“Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe.” — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law.” — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“The president and the vice president wanted the FBI to execute searches in secret, avoiding the strictures of the legal and constitutional standards set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
“On December 4, 1998, the headline on the President’s Daily Brief, the most secret intelligence document in the government of the United States, read: “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” It was a secondhand report picked up by the CIA from the Egyptian intelligence service, but no one ever had seen anything like it. “Bin Ladin… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
“Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480)” — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“Where were the weapons of mass destruction? he asked. Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay. “We destroyed them. We told you,” he told Piro on February 13, 2004. “By God, if I had such weapons, I… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
“The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah,” President Bush said at a Republican fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 9.… — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“The attorney general also spelled out some of the authorities the FBI would use under the Patriot Act, which passed the Senate that same day: capturing e-mail addresses, tapping cell phones, opening voice-mails, culling credit card and bank account numbers from the Internet. All of this would be done under law, he said, with subpoenas and search warrants. But the… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
“Mueller was embroiled in another ferocious argument over the rule of law and the role of the FBI as the interrogation fight festered. Vice President Cheney had wanted to send the American military to a Muslim enclave in Lackawanna, a dead-end upstate New York town by the Canadian border. The troops were going to seize six suspected al-Qaeda supporters—all of… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
“In mid-September Soufan talked to an al-Qaeda prisoner named Ramzi Binalshibh, who was chained naked to the floor in a CIA black prison at the Bagram air base outside Kabul. He said he was starting to obtain “valuable actionable intelligence” before CIA officers ordered him to stop talking forty-five minutes later. On September 17, they flew their prisoner to a… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
“On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI’s Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
“Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
“On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. “When I see those columns,” he said, “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome.” “They lost their will to live,” he said. “They became subject to… — Tim Weiner Copy Share
