08/05/08 – Michael Scheuer – The Scott Horton Show

Chemical Warfare!
Chemical weapons that they needed to protect themselves from.
He had lied to them too.
It's a simple answer to that.
Anyway, so we've been talking about Ron Susskind's new book.
It's called The Way of the World, A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism.
And two major accusations that have already broken in the news.
The book doesn't come out until tomorrow.
But the first major accusation is that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a document tying Muhammad Ata saying that he trained for the attacks in Iraq.
And then secondly, that they were told outright by the CIA that there were no weapons of mass destruction in plenty of time to avert the war, as it's being phrased.
Well, we don't have the book yet, haven't read it yet, haven't had a chance to invite Ron Susskind on the show.
But here to discuss these two major accusations that have already been revealed is former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer.
He was the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit in the 1990s.
And then for a short time after September 11th and up through the time of the 9-11 commission report, he's the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and Marching Towards Hell, the West and Islam After Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
Thank you, sir.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Good, thank you.
Good to have you on here.
Good to have you on here.
Okay, so first things first, let's talk about this forged document.
Are you going to tell me this is the first you've ever heard, that the White House actually wrote on stationery, on White House stationery, and gave George Tenet marching orders to have the CIA write up a forgery implicating Saddam Hussein in the training of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.
Were you in on that?
No, it would have been a nice apparition, I guess, but no, I wasn't involved in it.
I had never heard of it before, except that it was in the British press back in 2003.
Right.
You know, I was involved in proving, if you will, from the agency's perspective, that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
That's a pretty definite thing.
Now, the one thing I would say from a career of nearly 25 years at the agency is there's always something going on in your area of responsibility that you don't know about.
Mr. Susskind's claim seems a little far-fetched to me, but I can't say that it's impossible.
And what really interested me was the White House's response.
They came back very strong that they were going to fight this hard, when they really could have just dismissed it as old news since it was in the British press four years, five years ago.
You know, maybe there's a little smoke here, maybe there's a little fire.
I don't really know, Scott.
Okay, well, now, so let's talk about your role in analyzing the evidence about the Saddam Hussein-Osama bin Laden connection in the months leading up to the war.
I know you've been back and forth with the Weekly Standard over this, because in your first book you said that, yep, looks like ties to Saddam Hussein, all right, and they like to quote that, but now you've corrected them and said, no, I found out that my first book was wrong.
But what's most important is that you found out your first book was wrong in your official capacity, working with your team at the CIA in the run-up to the Iraq war.
That's right, Scott.
I was absolutely wrong in my first book, because I used only open-source material, unclassified material.
When Mr. Feist's shop at the Pentagon published a paper in late 2002 that made a strong argument that there was a working connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, Mr. Tennant asked us to go through the agency's documents for the past 10 or 12 years and find out if we had missed something, or if Mr. Feist had simply made it up.
And we went through about 80,000 pages of documents, and there was absolutely no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
And that was December 2002 to January 2003.
So we had come down with the decision that there was no tie between al-Qaeda and Saddam at least two and a half months before the invasion, and certainly before Secretary Powell went before the UN.
Was it before George Bush gave his 2003 State of the Union?
Yes, I think, well, the State of the Union is in January.
The very end of January, yeah.
Yeah, I think the study was certainly complete by then, yes.
Now whether Mr. Tennant delivered it to the president or not, that's another question.
Right, you've told me before that you don't know that.
You've told me before that you don't know whether Tennant delivered your intelligence to the president.
No, there's no way to know whether he delivered it or if he delivered it in the form it was given to him.
There's just no way to know that.
He's the only one that knows.
As I said before, Mr. Tennant was very unusual in that he was the one who briefed the president.
Usually it was a very senior agency officer, a civil servant, who didn't go there to be the president's friend or advisor.
He went there to give him the intelligence.
So no one really knows what Mr. Tennant said to Mr. Bush except Mr. Tennant.
Yeah, well, he even says that when he said that the case was a slam dunk, he wasn't referring to the case against Iraq.
He was referring to the case is strong enough to convince the American people about Iraq, and that was his excuse.
That was his alibi.
Well, to me, of all the many things that were surprising in his book was that admission, because generally speaking, it's an indictable offense for the CIA director to be involved in trying to influence American opinion.
Right.
Okay, now, quickly, we're almost out of time here.
The weapons of mass destruction.
There was the story a couple of years back from NBC News from March of 2006 about Najib Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister under Saddam, and how basically he had taken some money and made a deal with the CIA and told you guys, no, really, trust me, they don't have any weapons.
You know, I don't know if that's true or not.
God, it turned out that there was no weapons.
That would have been one report among many.
But I think the bottom line is, even if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, he was absolutely no threat to the United States.
With those weapons of mass destruction, there's no way to get them here.
If we went to war on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, we went to war to protect the Israelis.
That's the bottom line.
Well, touche.
But so now, do you know about another report by a guy named Habush or something like that, that he was an informant and saying that there were no weapons?
Do you know about that?
I don't know about either one of them.
I have to be very clear, Scott.
I worked on al-Qaeda, and my knowledge of Iraq is basically peripheral to al-Qaeda.
If there was something to do with al-Qaeda in Iraq, then I would have worked on it.
If it was Iraq-specific, it could very well be that I don't know the first thing about it.
All right.
Well, we'll have to get you back on the show to talk more about al-Qaeda sometime soon.
I look forward to that, sir.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for your time today.
That's Michael Scheuer, former head of Alex Station, the CIA's bin Laden unit.
And don't blame it all on him.
He and his team gave Bill Clinton plenty of chances to capture or murder Osama bin Laden before September 11th.
He's the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism and Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq.
Sorry, I got the name of the sub-headline of that wrong in the intro there.