Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's get Osama task force.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/july-dec05/egypt_7-25.html JIM LEHRER: Is it overstating the case -- if you all are right, that these things are loosely connected to an international movement, that there's more to come?
MICHAEL SCHEUER: Oh, sure. And we're not being well served -- Mr. Blair, Mr. Bush don't serve their electorate well by the Pavlovian response of they hate our freedoms and they hate our liberties and they hate gender equality and all of that stuff. They downplay these people as simply haters.
And in many ways these people are lovers in the sense that they love their religion and they love their society and they deem our foreign policy an attack on that. This is not going to end any time soon. And, indeed, as long as Western and U.S. policies in the Middle East remain the same the growth potential for what I guess you could call al-Qaidaism is enormous.
JIM LEHRER: Do you have the same analysis?
SAMER SHEHATA: Pretty much the same analysis. There's a skewed understanding of Islam, of course. But nevertheless, U.S. foreign policy -- whether it be 150,000 American soldiers in Iraq or the U.S. government's position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or our military footprints in the Persian Gulf -- these are the policies that are the underlying root cause of this phenomenon.
JIM LEHRER: Debates about it aside, the rights and wrongs of U.S. policy aside, it's the way it's perceived by these young people in the Islamic world.
MICHAEL SCHEUER: Perception is reality, Mr. Lehrer.
JIM LEHRER: I noticed when Kwame's report was airing before I introduced the two of you and the young man, the young Egyptian said, these could not have been Muslims who did this because these were Egyptians who are also Muslims, et cetera. You agreed with him. And, yet, what other explanation is there?
SAMER SHEHATA: Well, I think what he's saying is that they were Muslims in name only. This has nothing to do with Islam, that this isn't what Islam is about and that even if they called themselves Muslims, they were the ones who were delusional. I think that's what he meant, and I was agreeing with him.