144 Quotes by Michael Scheuer

Although my own view is that bin Laden does not want to stage an attack that looks like 9/11 in Europe simply because he does not want to be the agent of Trans-Atlantic reconciliation. I think they will continue to do attacks like Madrid, the British attack, the subway systems, because those attacks have proven that the European response so far has been to blame the domestic government, not to side with the Americans.

We haven’t done anything. That has devolved into a partisan bickering of the kind that says Nero was fiddling while Rome burned.

One of the reasons they didn’t go to Bosnia, bin Laden has explained extensively, was because they couldn’t establish a base anywhere. Not in Catholic Croatia. Not in Orthodox Serbia. So they sent some trainers and a lot of money.

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.

I think it’s very instructive to look at a man like Ramsey Ahmad Yousef, who almost brought down the World Trade Center in 1993. He’s short some fingers, his body is scarred, he’s missing an eye – because he was practicing and not getting it right. But eventually they get it right.

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

If you look at groups in the Palestine region, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic jihad, more often than not in their first operations they would accidentally blow themselves up on the way to the target or the bomb wouldn’t go off.

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.

Major danger lie for America? That we could very well be defeated oversees and at home. And the source of it is clearly that we have yet to find a politician in either partywho’s willing to tell the American people the truth.