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Michael Scheuer Vying For a Role on 24?
Getting exercised over the mind-numbing stupidity exhibited each day on the cable news networks is easily avoided. Just turn them off. Read a book. Go for a walk. Do something... anything else. But occasionally they're worth watching (in very small doses), if only for their grim comedic value. Tuesday's Glenn Beck show on Fox News is a case in point. The conservative blowhard spoke with Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, about Obama's proposed plan to send 1,500 National Guardsman to the US-Mexico border to combat drug smuggling. But the conversation quickly went off course, ultimately ranging from Scheuer's views on gun control (Democrats "want guns only in the hands of the government") to his aggrieved sense of populism. Scheuer, a highly educated guy himself and one who made a career in the elite echelon of the country's intelligence service, derided how the federal government is run by elitists who care nothing for the common man. "Now the minority--those folks who go to Harvard and Yale and the prestigious universities who think they know everything and who want the government to control everything--are in power. The majority of Americans... are generally neglected in terms of security by the minority that runs this government." Music to the ears of Scheuer's Fox audience.
But Scheuer didn't stop there. When Beck brought up Obama's strategy against Al Qaeda, the former CIA man launched into a diatribe you'd expect from Jon Voight's crazy-patriot character on 24, not from America's former chief Bin Laden hunter. The transcript speaks for itself:
BECK: Do you really, honestly believe that we have come to a place to where those very senior people in the highest offices of the land, Congress and the White House, really will not do the right thing in the end, that they won't see the error of their ways?
SCHEUER: No, sir, they will not. Not -- the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grassroots, bottom-up pressure, because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. Only -- it's an absurd situation. Again, only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.
It should be said, Scheuer penned one of the best books on Al Qaeda yet in print and really knows his stuff, but one wonders, well, what the hell he was thinking. Sure, people often play it up for the cameras on cable news. It's entertainment after all, isn't it? But left unanswered is whether Scheuer, like Voight's character on 24, truly believes that another terrorist attack is just what America needs to get itself back on track.
Watch:
Michael Scheuer: "highly educated"--WTF?
Michael Scheuer: a "highly educated" member of an "elite echelon"? Is Bruce Falconer high, or does he know something about the merits of doctoral studies at the University of Manitoba lost to the rest of us? Perhaps not all Americans possess the right combination of intelligence, grades, and good fortune to make it to the Ivies, but is a top 50--hell, even a top 200--university too much to demand of officers in our nation's "premier" intelligence service? We've fallen far from the "Oh so social" days of the Agency's inception. "Oh so stupid" better fits the likes of Scheuer, an unhinged cretin who clearly "went native" long ago in his deranged identification with the very OBL goons he was charged to combat (actually, substitute “track” for “combat,” as this “expert” was never operational, his pudgy bearing betraying a man who never stepped foot in the brutal AO of which he claims special knowledge). Sick, stupid, and employed by our tax dollars--dollars paid at an inflated wage thanks to graduate studies of a highly suspect nature. Even Fox News surely has higher standards than this...
Not At All to Apologize but...
Scheuer has trucked this argument out in the past but it has always been framed as: We can't stop Al Qaeda because we aren't willing to send 500K troops into Afghanistan and keep them there as long as it takes.
Also, he really believes that policy decisions should be made regardless of how the "liberal-pacifist media and intelligentsia will react."
With those two attitudes, I can easily see him making that statement, not because he wishes that there will be an attack but because he really believes that only another 9-11 will create the political climate that will allow for the sort of policy changes towards Israel and Iran that he suggests.
I also find the above comment ironic in that Steve Coll went out of his way in Ghost Wars to point out the class differences between effective field agents like Scheuer (IMO Baer is another example) and the CIA's Ivy League dominated management class.