Michael Scheuer Quotes (36 Quotes)

There's no quality control. You'll have guys out there with a smattering of Arabic drawing all kinds of crazy conclusions. Rush Limbaugh will cherry-pick from the right, and Al Franken will cherry-pick from the left.

The agency never asked me, for either book, not to publish it.

Without the connotation good or bad, bin Laden's a great man in the sense that he's influenced the course of history.

One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.

A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device. Yes, I think it's probably a near thing.

No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable.

Sister Virginia used to say, 'You'll be known by the company you keep.'

Bin Laden has consistently shown himself to be immune to outside pressure. When he wants to do something, he does it on his own schedule.'

There's been a huge wedge between what the analysts think and what the Bush administration wants them to say.

In this case, nuclear material, so by the end of 1996, it was clear that this was an organization unlike any other one we had ever seen.

You'll have to ask the lawyers.

Our leaders continue to say that we're making strong headway against this problem. And I think we are not.

We are tangled in a very significant Islamic insurgency in Iraq.

'The war in Iraq - if Osama was a Christian - it's the Christmas present he never would have expected.

Saudi Arabia was, until just a few years ago, probably one of the most safe countries on earth. And now the paper is daily full of activities and shootouts between Islamists who supported Osama bin Laden and the government there.

The treatise found that he was perfectly within his rights to use them.

We had found that he and al Qaeda were involved in an extraordinarily sophisticated and professional effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available again Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet.

You couldn't have done this without killing an Arab prince.

Until we respect bin Laden, we are going to die in numbers that are probably unnecessary.

Warning your enemy before you attack him is very much a tradition in Islam.

In all cases, bin Laden indicated that these attacks would be designed to make the countries rethink their support for America.

And if that's what the American people want, then that's what the policy should be, of course. But the idea that anything in the United States is too sensitive to discuss or too dangerous to discuss is really, I think, absurd.

Most dramatically, and perhaps least noticed, is the violence inside Saudi Arabia itself.

Time is not on America's side. We're clearly losing.

No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it's probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog - that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area.

She was always of the view that she would rather not get her hands dirty with covert action.

Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about.

The world is lousy with Arab princes. And if we could have got Osama bin Laden, and saved at some point down the road 3,000 American lives, a few less Arab princes would have been OK in my book.

The uniqueness of the unit was more or less that it was focused on a single individual. It was really the first time the agency had done that sort of effort.

I think Mr. Clarke had a tendency to interfere too much with the activities of the CIA, and our leadership at the senior level let him interfere too much. So criticism from him I kind of wear as a badge of honor.

Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions.

It proves two things. He's not dead. And despite all the things we say about him being isolated and alone, he can clearly dominate the international media when he wants to.

The exposure of such, either firms or aircraft, just undoes years of cover building and makes America weaker.

Where he was, where his cells were, where his logistical channels were, how he communicated. Who his allies were. Who donated to them. I think it's fair to say the entire range of sources were brought to bear.

It's not a choice between war and peace. It's a choice between war and endless war. It's not appeasement. I think it's better even to call it American self-interest.