George Tenet Quotes (35 Quotes)


    Three thousand people died, ... No matter how hard we worked or how desperately we tried, it was not enough. The victims and the families of 911 deserve better.

    This has only succeeded in buying time against an increasingly dangerous threat. The difficulty in destroying this threat lies in the fact that our efforts will not be enough to overcome the fundamental causes of the phenomenon -- poverty, alienation, disaffection and ethnic hatreds deeply rooted in history,

    By no stretch of the imagination am I going to tell you that I've solved all the problems of the community in terms of integrating and in lashing it up, ... But we've made an enormous amount of progress.

    We know that they will continue to plan, ... We know that they will hurt us again. We have to minimize, we have to minimize, we have to minimize their ability to do so because there is no perfection in this business.

    I have analysts in my building who are convinced that that's exactly what they were, ... and analysts with the Defense Intelligence Agency who tell me the opposite.


    another five years to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs.


    Cord defined the concept, doctrine and implementation of covert action on behalf of the security and interests of our nation,

    I am greatly saddened by the death of Cord Meyer, a passionate defender of freedom around the world,

    We didn't steal the secret that told us what the plot was, we didn't recruit the right people or technically collect the data, notwithstanding enormous effort to do so,

    We must eradicate these organizations by denying them the source of financing, their sanctuary and eliminating their ability to hijack charitable organizations for terrorist purposes. We must be prepared for a long war, and we must not falter.

    I think the declassified answer, is yes, they can do that,

    Foreign nations have begun to include information warfare in their war college curricula with respect to both defensive and offensive applications.

    time and again uncovered plots that are chilling.

    The Tenet work plan requires a 100 percent effort by Chairman Arafat to end the violence and the terror, and I would expect the 100 percent effort to begin immediately.

    ... we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong.

    The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound... These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.

    The background ... makes it even more troubling that the 16 words eventually made it into the State of the Union speech, ... This was a mistake.

    We assess that Iraq continues to hide critical (weapons of mass destruction) production equipment and material from U.N. inspectors,

    Let me say this. I'm the Director of -- I'm the Director of Central Intelligence. The President of the United States sees me six days a week, every day. I tell him what the American intelligence community believes,

    When I took on this job I had a set of conditions to do it because I was essentially taking on the moral hazard, as I've referred to it, for the CIA. That is, it was a CIA conclusion that there were weapons.

    What I learned...or was reminded of, because I probably heard all this when it first came out...is that George Tenet felt his job was to present the facts but NOT to add any commentary regarding the world in which those facts existed. After all, ... such comments would get into making policy. And that wasn't my job.

    In 1999, the Germans gave us a name -- 'Marwan,' that's it -- and a phone number, ... And we didn't sit on our hands, and I'm not going to go through the rest of it in open session. They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 911.

    THIELMANN When it came to presenting the intelligence community's formal judgment on matters White House officials had already publicly addressed-- especially Iraq's nuclear weapons capabilities ... defended very stubbornly the erroneous CIA interpretation.

    Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days, ... But these times demand it because the alternative -- politicized, haphazard evaluation without the benefit of time and facts -- may well result in an intelligence community that is damaged and a country that is more at risk.


    When people use the word 'failure,' failure means no focus, no attention, no discipline, and those were not present in what we or the FBI did here or around the world,

    raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues. Some of the language was changed.

    We discovered the extent of Khan's hidden network. We tagged the proliferators. We detected the network stretching from Pakistan to Europe to the Middle East to Asia offering its wares to countries like North Korea and Iran,

    Over the next 15 years ... our cities will face ballistic missile threats from a wider variety of actors -- North Korea, probably Iran and possibly Iraq,


    The fact that the United States is arguably the world's most powerful nation, ... a larger target for those who don't share our interests, values or beliefs.

    His network is now answering to the world for years of nuclear profiteering,

    There was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced,

    this is the largest release of formerly classified CIA documents ever. It reflects my commitment to be as forward-leaning as possible in releasing information that with the passage of time no longer needs to be protected.


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