Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Bin Laden desk at the CIA, interprets the National Intelligence Estimate document on the global terrorist threat, which reflects the consensus view of the intelligence community and is the first comprehensive report of its kind since the October 2002 NIE document on Iraq's estimated weapons program, most of which was released in July 2003. Scheuer, interviewed by National Interest online editor Ximena Ortiz, uncompromisingly describes the nature and scale of the terrorist threat, and the political hedging of the current NIE. He also weighs in on former President Clinton's real counter-terror record.

The Bright Shining Truths

Q: Much of the NIE reflects what you have long been warning about, especially in regards to Iraq War. How much political hedging is done in completing these documents, and could you parse for us the politics from the good intelligence in this latest NIE report?

MS: There unfortunately has been increasing politicization in the NIE throughout the course of my career. On the whole, the NIE accurately presents the terrorist threat, in that it doesn't say that so many young men are willing to blow themselves up because Scheuer has a draft beer after work, or there are women in the workplace or we have primary elections in Iowa. And it begins to talk about anti-Americanism.

The failure that I see in the excerpts was not to take anti-Americanism a step further. Because it leaves the impression that we're hated in the Muslim world because we're Americans. That, thank goodness, is just not the case yet.

We're hated for our policies and their impact. And I thought that the NIE took a step in the right direction and I also thought that the President's words two weeks before in the Rose Garden that we should begin to listen to what Bin Laden and Zawahiri and the others are saying were also a step in the right direction.

The Opacity of Politics

Q: Given the politicization that you describe, does the intelligence have to reach a critical mass, if it is inconvenient for the president, before it would be included in a document like this?

MS: In my experience, and I only worked on half-a-dozen NIEs over the course of my career, but in my experience there were always issues that were difficult to put into finished intelligence. But now what we're seeing, under either kind of administration, Republican or Democrat, are a certain number of issues that just will not be mentioned in the NIE simply because they're sacrosanct to both parties.

The failure of the NIE to describe how firmly we're tied to supporting police states in the Islamic world because we are so dependent on oil in that region-that's something that under recent administrations, whether it was Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush, is not going to find its way into the report.

The whole question of our relationship with Israel, whether or not that's a good thing is kind of irrelevant. But the reality of it, the factual information is that our relationship with Israel makes it more difficult for us to be accepted on a non-antagonistic basis in much of the Middle East. That can't get into it. So, what we've done is create a situation where the intelligence is not written in a way that is the most useful to the president of either party because there a number of issues that-when we're talking about this particular enemy, the Islamist enemy- that you can not write about with any kind of frankness or regularity in intelligence publications.

Briefer-in-Chief Barely Briefs

Q: Would those issues be presented verbally to the president in your view?

MS: No, I think that's very unlikely. Under Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush, my impression is, certainly it was the case until I resigned in 2004, that the director of central intelligence had become the briefer-in-chief for the president. And I think we've seen that what that led to was sort of a personal friendship between the director and the president. And I think it's very unlikely that in that kind of relationship the director of central intelligence is going to go to the president and say: "Listen Mr. President, analytically we're really without options in foreign policy as long as we're dependent on the Saudis for oil. That's something that's not going to happen.

It used to be before Mr. Tenet, that the senior briefer for the president was an analyst who had long experience and deep expertise on particular subjects. He or she was kind of designated to go in and tell the president what he needed to know and be ready to absorb whatever discontent the president might respond with.

But that's no longer the case. Now it's much more, I think, telling the president what he wants to hear.

Q: What about the areas where the document doesn't suffer as much from political liability, where there actually is some truth telling on Iraq? Is it your sense that the president would have been confronted with that kind of information earlier on, or that he had really seen it for the first time in the report?

MS: If it's the first time he saw it, what that will tell the American people was that George Tenet didn't carry the message from the CIA.

Because what's in the new National Intelligence Estimate, again, that I've read, is kind of soft, but it's exactly the viewpoint that was expressed from the counter-terrorism center before the invasion of Iraq. The consensus among the terrorism section of the intelligence community was-I think it would have been phrased something like: "Mr. President, whatever the threat is from Saddam Hussein in Iraq, you need to be aware that if you invade Iraq, you break the back of our counter-terrorism policy.

I think that we're slowly moving toward that truth. It's a truth that was recurrent and accepted within the terrorism part of the intelligence community far before the invasion actually occurred.

Q: Right. And then the question is, did that information actually make it to the president?

MS: Only Mr. Tenet knows that because again, Mr. Tenet appointed himself briefer-in-chief to the president. And one of the interesting things to see in Mr. Tenet's book that's coming out this fall is if he carried that difficult message to the president, General Powell and Mr. Rumsfeld. I'm not sure he did. He's ultimately the only one that can tell us that.

The Truth, Obliquely

Q: The other thing that's interesting is that NIE report said: "perceived jihadist success [in Iraq] would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere." And so you wonder what kind of implications that has for Afghanistan. There's no direct mention of Afghanistan, but what's your take on that? Are they trying to, in oblique language, reference the Iraq impact on Afghanistan?

MS: Oh sure. Afghanistan we forget sometimes is the source of modern jihadism, not only in the sense that so many non-Afghan Muslims went to fight the Soviets, but they actually won. Now what we're seeing in Afghanistan, is that it seems to me that the war is basically over there, that we're fighting a rear-guard action, spending most of our time trying to protect Mr. Karzai. My own view is that both of those wars are over-Iraq and Afghanistan. We're not going to do what the necessary militarily, which would be to greatly increase the force we have and the aggressiveness of the force we use. And so we're basically going to have to withdraw from both.

At the end of the day, what the message is, as you say, rather obliquely saying, is that, listen, if we don't win in Iraq and if we don't win in Afghanistan, suddenly the jihadists have beaten one superpower once, and the second superpower twice. And it's a rather weak way of saying that, but that's where we're heading.

Got Metrics?

Q: You remember that famous leaked Rumsfeld statement, where he ponders about whether we have the metrics to figure out if we have we're killing the jihadists faster than they're being created. This document clearly posits that they're being created faster than we're killing them. So do we have a better handle on the metrics or have the sheer number of the jihadists that are being created just become so large that it's unmistakable?

MS: I think it's the latter. The pace of the insurgency gradually continues to increase, mixed with some kind of civil war. But what's really stunning, I think, is the quality of the Taliban forces and the pace of the fighting that's occurring in Afghanistan. Clearly, these two invasions have increased the number of people willing to train and willing to fight and, ultimately, happy to die to beat the Americans.

I'm not sure we have a precise metric yet. But the impression to me, at least, is that we're in far worse shape now than we were in 2001, primarily because we've kind of, perhaps unknowingly, provided the Quranic predicate for a jihad: the unprovoked invasion of a Muslim country by an infidel. And so, as night follows day, no one should be surprised that the level of fighting has increased.

The other half of Mr. Rumsfeld's ponderings should be: do we understand what the motivation is for them to do this? And clearly, we come back to the point that what we do, and not how we live or what we think, is what the motivation is.

And so not only are we losing those two wars, but we have yet to take the measure of the enemy's motivation.

Q: And perhaps a more accurate way of pondering the question would be: are we creating them faster than killing them? Not, are they being created, but are we creating them.

MS: We are certainly providing the predicate for their creation. You know, we're not talking here about good policies or bad policies, we're just simply talking about reality in terms of what really motivates the enemy. And we haven't had that discussion in this country.

And whenever, at least, I've tried to raise it, I become a Bush hater, or an America basher or an Islamophile. And so it's a very hard discussion to have in this country.

ClintonAnd Bin Laden

Q: Is there more of a willingness now to take on those questions?

MS:  I haven't noticed it. I certainly get a good hearing but I think it's because people don't know quite what box to put me in. They say I'm an equal-opportunity basher. But I'm not sure…Looking at the media over the weekend, we don't even seem to be able to discuss fact.

The whole exchange between Mr. Wallace and Mr. Clinton on Fox was really an argument about fact, not an interpretation. Clinton indisputably had X number of chances to kill or capture Bin Laden. Mr. Bush had none in his first eight months. So that's a fact.

But if we can't even agree on that, it's very hard to have substantive discussion on policy issues or policy trends or policy impact.

Corpses Not a Metric

Q: The NIE report refers generally to a strengthening of Al-Qaeda and to the organization distinguishing itself as our prime threat. What's left unclear is, when they say Al-Qaeda, what exactly do they mean?

MS: The editors, whoever they were, really did a disservice in the very opening sentence of the material that appears on the [Director of National Intelligence] website because it's contradictory: We've hurt them, but they're the biggest danger out there.

It goes back to your question about a metric. We just don't have it. We've been kind of assuming that the body count we've attained by killing Al-Qaeda leaders, and by capturing them, amounts to a measure of progress. I think it's perfectly possible that the admirable achievement in all those dead and captured people is not really a measure of progress. It just gives you the ability to say we killed X number of people.

We really have witnessed, and again we're really in the realm of fact here, an extraordinary ability by Al-Qaeda since 2001 to replicate itself. It clearly has very deep succession plans on the shelf, so that when a senior man is captured or killed, he is replaced by his understudy.

And so, the contradictory nature of those opening sentences is just the result of us not having the ability, or not wanting, to do a solid analysis of the damage we've done to Al-Qaeda.

A New Tier of Threat

Q: And would that be Al-Qaeda as an organization, or ideology.

MS: I think that the problem we have is that we now have three tiers of threat. My own view is that we've put too much stock in the body count. What Peter Bergen calls Al-Qaeda central, the organization that answers to Osama bin Laden, has been hurt but not nearly as badly as we assume.

So that organization that attacked us on 9/11 is getting ready to attack us again.
And there's no solid reason to think it can't.

The second level of threat remains from those allies of Bin Laden that have threatened us and our allies in the past. Whether it was Kashmiri groups, some of the Afghan groups- there are various groups around the world.

But now we have a third tier. The war in Iraq has had a transforming impact on what Bin Laden has been aiming at all along, which is to find a way to transform one Muslim in a vanguard (himself) to a philosophy and a movement. And that's what we're seeing now. So the third tier is the inspiration that is flowing out from Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda-their words and actions. And that's what we're seeing in these cells that have been taken down in Miami, Toronto, a couple in Australia, two in London, the recent ad hoc group that was going to bomb trains in Germany.

They are not directly tied to Al-Qaeda. Their activities are not directed or supported by Al-Qaeda. But invariably, the men who were arrested in these cells either said they had been inspired by Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, or it was clear from the documents that were captured with them.

So now we have three tiers, rather than one or two. And again, we assume far too glibly that Al-Qaeda central is out of business.