George W. Bush Quotes
[William J.] Casey was an inappropriate choice.
Bush was Reagan’s Vice President, but had little influence on top level appointments. Bush would have been particularly helpful with this appointment as he had previously served as a very successful CIA Director. Others also disagreed with this Regan appointment. See {637469}. See {637470}, {613419} and {623500} for Casey quotes that support Bush’s judgment
George W. Bush, 41st President of the United States (Republican, TX), Criticizing the Ronald Reagan Appointment his CIA Director, Quoted in Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Response to an aide who was worrying that the CIA was recruiting too many radical fundamentalists to fight in Afghanistan against the Russians as opposed to middle of the road Muslims. The fundamentalists were very successful against the Russians, but then they turned on the United States and we had to go to war to rout them out.
Most CIA Directors have not had this extreme attitude, but because Casey did, journalists, members of Congress, other government officials and even Presidents have often distrusted the CIA and their personnel more than was necessarily warranted.
Casey was a disaster for the CIA. In addition to having the usual problems, Casey did not believe that the CIA should be constrained by law, and on numerous occasions his CIA broke the law—so much so that the distrust spilled over for the decades into the future. See {637470}, {613419} and {623500} for Casey quotes that support Ford’s judgment, and {636743} for another who agreed with Ford.
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 not referring to economic corruption but intellectual and moral corruption. Regan who appointed many excellent key officials picked a very unfortunate choice to lead the CIA. William J. Casey had many faults and weaknesses—See {637472}, {636743} and {637469}. But the worst of his damage was imposing his ideology on the agency and having the intelligence analysts shape their intellectual product to conform with a particular world, political, and religious view. See {634408}. This became acceptable and as future administrations took power their ideologies were considered by the CIA professionals and reports were edited and shaped accordingly. Reform was instituted by some of the future CIA directors but there were precedents from the Casey days for years. One particularly bad manifestation of this intellectual corruption occurred when Vice President Richard Cheney imposed a neocon world view on the agency with a pliant CIA director and the agency gave the President a totally inaccurate assessment of Iraq nuclear capability and intention which triggered the disastrous Iraq war, made all the worse when there were not only no nuclear weapons in Iraq as had been reported, but there was not even a single laboratory trying to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear power.
George Walker Bush is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush previously served as the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. He was born into the Bush family; his father, George H. W. Bush, was the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993.
