All right, welcome to Anti-War Radio, it's chaos in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Our first guest today is Michael Shoyer.
He's the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Alex Station.
He's the author of the books Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism and Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq.
You can read his antiwar.com archives at antiwar.com slash Shoyer.
Welcome to the show, Mike.
Thank you, sir.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Good.
Just fine.
I really appreciate you coming on the show short notice for us here.
I've got a couple of things I'd like to ask you about.
First of all, we've kind of made fun of John McCain on this show a few times because he keeps saying he'll follow Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell and I guess we've tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that what he was saying was he meant Osama Bin Laden harm.
He just didn't understand what that figure of speech meant.
But now, looking at this article in the Washington Post, apparently the Al Qaeda guys prefer John McCain.
So maybe these guys are best buds after all.
What do you think is going on there?
I think it's just, you know, I don't think they really care one way or another.
What they prefer is somebody who's very clear in their rhetoric.
In 2004, they said, we don't care if you elect Kerry or Bush or the devil himself.
You're going to continue to be attacked unless you change your policy.
So the one thing they do prefer is to have someone who speaks clearly and that has been Bush and certainly McCain.
But the one thing I would note here is they have an unprecedented opportunity to hurt the United States because of our own domestic and international monetary financial problem.
And if I had to sit down and say who would they want to be in charge of the United States after the next election, I would have to say Obama, because he's the one that has promised everything from health care to free mortgages to everything else on top of the how many hundreds of billions of dollars in rescue for Wall Street.
So in an odd way, this may be something that is meant to hurt McCain, not to help him.
Well, you know, it's interesting there, because as far as, you know, who's going to bankrupt us faster, it's a race.
I mean, McCain's offered to buy every bad mortgage in America, too.
If it's if what Al-Qaeda wants is for our politicians to bankrupt us, I don't know really why I prefer one over the other.
I guess from their point of view, maybe Obama would be better just because he wants to escalate the war in in Afghanistan and Pakistan more.
Well, yeah, you know, I don't think they're awfully worried about our military.
I think they have us on the they believe they have us on the run in both places.
They won't they don't worry so much about Iraq anymore because they know we're never going to leave Iraq, no matter if it's Obama or McCain, because if we leave Iraq, then we expose Israel to more problems and we're not going to do that.
Obama's been doing the Tel Aviv shuffle now for the last, what, year.
He's as close to the Israelis as McCain is.
So they don't worry awful lot about that.
We don't have enough troops, Scott.
If we took every troop we had in the world and put them all in Afghanistan, we still wouldn't have enough to win.
So they're not particularly worried about either one of those locations, just as long as we keep spending money there.
Well, was it you that told me that bin Laden had said before that he really thought that the final chapter of America's defeat in the Muslim world would be inside Pakistan rather than in Afghanistan?
Well, they've talked about that.
I can't remember right off the top of my head if it was bin Laden exactly.
But I think I think they've certainly seen that Afghanistan is a is a sucking wound and now that Pakistan is also my own view is that at some point in the next year or so, we're going to have to make a decision about whether we want to save Afghanistan or we want to save Pakistan, because we can't do both.
My hunch is we'll trade Afghanistan in order to try to keep Pakistan a functioning entity.
Hmm.
Well, I don't know.
That's going to take a lot of effort at this point.
Seems like the more effort we put into Pakistan, the shakier their government gets rather than the stronger.
Oh, I think I think you're right about that.
I think what's going to happen is the military will take over.
The diary will either be killed or removed.
And they'll put in the other candidate, Nawaz Sharif, who will do the bidding of the military, which is the best we can hope for from our perspective.
The real danger is, of course, is if the Democrats are in, they'll go to beating the war drums over more democracy.
And that'll probably spell the end of Pakistan.
Well, we know the recent news is that there are posh toon fighters, tribal fighters who themselves are sick and tired of the Taliban and are now fighting them on the side of the Pakistani government.
Do you put much stock in that?
I think that's a lot of talk, Scott.
The Taliban and the Pakistani tribes are all of one one ethnic group, one one, one ethnic group, one tribal group.
There's fighting between clans and fighting between tribes.
But the idea that somebody is going to side with the Pakistani government against their brothers, that's very, very unlikely.
I think it's mostly talk by the new government and also a way to extort more guns from us, because they'll tell us that these tribes are willing to help us if we arm them.
And so we'll cough up some weaponry and then eventually it will be turned on us in Afghanistan.
I want to get back to the strategy here and this this news story by Joby Warwick and Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post from yesterday on Al Qaeda website's joy over U.S. crisis support for McCain.
And as you've already said, you know, Obama's, you know, either way, whoever it is, they're trying to actually help here.
Either way, either of these guys is going to continue the policies that we've been following under the Bush years.
However, well, you know, I don't know.
I think to most people on their face, it would be kind of confusing when McCain is saying, I'll kill them all.
And they're saying, yeah, that's the guy we want.
Are they not scared of him?
They want someone who's belligerent and warlike to go up against.
They said that pretty clearly, Scott.
What they don't like about the Democrats that the Democrats will keep the policy the same, but their rhetoric is much softer and much more ambiguous.
And Bin Laden himself has said in a statement a couple of years ago that Democratic rhetoric sometimes fools Muslims into believing that the Americans will somehow get out of the get out of the region or stop supporting Israel.
It never happened, but it confuses Muslims.
So they prefer the rhetoric of McCain or Bush or Mr. Reagan.
Now, so I guess it was October 2004 and Osama bin Laden came out with his statement right before that election and said that our plan is to bleed you until bankruptcy.
Were you surprised by that?
Or as the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, that was pretty much exactly what you expected him to say then?
No, I think that was that if you follow what he said over over more than a decade now, that's exactly what he wanted to do.
And he was talking directly to the American people.
That was the first speech he gave in which it was almost completely devoid of any kind of quotations from the Koran or allusions to Islamic history.
He wanted Americans to be very clear that what they didn't care who the president was.
They wanted a change in our policy.
And so that he was right on message that time.
Well, now, the strategy here is all important.
And this is what you talk about in especially in your first book, Imperial Hubris.
What the American people have to wrap their head around is that they didn't think that by knocking down our towers, that they would scare us away and that we would pack up our empire and go home.
What they were trying to do basically was slap us in the face and lure us into putting our combat forces in battle in the Middle East.
If they could get us to overthrow their enemies in Iraq, Syria, Iran, so much the better.
But it was all about getting us to go ahead and bring our combat forces to their arena.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
They could knock down skyscrapers all day in the United States, and that by itself would not bankrupt us.
We tend to forget that bin Laden and Al Qaeda have always said that they can't do this by themselves, that they need the help of Muslims and they need the help of the United States.
And so when they attacked us on 9-11, what they wanted to do was to get our combat forces into Afghanistan where they could get shot up.
And that took a long time to get.
They started trying to do that in 97.
They succeeded in 2001.
And it's really only in the last year that we've decided to go out and go after them.
And so we started to lose more and more troops.
So what they're really, they need our help to win.
And unfortunately, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush and probably these next two characters are going to continue to help them.
Yeah, well, you know, I think that's, it's really important for, to kind of walk through this, I think.
From what I understand, after successfully forcing the Russians out of Afghanistan with some American and Saudi and Pakistani help, that basically they learned the lesson that if we only believe in God enough and are brave, we can defeat a superpower.
And so they decided to basically try to reenact that, to try to get us to do what the Russians had done and bring our forces in so that they could shoot them up, bleed them dry, and then force them out all the way.
Yeah, it's history repeating itself.
If there's anything that seems certain, it's that Afghanistan is the place where history repeats itself.
And they've got us there now.
I think that the events in Afghanistan and Pakistan have developed so much to their advantage that they probably find it hard to believe at the moment.
But when we hear Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain talking about sending, you know, two more brigades to Afghanistan, they're just completely lying to the American people.
Because two more brigades, it comes out to about three more people for every mile of border there is between the two countries.
So we're beaten.
We're beaten in Afghanistan.
There's no way out of it at the moment except to leave.
And that's all the next president will do, will be to preside over when we leave and how much disgrace there's attached to it.
Well, and also in your first book, the most quotable phrase, you said the invasion of Iraq was the hoped for but unexpected gift to al Qaeda, that if their strategy was to knock down our towers in order to provoke us into invading Afghanistan, that Bush and Cheney turning around and redirecting the entire war against the Baathist regime in Iraq was an absolute dream come true for them.
Sure.
Iraq is just an unbelievable mistake on our part.
Probably, you know, a lot smarter people than I am have said it's probably the worst foreign policy move we've ever made.
And I think that's true because we're really stuck there now.
We're seeing rising Shia animosity toward the Sunnis, the people who helped us are now being killed by the government we support.
That's going to be an unbelievable bleeding wound over time.
And we're also seeing the stability of the countries in the Levant, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, being very seriously eroded by a bleed through from Iraq.
Right.
And that has radicalized and helped the more kind of right wing partisans all across the region already, hadn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
You know, to see the Syrians and the Lebanese after 40 years of not talking to each other suddenly sign a security agreement in the last 10 days, that surely shows that both of those governments are afraid of what's happening in their country because of the influence of Iraq.
Yeah.
What do you think when you hear neoconservatives, and maybe it's been a while since they talk like this.
I don't know.
I don't read commentary that often.
But what do you think when you hear people talk about doing a regime change in Syria?
Who might be available to replace the Baathists in that country if they were to be deposed?
The regime change is already going on in Syria.
We're going to have an Islamic country there at some point.
You know, the old man, Hafez al-Assad, after he just tried to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, he tried to co-opt Islam in Syria, and so established a lot more Islamic schools, mosques, universities.
And so Syria, which for a long time was decidedly secular, is more and more Islamic.
And so whether we have an active role in it or not, Syria is on the way toward Islamism, and there's really no way to call it back.
We're going to be, at some point, sitting around the fire wishing we had either Hafez or Bashar al-Assad back in power, because the change that's going on in Syria is a disaster for Israel, and there's no way to stop it anymore.
Okay.
Now, in the larger sense about the war that we find ourselves in here, you told me years ago that you think our solution is war or total war.
We need to war against our actual enemies in al-Qaeda and roll back the rest of the empire that's getting us into this mess, or the other solution is eventually we are going to find ourselves at war with all the Muslims in the world.
And I know that you reviewed this book, Who Speaks for Islam?
What a Billion Muslims Really Think, by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed.
They wrote it based on the Gallup's World Poll, a study of Muslims all around the world.
What's so important about this book?
I believe in your review, you said Americans must read this before it's too late.
Yeah.
What I thought was very important was the finding across an enormous poll taken over seven years in all Muslim countries that showed that upwards of 80% of Muslims detest our foreign policy and believe that it's an attack on Islam.
And at the same time, huge proportions of people admire the way Americans live at home.
It's not that they hate us, as we've talked before, Scott.
For what we are, they hate us for what we do.
And what I was hoping that that book would have an impact on is maybe even the media asking the presidential candidates, why are they lying to the American people?
Why do we keep saying that they hate our freedoms when it's the fact that they hate our action?
You know, I think it's kind of a forlorn hope.
I don't think any of the media really wants to get into this issue at all, and certainly the candidates won't do it off their own hook.
Well, it's interesting.
You know, I haven't seen the reaction.
I just can't stand to watch the TV news nowadays.
I don't know if this made the TV news, this Washington Post story, but it seems like if I was Brian Williams and my reporter did his little, you know, two-minute piece on, yeah, apparently on these Al-Qaeda websites, they're hoping McCain wins and stuff.
It seems like I'd have to ask the follow-up.
But why would they want the more warlike guy to be the one?
And then the explanation, well, they're trying to bleed us dry.
The action is in the reaction.
Seems like with a story like this, Al-Qaeda endorses McCain, that this conversation would at least break through a little bit.
No, I think the media is so, the media for the most part, the mainstream media is so pro-Obama that they'll just use this for that kind of purpose.
And frankly, you know, how many brains are there in the real media?
You know, they're just script readers.
They don't have any brains.
You know, if you want to listen to people with ideas, you listen to cable or radio.
That's all you can do because, you know, Brian Williams and Katie Couric, they're a little bit smarter than my shoes, but not much.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, this does seem like the kind of question that maybe Chris Matthews could come up with if he wanted to.
Yeah, it's a question that ought to be asked.
Why do they want another interventionist warmonger?
It's because it builds support for their movement in the Islamic world.
It makes sure that the fighters keep coming and the donations keep flowing, and no one gets too upset with the number of Americans killed.
That's exactly the reason.
But they win both ways.
Because, as I said, Obama's not going to challenge the oil industry, he's not going to challenge the Israeli lobby, he can't remove our troops from Iraq.
So they're both going to be interventionists, but McCain has a much better rhetorical style in terms of benefiting the Islamists and Al-Qaeda.
Listen, I interviewed Larry Wilkerson the other day on this show, last week, Colin Powell's former chief of staff.
And I asked him, I said, you know, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, tells me that he and his team worked on a report where they went back through and re-studied everything they had about any connections between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.
And he and his team furnished their report up the chain of command in January of 2003, explaining that there were no operational ties whatsoever.
This was certainly before Colin Powell's famous speech at the UN.
And I asked Larry Wilkerson if he had ever heard of that report, and he said no.
Do you have a comment about that?
It wouldn't surprise me.
You and I have talked before, Scott, that Mr. Tennant was in the business, the former DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, was in the business of making sure the president heard what he wanted to hear.
And I think I've told you before, we produced the report, we had no way of knowing who actually read it or received it.
But if Wilkerson didn't see it, I suspect it probably died in the office of the director.
Well, and I'm glad that you mentioned that.
He's not just the head of the CIA, I guess Hayden now is, but at that time, the way things were structured, the head of the CIA was also the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, which would make him the boss over all of these different 16, 17 intelligence agencies in the U.S. government.
Is that right?
That's correct.
That's correct.
I think there were 16 at the time, and there were 17 with the reorganization.
Is it okay, have you read, I'd like to ask you about some of the revelations in James Bamford's new book.
Have you had a chance to take a look at it yet?
I have not seen it yet.
No, I have not.
I have a copy of it.
Someone was nice enough to send me a copy, but I just got it at the end of last week.
Okay, well, I'll tell you what, I'll ask you about something that's not in the book, but it's something that he said on the radio show yesterday.
I was asking him about the infighting between the NSA and the CIA and the FBI.
One of the things that he said was that the NSA was so uncooperative in forwarding on their intercepts to your team at CIA when you were still the chief of Alex Station, that you guys ended up having to go and make your own listening post, he said he thought it was in Madagascar maybe, in order to tap the phone and listen to what was going on at the Al-Qaeda Yemen safe house, phone call switchboard house there, but that even still you could only get half the conversation, and the NSA still wouldn't furnish to you the other half of the conversations that were coming in and out of that safe house in Yemen.
Is that correct?
That's exactly correct, yes.
And I can't confirm where the listening posts were, there was more than one, but we had to build our own system.
With Mr. Bamford, I did a documentary for NOVA, which I think will be on the 28th of October, but we go into this.
There was no intelligence failure before 9-11, the problem was between the senior leaders of the intelligence community component, and the long and the short of it, Scott, is that the 9-11 Commission lied to the American people about what could have been done, what should have been done, and if Mr. Bamford's writing about those things, it's all for the good, because the story of 9-11 has never been told.
Well, remind me again, at what point you left the Bin Laden unit?
I left in November of 2004, because I thought, precisely because the 9-11 Commission had not told the truth, and I wanted to be able to speak out about it.
I'm sorry, let me rephrase that.
Tell me about the first time you left the Bin Laden unit.
June of 99.
June of 99.
Right.
So you were basically sitting in the library studying while other people were running the Bin Laden unit in the run-up to this attack.
Yeah, they were...
Well, I was...
You know, I guess it's okay after the fact, but they were kind of...
I had the institutional knowledge.
So I was out of favor, but I was being kind of surreptitiously used by the people who took over my position.
They gave me an office, they said, just make sure you're not seen around when the big shots come through.
That's basically what I did for about two years, between 99 and 01.
Now in the book...
I'm sorry, I just said I wouldn't ask you about the book, but I'm going to ask you about the book.
In the book...
I might say that one of the reasons that I was removed from that position was just what Jim Bamford told you.
I pushed too hard and upset too many people about trying to get information that we knew NSA had on their shelves.
Well, and there's so much to what the NSA knew and didn't forward to the CIA, didn't forward to the FBI in the book, but one of the parts of the book is when the CIA, when Alex Station actually figured out the last name of Al-Midhar or whatever, and figured out that they needed to keep a watch on these guys, that they had at least probably made it to the United States, etc.
That there was an FBI agent at Alex Station, I believe Rossini, who wanted to go and take this information to the rest of the FBI, and the way Bamford tells it, the guy who replaced you, his name is still classified, but the deputy is a guy named Tom Wilshire, and that Tom Wilshire refused repeatedly to allow the FBI to take that information out of the Counterterrorism Center and to the FBI anti-terrorism guys so that they could begin looking for these hijackers who'd been living in San Diego, one of whom was the son-in-law of the guy that owned the Yemen safe house, and they'd been in this country for more than a year at that point, I think.
Well, whether or not that's true, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I can tell you what I know and what I wrote in my most recent book, is that Rossini and the other FBI officers were there to steal all the material they could out of CIA.
They were taking everything they wanted from our classified information and taking it over to the FBI in hard copy because there was no ability to communicate electronically with the FBI.
But if, you know, I don't know what Tom's decision was, he's a very good officer, I would doubt that he blocked the information, but it really didn't matter, because everything that we had, they stole.
Anybody else would have been in prison because of the manner in which they acted, but when I or my assessors would bring it to the attention of the Director of Central Intelligence, he would just not do anything.
So it's a useful hook for the FBI to try to get off of the bullseye of any kind of blame, but I think it's pretty flimsy for the people who know actually how the system was working.
Well, I mean, it's pretty clear, though, that, well, I don't know, it's clear that you guys didn't get along with the FBI agents very well.
What about the relationship between Alicestation and the NSA?
I guess we already talked about how they wouldn't share their intercepts with you.
You know, I don't think there was a problem between FBI agents or NSA officers and CIA officers.
The problem was at the upper level.
You know, the real problem with the cooperation with the FBI for all of the intelligence community should be laid at the door of Louis Freeh, who refused to buy his officers an electronic computer system that would allow them to communicate with people.
Not just with the FBI, but with the FBI, who was responsible for not giving us the intercepts.
It certainly wasn't the people who were doing the work and the translating.
It was the deputy director of operations in February of 1998 when I went up there to ask her for those intercepts.
She said she would refuse because they were NSAs and they weren't going to share them.
But they were sharing them at the same time with the British, the Canadians, the Australians.
Yeah, well, when you say that the story of 9-11 has never really been told, what you're referring to is just how much the government could have, would have, should have known before that attack?
What I'm referring to is a bunch of senior politicians and bureaucrats who didn't do their job, either through negligence or just a refusal to risk their political status and their future appointments, and let the lack of cooperation continue to the point that we got to 9-11.
That's what I'm talking about.
And you're referring to the White House as well, or simply the...
Absolutely.
Absolutely the case.
And the thing I would tell you, Scott, is there are dozens of us who testified to this effect and also provided supporting documents, and none of it was used by the 9-11 Commission.
Yeah, they wanted... it was an outcome-based commission.
They said from the beginning it was an outcome-based commission.
It wasn't about finding the truth.
It was about finding an excuse to rearrange everything.
That's all.
That's all.
And there was so much blame to go around that both parties figured they couldn't bear the amount of shame that would be heaped on them because of their lousy performance, and so they decided to blame 9-11 on the kind of inanimate object known as the intelligence community.
Right.
Well, and this is why you resigned, because you read the 9-11 Commission report and threw up your hands and said, they're not going to tell the truth about this, I got to?
That's what I was going to try to do.
I don't think I've had very much influence at all, but that was the reason I left.
I loved the agency.
There was no reason I would have ever left there except if they carried me out dead.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry, because this conversation could go on for hours and hours at this point, but I've got to let you go.
I hope maybe we can follow up after you've read Bamford's book.
We can discuss a little bit more of this.
I'd like to do that.
That's the next on my list, so I should have it done in a week or 10 days or so, Scott.
Okay, great.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Anytime, sir.
Talk to you soon.
All right, folks.
Michael Shoyer, former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alex Station, is the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism and Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq.
You can read what he writes at antiwar.com slash Shoyer.
That's S-C-H-E-U-E-R, Antiwar Radio, and we'll be right back.
