Quotes & Sayings About Intelligence Analysts

Similarly, the press never tested many of the assumptions about WMDs. One of the great myths about the WMD issue is that everybody believed Iraq had them. Well, that's not true. There were a number of people in the intelligence community and the State Department who were skeptical, and many analysts in the Department of Energy were dubious about Iraq's nuclear capability. There were also people like Scott Ritter who were saying quite accurately what was going on. — Seymour Hersh

All descriptions of how near certainty is to be achieved are based primarily on emerging technologies. A Global Information Grid of "persistent surveillance" will gather information and share that information in a networked "collaborative information environment." Automated systems will fuse that intelligence and make possible "virtual collaboration among geographically dispersed" analysts who will generate intelligence and, ultimately, knowledge. Some even assume that this "robust intelligence" will deliver not only a clear appreciation for the current situation, but also generate "predictive intelligence" that will allow US forces to "anticipate the unexpected." Despite its enthusiastic embrace, the assumption of near-certainty in future war is a dangerous fallacy. — H.R. McMaster

For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he'd have to be a pretty peculiar type. I don't know. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he wasn't run over by a goddam truck before he ever got his license to practice. He'd have to believe that it's through the grace of God that he has the native intelligence to be able to help his goddam patients at all. I don't know any good analysts who think along those lines. But that's the only kind of psychoanalyst who might be able to do Franny any good at all. If she got somebody terribly Freudian, or terribly eclectic, or just terribly run-of-the-mill - somebody who didn't even have any crazy, mysterious gratitude for his insight and intelligence - she'd come out of analysis in even worse shape. — J.D. Salinger

Langley bred a certain type of person with great intention. The human resources department required nearly as sophisticated of analysts as the foreign intelligence department. Apply the massive computing technology of the CIA to hiring, along with the naive appeal of the exciting, though perhaps not so lucrative life of a spy, and any headhunter would be jealous of the results. — Lynn Blackmar

One is to ensure that the war fighters and the intelligence analysts get the information that they need when they need it, in a format that's useful to them. — Stephen Cambone