ON NOVEMBER 14, 60 Minutes aired a segment with Michael Scheuer, who made headlines after resigning from the CIA to pursue his second career as a critic of the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Scheuer was the head of the CIA's bin Laden unit (codenamed "Alec") from 1996 to 1999. With the publication this past summer of his "anonymous" book Imperial Hubris, he became a media star, giving countless interviews as "one of the CIA's foremost authorities on Osama bin Laden." Out of government, he appears poised to become a regular pundit. His appearance on 60 Minutes was followed two days later by appearances on Chris Matthews's Hardball on MSNBC and Aaron Brown's NewsNight on CNN.
During his appearance on 60 Minutes (and his follow-up interviews), Scheuer warned that al Qaeda's detonating a weapon of mass destruction on American soil was "pretty close to being inevitable." When asked what type of weapon al Qaeda could detonate, Scheuer responded that it would be "a nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device . . . it's probably a near thing."
Such dire predictions call to mind warnings that both Presidents Clinton and Bush have made about the dangers of WMD in the hands of terrorists. Scheuer says also that within the first year of the "Alec" unit's existence, he learned that bin Laden and al Qaeda "were involved in an extraordinarily sophisticated and professional effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction. 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." |