Tim Weiner QUOTES

121 " Putin summoned Yanukovych to his home and ordered him to sign a backdated letter asking Russia to invade Ukraine. On March 18, he walked into the Kremlin and announced to thundering applause that Crimea was reunified with Russia. Putin had broken the rules, treaties, and understandings about the sovereignty of nations and the inviolability of borders that had kept the peace in Europe since World War II. No nation on earth had taken another’s land like this since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. And the Russians hadn’t fired a shot. Cyberwarfare, media manipulation, and psyops had done the trick. It was twenty-first-century political warfare at its most potent. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

122 " And George Kennan, at the age of ninety-three, warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” He feared it could be the beginning of a new cold war, and in this he was prophetic. Kennan knew that empires do not vanish into thin air. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

123 " Hoover condemned the proposal for the CIA as nothing but the “dreams of visionary but impractical empire-builders. "

― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI

124 " The CIA falsely claimed credit for the arrest and wrested back control of the interrogation. Its officers blasted the prisoner with noise, froze him with cold, and buried him in a mock coffin. Soufan and Gaudin protested. The CIA officers told them the techniques had been approved at the highest levels of the American government. Soufan "

― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI

125 " February 2007. “And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made?” He has sought revenge ever since. He believed that the United States had moved the Berlin Wall east to Russia’s borders. And he began to push back. Only in the past few years have some of the key American records of the 1990s been declassified, and now that we can read them, we can begin to understand the origins of Putin’s assault on America. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

126 " On July 17, Putin’s troops shot down a civilian plane, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17, bound from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over southeastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. He insisted Russia had nothing to do with it. “Of course not!” he said indignantly. To counter the harsh facts, the Kremlin put a conspiracy theory out on the internet. “I saw people claiming the CIA had put dead bodies inside a plane and purposely shot it down to create propaganda against the Russian government,” said Sri Preston Kulkarni, the campaign director for the Ukraine Communications Task Force. “People were repeating that story again and again.… And I realized we had gone through the looking glass at that point and that if people could believe that, they could believe almost anything.” It took more than three years before the Dutch and Australian governments published an official report holding Russia responsible for shooting down the aircraft. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

127 " On August 1, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel granted the CIA’s request to begin water-boarding Abu Zubaydah. The technique, tantamount to torture, was designed to elicit confessions through the threat of imminent death by drowning. That same day John Yoo, now a deputy to Attorney General Ashcroft, advised the White House that the laws against torture did not apply to American interrogators. The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence approved. The "

― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI

128 " On September 4, General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s top military commander, said this cascade of lies was an aspect of “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen.” The message from the Kremlin was that reality could be bent to its will, because objective truth did not exist, and thus falsehoods could trump facts. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

129 " As Kennan had written in the Long Telegram back in February 1946: “The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.” Now the internet could magnify their clandestine ambitions a millionfold. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

130 " In mid-September Soufan talked to an al-Qaeda prisoner named Ramzi Binalshibh, who was chained naked to the floor in a CIA black prison at the Bagram air base outside Kabul. He said he was starting to obtain “valuable actionable intelligence” before CIA officers ordered him to stop talking forty-five minutes later. On September 17, they flew their prisoner to a second black site in Morocco, then on to Poland; under extreme duress he described plots to crash airplanes into Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London. He was also diagnosed as a schizophrenic. "

― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI

131 " The United States did little in direct response to Putin’s war on truth. “We had a massive information gap,” Ambassador Nuland said. “We didn’t have the kind of intelligence assets where we could prove that he was lying about Russian involvement. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

132 " And he said explicitly: “We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” Not an inch eastward. The United States gave “categorical assurances” on that point, said Jack Matlock, the American ambassador in Moscow under Reagan and Bush. Gorbachev heard them clearly, and he heard them repeatedly. He responded: “Any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.” He trusted but did not verify: he never got America’s assurances in writing. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

133 " Army officers demanded “a piece of al-Qahtani” and “told the FBI to step aside” in October. They questioned him for twenty-hour stretches, leashed him and made him perform dog tricks, stripped him naked and paraded him, froze him to the point of hypothermia, wrapped him from the neck up in duct tape, confronted him with snarling dogs, and ordered him to pray to an idol shrine. By "

― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI

134 " Today an old torpedo factory not far from the Pentagon houses eight miles of microfilm, a small part of the archive of American intelligence from the war. "

― Tim Weiner , Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

135 " Mueller was embroiled in another ferocious argument over the rule of law and the role of the FBI as the interrogation fight festered. Vice President Cheney had wanted to send the American military to a Muslim enclave in Lackawanna, a dead-end upstate New York town by the Canadian border. The troops were going to seize six suspected al-Qaeda supporters—all of them Americans—charge them as enemy combatants, and send them to Guantánamo forever. The "

― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI

136 " And he was the last to lead the United States into battle backed by an international alliance. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the planning and execution of the war to drive him out was more than a display of America’s military might. Thirty-eight countries combined to face the Iraqi Army in combat, and they all fought and flew on NATO signals when the war was launched in January 1991. Six kinds of warplanes with pilots from eight nations flying up to four thousand sorties a day were woven together on NATO wavelengths. Nothing like it had happened before, and nothing like it has happened since. The war was a striking demonstration of the power the alliance possessed when harnessed by the United States. The lesson was not lost within the high councils of the Soviets. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

137 " Tenet now had to make a life-and-death decisions unlike any that had ever confronted a director of central intelligence. A year before, after a seven-year struggle between the CIA and the Pentagon, a small pilotless aircraft equipped with video cameras and spy sensors called the Predator had been declared ready to be deployed over Afghanistan. The first flight had come on September 7, 2000. Now the agency and the air force had figured out how to put antitank missiles on the Predator. In theory, for an investment of a few million dollars a CIA officer at headquarters would soon be able to hunt and kill bin Laden with a video screen and a joystick. But what was the chain of command? Tenet wondered. Who gives the go-ahead? "

― Tim Weiner , Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

138 " As President Bush made the case for a wider war against Iraq in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, he called the six men in Lackawanna an al-Qaeda cell. The FBI would conclude that this was not true. "

― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI

139 " Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free. ALEXANDER HAMILTON, 1787 "

― Tim Weiner , Enemies: A History of the FBI

140 " After suffering another insomniac night, Nixon went to the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs showed him maps detailing where Communist forces occupied Cambodia. "

― Tim Weiner , One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon