ALI MOORE, PRESENTER: And now we'll head back to Washington for our guest, Michael Scheuer.

Michael Scheuer was head of the CIA's (Central Intelligence Agency) Osama bin Laden tracking unit during the Clinton administration.

His disenchantment with the way the 'war on terror' was being conducted led him to resigning from the CIA to be able to speak out more publicly. Something that has, at times, made his life quite difficult.

He is an adjunct professor at the Centre for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, he joins me now from our Washington studio.

Michael Scheuer welcome to Lateline.

MICHAEL SCHEUER, TERRORISM EXPERT: Thank you very much for having me.

ALI MOORE: As we've just heard, the US authorities are warning of a specific credible but unconfirmed threat; do you think a terror attack is likely?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Generally Al Qaeda doesn't pay much attention to anniversaries. But the combination this year of the tenth anniversary, a very strong desire to avenge the death of Osama bin Laden, plus the fact that the American economy is on the ropes, makes this a much more likely date for an attack than Al Qaeda would usually regard anniversary dates.

ALI MOORE: And what are they capable of?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well they're capable of any number of things. They're certainly capable of car bombs or any of the Hamas-style attacks are something that they've been capable of since 9/11 or before. And something they've deliberately chosen not to do.

But in the last four or five years we've seen during the end of bin Laden's career, a deliberate effort on the part of Al Qaeda to recruit US citizen Muslims to begin to try to incite operations within the United States.

Anwar al-Awlaki, Adam Gadahn, who's known as al-Amriki; a number of other people who are intent on encouraging US citizen Muslims, English speaking Muslims, to attack in the United States.

So they have the capability of sending people from abroad, our borders are wide open. And they also have an increasing number of US citizen Muslims who are willing to take action.

ALI MOORE: You say that, but isn't there a question mark over the extent of the resources and, I guess, the strength of Al Qaeda right now. Documents that were found in bin Laden's house apparently have both bin Laden and his lieutenants lamenting the fact that they didn't have very much money and that they had constant casualties from drone strikes?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well I think what we, America at least, is pretty much unable to integrate things at our leadership levels. There's no doubt that the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Special Forces and their allies have taken a deep toll on Al Qaeda's organisation in South Asia.

But as we fought, as we have been bore sighted on South Asia, if you look around they now have an operational platform in Yemen, one in Somalia, several across North Africa, Palestine and Iraq.

So the idea that somehow Al Qaeda is weaker than it was on 9/11 perhaps is true of about Al Qaeda in South Asia, but otherwise they have many more platforms than they do, than they did rather, at 9/11.

ALI MOORE: But I guess, what evidence do you bring forward for that, besides their geographical locations now? If you look at the writings, say, of John Mueller from Ohio State University, he talks about the menace of Al Qaeda being greatly inflated, and he points out that there hasn't been a single simple bomb detonated in the US in the past decade. If they have these resources, why has there been such little activity?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: There's all kind of nutcakes on the fringe of comments on Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism.

The fact is that the attack of 9/11 was not intended to start a war in the United States, but rather to lure the United States into Afghanistan. And if you look at the accomplishments, they've accomplished far more than any bomb in the United States could possibly have done.

Two US-led NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) armies are retreating without winning from Afghanistan and Iraq. We continue to support the Israelis, which is one of the main causes for why we're fighting this war. And the American economy, which has always been a clear Al Qaeda target, clearly is on the ropes. So there's, you can take some comfort if you're isolated enough of your view of how you think the war should be going.

But the idea that the super powers, two super power armies have been essentially defeated by people with Korean-War-era weapons, is an enormous victory for the Islamists.

ALI MOORE: Takes us through the organisation that Al Qaeda is today, post bin Laden, and particularly against the backdrop of how you describe the Al Qaeda that bin Laden built; and that was one that was organisationally sound, geographically dispersed and resilient.

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well it's very much the same only bigger today, minus, and a very big minus, Osama bin Laden.

But Ayman al-Zawahiri now leads the organisation. It is, as you say, more dispersed. The documents that came out of bin Laden's residence in Abbottabad, however, proved that there is not lack of coordination or communication between the six or seven branches of Al Qaeda that now exist.

And, you know, in many ways bin Laden died an enormous success. He all along said, "listen, Al Qaeda and I are a small group of people, we cannot possibly defeat the United States by ourselves. So our major goal is going to be to incite Muslims worldwide to take up this battle by themselves."

And, of course, the jihad now across the world is self-generating, self, it maintains itself. Thanks to Osama bin Laden, but especially thanks to the US invasion of Iraq which really made the Al Qaeda, it moved it from being a man and a group to being a philosophy and a movement.

ALI MOORE: So you feel very much that bin Laden was not the glue that held everything together, that Zawahiri, even though he is an incredibly different character to bin Laden and doesn't have many of those, you know, truly, in the true sense of the word, extraordinary traits, true sense of the word extraordinary traits of bin Laden. You believe the organisation will go on as before?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: I don't know if it'll be as strong as before without bin Laden, that's an enormous loss for them. But I think most of our information about Zawahiri and his inability to get along with people came from before 1998. And if you study how he behaved under bin Laden's command and how he wrote, what the words he said; his ideas have changed greatly since then.

I think the jury's out on whether bin Laden is the glue to the organisation. But any organisation that is approaching a quarter century in age certainly has developed a durability that ought to be able to able to endure.

ALI MOORE: In fact you've written that the next generation of leaders are likely to be not just better educated but more ruthless and more bloody minded; why?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well, they grew up in a society generally that's much more violent. Our society in the United States and in the west generally, look at our media and our entertainment, is extraordinarily more violent.

But they're also going to be more educated in a formal sense, and not just in religious education, but in science and computers. And they're also very savvy when it comes to the tools of technol... the tools of modernity.

We in the west often think modernity and westernisation are the same thing. Well the Islamists will fight westernisation to the death, they love modernity, whether it's weaponry, communications, air-conditioning, it doesn't matter. And unlike bin Laden they're not as tolerant. They're much more willing to kill people for the sake of killing them without a specific actual goal in mind.

So I think Omar bin Laden, Osama's oldest, one of his oldest sons, said "the Americans will be sorry that they didn't kill my father in the 90s because the next generation is going to be much smarter and much more brutal."

ALI MOORE: As we heard earlier from Craig McMurtrie, of course, the information about this credible threat came from Pakistan, basically from chatter, as I understand, from the tribal areas. Pakistan is key, isn't it, to this entire, if you want to call it 'war on terror', as the Americans do?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well no, America is key to the war on terror. Pakistan has become a key because our leaders are desperate to delegate their dirty work to other people.

The Pakistanis have been extraordinarily helpful in, over the course of the past decade, to the point of creating a civil war in their own country in an effort to help us. We remain at risk because the United States under Republicans and Democrats refused to do their own dirty work and kill the necessary number of people.

We delegate that to others. And in this case the Pakistanis did as much as they could, they cannot do any more without really destabilising a nuclear power.

ALI MOORE: In fact your argument is, isn't it, that really the US has underestimated the type of organisation that Al Qaeda is; it's not an organisation against freedom, it's an organisation fundamentally driven by a hatred of US foreign policy?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Yes ma'am. You know the American and the western position in the Middle East has been based on tyranny, our whole strategy has been based on tyranny for the past 40 years, and now that's fading away.

But there's not one American in 1,000 who realises that if we were fighting an enemy who hated democracy and liberty and women in the workplace and beer after work, that the threat wouldn't even rise to the level of lethal nuisance.

They wouldn't have any of the things we have in our own country. But they're not fighting us because of who Americans are, how we live or how we think, they're fighting because of what our government has done in the Muslim world over the past 40 years.

Whether it's support for the Saudi police state, our military presence in various Muslim countries and probably the most dangerous thing now is our unqualified, unquestioning support for the Israelis. This is a very substantive religious war from the perspective our enemies.

And none of that really is to say that our policies are evil or were made by mad men. But if you're going to understand how to defeat an enemy, you best understand his motivation. And right now the United States government, under both parties, is fighting an enemy that doesn't exist. There is not an enemy out there who's just crazy wild to die because my daughters go to university.

ALI MOORE: What about the impact, I guess, of the Arab Spring on Al Qaeda, because many have argued that, in fact, the organisation is at a crossroads because the various revolutionary groups didn't do anything in the name of Al Qaeda, they didn't call on Al Qaeda? Has it weakened the organisation?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: No, of course not. It strengthened it. The American government will not have as close relations with successor government in the Middle East. Their goal has been help to destroy the Arab tyrannies.

And I'm afraid much of the media turned out, turned their credentials in as reporters and became cheerleaders. In Tahrir Square they interviewed 100 or 200 middle class, English speaking, democracy talking, well groomed Egyptians. Then they read their Facebooks and their Twitters and then they extrapolated that over 85 million devout Muslims, more than 60 per cent of whom are illiterate, and decided that secular democracy was blooming. I think that can only be described as a fantasy.

But in terms of the Arab Spring over the course of the entire area of North Africa, it's been an enormous advantage for Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Libyan Islamic Fighting group. They've overrun numerous arsenals, the flow of weapons into the hands of Islamists in Africa now is enormous.

And they've also opened up gaols and Gaddafi and Mubarak and Ben Ali filled their gaols with Mujahideen, with Islamist fighters. Some portion of those fighters are going to return to the ranks of the Mujahideen with a very, very strong grudge to work out.

ALI MOORE: So you would say that the argument that you now have rival Islamist groups who are prepared to run in elections, who are prepared to work within a political system, that's the argument of those who say that this weakens Al Qaeda, you would say that is a misreading of the situation?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: I think that's a misreading. I'm not sure that Al Qaeda will ever gain power anywhere in the world, but Islamists are going to gain power.

The real question is here not what government follows Mubarak in Egypt, but what government is going to be acceptable to David Cameron, to the Australian Prime Minister and especially to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

On the 19th May Obama and Mrs Clinton basically declared a cultural war on Islam saying that they were going to bring secular democracy from Mauritania to Karachi, that all Arab women were going to have the rights of western women, that they were going to settle the Sunni-Shi'a problem, because religion shouldn't play such a large part in public life.

So it's very odd, but this administration, Obama and Mrs Clinton, along with John McCain on the Republican side, they're going to bring the war, the clash of civilisations to this world. The Islamist are not going to do it.

ALI MOORE: But isn't there an argument that those who have been the revolutionaries do want the same things as many in the West have? They do want a more democratic state. They don't want to be ruled by tyrants.

MICHAEL SCHEUER: They won't be ruled by tyrants but there will be not be a secular democracy ma'am. The people who want secular democracies will be eaten by the revolution. NATO has just supplied air support for a group of people fighting Gaddafi in Libya who, if they were in Afghanistan, would be known as the Taliban.

You know, I think we in America, in Britain, in Australia, in Canada, we forget that we have been at this, meaning we've been at democracy-building since 1215, for 800 years, and we don't quite have it perfect yet. But somehow we believe we're going to put our experience on a CD-Rom and give an iPad to these would be democrats in Tunisia and Egypt, and they're going to replicate what's taken us eight centuries to produce.

I think that's probably not going to happen and it speaks to the kind of ahistorical viewpoint that we bring to the world.

ALI MOORE: A final question, Michael Scheuer, because we're almost out of time, but of course Pakistan's a nuclear power. You've written quite a bit about Al Qaeda's effort to secure nuclear weapons. Do you believe that's still their intention? Do you believe they're close and where will they get it from?

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well it's clearly the number one goal in terms of hurting the United States, in making us pull out of the Middle East, to pull our horns back from that area. I have no idea how close they are.

Although the one thing that continues to worry me is that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we and the Russians cannot account for all the nuclear weapons that have been produced or had been stored by the Soviet Union.

And so the question of money is not a problem. The question of religious authorisation to use it, they already have that. They've stated their intention to use it. So what we are betting on is that our laxity in not controlling the Soviet arsenal won't lead to a situation where they acquire a weapon.

ALI MOORE: Indeed, that's an understatement.

Michael Scheuer many thanks for your insights tonight from Washington.

MICHAEL SCHEUER: Thank you for having me ma'am, it's always a pleasure.