Quotes by George Tenet

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

“[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 wasnt my job.”

“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 Ive referred to it, for the CIA. That is, it was a CIA conclusion that there were weapons.”

“This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was removed,”

“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.”

“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,”

“We protect the rights of Americans and their privacy, ... We do not violate them and we never will.”

“If one side does something, and the other side does something within the span of a security meeting, we can say we are into Tenet.”

“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.”

By definition, intelligence deals with the unclear, the unknown, the deliberately hidden. What the enemies of the United States hope to deny we work to reveal.

To understand a difficult topic like Iraq takes patience and care. Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days.

Heres the teaching point, if youre teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesnt absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

You know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. Thats all you have. All you have is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor. When you dont have that anymore, well, you know, there you go. Trust was broken.