Intelligence Credibility Quotes

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's secret.'

The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what the real problems are.

After the heavily politicized 2007 Iran NIE, many of us in Congress found it hard to take some intelligence analysis at face value.

Nobody should believe something just because an intelligence agent says it.

I don't concede that Guccifer is a Russian agent. Officials also said, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Just because the intelligence services say something, as we know from history, does not make it true.

Donald Trump'd rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us.

If the intelligence we send forward support the views that the administration has, it is welcome and we are told what a great job it is. And if the intelligence that gos forward don't support the views of the policymakers, it is instantly condemned.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

Spies could be invaluable in peacetime, once the fighting actually started, their value dropped steeply. When the swords were out, it was the information your own scouts provided that mattered, not reports from unknown people whose veracity you couldn't prove.

I don't trust American intelligence. You look at the torture report from the Senate: People inside the CIA are saying that it doesn't work, and we're getting the information not from torture, but simply from questioning people.