Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Scheuer

It is not just a rebuttal; it is a power grab over narrative authority in the post-9/11 blame economy. Michael Scheuer frames knowledge as a weapon, not a shared public good. "Much better informed" isn’t aimed at persuading the audience on facts so much as disqualifying rivals from the conversation. In Washington’s counterterrorism disputes, the most valuable currency is proximity: who saw what, when, and how close they were to the raw intelligence. Scheuer claims the front-row seat and casts Richard Clarke and George Tenet as people either too removed to understand the record or too invested to tell it straight.

The phrasing does extra work. "The nature of the intelligence" signals he’s arguing about texture and quality, not merely quantity: fragments, sources, caveats, the kind of messy material that can look obvious in hindsight and ambiguous in real time. By saying it was "available again[s]t Osama bin Laden", he implies a missed opportunity was sitting there, waiting to be used. That’s the hook that turns an analytic debate into an indictment.

Then comes the real jab: "consistently denigrated". It suggests a pattern of dismissal, not one bad call, and implies motive - bureaucratic protection, reputational management, or policy preferences. Pairing Clarke and Tenet in the same sentence is strategic: it collapses interagency complexity into a two-person villain set, tightening a chaotic history into a story with culprits.

The intent is to reframe institutional failure as willful disregard, and to position Scheuer - architect of an early CIA bin Laden unit - as the aggrieved expert whose warnings were minimized. It’s an argument built for public dispute, not internal memo: credibility first, then culpability.