Michael Scheuer on O'Reilly's Radio Factor

Scheuer is a 22-year veteran of the CIA who served as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit. :

Smerconish: “Among all of them [i.e., the candidates], who gets it in your opinion?”

Scheuer: “Only Ron Paul understood what was going on.”

Smerconish: “And he gets portrayed as a crackpot in certain quarters when he speaks this lingo.”

Scheuer: “Not only as a crackpot but as an anti-American and an anti-Semite and all the rest of the vituperation that comes along with just recognizing the reality of the situation. … Mr. Paul was trying to convince the American people of the threat they lived under, and how to alleviate some of it, and instead he was called unpatriotic and other things.”

You can hear the clip here.

In the Republican Presidential Debate held back in May of 2007, Ron Paul claimed that American foreign policy was a "contributing factor" to the Middle East's anti-Americanism. Rudy Giuliani objected to this statement as "absurd". Michael Scheuer several days later in an interview said:

"I thought Mr. Paul captured it the other night exactly correctly. This war is dangerous to America because it's based, not on gender equality, as Mr. Giuliani suggested, or any other kind of freedom, but simply because of what we do in the Islamic World--because "we're over there," basically, as Mr. Paul said in the debate."

In September on Larry King Live, responding to a Fox News moderator's accusation that Ron Paul wants to take "marching orders" from Al Qaeda, Scheuer said,

"The truth of the matter is that it is all of the Democrats and the Republicans, except perhaps for Mr. Paul and Mr. Kucinich, who are marching to Osama Bin Laden's drum."