CIA officer: US depended on tyrannies

Published: 15 April, 2011, 01:22
Edited: 15 April, 2011, 12:25

Michael Scheuer has written much about Bin Laden and America's relationship with him.

The United State’s intervention in Libya has been called a humanitarian effort by officials, but the true intentions of the American government can be not-so-easily explained by examining the country’s actions overseas.
“The best thing for the United States is to back away and let the cards fall where they may,” says Michael Scheuer. "If Israel disappears, if Palestine disappears…who cares?"  A former intelligence officer with the CIA who, like many, insists that the US’ intervention in Libya isn’t doing any good for anyone. Despite America’s insistence that their involvement in the Middle East is for the better of the citizen’s of Libya, the United States is only accentuating its reputation as the bad guy, says Scheuer.
“We’re just trying to fool the Muslim world…but the Muslim world is much smarter than that,” says Scheuer, who has written extensively on Islam and America’s relation with Muslim countries. Scheuer says that the United States is known for attacking countries that have oil and that their involvement in Libya is being enacted to serve America, not the Middle East. This, the author says, only confirms what Osama Bin Laden has always inferred about America.
Scheuer served as chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station in the CIA for three years before moving to the Bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center. After September 11 he became a special adviser to the chief of the Bin Laden unit and, “Imperial Hubris,” his controversial 2004 book about the Taliban leader, was acknowledged by Bin Laden himself for revealing “the reasons for your losing the war against us."
Intervention in Libya is only making things worse for America, says Scheuer. He predicts that the end result will lead to weaker governments in the Middle East—governments which will not be of use to the United States. Such a result seems unmerited since Gadaffi’s regime was a powerful ally for the US when it came to attacking al-Qaeda, he says
“It’s hard to see what we’re trying to accomplish in Libya,” says Scheuer. He adds that, if the men who are in the resistance in Libya were in Afghanistan, they would be comparable to the Taliban. “Basically,” he says, “we are providing ….people that are fighting for the same reason.” The reasons? To ditch Gaddafi and to establish an Islamic government. A government that will surely take on America, Israel and their allies.
Americans, says Scheuer, “are going to bring democracy to people even though those people will fight it to the death.”
In the meantime, what could very well be a highly-orchestrated PR move by Obama to mislead America will exist to serve our own needs and nothing more. Scheuer says that, “as long as the United States and its allies are dependent on Persian Gulf oil, were going to be fighting in that region.”
“Libya is nonsense,” he says. ”If NATO had not intervened, that war would be over.”
“Most of the world knows that NATO doesn’t do anything without US.”
“Now,” he says, “it appears to be an endless war.”