Intelligence Failures Quotes

I want to emphasis again, Governor (Thomas) Kean and Congressman (Lee) Hamilton pointed out that congressional oversight also was a major contributor to our failures prior to 9/11 and that has to be fixed as well.

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

This president has been reluctant to hold anybody accountable. No one was held accountable after September the 11th. Nobody's been held accountable after the clear flaws in intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq.

There were major intelligence failures and staying out there chasing weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist was not what I wanted to do.

The CIA is an easy target because they do so much that is wrong.

The Committee's review of a series of intelligence shortcomings, to include intelligence prior to 9/11 and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, clearly reveal how vital a diverse intelligence workforce is to our national security.

… civilian casualties [with drone attacks] have proved formidable. Haphazard intelligence has often been to blame, as earn local tipsters have provided the United States with false information in order to take out innocent rivals.

I really wanted to talk about the War on Terror and say that both sides were completely incompetent [in addressing it]. You can't blame the other side when you're involved in it.

The Chilcot report is damning. It exposes a litany of failures over a long period, including reliance on flawed intelligence assessments, lack of planning and insufficient foresight of obvious consequences. But the report also exposes a chilling lack of rigour and a political culture of deference.

In terms of our foreign policy, that's where we made a mistake after 9/11. Everyone's going, "Why, why, why," and there wasn't any investigation or learning from any of what we had been doing up to that time that had set us up.

CIA Director George Tenet has now testified before the 9/11 commission and he said we are still making the same dumb mistakes, like leaving memos on the President's desk.

Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.

In war, where imperfect intelligence, the threat of a catastrophe, and the number of accidents are incomparably greater than any other human endeavor, the amount of missed opportunities, so to speak, is therefore bound to be greater.

There are some legitimate security issues, but I believe many of the objections the administration is making are not for security reasons, but to disguise mistakes that were made prior to Sept. 11.

I believe that we're going to find out that America made a lot of mistakes diplomatically, economically, militarily, intel-wise. But, I also think we're going to find out the U.S. has done a lot of good things too.

In the espionage world whenever something works, it looks brilliant. Whenever it goes wrong, it always looks like a terrible bungle.

The combination of secrecy and bureaucracy in the CIA has led to a special kind of disaster.

The history of the intelligence community is replete with violations of the trust of the American people.

There is much in the result of John Chilcot's seven-year inquiry into the decision-making that led to Britain's involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq that can be cited to excuse headlines that refer to his findings as 'scathing' and 'damning.'

Instead of talking about accomplishments, we are talking about stupidity and intelligence reporting that is based on facts that's not coming out of the actual heads of these intelligence agencies. And we are sitting here talking about it. And it is a shame, and it needs to end.

The trust that was reposed in the CIA has faded. The agency is so battered that its utility for espionage is subject to question

Why did the Clinton Administration wait from 1995 to 1998 to tighten security and bolster counterintelligence at U.S. weapons labs?

… a closed world. … an almost perfect record of resisting change. … fragmented, loosely managed, and poorly coordinated. … often unable to gather intelligence about the things we care the most about. … analysts do not always tell the decision makers just how limited their information really is. … increasingly irrelevant to the new challenges presented by weapons of mass destruction. … espionage is always chancy at best. Still we have no choice but to do better.

We also know that ISIS is recruiting who are not in those databases. So of course, we're going to miss them. And then we now learn that DHS says, "No, we can't check their social media."

I don't believe that the Bush Administration had something to do with September 11th. I do believe that there were a lot of warning signals, but I don't think they were ignored on purpose - Bush just wanted to go to the ranch for a month.