Michael Scheuer, the
former head of the Osama bin Laden desk at the US
Central Intelligence Agency, interprets the
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) document on
the global terrorist threat, which reflects the
consensus view of the intelligence community and
is the first comprehensive report of its kind
since the October 2002 NIE document on Iraq's
estimated weapons program. Scheuer is interviewed
by National Interest online editor Ximena
Ortiz.
The bright shining
truths Ximena Ortiz: Much of the NIE
reflects what you have long been
warning about, especially in
regards to Iraq war. How much political hedging is
done in completing these documents, and could you
parse for us the politics from the good
intelligence in this latest NIE report?
Michael Scheuer: There
unfortunately has been increasing politicization
in the NIE throughout the course of my career. On
the whole, the NIE accurately presents the
terrorist threat, in that it doesn't say that so
many young men are willing to blow themselves up
because Scheuer has a draft beer after work, or
there are women in the workplace or we have
primary elections in Iowa. And it begins to talk
about anti-Americanism.
The failure that I
see in the excerpts was not to take
anti-Americanism a step further. Because it leaves
the impression that we're hated in the Muslim
world because we're Americans. That, thank
goodness, is just not the case yet.
We're
hated for our policies and their impact. And I
thought that the NIE took a step in the right
direction, and I also thought that the president's
[George W Bush's] words two weeks before in the
Rose Garden that we should begin to listen to what
[Osama] bin Laden and [Ayman al-]Zawahiri and the
others are saying were also a step in the right
direction.
The opacity of
politics XO: Given the
politicization that you describe, does the
intelligence have to reach a critical mass, if it
is inconvenient for the president, before it would
be included in a document like this?
MS: In my experience, and I
only worked on half a dozen NIEs over the course
of my career, but in my experience there were
always issues that were difficult to put into
finished intelligence. But now what we're seeing,
under either kind of administration, Republican or
Democrat, are a certain number of issues that just
will not be mentioned in the NIE simply because
they're sacrosanct to both parties.
The
failure of the NIE to describe how firmly we're
tied to supporting police states in the Islamic
world because we are so dependent on oil in that
region - that's something that under recent
administrations, whether it was Mr [Bill] Clinton
or Mr Bush, is not going to find its way into the
report.
The whole question of our
relationship with Israel, whether or not that's a
good thing is kind of irrelevant. But the reality
of it, the factual information is that our
relationship with Israel makes it more difficult
for us to be accepted on a non-antagonistic basis
in much of the Middle East. That can't get into
it. So what we've done is create a situation where
the intelligence is not written in a way that is
the most useful to the president of either party
because there a number of issues that - when we're
talking about this particular enemy, the Islamist
enemy - that you cannot write about with any kind
of frankness or regularity in intelligence
publications.
Briefer-in-chief barely
briefs XO: Would those issues be
presented verbally to the president in your view?
MS: No, I think that's very
unlikely. Under Mr Clinton or Mr Bush, my
impression is - certainly it was the case until I
resigned in 2004 - that the director of central
intelligence had become the briefer-in-chief for
the president. And I think we've seen that what
that led to was sort of a personal friendship
between the director and the president. And I
think it's very unlikely that in that kind of
relationship the director of central intelligence
is going to go to the president and say: "Listen,
Mr President, analytically we're really without
options in foreign policy as long as we're
dependent on the Saudis for oil." That's something
that's not going to happen.
It used to be,
before Mr [George] Tenet, that the senior briefer
for the president was an analyst who had long
experience and deep expertise on particular
subjects. He or she was kind of designated to go
in and tell the president what he needed to know
and be ready to absorb whatever discontent the
president might respond with. But that's no longer
the case. Now it's much more, I think, telling the
president what he wants to hear.
XO:
What about the areas where the document
doesn't suffer as much from political liability,
where there actually is some truth-telling on
Iraq? Is it your sense that the president would
have been confronted with that kind of information
earlier on, or that he had really seen it for the
first time in the report?
MS: If it's the first time
he saw it, what that will tell the American people
was that George Tenet didn't carry the message
from the CIA. Because what's in the new National
Intelligence Estimate, again, that I've read, is
kind of soft, but it's exactly the viewpoint that
was expressed from the counter-terrorism center
before the invasion of Iraq. The consensus among
the terrorism section of the intelligence
community was - I think it would have been phrased
something like: "Mr President, whatever the threat
is from Saddam Hussein in Iraq, you need to be
aware that if you invade Iraq, you break the back
of our counter-terrorism policy."
I think
that we're slowly moving toward that truth. It's a
truth that was recurrent and accepted within the
terrorism part of the intelligence community far
before the invasion actually occurred.
XO: Right. And then the
question is, did that information actually make it
to the president?
MS: Only
Mr Tenet knows that because again, Mr Tenet
appointed himself briefer-in-chief to the
president. And one of the interesting things to
see in Mr Tenet's book that's coming out this fall
is if he carried that difficult message to the
president, General [Colin] Powell and Mr [Donald]
Rumsfeld. I'm not sure he did. He's ultimately the
only one [who] can tell us that.
The
truth, obliquely XO: The other thing
that's interesting is that NIE report said
"perceived jihadist success [in Iraq] would
inspire more fighters to continue the struggle
elsewhere". And so you wonder what kind of
implications that has for Afghanistan. There's no
direct mention of Afghanistan, but what's your
take on that? Are they trying to, in oblique
language, reference the Iraq impact on
Afghanistan?
MS: Oh, sure.
Afghanistan we forget sometimes is the source of
modern jihadism, not only in the sense that so
many non-Afghan Muslims went to fight the Soviets,
but they actually won. Now what we're seeing in
Afghanistan is that it seems to me that the war is
basically over there, that we're fighting a
rear-guard action, spending most of our time
trying to protect Mr [Hamid] Karzai. My own view
is that both of those wars are over - Iraq and
Afghanistan. We're not going to do what is
necessary militarily, which would be to greatly
increase the force we have and the aggressiveness
of the force we use. And so we're basically going
to have to withdraw from both.
At the end
of the day, what the message is, as you say,
rather obliquely saying, is that, listen, if we
don't win in Iraq and if we don't win in
Afghanistan, suddenly the jihadists have beaten
one superpower once, and the second superpower
twice. And it's a rather weak way of saying that,
but that's where we're heading.
Got
metrics? XO: You remember that
famous leaked Rumsfeld statement, where he ponders
about whether we have the metrics to figure out if
we're killing the jihadists faster than they're
being created. This document clearly posits that
they're being created faster than we're killing
them. So do we have a better handle on the metrics
or have the sheer number of the jihadists that are
being created just become so large that it's
unmistakable?
MS: I think
it's the latter. The pace of the insurgency
gradually continues to increase, mixed with some
kind of civil war. But what's really stunning, I
think, is the quality of the Taliban forces and
the pace of the fighting that's occurring in
Afghanistan. Clearly, these two invasions have
increased the number of people willing to train
and willing to fight and, ultimately, happy to die
to beat the Americans.
I'm not sure we
have a precise metric yet. But the impression to
me, at least, is that we're in far worse shape now
than we were in 2001, primarily because we've kind
of, perhaps unknowingly, provided the Koranic
predicate for a jihad: the unprovoked invasion of
a Muslim country by an infidel. And so, as night
follows day, no one should be surprised that the
level of fighting has increased.
The other
half of Mr Rumsfeld's ponderings should be: Do we
understand what the motivation is for them to do
this? And clearly, we come back to the point that
what we do, and not how we live or what we think,
is what the motivation is. And so not only are we
losing those two wars, but we have yet to take the
measure of the enemy's motivation.
XO: And perhaps a more
accurate way of pondering the question would be:
Are we creating them faster than killing them? Not
are they being created, but are we creating them?
MS: We are certainly
providing the predicate for their creation. You
know, we're not talking here about good policies
or bad policies, we're just simply talking about
reality in terms of what really motivates the
enemy. And we haven't had that discussion in this
country.
And whenever, at least, I've
tried to raise it, I become a Bush-hater, or an
America-basher or an Islamophile. And so it's a
very hard discussion to have in this country.
Clinton and bin Laden XO:
Is there more of a willingness now to take
on those questions?
MS: I
haven't noticed it. I certainly get a good hearing
but I think it's because people don't know quite
what box to put me in. They say I'm an
equal-opportunity basher. But I'm not sure ...
Looking at the media over the weekend, we don't
even seem to be able to discuss fact.
The
whole exchange between Mr [Chris] Wallace and Mr
Clinton on Fox was really an argument about fact,
not an interpretation. Clinton indisputably had X
number of chances to kill or capture bin Laden. Mr
Bush had none in his first eight months. So that's
a fact. But if we can't even agree on that, it's
very hard to have substantive discussion on policy
issues or policy trends or policy impact.
Corpses not a metric XO:
The NIE report refers generally to a
strengthening of al-Qaeda and to the organization
distinguishing itself as our prime threat. What's
left unclear is, when they say al-Qaeda, what
exactly do they mean?
MS:
The editors, whoever they were, really did a
disservice in the very opening sentence of the
material that appears on the [Director of National
Intelligence] website because it's contradictory:
we've hurt them, but they're the biggest danger
out there.
It goes back to your question
about a metric. We just don't have it. We've been
kind of assuming that the body count we've
attained by killing al-Qaeda leaders, and by
capturing them, amounts to a measure of progress.
I think it's perfectly possible that the admirable
achievement in all those dead and captured people
is not really a measure of progress. It just gives
you the ability to say we killed X number of
people.
We really have witnessed, and
again we're really in the realm of fact here, an
extraordinary ability by al-Qaeda since 2001 to
replicate itself. It clearly has very deep
succession plans on the shelf, so that when a
senior man is captured or killed, he is replaced
by his understudy. And so the contradictory nature
of those opening sentences is just the result of
us not having the ability, or not wanting, to do a
solid analysis of the damage we've done to
al-Qaeda.
A new tier of
threat XO: And would that be
al-Qaeda as an organization, or ideology?
MS: I think that the problem
we have is that we now have three tiers of threat.
My own view is that we've put too much stock in
the body count. What [terror expert] Peter Bergen
calls al-Qaeda central, the organization that
answers to Osama bin Laden, has been hurt, but not
nearly as badly as we assume. So that organization
that attacked us on 9/11 [September 11, 2001] is
getting ready to attack us again. And there's no
solid reason to think it can't.
The second
level of threat remains from those allies of bin
Laden that have threatened us and our allies in
the past. Whether it was Kashmiri groups, some of
the Afghan groups - there are various groups
around the world.
But now we have a third
tier. The war in Iraq has had a transforming
impact on what bin Laden has been aiming at all
along, which is to find a way to transform one
Muslim in a vanguard (himself) to a philosophy and
a movement. And that's what we're seeing now. So
the third tier is the inspiration that is flowing
out from bin Laden and al-Qaeda - their words and
actions. And that's what we're seeing in these
cells that have been taken down in Miami, Toronto,
a couple in Australia, two in London, the recent
ad hoc group that was going to bomb trains in
Germany.
They are not directly tied to
al-Qaeda. Their activities are not directed or
supported by al-Qaeda. But invariably, the men who
were arrested in these cells either said they had
been inspired by bin Laden and al-Qaeda, or it was
clear from the documents that were captured with
them. So now we have three tiers, rather than one
or two. And again, we assume far too glibly that
al-Qaeda central is out of business.
