[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.

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

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.

What we learned in the five or six weeks leading up to the New Year’s celebrations, … that there is an infrastructure out there that is perhaps bigger than we anticipated.

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.

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...

[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...

haunts all of us to this day.

You must expedite our access to the current list of outstanding documents and interview requests.

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,

I’m Greek, and we’re conspiratorial by nature.

last chance to exact vengeance.

[At the CIA, Director George Tenet issued a statement saying,] Our role is to call it like we see it. … That is exactly what was done.

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 9/11 deserve better.

still dedicated to striking the U.S. homeland.

[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.

As a nation we have, over the past seven years, been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine...

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...

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.

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

There is a presence in Baghdad,

Admiral Jeremiah is the perfect person to lead such a review, … His credentials are impeccable and his credibility is unquestioned.

Iraq… has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between...

lawless zones, veritable no man’s lands … where extremist movements find shelter and can win the breathing space to grow.

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.

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,

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...

rendered 70 terrorists to justice.

Here’s the teaching point, if you’re teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn’t absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of...

No one told us what to say or how to say it, … We will always call it as we see it.

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

… we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong.

one of the most immediate threats the United States is likely to face.

Iran’s success in gaining technology and materials from Russian companies, combined with recent indigenous Iranian advances, means it could have a medium-range missile capability much sooner than I assessed last year.

I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to.

and those debates were spelled out in the estimate.

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

the system was blinking red.

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

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 —...

We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America. Period.

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...

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...

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

You know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. That’s all you have. All you have is your reputation built on trust and your...

at that time that was what we thought.

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...

I still lie awake at night thinking about everything that could have been, that wasn’t done to stop 9/11. To the 9/11 families, I said, you deserve better from your entire government. All of us.

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...

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,