144 Quotes by Michael Scheuer

They have always been almost puritanical in talking about setbacks.

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

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

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

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.

There is a direct correlation between what al Qaeda says and what it does. And the one thing that has been the gold standard of correlation has been bin Laden's 1995 - or was it 1996? - pledge that every attack is going to be more powerful than the last. If you go back to the first attack in Yemen in 1992 and chart it out, every attack has been more powerful, more destructive than the last one.

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.

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.