Scott Anderson Quotes
As a journalist, I try to avoid talking to American diplomats, because I am stunned again and again by just how little grasp they have of what people are really feeling in a country. Especially CIA guys. Maybe they're just really good at playing stupid, but I don't think so.
Anderson, Scott. Interview by David Barsamian. "The Ruins of Empire." The Sun, Oct. 2014.
The scandals of the past of CIA lies to Congress and the President, mistakes they had made, and a raft of illegal activities, had eroded support for the agency. The reason for the minimal funding was that, and not the lack of interests. We still had the NSA and the Military Intelligence Agencies which had not been involved in the CIA scandals
Turkey with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, had little experience in modern international politics—and no modern leaders until Ataturk came and modernized the nation. The Turks had allied themselves with Germany in WWI and in the aftermath came out as badly in the peace as they had in the war.
The argument here is that secret intelligence, comes from sources and people whose views and claims are not subject to the test of public scrutiny representing a narrow information sample. Publicly available information, while it does not include secrets that the enemy wants to keep secret, does represent vetted and processed information with challenges and contradictions also publicly available. Proponents argue that it is more reliable. Secret intelligence has produced some of America’s worst debacles. An example is the Bay of Pigs. Secret intelligence assured Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy that the majority of Cuban people was hostile to the Fidel Castro government. If freedom fighters would land in Cuba, the vast majority of Cubans would join them. When the invaders landed, most Cubans were so outraged that their country was being invaded that there was massive public support for Castro’s troops who quickly captured the invaders who were waiting for the popular uprising.
President Wilson had gone to Paris for peace treaty negotiations. Ex-President Roosevelt was on his deathbed. But even then TR was his politically contentious self.
Kay was chasing around Iraq trying to find the weapons that the George W. Bush administration had said definitely existed. Based on the weapons existence, the United States went to War in Iraq. No weapons were ever found.
Dulles lied to Congress. The CIA at the time was supplying planes and American pilots in support of an anti-Sukarno Government faction that was in armed revolt. It is not clear whether or not Dulles knew the truth when he had so testified.
The President was complaining about the lack of intelligence on North Vietnam:
President George W. Bush initiated an invasion of Iraq based on the fact that Iraq was developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. After the invasion however, there were none of these weapons found and much evidence that there were not any at that point in time. By the time Congress, the body which is supposed to declare war, found out that the reason for the war was bogus, it was too late. We had already occupied the country and were in the midst of a civil war. The President either acted on bad intelligence or wanted to invade Iraq for other reasons and history may finally tell us which, but Fein sees the problem as too much secrecy in the executive branch.
Scott Anderson (1959--)is an American novelist, journalist, and a veteran war correspondent. He wrote novels Triage, Moonlight Hotel, The Man Who tried to Save the World, and War Zones. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Men's Journal, Vanity Fair and other publications.
