American - Public | March 17, 1945 -
If Snowden really claims that his actions amounted to genuine civil disobedience, he should go to some English language bookstore in Moscow and get a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience'.
Michael Hayden
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President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.
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Access to the security clearance database would disgorge even more detailed personal information, including the foreign contacts of American officials.
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Chairman Chaffetz was an enthusiastic supporter of the 'USA Freedom Act,' designed to rein in the allegedly renegade NSA and its wanton depredations of American privacy.
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A significant U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan has been continuous since October 2001, and President Obama's short-lived 'surge' in 2009 was a continuation of his predecessor's buildup there.
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President Obama came to office with a strong belief that America had overreached, that we had become too involved. It matched the national mood, and indeed, there was some evidence that it was true.
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I've often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be.
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My life experience confirms that the U.S. government frequently overclassifies data. But that's a stronger argument for not dumping large volumes of government traffic on an unclassified personal server than it is a justification for retroactively challenging classification decisions.
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Americans are very practical folks. Accustomed to hard choices in their own lives, they are willing to give us in intelligence a lot of slack as we make the hard choices our profession demands.
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Politicization - the shading of analysis to fit prevailing policy or politics - is the harshest criticism one can make of an intelligence organization. It strikes beyond questions of competence to the fundamental ethic of the enterprise, which is, or should be, truth telling.
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Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.
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My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.
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