Benjamin Wittes Quotes

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Benjamin Wittes

Profession : Journalist

Birth : November 5, 1969

Good intelligence analysis, after all, is all about discrimination between what's important and what's not.

Benjamin Wittes

National security is not just things that go boom. It is not just terrorists and foreign adversaries.

Benjamin Wittes

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

Benjamin Wittes

Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.

Benjamin Wittes

It's hardly a news flash that a secret, clandestine intelligence agency might resist giving out information about its operations when not not legally required to do so.

Benjamin Wittes

Sometimes, the intelligence community does legal collection against a legitimate foreign intelligence target and that target interacts with U.S. persons, against whom our people thus end up collecting information as a collateral matter.

Benjamin Wittes

I have fiercely criticized both the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies and the Obama administration's - and fiercely defended both as well.

Benjamin Wittes

Government lawyers, like private ones, face the problem routinely of aiding in the defense and development of positions in whose correctness they don't believe.

Benjamin Wittes

The concept of war is not the construct that will govern - psychologically, politically, and legally - our continuing response to Al Qaeda.

Benjamin Wittes

I'm a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith from reason.

Benjamin Wittes

Drosnin's 'The Bible Code' would hardly be worth mentioning were it not such a smash hit.

Benjamin Wittes

In any long string of letters, one can find countless anomalies that will seem like convincing proofs of hidden meaning to the mind that wants to believe that the text is somehow special. Numerological tricks, for example, can demonstrate that William Shakespeare wrote the 'King James Bible.'

Benjamin Wittes

Once upon a time, science, philosophy, and theology were disciplines largely undifferentiated from one another, and proving the existence of God was a fairly commonplace intellectual exercise. But as the scientific method became increasingly refined, particularly through the nineteenth century, science and religion grew apart.

Benjamin Wittes

It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.

Benjamin Wittes

Political as well as religious cults can be distinguished from legitimate organizations by their use of doublethink. Though political cults espouse extremist ideologies, not extremist theologies, operationally they are virtually identical to religious cults, and they also go to great lengths to control the vocabularies of their members.

Benjamin Wittes

It used to be that what was going to be written on my tombstone was 'Benjamin Wittes, former 'Washington Post' editorial writer,' or 'Benjamin Wittes, who wasn't even a lawyer.' Now it's just, like, 'Benjamin Wittes, who's a friend of Jim Comey's.'

Benjamin Wittes

There's all kinds of crazy right-wing conspiracies about me.

Benjamin Wittes

The only way to tyrantproof the presidency is not to elect tyrants to the presidency.

Benjamin Wittes

You cannot denude the presidency of the substance and power of its office. It can't be done.

Benjamin Wittes

I was much less offended than others were by the CIA's interrogations in the years after September 11.

Benjamin Wittes