Politics & Power Quote by Michael Scheuer

Scheuer’s line has the clipped, almost bureaucratic menace of someone describing a wildfire with a weather report. The key move is how he frames Bin Laden not as an irrational fanatic but as a communicator with a campaign plan: message, motive, and execution. “Remarkably eager” sounds like a professional assessment, but it also needles an American reflex after 9/11 to treat the enemy as unknowable, beyond politics, beyond comprehension. Scheuer implies the opposite: the signals are loud; the audience just doesn’t want to hear them.

The subtext is an indictment of U.S. strategic illiteracy. Bin Laden, he suggests, is doing the basic thing every serious adversary does: broadcasting grievances, defining objectives, then proving credibility through action. That “following up” phrase is chilling precisely because it’s so plain. It drags terrorism out of the realm of abstract evil and into the realm of cause-and-effect, where ignoring stated intent becomes not moral purity but operational negligence.

Context matters: Scheuer was a CIA analyst associated with the agency’s Bin Laden unit, speaking from a counterterrorism worldview shaped by pre-9/11 warning failures and post-9/11 policy debates. His emphasis on “why he doesn’t like us” is deliberately provocative, poking at the taboo that explanation equals excuse. He’s not offering sympathy; he’s insisting on diagnosis. The rhetorical power comes from that unnerving inversion: the terrorist is “eager” to explain himself, while the superpower acts like it has no time to read the memo.