Michael Hayden Quotes

Michael Hayden

Profession : Public Servant

Birth : March 17, 1945

'End strength' - the total number of government employees you can have at the end of the year. That's a separate exercise and requires independent energy, independent effort with the Congress to get the ceiling of your government employees raised.

Michael Hayden

George Tenet was actually a very strong centralizing force. If you met George by personality, George met with the president six days out of seven: nontrivial attribute inside the federal government. And George was head of the CIA.

Michael Hayden

Public discussion of how we determine al Qaeda intentions, I just - I can't see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation.

Michael Hayden

The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what's called an emergency FISA.

Michael Hayden

The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results.

Michael Hayden

People don't question American power. What people need to be convinced of is American will.

Michael Hayden

Once you're in a network, you can do a whole bunch of things to that network. It's just that NSA doesn't have the authority to do that.

Michael Hayden

It's hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can't - no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody.

Michael Hayden

The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.

Michael Hayden

When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.

Michael Hayden

Al Qaida changes; Al Qaida adapts. We have to adapt as well. We rely on resources to do that. Reducing resources beyond a certain point will make us less able to adapt as our enemy adapts.

Michael Hayden

My personal view is that Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn't quite in the red for the international community. And, frankly, that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon.

Michael Hayden

When I was in government, what we would used to mystically call 'the kinetic option' was way down on our list. In my personal thinking - in my personal thinking, I need to emphasize that - I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes.

Michael Hayden

As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it's not going to stay together.

Michael Hayden

In my heart of hearts, I don't think it's a good position to say that Guantanamo is not an acceptable answer for anyone we might capture now or in the future.

Michael Hayden

We're an organization with a clear objective: to protect the American people. We have a number of missions that feed into that, to protect America, and one of those missions we share with the council, which is to help our policymakers make sense of global events.

Michael Hayden

Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now.

Michael Hayden

Renditions before and since 9/11 share some basic features. They have been conducted lawfully, responsibly and with a clear and single purpose: Get terrorists off the street and gain intelligence on those still at large. Our detention and interrogation programs flow from the same inescapable logic.

Michael Hayden

Responsibility demands action, and dealing with the immediate threat must naturally be a top priority.

Michael Hayden

What Edward Snowden did amounted to the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of my nation.

Michael Hayden