Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Scheuer on interrogation
I haven't been a big fan of Michael Scheuer in the past. Scheuer ran the CIA's bin Laden desk in the late 1990s, and came to fame post-9/11 basically saying that if only the world had listened to him, all of this could have been avoided. He can seem as though he has read all of the Tom Clancy novels and really fancies himself as Jack Ryan, the action-oriented intelligence analyst, and the Best Man in Government. More obviously, he is routinely as anti-Israeli as an old-school John Bircher.
Scheuer's op-ed in Sunday's WaPo has threads of many of the above elements, but also makes some good points.
"Americans and their country's security will be the losers. The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party's left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America's defense and -- like Obama -- naively believe that the West's Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya."So with a big grain of salt, read the whole thing.
CWCID: Ace
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Apr 29, 11:35:00 PM:
This is an excerpt from Scheuer's book "Marching toward Hell" on the rules of engagement:
(pg 42) "Since leaving the CIA, I have been involved in teaching intelligence analysis junior U.S. military personnel-lieutenants, captains, and NCOS. Most of these men and women are on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan, many of them for the second or even third time. In late 2006 one young sergeant offered me an example of how difficult it is for U.S. soldiers and Marines to eliminate the threat they face. This sergeant said that his unit's camp came under mortar fire from Iraqi insurgents, and his squad was sent out of the camp to try to find and destroy the mortar and its crew. The squad worked around to the flank of the mortar position and found that its insurgent crew had fired the last of its rounds and was breaking down the mortar to leave the area. The squad leader radioed this information back to his unit and asked permission to attack. His request was denied because the insurgents were no longer in the act of attacking Americans, and so they were allowed to move off with their mortar, presumably to attack U.S. forces again another day."
By 
Ray, at
Thu Apr 30, 02:12:00 AM:
Scheuer struck me as an intelligent guy who had been studying crazy Islamists for so long that he'd internalized the principles behind their worldview: that the logic of force is superior to the logic of reason, that greater fanaticism and brutality will prevail over a more moderate approach, that the Muslim umma acts and believes as one, and that individuals with great zeal alone can win wars.
These are not unreasonable precepts, but they never struck me as providing an accurate view of the world, either.
