Julian Assange was on “60 Minutes” last night, a rerun. Assange is a great man–and here’s one reason why.
Stuart Levey was an Under Secretary of Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence for both GW Bush and Obama, running around the world putting the squeeze on Iran. Last fall he got a full hour on Charlie Rose. Levey’s a very discreet man, but he was about to leave Treasury and become a talking head and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, so he was building the brand. Charlie Rose asked him how you define terror (48:00; transcript here).
Rose said, “People say we don’t have a war against terrorism because terrorism is a tactic.”
Stuart Levey:
I think that whether we say — we use the word war or not– is for someone else to decide. That’s semantic. But the point is we do have a threat to us that’s disproportionate to the amount of people on the other side and that — a small group of people can inflict very significant harm on us.
Sounds pretty reasonable, huh? It’s uncool to talk about a “war on terror.” Well this is from Wikileaks, when Levey was in Kuwait, back in 2006:
U/S Levey praised the GOK’s [Government of Kuwait’s] strong support for the war on terror … With numerous overseas branches of RIHS [Revival of the Islamic Heritage Society] suspected of supporting terrorist networks, U/S Levey stated that RIHS was like a tree bearing poisonous fruit, a problem that must be addressed at its roots, i.e. at its headquarters in Kuwait. He encouraged increased GOK information sharing, vigilance and scrutiny of RIHS headquarters in Kuwait and its branches abroad to address the concerns outlined in the paper and to protect Kuwait’s international reputation in the war on terror….
U/S Levey has cleared this message.
P.S. Levey is a fascinating figure. There’s a lot about his government activities in Wikileaks, and I’ll have more to report in days to come…
