Richard A. Clarke Quotes
The CIA has become a hollow shell of words without deeds
Richard A. Clarke, National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism for President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Note to Condoleezza Rice, September 4, 2001
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Gates was then a mid-level functionary at the CIA. His ability to tell the truth to powerful people got him promoted and he eventually became director himself as well as the Secretary of Defense. The Department of Agriculture at the time was generally known as a very bureaucratic organization.
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. We still had the NSA and the Military Intelligence Agencies which had not been involved in the CIA scandals.
It is noteworthy that a U. S. President had such a harsh evaluation of our major intelligence agency. Even more important in this case is that this President justified his 2003 decision to invade Iraq and start the war on the intelligence he claimed was provided to him by the CIA that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This quotation and the President’s view was not public at the time. I all fairness to the CIA staff, many of them had provided a number of caveats and warnings about the unreliability of the information. However, the CIA Director, George Tenant, advised Bush in a way that the caveats were sublimated. See {633093} for more detail.
The CIA had been lying and withholding critical information from the President and Congress, engaging in illegal activities, and overbalanced in favor of covert action and they had missed many of the major happenings in the world. There were various opinions as to how to fix the CIA.
On the possibility of Jesse Jackson running for mayor of Washington DC with little administrative experience:
The inoming President was meeting with and getting briefed by the Director of National Intelligenc, James Clapper and this is the word he used to descrive the American Intelligence Agencies.
Richard Alan Clarke is an American former government official. He was National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism for the United States between 1998 and 2003.
