George Washington Quotes
The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged-All that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned & promising a favourable issue.
Washington, George. The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, edited by John C. Fitzpatrick, vol. 8, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933, p. 479.
While it is true that almost all nations have intelligence agencies and collect intelligence about both friends and foes, our allies did not bug the personal phones of leaders of friendly countries and were very distressed when they discovered that the US NSA had access to the personal calls of world leaders including the leaders of Brazil, Germany and France. Rubio and others believed that they only reason our allies had not done so is that they did not have the technical capability to do so; otherwise they would have been bugging our Presidential and cabinet level phones. President Obama ordered the practice stopped with respect to our allies.
Most of the successful intelligence agency administrators think that Cheney and some others are absolutely wrong that there should not be any discussion. There are times, of course, where secrecy is critical, but that does not mean that there cannot be classified discussion and coordination. Almost every one of the disastrous intelligence agency fiascos, could have been avoided if there were more and wider discussion in the planning. In many cases, Chaney, William Casey and others who hold their view prefer no discussions is that lawyers cannot block the operation on grounds of illegality. Or other agencies cannot get their priorities into the mix. If the NSA had discussed their plan to hack into the telephone calls of our most important allies with the State Department, the plan might not have gone through or if it had, the President would have been consulted. The Bay of Pigs was based on a set of assumptions that were not true and our government had a number of experts who could have debunked the assumptions the CIA planners were counting on which did not pan out.
George Washington was the first President of the United States (1789-97), the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He presided over the convention that drafted the current United States Constitution and during his lifetime was called the "father of his country".
