John D. Marks Quotes

Everything the CIA does is secret and it is secret particularly from the Congress.

Governmental officials -- including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law --have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law. The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities

An urgent need exists for regular and responsible Congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such scrutiny is essential… Our form of government…is based on a system of checks and balances. If this system gets seriously out of balance at any point the whole system is jeopardized and the way is opened for the growth of tyranny…CIA is freed from practically every ordinary form of Congressional check. I agree that an intelligence agency must maintain complete secrecy to be effective. However, there is a profound difference between an essential degree of secrecy to achieve a specific purpose and secrecy for the mere sake of secrecy.

As the CIA is set up neither you, the National Security Council, nor anyone else will be in a position to know what it is doing or control it.

The Pentagon says that they are too big to be audited. That’s an insult. They spend $700 billion a year. They need to be audited.

I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up, neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or control it.

We will just have to tell the House that they will have to accept our judgment and we cannot answer a great many questions that might be asked

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers

[William J.] Casey was guilty of Contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in.

I have grave concerns that the CIA search may have violated the separation of powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution.

I learned later, just as a footnote, that the World Assembly of Youth was a CIA front.

When the President of the United States breaks the law he must be held accountable. That is why I am introducing today a resolution to censure George W. Bush…. At the very heart of our constitution is the assumption that some members of the government will do wrong, and when they do, others in the government must do right…. The President has broken the law. Congress must act…. Our job is not to stand up and cheer when the President breaks the law.

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of the government. They, in a word, hold the purse: that powerful instrument by which we behold in the in the history of the British constitution an infant and humble representation of the people, gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government.

The only way we can do oversight is if people tell the truth.

The real scandal in Washington is not what is against the law. It is what is not against the law.

The combination of secrecy and bureaucracy in the CIA has led to a special kind of disaster.

The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we [the CIA] too are honorable men devoted to her service.

To be objective you don't have to be an adversary. You don't have to be a bulldog tearing down everything. To make the system of checks and balances and separation of powers work, you don't have to be on their ass all the time.

With Government funding comes regulation.

Quite as important as legislation is vigilant oversight of administration; and even more important than legislation is the instruction and guidance in political affairs which the people might receive from a body which kept all national concerns suffused in a broad daylight of discussion .... The informing functions of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function. The argument is not only that a discussed and interrogated administration is the only pure and efficient administration, but, more than that, that the only really self-governing people is that people which discusses and interrogates its administration.

Absolutely get rid of CIA agents from units and the territory of Cambodia.

The men who control the CIA are of an older, conservative generation which has kept the agency fifteen or twenty years behind the progress of the nation at large.

We’re very hard on our intelligence agencies.

A government may only govern so long as the people, through their representatives, vote it the money to carry on.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.