As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it’s not going to stay together.
The CIA held about a hundred detainees from 2002 to 2008; about a third of them underwent interrogations that have been variously described as enhanced, tough or torture. The toughest technique was water boarding, used on three detainees, the last in early 2003.
There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption.
A person seeking to be the President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way.
I believe we do have a great intelligence service. Is it good enough in all circumstances? Of course not. We live in the human condition. We try to make it better each day.
I have spent my adult life working in American intelligence. It has been quite an honor. Generally well resourced. A global mission. No want of issues. And it was a hell of a ride.
Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it’s about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free.
The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.
When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.
I’ve often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be.
National security looks different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa.
As director of CIA, I was responsible for everything done in the agency’s name, and it didn’t matter whether that was done by an agency employee, a government contractor, a liaison service on our behalf, or a source on our behalf.
The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas, and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
After the attacks on September 11th, we all learned lessons.
One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain’t.
For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.
Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now.
My experience has been that military assessments on ‘how goes the war’ are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.
My time in war zones have been fleeting and infrequent. I’ve been to Iraq. I’ve been to Afghanistan. I’ve been to other places where I’ve collected hazardous duty pay.
In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn’t stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.
The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results.
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