Barton Gellman Quotes

McCain, the former Vietnam War POW, had won the moral victory and marched away. Cheney sliced out the only part of the bill he really cared about, and it looked as though McCain did not even know.

It was one thing to say the president's politically appointed lawyers green-lighted domestic surveillance. It was another to claim a go-ahead from career civil servants, unbeholden to the White House.

Hardly anyone in the intelligence field believed the next administration would climb as far out on a legal limb as this one had.

Meawhile, Goldsmith had been studying the special surveillance program with growing unease. Addington's behavior with the NSA auditors was 'a wake-up call for me,' Goldsmith said, warning him that he had better look even more closely. Cheney and Addington, Goldsmith came to believe, manipulated the legal advice they sought. 'They were geniuses at this,' Goldsmith said. 'They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answers together to get the result they want.

The NSA's lawyer and inspector general made sure the agency carried out its orders to the letter. What they could not do was judge for themselves that the orders were legal.

If Brenner and Potenza had replied with the auditor-equivalent of 'you're not the boss of me,' they would have been right. The two men could have pressed their document request and told the big, loud man from the White House to get out of their way. But that kind of thing did not happen often to an emissary of the vice president, Addington least of all.

In the field of biological weapons, there is almost no prospect of detecting a pathogen until it has been used in an attack.

Bush had vowed during the campaign to act on climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but once in office Cheney countermanded him. In what Cheney’s biographer Barton Gellman describes as a “case study in managing an errant boss,” Cheney shifted the administration’s position to arguing that the science on global warming was “inconclusive,” requiring “more scientific inquiry.

There had been one time Bush jumped off the Cheney bus, a big decision on bioterror defense at the end of 2002. Two sensitive intelligence reports set off alarms for the vice president. One said 'al Qaeda is interested in acquiring biological weapons, to include smallpox.' The other, from the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center, assessed (with confidence ranging from 'medium' to 'very high') that North Korea, Iraq, France, and Russia had undeclared samples of the smallpox virus, variola, which no longer existed in nature. Cheney and his staff connected the dots and brought the government to the brink of a mass vaccination campaign. Scooter Libby argued so forcefully that colleagues called him Germ Boy behind his back.

It was possible to construct a case, one Bush administration lawyer said, in which the high-ranking officials who planned and authorized the program were engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

Participants in the Tuesday-afternoon meeting, including some of Cheney's recruits, left the room shaken. Mueller worked for the attorney general, and the FBI's central mission was to 'uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States.' Hayden's neck, and his agency, were on the line. The NSA director believed in the program, believed he was doing the right thing. But keep on going when the Justice Department said no?

LCCN 2019049573 (print) | LCCN 2019049574 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594206016

What distinguished whistleblowers from their peers was intolerance of belief without action. There was black and there was white and they refused to avert their eyes, even—or especially—if others would not let themselves see. Going public followed inevitably. Whatever else drove Ellsberg and Snowden, their zeal was sincere.

If you really want to prevent a surveillance state that could be abused by a tyrant, the only thing is to not have surveillance.