“Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office… — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“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 electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and… — 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… — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“Mueller was embroiled in another ferocious argument over the rule of law and the role of the FBI as the interrogation fight festered. Vice… — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“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… — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“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… — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“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… — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
“On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original… — Tim Weiner Copy Share Image
