Bin Laden Expert Steps Forward
Ex-CIA Agent Assesses Terror War In 60 Minutes Interview
-
Play CBS Video Video Ex-CIA Agent Sizes Up Osama In a 60 Minutes interview, Osama bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer says Osama bin Laden is still a threat - and the al Qaeda founder does have nuclear ambitions. Steve Kroft reports.
-
-
"Michael Scheuer created a secret CIA unit for tracking and eliminating Osama bin Laden. (CBS)
-
Scheuer (right) speaks with Correspondent Steve Kroft in his first television interview since resigning from the CIA and emerging from anonymity to speak publicly for the first time in 22 years. (CBS)
-
No one in the West knows more about the al Qaeda leader than Scheuer (left), who has tracked him since the mid-1980s. (CBS)
-
-
Interactive Bin Laden & Al Qaeda Where al Qaeda operates, who's been caught, how they're financed and a timeline of attacks on Americans.
-
Interactive Assault On Al Qaeda The manhunt on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
-
Interactive Global Terror Major terrorist organizations, the FBI's most wanted and facts and photos from recent attacks.
"I think I became too insistent that we were not pursuing this target with enough vigor and with enough risk-taking -- an unwillingness to take risks," says Scheuer. "I got relieved of the position I was in. I had a lovely sojourn in the library and then had other sojourns since."
His exile ended shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, when he was brought back to the bin Laden unit as a special adviser. But by then, everything had changed.
His nemesis had gone underground, and the United States was on its way to invading Afghanistan and Iraq - creating, Scheuer says, the perception in the minds of 1.3 billion Muslims that America had gone to war against Islam.
"The war in Iraq - if Osama was a Christian - it's the Christmas present he never would have expected," says Scheuer.
Right or wrong, he says Muslims are beginning to view the United States as a colonial power with Israel as its surrogate, and with a military presence in three of the holiest places in Islam: the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, and Jerusalem. And he says it is time to review and debate American policy in the region, even our relationship with Israel.
"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," says Scheuer. "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."
Is he talking about appeasement?
"I'm not talking about appeasement. There's no way out of this war at the moment," says Scheuer. "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."
Scheuer believes that al Qaeda is no longer just a terrorist organization that can be defeated by killing or capturing its leaders. Now, he says it's a global insurgency that's spreading revolutionary fervor throughout the Muslim world.
"Bin Laden's still at large. His most recent speech, I think, demonstrates that he's not running rock to rock, cave to cave. We are tangled in a very significant Islamic insurgency in Iraq," says Scheuer.
"Most dramatically, and perhaps least noticed, is the violence inside Saudi Arabia itself. 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."
© MMV, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.
