Political Quotes

“I love the analogy of play the ball where it lies because that is exactly what President Bush did after 9/11. He went back and took a look at what capabilities we had and the threats that were out there, but never went back to try to assess blame on something that happened 5 or 6 years ago or the Deutsch Doctrine that gutted our human intelligence. When we should have built intelligence up in the mid-1990s, it was gutted. That is exactly what happened when we get to 2001 and here we are in 2004 and we would like to have a human intelligence capability, we say, God, where did it go? We scrubbed it because we got rid of all the bad guys in 1995 and 1996 who spied for us. And one can say, well, when we are dealing with a terrorist organization, the only people that are in terrorist organizations are bad folks to begin with. But that is not where the President was. He took a look at 9/11, took a look at where we were strategically, militarily, and what we needed to get done, and went forward, never trying to pin blame anywhere but just said, hey, I am playing it where it lies.”