Scheuer's New Bin Laden Bio

Michael Scheuer was once head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, but what's most arresting in his new book is that the man detailed to catch bin Laden couldn't even speak Arabic.

The mailbag brings a copy of Michael Scheuer's new biography of Osama bin Laden.

I am not an admirer of Michael Scheuer's work. Here's an excerpt from my review of his 2004 book, Imperial Hubris:

[He] makes it clear that he sees no reason for the U.S. to continue supporting any of its non-European allies against takeover by bin Ladenism: "For our own welfare and survival, we must 'watch others die with equanimity' and help after 'the flames burn themselves out' by focusing our overseas intercourse on trade, sharing knowledge, and donating food and medicine." He is ready to evacuate all "military and naval bases on the Arabian peninsula." And here's how he characterizes the struggles of four other countries victimized by Islamist terror:

Washington has taken measures to enhance its ties to India and simultaneously to coerce Pakistan to halt aid for Muslim Kashmiri insurgents, thereby giving de facto sanction to India's sorry record of abusing its Kashmiri Muslim citizens, as well as its Israel-like refusal to obey long-standing U.N. resolutions. Similarly, Washington has supported and armed the Indonesian military's efforts to smash Islamist separatists on Aceh, advised and participated in Manila's attacks on Moro Islamist groups in Mindanao, and backed the Yemeni regime's drive to keep local Islamists at bay. . . . The point here is not to question whether the governments above are entitled to handle domestic "terrorism" as they see fit — they are — but to ask if the United States is wise to ally itself with regimes whose barbarism has long earned the Muslim world's hatred.

Three of these four countries — India, Indonesia, and the Philippines — are secular democracies under attack from the very same groups that hit the U.S. on 9/11. Yet in every case, Scheuer disdains them — India he labels "unsavory" and "malodorous" — and manifestly sympathizes with their attackers. And his tale is seriously misleading. Manila, for example, only "attacked" the Moro Islamist groups because the latter have launched a campaign of murder against Filipino citizens and foreign visitors.

I don't intend to read the current book as carefully as I read the last. But here's what I do see on first look into this new book by the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit: all the citations and every work in the bibliography is English-language. Perhaps the most arresting fact in this new study of the modern world's most spectacular terrorist is that the man the Clinton administration detailed to monitor and stop him could not speak his language.

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