Quotes from Tim Weiner

Under Cheney's direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism. The

The director of the National Security Agency, General Michael V. Hayden, had told tens of thousands of his officers in a video message: "We are going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again.

Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law.

their installations. Once a wiretap was approved, Hoover considered it approved forever. Hoover had asserted that the FBI was free to install bugs at will, without informing a higher authority. He told Katzenbach that this power had been granted him in perpetuity by Franklin Delano Roosevelt a quarter of a century ago.

Hoover had installed 738 bugs on his own authority since 1960; the Justice Department's attorneys had been informed about only 158 of them, roughly one in five.

A mob is a mob whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers and the vicious classes.

The Bureau had conducted uncounted break-ins and black-bag jobs on Hoover's say-so. The

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. Richard Nixon had quoted the same speech the day before

The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah," President Bush said at a Republican fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 9. "He's one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He's not plotting and planning anymore. He's where he belongs.

The target was destroyed. But the CIA had misread its maps. The building was not Milosevic's military depot. It was the Chinese embassy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

She also had run Stellar Wind since its inception. Mueller made her his right hand.

Nixon revived the FBI's traditions of wiretaps, bugs, and black-bag jobs. They quickly became a part of the political culture of the Nixon White House. He ordered Hoover back into the field of political warfare.

So they started to hear the rumors of the torture and the deaths inside the prison only in November and December 2003. Not until January 21, 2004, did they learn firsthand from an army captain that there were videotapes of beatings and rapes.

Marat Mindiyarov, an unemployed teacher who lasted four months at the IRA, said the job required him "to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.

Saddam said he had used the telephone only twice and rarely slept in the same bed two nights running since the first American war against Iraq began in 1991. He despised Osama bin Laden as a Sunni Muslim zealot. He was now prepared to die at the hands of his captors. Six