MS: Yeah, I don't think the possession or non-possession of Iraq makes any difference to the planning of Al-Qaeda, because Al-Qaeda's headquarter is in Afghanistan, where they're about to, over the next seven years, evict the U.S. and NATO. So the idea that somehow Iraq provides them a safe haven from which to plan attacks in the United States is kind of nonsense. Planning goes on where Bin Laden and Zawahiri are and that's in South Asia at the moment.

So I think that that's not a credible statement and the idea of Mr. Bush, with all respect for the office of the president, that we were going to fight them there instead of here is just ludicrous. There are 1.4 billion Muslims, there's plenty to go around.

I don't know if that was Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney, but that was always nonsense.

Scheuer's Estimate

NIo: What would be your own intelligence estimate of the threat that Al-Qaeda poses today?

MS: I think it's probably worse then it was on 9/11. Not necessarily because they're stronger, simply because we've done nothing to defend the United States.

We didn't have to invade Iraq and what we've done is really push the transformation that Bin Laden has been aiming for of Al-Qaeda, from a man and a group to a philosophy and an organization. But as an American citizen what I'm just utterly appalled by are basically three things. The president-not only not the president or the vice president but no one in the Democratic Party-has yet stood up and told the American people the truth about why we're fighting.

This is not about our liberties, our freedoms, our gender equality, it's about what we do in the Islamic world. And until we get some politician who will stand up and say that, we're not going to be able to even understand what the enemy is about.

The second thing is that the borders are still open. The idea that America can be defended without closing the borders, at least giving law enforcement the chance to find out who is in the country, is just not possible to do. We're losing in Iraq, we're losing in Afghanistan-one of the major reasons in both places is because we didn't close the borders. The enemy is constantly being reinforced and refunded and re-equipped.

And then the third thing, probably the one that will come back to haunt, is the failure of the last three administrations to complete the securing of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, giving Bin Laden now a 16-year window to purchase, build or steal some sort of a nuclear device out of the Soviet arsenal. You know, I think we're very much as a country and a government still at the drawing board.

NIo: In what regard? In terms of . . .

MS: In terms of defending America. You know it's almost-perhaps it's not a very clever analogy, but when you're on the airplane and they're giving you the safety indoctrination, they say: "If we lose pressure, the air mask comes down, put it on yourself before you help your daughter or your wife or your grandfather." What we did is exactly the opposite after 9/11. We've spent the whole period since 9/11 trying to put the oxygen on the Afghan situation, the Iraq situation, the Somalia situation and here at home, we're kind of gasping breath.

To me, as a former intelligence officer, I was impressed by what I think the released version of the NIE means about what's in the classified version.

NIo: That's very interesting.

Frank-And Dire

MS: It strikes me very much that it's a very frank NIE. Certainly with the released version, because they're bureaucrats and politicians they dressed it up to make it less Cassandra-like.

It's really kind of silly to say it but I'm proud of the people who wrote that NIE because it sounds to me like it's a very factual, direct text.

NIo: And your point before being that that level of frankness suggests to you that the classified version is really quite dire and grim indeed. And if what we're getting unclassified is, I guess you could say, this pessimistic, then the classified version must be two-fold in that regard, or three-fold.

MS: The classified version is going to be backed up point-by-point by evidence, by reporting from the field, by signals intelligence, by what other countries are telling us. So yes, if the part that's available on the DNI's website is as sweet and sunny as they could make it, the NIE itself must be a very frank document about, as you said, the dire situation in Iraq.

Michael Scheuer participated in The National Interest symposium "9/11, The Sequel?" in the September/October issue. He also authored "Al-Qaeda: Lebanon's Unbloodied Victor" in National Interest online in September 2006.