I also think that there is a huge failure in the American education system to educate Americans about where we, our system, our government, came from. And to some extent this failure is shared in places like Britain and Canada and Australia.

They [politicians] have defined the war simply in terms of the detonation of explosives. When you look at the broader picture, America is mired in two wars that we're losing at the moment. We have a political environment that is as poisonous as anything I've seen, at least since the end of Vietnam.

The second part of that war was that Muslims came from all over the country to Pakistan, and they met each other. For the first time those men had an awareness of the Islamic world as a whole, not of just Egypt or Algeria or Indonesia, but of what Muslims call the Uma, the Islamic community. And that's an extraordinarily important thing. And that emanated in Pakistan.

The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers. When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden's safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn't irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community.

Until we respect bin Laden, we are going to die in numbers that are probably unnecessary.

Major danger lie for America? That we could very well be defeated oversees and at home. And the source of it is clearly that we have yet to find a politician in either partywho's willing to tell the American people the truth.

No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable.