J. P. Morgan Quotes
Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.
Tarbell, Ida M. The Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel. D. Appleton & Company, 1925, p. 75.
Webster had been a lawyer his entire professional life and served as a distinguished Federal Judge and later as Director of the CIA and FBI. He was a stickler for adhering to the law. Casey, in contrast, was very frequently trying to get around any legal or Constitutional restrictions that might prevent him from doing what he liked. Since most of the CIA activity is secret and not amenable to oversight, his violations were not known to Congress and the public until years after his service.
He was reacting to the fact that in the George W. Bush administration, they found a few lawyers in the Justice Department that they put into key positions and they wrote legal opinions stating that many commonly used forms of torture were not torture and therefore were legal. Of course the legal opinion was secret so other lawyers could not fault it, and the CIA actually used that as justification for the torture of some of the enemy combatants in the War on Terror.
John Pierpont Morgan was an American financier and banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age. As the head of the banking firm that ultimately became known as J.P. Morgan and Co., he was a driving force behind the wave of industrial consolidation in the United States spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
