All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas.
And our guest today is Michael Shoyer.
He's the former head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alex Station, from 1996 through 1999, and then as a special advisor to the chief of the bin Laden unit after 9-11 through 2004.
He's an analyst for CBS News and the Jamestown Foundation.
He teaches at Georgetown University.
He's the author of the books Through Our Enemy's Eyes and Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.
He also writes for antiwar.com, antiwar.com/shoyer.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
Thank you very much, sir.
Glad to be back.
Good to talk with you again, and it's very timely here with this release of this tape.
And let me ask you, I'm a pretty cynical guy, please forgive me, why should I believe that this bin Laden tape is real?
He's wearing a fake beard is what they're saying.
What does that mean?
You know, I don't have any idea what it means.
But I think the only thing you need to understand, or we all need to understand, is that the voice is his.
You know that voice, and that's certainly his voice, you're saying?
Well, I think I do recognize the voice very well.
But also the government, the people who listen to it have confirmed it.
So I don't see any reason for anyone to mislead people about that.
The beard does look funny, it almost looks to me like the lengthy part of it is tucked in under his chin.
But it's, you know, I don't know if it's how relevant it is.
Of course, in the day of Britney Spears, the whole world is focused on his quaff.
Well, you know, I noticed that the video seems to pause in a few places.
And I really didn't have enough time to go back over it and analyze it closely.
But I at least read in a couple of places where they said, hey, you notice that the video pauses at the parts where he mentions Sarkozy and Gordon Brown, and other things that refer to current events.
Yeah.
And that isn't that kind of mysterious, that that's where the video pauses, what do you make of that?
Well, there's also stuff after that of current events that he talks about.
The thing I read over the weekend in a couple of those communications or computer sites on the internet was that there probably was a glitch in the transmission of the electronic packet that held the speech.
But I don't know, you know, you can spin any kind of conclusion you'd like out of it.
But I think we'll see the proof of the pudding today or tomorrow in the second half of the speech.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, right.
And there's a news story this morning saying they're going to release a video of bin Laden, I guess, given the last rites or something to one of these September 11th hijackers.
Yeah, I think what he did in 02 and 03 is to make a speech and also then present the last will and testament of one of the hijackers.
And I think what I heard on the radio was that this was going to be one of the actual pilots.
And now let me ask you this, too, and I'm not just pointing my finger at you, it seems like all these guys and you included, it seems like you're always so fast to assume that the tape is legitimate even before you've seen it.
Well, we've never had one that wasn't.
We have a we kind of have a 12 year track record here of never having an illegitimate tape.
Yeah.
And you're convinced of that?
I'm convinced as far as I yeah, as far as I can, I have no one, you know, in the last two, two and a half years, my my ability to provide technical explanations is certainly not there since I resigned from the agency.
But there's no doubt in the world that everyone before November 2004 was produced, what was him.
Yeah.
And I agree with that.
I know that at least one of those videos is very controversial where he's sitting in the room and talks about the September 11th attacks and and I've seen a lot of still pictures taken out of that video where people say, oh, see, that couldn't possibly be him.
But I went back and watched the video again and it looks just like him to me.
But I've never met the guy.
But yeah.
And I don't think that it's not I don't think that that was ever intended to be public.
That was kind of a home video that somehow got out.
That was not at all in the traditional manner in which things were staged that that video I think was intended by intended to be taken back by that paraplegic sheikh to Saudi Arabia and to be shown privately there to bin Laden's backers.
I don't think that falls into the category of of Al Qaeda videos.
But I do think it's a genuine piece of work.
All right.
Now, you've told me before that you consider this guy, bin Laden, to be a mastermind.
You consider him to be extremely intelligent.
Shortarily so.
Yes.
And so let me ask you, why do you think he mentioned your book?
Because I'm right.
Well, it occurred to me that perhaps he was trying to discredit you.
Well, he might.
You know, that's certainly what the pro-Israeli lobby is trying to do over the weekend.
And in that bunch of has-beens up at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, you know, Victor Davis Hanson and Sanuza or Danuza, whatever his name is.
I don't think so.
You know, to put me in the same category of Noam Chomsky is a little bit disconcerting.
But my book got her basically based on what he said.
Right.
What I tried to give Americans an idea about is what he was waging war about, what was motivating his followers.
Well, it seems like, you know, you told me before that he appreciates this war in Iraq.
It was the unexpected but hoped for gift.
And we gave it to him and that he wants to continue this war.
And in the in the transcript, he attacks the Democrats for not ending the war.
And it seems to me like, well, I mean, we can all just flip it to Fox News right now.
And they're saying, you know, see, the Democrats want to end the war and bin Laden wants them to do it.
And they're taking their marching orders from bin Laden, basically, as Chris Wallace accused Ron Paul in the debate.
Well, you know, the only people taking marching orders from Osama bin Laden, as far as I can tell, are every presidential candidate, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush, except Mr. Paul.
Mr. Paul has it very square about what the motivation of our enemy is.
And it's certainly exactly what he said it is, intervention.
The rest of them, you know, Chris Wallace, I think, I think really deserves a column, which I hope to write sometime.
Because really, it's the American political establishment that's marching to al Qaeda's beat, not Mr. Paul.
Well, I guess it could be marked as some progress, because when Chris Wallace did accuse Ron Paul of treason, basically, he accepted the premise of the question, which was what al Qaeda wants is America off the Arabian Peninsula.
So he didn't say, you know, oh, come on, Dr. Paul, they don't care about Saudi Arabia, they just hate our freedom.
Well, I guess it might be a small step forward, but it's very, it's a very small one.
Yeah, well, this is Fox News, we have to give them credit wherever we can find it, you know.
Okay, so, but do you think that he was trying, that bin Laden was basically trying to discredit the Democrats, he was trying to give Fox News ammunition against the people who are trying to end the war here?
You know, I think sometimes that we are a little bit too prone to split hairs here.
When Laden was given a gift by going there, we're going to leave.
And whether you're anti-war or pro-war, when we leave, it will be a defeat for the United States.
But Laden wins if we stay, wins if we lose.
And so, I think the bottom line is, he'd like to see us leave because he's accomplished his goal.
We were much more hated and violently opposed than we were before the invasion of Iraq.
But we have to remember that America is not their main enemy.
We're hit so frequently in Iraq and Afghanistan, and probably again shortly here in America, because we're in their way.
Because we protect the Israelis, because we protect the Saudis and the Egyptians.
So he doesn't want, bin Laden at heart, does not want this war to go on forever against America.
He wants to prevail, and then move on to their main target.
So basically, you think he's gotten all the PR value that he thinks he can get out of Iraq at this point?
Yeah.
Well, I think what he's weighing is, I think as long as we were there, he's going to get PR value out of it.
But we're past the point, you know, we're going to leave one way or another.
There's not a lot of difference between Bush and the Democrats.
They're going to, once Bush goes, somebody's going to pull out.
So the sooner that happens from bin Laden's perspective, the sooner they can claim a great victory, inspire millions of more Muslims to their side, and then begin to focus on our presence in Afghanistan, and then go after the police state in the Arab world.
Well, you know that the war party's answer to what you just said is, therefore, we cannot leave John McCain.
He's listening right now, and he's saying, see, Michael Shorter said it, we have to stay forever.
Well, McCain's got a loose bolt, you know.
Who's going to vote for a president who can't even control his temporal enough not to yell at a kid during his rally?
There's no difference between McCain and Bush, you know.
McCain wants 30,000 more troops, that's not going to do any good.
If anybody really intends to win that war, they're going to have to talk half a million or more troops, and no one's going to do that.
So as far as I'm concerned, every American life lost is there now is wasted, and we ought to get out.
Okay, now you've called this whole Al Qaeda movement a global Islamist insurgency, basically.
Now, it may just be my understanding of the term, but does that not imply in its own definition that there's some sort of oppressive force that they're insurging against?
I mean, you can't have an insurgency when you're the boss.
Of course.
The oppressive force they're going against initially is us, but just to get us out of the way, the oppressive forces that they have identified that merit demolition are Israel and Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and all of the police states in the Arab world that have oppressed Muslims from their point of view for the past half century.
And I think this really gets to the point about what happened on September 11th, right?
That attack was meant to provoke us, to get us to finally go over there and invade with our troops within rifle range in order to cripple the American ability to support the rest of their enemies nearby.
I think that's pretty much right on the mark, that they had been, certainly if you read what bin Laden has said in 96, 97, 98, he began to goad us trying to get us on the ground in Afghanistan.
And there are some people who said, well, I think George Tenet said he never expected us to invade Afghanistan.
I think that's exactly wrong.
I think that's just a lot of baloney.
I think what he wanted was us on the ground in order to kill us at rifle range, just as you said.
And then they almost denied him the battle in Afghanistan that he wanted by going to Iraq.
But then I guess they ended up keeping enough of an occupation in Afghanistan to make both true.
Yeah, they've divided forces just to the right amount that we can lose both wars.
It's almost mathematical in the way they've done it, but they've ensured that they can't win in either place.
Yeah, you said on one TV show or another last week or in print somewhere that the mission in Afghanistan as it is now is to suppress drugs and support the Taliban and fight an insurgency here and put down a rebellion there.
And it's everything but look for the Arab-Afghan army, the leftover Al Qaeda, Mujahideen types.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I'm surprised that American parents of servicemen in Afghanistan aren't more distraught than they are.
I don't think they realize that those few American servicemen and women and intelligence officers have six top-priority jobs on their plate, which would probably require a half a million people if you wanted to do them all simultaneously.
And you're not advising to do that.
You're advising to drop some of those commitments that are relevant to the real fight, or you are advising half a million troops?
You know, Scott, we've drifted over the past six years into a position where we cannot — that we're under attack there.
The idea that we're on the offensive there in any of these categories is incorrect.
We're under attack.
We really don't have enough people to — if we don't fight the Taliban, for example, they'll keep attacking us and hurt us while we're trying to focus on bin Laden.
If we don't fight to keep Karzai in power, he's dead, insofar as a functioning political entity.
So right now, not only do they have six top-priority issues to look at and to work against, but in some ways they're all interconnected.
They weren't that way when we went there, but once we decided instead of beating al Qaeda and the Taliban, we wanted a secular democracy and a parliament and the elections and all of this stuff, it's now all interwoven.
So I think at the end of the day, we're probably closer to losing in Afghanistan than we are in Iraq.
Well, now, would you say that, listen, we're going to lose Afghanistan one way or another, we ought to go ahead and leave there the way you say about Iraq?
Not yet, because I still think it's very important that we at least have a try at bin Laden, even if he's in Pakistani territory.
You know, I think — I don't know what Mr. Paul thinks on this, but I find it a little bit contrary to the Constitution, that the last two American presidents have delegated the protection of our country to a third world dictator in the person of Musharraf.
I think ultimately, if we want to bin Laden, we're going to have to do it ourselves.
Well, now, there's a cost-benefit analysis to be taken there.
I mean, if we send soldiers across the Pakistani border, that could lead to some serious upset in that country, and they're armed to the teeth with nukes.
And if we don't, will we let maybe a nuke go off in one of our cities?
It's not an easy decision, but it was a much easier decision to make in 2001 when we had the opportunity.
It's like anything else, Scott.
We didn't kill him in 98, we didn't kill him in 99, we didn't kill him in 2001.
Now we're this far down the road, and we're faced with exactly the same problem, but within a much more complex context.
Now, you often bring up the idea of a nuclear attack on the United States by these guys.
What is it that you know that makes you so certain that they want to attack us with a nuclear weapon?
Well, aside from the promises they've made in public, whether it's al-Ahiri or bin Laden, we know that since 1992, they have had a unit of hard scientists and engineers and technicians trying to either buy a nuclear weapon or steal one.
We also know that for them, money is no object.
We know that they went to the bother of getting a religious validation for an attack that allows them to kill up to 10 million Americans.
And finally, we know that our government has been absolutely negligent since 1991 in not fully securing the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
The one thing that we were in complete control of with the Russians was putting 22,000 Soviet nuclear weapons under wraps, and the last time I heard Senator Lugar talk, he said less than 40% of that program has been completed.
So you add up all that stuff, Scott, and I think we can hope that it doesn't happen, but the conditions that would promote it are very much in the favor of the enemy.
Do you have any reason to believe that they already possess a nuclear weapon?
I really don't have any way to know one way or another.
But if you leave a window open for, since the wall fell 91, that's 9, for 16 years, you'll probably get to the point where it's like they say you can put a monkey in front of a typewriter and eventually he'll type a poem.
I think that's the kind of condition we're in.
We've given them a 17-year window of opportunity.
Have you read Dying to Win by Robert A. Pape?
I have, yes.
And what's your opinion about that?
I think it's an excellent book.
I try to promote it whenever I can.
I have a little question about Dr. Pape's secondary emphasis on the role of religion, but I think in the suicide bombings, at least in the Islamic world, but I think his data is irrefutable.
The American military presence, foreign military presence, produces suicide bombings.
It seems pretty cut and dried to me.
Well, and now about that role of religion, the War Party says, oh, Islamofascism, Islamofascism, they're an aggressive, you know, Fourth Reich ban on taking over the world and that sort of thing.
It's just propaganda by the pro-Israeli black, Scott.
There are Islamofascists out there, but they're all on our side.
The president of Egypt, the kings of all the Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, and governmental junta generals in Algeria.
So unfortunately, America's lined up with the fascists, the Islamofascists.
Well now, in Pape's book, he says the role of religion, I guess what you call this kind of a secondary emphasis on it, he says the role of religion here, the most important thing to know is, it's the difference in religion between the occupier and the occupie that causes the motivation.
The Iraqis didn't resort suicide bombing against the Iranian invasion because it wasn't such an alien force coming that was a threat to their culture, their way of life, whereas this is a bunch of pale-faced Christians from across the ocean who come and don't speak the language or anything alike.
And I guess he points at Sudan and says, you know, this is the place with the most radical Wahhabists and they kill each other, but they don't use suicide bombing.
And it's because they don't have that difference of religion, they don't have, even though they're being attacked, they don't feel like their entire way of life is being threatened.
Well, you know, Dr. Pape has done an extraordinary job in researching this issue, and I think there's a little bit of difference between him and me on this, but I think he's going to be proven right in the Sudan, when Senator Dole, or former Senator Dole and Senator McCain get their way and they deploy American and British troops to Darfur.
I think we'll certainly see an increase at the beginning of suicide bombings then.
Yeah.
Well, so then what is your perspective on the role of religion here, in terms of motivation?
I think the most important part that religion plays is bin Laden speaks for almost 75% of all Muslims, according to Western polls, when he describes U.S. foreign policy, U.S. interventionism, as an assault on Islam and a threat to Muslim believers.
That's the most important thing, and that's where the motivation comes from.
I think motivation for suicide car bombings is a subset of that.
There's a bigger kind of motivation for actual warfare, which we're seeing in the various insurgencies in the world, but that's the key.
And for Americans to keep being told by their leaders that this is all about our primary elections and ladies in the workplace and freedom is wrong.
And I think what bin Laden said when he mentioned my book was simply that maybe he thought it would be better understood by Americans if they read it by an American.
I don't think he realizes quite the desperateness of our political establishment not to have my book be very well received in the country.
Well, you know, it's interesting that they keep trying to push this haters for freedom line.
They must know.
They've read your book right over there in the halls of power in the foreign policy establishment.
They know who you are, Michael Sawyer.
If they haven't read bin Laden's thought was they've at least read your American angle on them.
And so is it too much of a stretch for me to conclude that they've just decided that three thousand dead Americans every once in a while is worth it for their global empire.
And that's why they can't tell us the truth about it.
They know that the American people in supermajority, if faced with the real question, is it worth it to have our civilians killed just so that we can control other people's countries, would say no.
And that's why they're lying to us is because they don't want us to have that debate.
I think that's a large part of it, Scott.
I think they are moral coward and I think they are very low talk about anything that could take them cost them office, whether it's border control, Israel, oil and energy.
But I have to tell you that that all of the leading lights in this administration at least keep identifying my book as an anti Bush book.
And Mr. Bush is mentioned in about three pages of a three hundred and forty page book, so I don't know if they have read it or not.
The only person I'm confident of who has looked at it and thought about it is Mr. Paul.
Yeah.
Well, you're only the former chief of the bin Laden unit.
What could you have to say that anybody in American policy circles could learn from?
I don't know.
Well, you know, the one thing I don't want to be is is known as the expert.
I don't know if there's any expert on this at all.
I'm a guy that's worked in the vineyard for a little while and I'm putting up a view.
And I think it makes a little bit of sense because the other view, the opposite view clearly hasn't worked in the last decade.
Let me ask you about this.
I don't think we've ever discussed this.
You mentioned earlier that they failed to get him bin Laden in nineteen ninety nine.
And that reminded me of all the different reports I've read that America actually was working with, maybe not directly with bin Laden, but at least with his Mujahideen warriors in nineteen ninety nine, bringing them in from Afghanistan and using them as shock troops in the war in Kosovo.
What do you know about that?
I know that it's not true, primarily because bin Laden didn't want to go to the Balkans.
I don't know if we would have ever and he hates us from the word go.
But he is very careful not to commit major numbers of his fighters to places where they don't have contiguous territory and safe haven.
He grew up in the war against the Soviets and he looks wherever he goes for a Pakistan.
For example, they didn't go to the Balkans because they couldn't base out of Catholic Croatia or orthodox Serbia and bin Laden and Zawahiri have railed consistently against Lebanon and Jordan and Syria for not letting them base there to attack the Israelis.
One of the things they value most about Iraq is Iraq for the first time gives them contiguous territories not only next to the Levant, but next to Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula.
I was at the heart of the business in the Balkans and I knew of no contacts ever between Al Qaeda and the United States government.
What about any sort of Mujahideen types from Afghanistan coming to fight on the side of the Kosovars?
No?
Oh sure, they certainly went there.
A lot of them went there.
A lot went from Egypt, a lot went from Europe, but bin Laden's aid, I'm not saying he didn't help those people, but his aid was limited primarily to things like documents, money, a few advisers, but not a body of troops such as he has deployed in Afghanistan at the moment.
Yeah, I'm not saying his hands were not in there, surely they were, but in terms of a major effort, the configuration geographically just did not conduce to what bin Laden wants before he commits.
And to the degree that he was involved that was on the same side as the United States?
I don't, you know, I'm not quite sure what side we were on, except we wanted...
What were you on the side of the KLA?
Well then, if there were bin Laden people there and we were supporting the KLA, then certainly we were both on the same side.
I doubt that we were in any kind of contact.
I would be very surprised.
I would never say never, but I would be very surprised.
I don't know enough about it to really continue the conversation.
Frankly, that's a good way to put it, because I don't either.
I know that Brendan O'Neill has written a whole book about this, about how this really helped all the liberal do-gooderism in Bosnia, and especially in Kosovo, helped internationalize Al Qaeda far beyond what they were before.
Well, the one thing I know from my own studies is that the West does not appreciate the really dramatic, almost traumatic, effect the Balkans had in the Muslim world.
The behavior of the Serbs in the Croatian, especially toward Muslim children and women, had a far greater impact in the Muslim world than in the West, and the animosities that were stirred by that were really very much a monumental point in contemporary history.
And I think we have not heard the last of Islamic insurgency in the Balkans by a long shot.
All right, now I'm looking at the clock here, and I'm looking at my list of questions.
We're going to have to really go through these quick here.
Your most recent article for Antiwar.com is something to the effect of Iran and Syria, the enemies that aren't.
And it's pretty clear that these two countries are on the administration's hit list.
There's more and more information coming out all the time about seemingly well-connected people expressing fears that we really are about to bomb Iran sometime soon, and so forth.
So I wonder if you can help the audience understand America's conflict with Iran and Syria in terms of America's conflict with Osama bin Laden, which, since he knocked down the towers, would seem to be first and foremost the problem here.
The problem is he's not first and foremost.
This administration, and I'm afraid both parties, really are still stuck in the Cold War.
They think that the only real threats can come from nation states.
And really, this is a perfect example of America being involved in a potential war just because of our relationship with the Israelis.
Iran is no threat to the United States.
And Syria, my God, look at Syria on the map.
It's a little splotch, and it's dirt poor, and it's no threat to anybody but the Israelis.
Iran is surrounded by a Sunni world that hates it.
It's running out of energy over the next decade or two.
It's going to revert to being an impoverished third-world country, and it's also ringed by American military bases.
If they're a threat to the United States, it's hard for me to figure out why.
There's always classified information that I have no access to, so you have to at least give your government people the benefit of the doubt.
But on the surface of them, neither one seems to be a threat to me.
Certainly, neither one of them is going to detonate any kind of weapon inside of an American city.
Well, you know, Eli Lake in the New York Sun says that the Iranians are in bed with al-Qaeda.
That, oh yeah, they say that they're in prison, but really they're all working together and directing anti-American operations from Iran.
It always seems to me that most of the news out of the New York Sun is probably manufactured by the propaganda bureau of the Mossad.
The idea that the Sunnis and Shias are cheek by jowl is a fabrication of somebody's either imagination or their deliberate intent to mislead Americans.
Now, the one thing that could promote that really historic bridging of animosities between Shias and Sunnis would be an American attack on Iran.
That could be a negative achievement of truly historic proportions.
But that hasn't taken place up to this point, you're saying?
No, it has not.
There is no significant cooperation between the Iranians and al-Qaeda, no.
First of all, the Iranians would have to be idiots.
Whatever al-Qaeda does benefits Iran without Iran getting bombed in return.
But second, bin Laden has been studious in avoiding any kind of state-sponsor relationship with anyone.
Why would he go to people that he hated, like the Shia?
Well, I can only think of one reason, and it's from one of the letters they found at Zarqawi's place when they killed him, and it was they want America to have a war with Iran.
I guess if bin Laden could make it look like he's friends with Iran, that would help provide Cheney the excuse he needed.
I don't know why the Iranians would want to make that deal.
Yeah, and you know, if that was the case, I think, given what we know about al-Qaeda's propaganda machine and its sophistication, if they wanted to do that, I think they could have done a much better job than they have so far.
In trying to get America to bomb Iran?
Yes.
But the problem is, the constituency bin Laden speaks to, up to the people who are going to come out and support him with guns, who are going to fight, would be turned off by the idea of any kind of an alliance with the Shia.
So I think that's why we haven't seen that kind of program.
So you don't think that he would consider it a hoped-for but unexpected gift for America to bomb the ayatollahs out of power?
Well, I don't think he can bomb anybody out of power unless we use nuclear weapons.
Their power has never won anything.
I don't think he would frown on it at all.
All I'm saying is that I haven't seen evidence to point to the kind of effort al-Qaeda is capable of in terms of convincing America that they and the Iranians are allied.
Right.
I see what you're saying.
Okay.
Now, the war is already spreading to Africa.
We mentioned Sudan and some of the Democrats' vows to put American combat troops on the ground there.
And of course, there's a proxy war being fought in Somalia.
Is this a good strategy to hunt al-Qaeda guys down with military force in Africa, or are we just going to spread this whole global Islamist insurgency further west at this point?
In Africa, my impression that the way to handle things is quietly, either by capturing al-Qaeda people that we know of or killing them.
I'm afraid that increased American military presence on the ground is just going to spread a jihad in a place where very little has occurred that's beneficial to bin Laden.
But now, we're in about 12 different African states, we're supporting a Christian army from Ethiopia that invaded an Islamic country in Somalia, and it seems like either wittingly or unwittingly, we're trying to, and I think unwittingly, trying to spread this business.
Well, if it's unwittingly, there's a real lack of wits going on, it would seem.
The Washington Post reported that there were three al-Qaeda guys in Somalia justified this war.
Now, it's hard for me to believe that's just myopia, that's taking advantage, that's taking an excuse to do something you wanted to do anyway at that point.
That could well be.
I think that's a fair point, Scott.
I also think that this administration is particularly operating, for whatever reason, from a basis of fear.
At the end of the day, one of the best things that could have happened to America was to have the Islamists rule Somalia.
They were bringing order and peace, and a harsh law and order, to be sure, but at the same time, once they had a state, they had something to lose, and people with something to lose are much easier to keep in line than people who you can't find and locate and kill.
So to me, the whole Somalia thing was just...there's just very little contact with reality in it.
I don't understand it, except if you look at it in the context of people just wanting to extirpate this Muslim phenomenon wherever they can find it.
Now, back to Iraq here for a minute.
The president, I guess the story changes, you know, one week it's everyone fighting Americans in Iraq is Al Qaeda, and then the next week it's, oh, Al Qaeda's on the run because we've turned the Sunni against them, although it seems like the Sunni turned against them themselves, the regular Sunni Iraqi population.
But the threat that the president has used over and over and over again is that if we leave Iraq, and I'm sorry, this also goes for many of the Republican presidential and Democratic presidential candidates as well, if we leave Iraq, then Al Qaeda in Iraq will take over, and we'll use that as their new base of operations.
That's nonsense, Scott.
I think, as you say, it's hard to tell what the story is, because one day we're going to bring all of Al Qaeda in Iraq to justice one person at a time, and then they talk about Anbar and they talk about Al Qaeda as if it was a 10,000-person force that they had to defeat conventionally or with the Sunnis.
I don't know what the truth is there, but to identify the opposition in Iraq as Al Qaeda mainly is certainly a lie.
First of all, there's not enough Al Qaeda people to do what's going on in Iraq at the moment.
Al Qaeda is only welcome in other countries, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Philippines, in Yemen, if it comes to play a supporting role and let the national insurgency, the Iraqi insurgency, the Yemeni insurgency, take the lead.
One of the reasons Zarqawi, for example, was causing them such a problem, Al Qaeda, was because he was a Jordanian and he was trying to take over the leadership of the Iraqi insurgency.
Our hearing letter to Zarqawi in July of 2005 was very clear on that point.
He said, you cannot be the leader, all you will do is get us kicked out of the country.
So what happens if American troops leave and you think the local Sunnis will just clean them out and that'll be the end of that?
No, I think once we leave, the Sunnis will make peace with what's left of Al Qaeda and then fight with the Shias.
You know, the Sunnis there know we're going to leave and they know they're going to need help in the future, so they're not going to, you know, they'll fight them now, but they're not going to destroy them.
Well, so then I guess that does sound like you're saying, well, they will have a safe haven there then.
Oh, sure, they'll have a safe haven no matter what happens, as long as Iraq is unstable or if it has an Islamic government, that they have a safe haven, that's what people don't seem to get, that it's not that if we leave Iraq, they'll have a safe haven, they have a safe haven.
Because we invaded.
Because we invaded and because there's no entity in Iraq at the moment that controls the borders.
You know, those problems that they're having in Algeria, the problems in Egypt, the fighting that went on for, what, four months in Lebanon, that's the first indication of the seepage of al Qaeda out of Iraq into the Levant.
And you know, the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis have said al Qaeda is in Gaza too.
I don't know whether I trust them or not, but it's not impossible.
Well now, so do you think that this new generation of jihadists then that have grown up fighting the Iraq war, that they basically are tantamount to the same threat as Osama bin Laden in terms of, you know, coming here and killing Americans?
No.
I think the problem we have from the core al Qaeda group is that we didn't destroy it, it's still functioning, and it's still focused on us.
And it doesn't take an awful lot of people to stage an attack in the United States when our borders are open.
I think what the other groups are just going to be fighting primarily in their own countries, I think in some ways the generation that's coming of age in Iraq is probably more of a threat, at least at this stage, to Europe than it is to America.
They're sort of the junior mujahideen.
Right now, they don't have as much experience or talent, but it's always a learning curve, Scott.
And they'll learn as they go.
When we were first attacked by al Qaeda in 1992, al Qaeda blew itself up in Yemen, and nine years later they hit us in New York and Washington.
So people who kind of make fun of the amateurish attempts we've seen recently are really whistling past the graveyard because people learn over time.
Let me ask you real quick, if I can, about the economics of Osama bin Laden.
His denunciations of corporations and capitalism in this recent speech kind of remind me of the most radical leftist, and I've read him compared to a Leninist before, in terms of his hatred of markets and so forth.
Can you comment on that?
Yeah, I think that was the one discordant note that I caught in the speech, is that previously he's been posing as, or at least talking as, a capitalist.
He sees how the economy works, he's an economist trained as an economist and an engineer, and he's always said, well, what do the Americans think I'm going to do with the oil?
But I'm going to sell it to them, but they're going to pay more for it.
I think what we saw in the speech last Friday was the influence, to some extent, of the American that's working with them now, Adam Gadahn, the guy they call Islam Al-Amriqi.
But it's not a theme that's new to al-Qaeda, it's a theme that bin Laden, or al-Zawahiri, has been focusing on since 2005, the inequities of capitalism, the poor people in our country, and more recently trying to point out racial inequalities, especially vis-a-vis the number of blacks that are being killed in the military actions around the world.
So it's a little different for bin Laden, but it's not new, it's just more developed a theme than it has been before.
And I think the main thing he's trying to do is to contrast the capitalist, the failings of the capitalist society, if you will, to the pleasures of Islam, the all-encompassing philosophy that Islam presents for humans.
Yeah.
I try to be aware of all-encompassing philosophies.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay, now, a couple last footnotes here, if I can squeeze them in.
Before the war against Iraq, you were assigned, correct, to go back and double-check all the evidence about Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda.
And you had already written a book, Through Our Enemy's Eyes, that detailed vast and extensive links and ties between these two groups, and that's what you found, right, when you went back through the CIA's material?
No, I found nothing.
My books are based on open-source material, and I don't think I described a vast and extensive coordination between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but I did mistakenly describe a relationship that was developed between them on WMD in Sudan, when Torabi was the leader in Sudan.
I went back at the direction of the DPI and examined, with several other officers, about ten years' worth of the intelligence community's records, about 20,000 documents, about 80,000 pages of material, and we found nothing.
There was no connection at all, and so in the subsequent edition of Through Our Enemy's Eyes, I recanted what I had said and explained how I had come to a wrong conclusion and why I was recanting.
And you told the director of Central Intelligence this before the war?
Yes, of course.
You didn't keep this a secret from Mr. Tenet?
No.
Well, I have to explain to you, it was a two-tiered thing.
We did the research, the team that I led, and then the analysts wrote it up, but I saw what the analysts wrote and it basically said, there's nothing here, boss.
What he passed on to the president is an entirely different issue.
I have no idea what he told the president.
And one last thing.
There have been many terrorism prosecutions here in the United States, and I want to exclude Zacharias Moussaoui, because he was connected, but Lodi, California, Brooklyn, Miami, New Jersey, Army Base, the JFK Airport, the Detroit Four, all these terrorism cases.
In your opinion, are any of these guys actually members of Al-Qaeda or tied Al-Qaeda, and I guess secondly, are any of them even terrorists at all?
It looks like the Fort Dix guys perhaps were a serious threat, and the guys earlier in Lackawanna near Buffalo, New York.
But as I understand the rest of those cases, it was entrapment that the FBI found a slightly unintelligent group of Muslims, then found a slightly more intelligent Muslim who was wanted for something, and promised him a plea deal if he would go back to the group of unintelligent Muslims and entrap them in terrorism.
So I think a couple of these cases were real, a couple of them just looked like ordinary run-of-the-mill sting apparitions.
Well, so if you were having lunch with the director of the FBI, what would you say to them about this?
I mean, it seems to me like the more time these guys spend running around playing Keystone Cops, the more likely it is that some actual terrorists are actually going to get away with another spectacular attack in this country.
Well, the FBI is not very good at counterterrorism.
They probably should have been taken away from them, and we should have had a MI5-type system established after 2001.
Somebody's got to do the job, but to give the FBI their due, and all law enforcement, they don't have a chance to stop anything in this country of a serious nature as long as our borders are open.
At the end of the day, if we get attacked again, the FBI, the CIA, the local police, they'll be blamed.
But the real murderers of the next group of Americans won't be bin Laden, but the Congress that didn't close the borders.
And you think that's the most likely entry for some terrorists, is to come across like Mexican laborers?
Yeah, or from Canada.
You know, when I was a kid, I lived in Buffalo, and we used to run beer across the border in a boat, you know, three or four times a week, and I don't think in ten years I ever saw anybody that even looked like law enforcement.
We've got an awful long border on both sides, north and south, so unless we're going to be serious about that, talking about effective homeland security is really a hoot.
All right, well, we're all out of time, I really appreciate your perspective today.
Everybody, Michael Shoyer, he's the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alex Station, he's the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, you can find his archives at antiwar.com/shoyer.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, sir, it's always a pleasure.
We have heard that a half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima, and you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
