of the countries we don't control yet and turn them into democracies, or the ones that are being overthrown anyway.
We can try to get on the bandwagon for that.
And then maybe that way, by giving them all democracy, they'll all want to stop being terrorists instead of such Islamic extremists all the time.
That's basically the dominant narrative in the United States of America right now about this war, after 10 years of this.
That's exactly right, Scott.
Especially in people like McCain and Lindsey Graham, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama.
If we come to a civilizational war with the Muslims, with the Islamic world, it'll be driven not by people like bin Laden or his successors, but by Hillary Clinton and Obama and McCain.
They have more or less declared war on Islamic civilization, with the president in May promising to remove, to conduct regime change in five countries that he didn't particularly like, and also promising to put secular democracy and women's rights everywhere, from Mauritania to Pakistan.
So we're closer today to a war of civilizations than we were 15 years ago, and the engine behind it has been the status quo in U.S. foreign policy and the sort of Ivy League brigade that mans our government and insists on trying to make the poor unwashed Muslims just like us.
Well, you know, it seems like because we base our policy on this false premise and we continue it on, we're actually accomplishing what bin Laden set out to do, which was, as you say in your book, Imperial Hubris, to radicalize the Islamic world, to consolidate various radical groups across the Muslim world into one big war against their American-backed dictators.
And so by denying the cause in the first place and setting about this policy based on this false premise, I guess Dick Cheney and the PNAC crew thought they were getting away with murder here, but really they were too clever by half.
They went and did exactly what he was trying to get us to do.
Yeah, Dick Cheney and the president either knowingly or unknowingly danced the tune that bin Laden played on the fiddle.
They couldn't have done better.
In fact, they went and won better.
He wanted to lure us into Afghanistan, of course wanted us to go to Iraq, but I think he never really believed we would go there, but we did.
And, you know, bin Laden's goal was never to defeat the United States.
He saw al-Qaeda's role as to incite Muslims, and really he couldn't do that without a very important partner, and that important partner was U.S. foreign policy.
And it remains today what it was in 1996 when all of this started, and there's no sign, short of another calamity in the United States, that it's going to change any time soon.
Well, you know, there was an interesting point that was made by a Ron Paul critic at the Daily Caller where he said that Ron Paul's statement that they were trying to lure us into the Middle East, as you just said, into Afghanistan, the rest of this is all just bonus extra credit for them, but that they only started saying that after the fact, that there's no evidence of that, that they thought we would turn tail and run, and that was why they did it, and so we're showing them by doing the opposite.
Well, that became the common wisdom after 9-11, but beginning in 1997, even before our embassies were attacked in East Africa, bin Laden began to taunt us and saying we weren't men and you're not like the Soviets, you know, if you were really men you would come to Afghanistan and we can show you there what happened to the Soviets.
The embassy bombings were an attempt to get us to come in there.
The bombing of the coal in 2000 was another attempt, and clearly the 9-11 attack was meant to kill, cause economic damage, and do a number of other things, terrorize the population, but primarily it was meant to get us to come to Afghanistan, and we certainly did, and the evidence is open.
One of the reasons I wrote Osama bin Laden the biography is because so many people had written books about al-Qaeda or bin Laden without looking at any of the primary sources, and so it's the people like the guy you mentioned at the Daily Call who have never read what the enemy has said, who are kind of ignorant of what's going on here.
Well, you know, when bin Laden said in his 2004 please re-elect George W. Bush speech that we are doing to you what we did to the Russians, that was our plan all along, was to lure you in and lead you to bankruptcy.
When you read that or heard that, that was nothing new whatsoever.
This is the exact same narrative that he'd been pushing since your time in the bin Laden unit between 1996 and 1999.
Yeah, not much.
If anything, he would have been prized by any U.S. political party because he stayed on message.
His message from the first was exactly we want to get you where we can fight you, and in terms of their goals toward the United States, how do we beat the Americans, you know, threefold, and again from 1996-97 they were clearly enunciated to take advantage of the international economic condition to try to bleed the Americans to bankruptcy, to spread out our military forces and our intelligence forces until we don't have any reserves and we lack flexibility, and to create dissent in the United States and strip away our allies as much as they could.
And I have to say that if I was Osama just before he died, I'd be perfectly happy with the progress I had made since 1996.
Yeah, the great humorist Jeff Huber, military critic, wrote a wonderful piece at Pen and Sword called Osama Bin Laden, Dead and Loving It, about all the progress that's been made across the entire Muslim world, mostly not at his hands but at our hands, and the name is stopping him.
Yeah, it's extraordinary that we are the key player.
He's kind of turned Clausewitz on his head.
You know, Clausewitz always talked about centers of gravity.
Well, al-Qaeda's center of gravity is our foreign policy, because not only has it inspired the people who are in the field against us and our allies today, but it's clearly inspiring the next generation of young Muslim males in North America, in Europe, and across the Middle East, of course.
I do think he died at least happy with the progress that had been made so far.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Michael Scheuer.
He's the former chief analyst at the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Alex Station.
He's the author of Imperial Hubris and Osama Bin Laden, also Marching Toward Hell, which is, I think, a pretty apt description of where we're going.
And I wanted to go back to something that you said before about if this becomes a war of civilizations, we'll know who to point the finger at.
These leaders of the American empire in the last administration and the current one.
And yet that goes directly against the grain, Michael Scheuer, of all of the war propaganda since, and for that matter, I don't know, highly advanced studies and articles written somewhere, I don't know, couldn't be in the National Review, say that they started this war, that it is a civilizational war already, that it is Islam against us, and we've got to stop them.
They're trying to build an Islamofascist caliphate that sooner or later is going to come to North America.
Well, that's pretty good scare propaganda, but there's not a lot of truth in it.
You know, if the question is, do Muslims believe in a caliphate, the answer is yes, because their god ordained it.
At that point, the world would be entirely Muslim.
But in terms of the guys who are fighting, they're not fighting for a caliphate in the near term.
I think they would believe it's as likely to occur in the next century as we would expect to wake up tomorrow morning or next week and find everybody turning the other cheek and loving their neighbor.
That's just meant to quash debate and to scare people into just silence.
So they don't question what our interventionists are doing overseas.
But it's just nonsense.
And until Dr. Paul can generate perhaps a national debate, they're going to lead us into more and more wars, just because they are so arrogant that they think they can make the world fit their aspirations.
You know, they see the world as they want it to be, and not as it is.
And if there is a clash of civilizations, it'll be labeled made by the Ivy League.
Well, okay.
So you take something like Somalia, though, where you have the entire war on terrorism in such a small capsule, where America goes in, overthrows a moderate government, and supports a foreign invasion, rendition, and everything else, and rendition to Ethiopia to be tortured.
And special forces firing from their gunships, submarines firing missiles involving the Americans in a major way in this thing.
And then now the country is torn apart by al-Shabaab and all this.
This has only been going on for five years.
It couldn't possibly be that people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and for that matter all the men on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and all the generals that work for them, and all the CIA analysts, etc., don't see this game.
That they don't understand everything that you understand here about how the intervention causes the crises that create the enemies that then become the excuse for more intervention and on down the line.
I don't know if you'd agree this is all Woodrow Wilson's fault going all the way back down the chain, like I say, but at least this all...
They must know and be simply lying and cynically exploiting the fear of terrorism and the fear of the alien Muslim, etc., in order to deliberately generate these enemies.
There's an article in the New York Times today, Michael Scheuer, that says there are three new Islamist terrorist groups in Africa and we're going to have to expand the African command in order to take them on.
Well, Africa is turning into a nightmare.
That's exactly right.
You know, your comment about Somalia is very timely, Scott, because I think what we're going to see is a replica of what happened there across the Middle East where these other governments fell.
You know, Somalia was finally coming under the control of a government that was run by an organization called the Islamic Court.
They were certainly fundamentalists, but they were not eager at all to export their violence or export any violence.
And they were bringing the country under control for the first time, but the Bush administration couldn't stand the idea that the word Islamic was in the title of their government, and so they unleashed, of all people, the Christian Ethiopians to invade a Muslim country, and we have the mess we have now.
And I think when you look at what happened in Egypt and what happened in Tunisia, what's happening in Libya, the question is not so much what government will follow, because whatever government follows is going to be much more Islamic than the government that it replaces, but what will the interventionists in Washington and London and Paris accept?
You know, they've intervened in all these places in the name of secular democracy, and when we find out that there is an Islamic government now of some description in each of those countries, are they going to try to overthrow them like they did the Somali example?
I think it's perfectly possible.
And the other point about Africa, that one of the costs of this Arab Spring was to create a situation where the jails of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya were all open, and a great percentage of the people in those prisons weren't crooks and robbers, but they were Islamic fighters, and those people now have reinforced the groups across Africa, and in addition, in each of those three countries, they opened up the arsenal.
So the flow of modern Soviet-made weapons to the Mujahideen across Africa and probably across the Middle East has been almost a tidal wave of weaponry has come out of that area.
So the whole thing is going to hell in Africa, and if we get involved with that, it will make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a picnic.
Well, things are going to hell over at the New York Times, too, where they list Al-Qaeda in North Africa as one of these groups we're going to have to intervene against, and completely neglect to mention we just fought a war to help install them in power in Tripoli.
Yeah, it's almost a schizophrenic kind of thing, Scott, and facts never get in the way.
You know, on the one hand, you have numerous people saying that Al-Qaeda is falling apart and it's declining and it may be gone in another year or so, and at the same time, just as you said, they're banging the war drum to go to Africa.
So it's really...
We Americans in this day and age are good at some things, but in terms of our leadership, they can't integrate a problem to save their lives.
They see each little one as a separate entity and so end up with a dozen wars where they really don't need any.
Yeah, well, and that goes to what I was getting at before, whether this is stupidity or the plan.
I mean, it really does seem the case that these people, rather than being able to have a discussion like you and I are having right now about, hey, let's try to look at going 15 years back and get a little bit of a big picture about what's going on here, they do seem to just see these as isolated incidents or, you know, like in the creating enemy after enemy, like it's always an accident, time after time after time.
Like they can just double-think it away, like a member of the higher party in 1984, where they don't have to consider that they're the ones who created this situation, like, say, for example, in Somalia in the first place, much less the whole terror war in general.
I think there's a third option.
I've always tried to never think that I'm smarter than anyone else, and certainly the last four presidents and their advisors, most of them have come out of the Ivy League, so they have had a very expensive, very elitist education.
I think what we're looking at, Scott, really, is an evolution of people who believe in democracy into people who believe in it in the sense of Marxism-Leninism.
That is, that it is inevitable, and because it's inevitable, the United States must be the agent of its application around the world.
You know, Mrs. Clinton, she's happy to see Marines and soldiers die in Afghanistan if women can vote or women can sit in the Afghan parliament, and that's just part and parcel, I think, of an ideology that really infects these people.
And it's not just Democrats.
It's Joe Lieberman.
It's John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Rudy Giuliani.
Both parties, with the exception, of course, of Dr. Paul.
Dr. Paul at least seems to know some history, that we've taken 800 years to get to where we are from Magna Carta in 1215.
Yeah, well, and it really just goes to the lost opportunity cost of this entire thing, because, you know, in a way I'm a little bit neocon on this issue.
I believe that, you know, Rothbardian purist individualism is the future of mankind.
It's the English Enlightenment perfected, basically, and that this, if mankind is to have a future, it's going to be based on the premise that everybody is born with a right to their own life and their own destiny, and not everybody is just the other that it's okay to kill, as has been the history of mankind pretty much up until now.
And I want to spread that ideology to the four corners of the world just because I'm like that.
That's why I'm on the radio in the first place.
But these people are betraying my exact agenda in the worst way by saying, yeah, we're here to bring you John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government with a drone strike to wash it down.
And all these people are, it's so counterproductive if what we really want is for people to have little-d democracy and human rights protected worldwide.
This is the worst thing for it.
People march with signs that say, embrace Islam instead, and we're giving them all the ammo in the world for that kind of propaganda when it didn't have to be this way at all.
If we'd just given the Middle East a fair shake and said, hey, look, let's be trading partners and friends and work things out, our individualist, our freedom ideology in America is infectious anyway.
That's why we've been the light of liberty for up until this time, really, right?
Well, I think there's a great deal of truth in that.
I've always thought of the neocons and Mrs. Clinton and Obama really as more the heirs of the French Revolution, of people who believe that through a combination of law, diktat, and military force, that you can perfect people.
I think the beauty of the English Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment was that it said, listen, man is flawed.
He cannot be perfected.
And so you have to work with the material at hand.
You have to work with the world the way it is.
And work with ideas rather than coercion.
But the French Revolution, they insisted that man could be perfected by science and by education and by government especially.
And if you follow the trail of the French Revolution, it leads to Stalin, it leads to Adolf Hitler, it leads to Mao Zedong.
In some ways it leads to the kind of proto-dictatorship that is the European community today.
And so I really do think the neoconservatives and people who think like Obama and Mrs. Clinton are really alien entities in the American system, in the American way of thinking.
Well, they're certainly putting us all at risk.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Michael Schoyer.
I appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Thank you.
Everybody, Michael Schoyer was the chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Alex Station, and he wrote the books Imperial Hubris, Marching Toward Hell, and Osama Bin Laden.
You can find his website at nonintervention.com.
And that's it for Antiwar Radio tonight.
Thanks very much for listening.
We're here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 in Los Angeles.
Full interview archives are available at antiwar.com.
