Michael Scheuer Quotes

The motivations and willingness to die of the suicide bomber is not unique to Islamic terrorists. On occasion our CIA has used the technique. Official CIA instructions on “lost assassination” were distributed within the agency and sometimes to our “allies” who we were training.

See Banjamin Disraeli for an earlier expression of this idea.

The reference was to Iraq president Sadaam Hussein. The CIA had determined his location and to implement the George W. Bush administration’s policy of regime change, the Air Force had been ordered to send two Stealth Bombers with “bunker buster” bombs to assassinate Sadaam. The mission was completed flawlessly and both planes hit the target destroying it completely. However, it turned out that the CIA intelligence was inaccurate, and Sadaam was not at the location. This quotation is often used to illustrate the problem of believing early action reports and the fallibility of CIA intelligence at the time.

Pinkerton worked out a plan to spirit Lincoln through Baltimore where he had to change trains.

This proverb only makes sense in the light of understanding the Arab concept of revenge—“blood.” In a rural desert environment where little can be expected of government, the Arabs have developed a law enforcement and peace keeping mechanism which while primitive from modern standards, nevertheless worked to some degree. It is that revenge—“blood” is a moral necessity and obligation of all people, and revenge is not limited by time or to the individuals involved in the first incidence. The immediate family are the first to extract revenge, but the extended family follows and often the entire clan. Sometimes revenge is tribal or even national. Anyone who fails to revenge a member in his group is not only a disgrace, but is a clear and present danger to the group because then they can be attacked with impunity. So revenge is a strong obligation of the group members and blood must be paid with blood no matter how many generations it may take. The only thing that keeps me and my family safe, is the surety what whosoever kills one of us will themselves be killed or if they die a natural death we will take revenge on one of the evildoers relatives. Crime must never pay!

Yitzhak Rabin was the extremely popular President of Israel. At the time of his assassination his party controlled the Knesset (Parliament) and he was moving to make a two state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli problem. An ultra Orthodox Jewish fanatic shot Rabin so what there would be no settlement that would give up Israeli control of Judea and Samaria—the Biblical lands that literal believers in the Bible know that God consecrated that land for the Jewish People. To make a settlement compromise was needed on both sides and Rabin was strong enough to persuade most of the Israelis to take that risk. His successors never had the trust and confidence of the Israeli people that Rabin had as he had led the Israeli armed forces to victory and had also proved that he was a brilliant politician on domestic affairs. The unity that Rabin was able to create among Israelis has never been duplicated by any Israeli politician since.