Richard A. Clarke > Quotes

“I have only a very brief opening statement.

I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurance.

I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11.

To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed.

And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll be glad to take your questions.”
― Richard Clarke

“Cognitive biases worked well when rapid pattern recognition and decision making was critical for survival,”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“George Bush was right, however, when he said that “Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.” He made it so. He turned it from a nation that was not threatening us into a breeding ground for anti-American hatred. For a generation or more, we will be the victims of Iraqi revenge. And the Iraqis are not alone. The scenes of the U.S. occupation have inflamed Islamic opinion from Morocco and Western Europe, through the Middle East and South Asia, to Thailand and Indonesia. Radical Islamicists will not easily or soon be dissuaded of their hatred of America. Egypt’s President had said, “Before you invade Iraq there is one Usama bin Laden, after you invade there will be hundreds.” Hosni Mubarak was right. I”
― Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror

“In 1957, a flu virus that had not been seen for sixty-five years was discovered in Asia. Because of its long dormancy, most of the world had no immunity. In two waves of deaths, nearly 1.5 million people were killed, including seventy thousand Americans.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“I have been taught by senior national security officials for decades never to bring them a problem without also suggesting a solution.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It

“When the next pandemic strikes, all that will matter is the capacity of our public health system to detect and respond.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“In the past twenty years, that feeling of mastery has turned to growing fear, fear that antibiotics are losing their efficacy. The excessive and improper use of antibiotics has imparted resistance on the bugs they used to kill.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Silicon Valley quickly realized there was far more money to be made by adapting their vision to the wider world than trying to force the wider world to adopt the vision of an internet where free speech reigned supreme”
― Richard A. Clarke, The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

“Influenza is amazingly adaptable. It changes lethality and transmissibility quickly and jumps from animal to human more readily than any other disease. New flu mutations emerge daily, some proving more contagious than others.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Regardless of what deadly microbe comes up next—pandemic influenza, a man-made chimera, or multi-drug-resistant bacteria—Garrett insists that the world needs a greatly improved public health infrastructure to respond appropriately”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Alternative history is a parlor game.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“North Korea gets a high score for both “defense” and “lack of dependence.” North Korea can sever its limited connection to cyberspace even more easily and effectively than China can. Moreover, North Korea has so few systems dependent upon cyberspace that a major cyber war attack on North Korea would cause almost no damage. Remember that cyber dependence is not about the percentage of homes with broadband or the per capita number of smart phones; it’s about the extent to which critical infrastructures (electric power, rails, pipelines, supply chains) are dependent upon networked systems and have no real backup.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It

“On October 1, 2009, a general took charge of the new U.S. Cyber Command, a military organization with the mission to use information technology and the Internet as a weapon. Similar commands exist in Russia, China, and a score of other nations. These military and intelligence organizations are preparing the cyber battlefield with things called “logic bombs” and “trapdoors,” placing virtual explosives in other countries in peacetime.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It

“If Fouchier’s pandemically engineered H5N1 had breached his laboratory, or if something similar emerges naturally, the resulting damage to civilization is hard to fathom. Even if H5N1 follows the Spanish Flu percentages—30 percent infected and a lethality of 2 percent—Fouchier’s superbug would kill 42 million people. However, Webster thinks that is a foolishly low estimate. Why would the lethality decrease when Fouchier just proved the virus can become airborne without weakening? Webster thinks 3.5 billion could die.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“The Bible tells the story of the Hebrew prophet Daniel, who was able to read mysterious words that appeared on the wall of the Babylonian king Belshazzar’s banquet hall during a rowdy feast. The words mene, mene, tekel, upharsin (“numbered, numbered, weighed, divided” in Aramaic) were unintelligible to all but Daniel, who warned the king that they foretold the fall of his kingdom. According to the story, Belshazzar was killed in a coup only hours later. Daniel had seen the “writing on the wall.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“They had just held a naval exercise in the Gulf anyway, what more signaling could be necessary? In fact, U.S. ships were already leaving.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“The WHO warns, “This serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future; it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country. Antibiotic resistance—when bacteria change so antibiotics no longer work in people who need them to treat infections—is now a major threat to public health.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Often it is not clear whose job it is to detect the warning, evaluate it, and decide to act. The President of the United States or the CEO of a corporation might be the person who could order action, but there may not be a general understanding of who should take the issue to them. Who owns it? Frequently, no one wants to own an issue that’s about to become a disaster. This reluctance creates a “bystander effect,” wherein observers of the problem feel no responsibility to act.7 Increasingly, complex issues are multidisciplinary, making it unclear where the responsibility lies. New complex problems or “issues on the seams” are more likely to produce ambiguity about who is in charge of dealing with them.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Congress is a federation of fiefdoms, subject to the vicissitudes of constant fundraising and the lobbying of those who have donated the funds.”
― Richard A. Clarke , Robert K. Knake

“The Pentagon has long identified four primary domains of conflict: land, sea, air, and space. In recent years, cyberspace has come to be known as the “fifth domain.”
― Richard A. Clarke, The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

“When the offense has the advantage because of some combination of technological superiority or cost, military theorists write, there will be conflict. When the reverse is true, when it costs more to attack, or when the chances of an attack defeating the defenses is low, greater stability will prevail.”
― Richard A. Clarke, The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

“And then, it was not written by a government committee, but by an academic named Roberta Wohlstetter. She concluded that the problem had not been a scarcity of information, but an overabundance of it. It was difficult, Wohlstetter concluded, to identify the reports that mattered among the avalanche of intelligence and other inputs.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“our guiding principle is to avoid solutions that would cause more disruption than the problems they are meant to solve.”
― Richard A. Clarke, The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

“Another survey found that at one very large electric company, 80 percent of the devices were connected to the corporate intranet, and there were, of course, connections from the intranet out to the public Internet.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It

“prestidigitation,”
― Richard A. Clarke, The Scorpion's Gate

“Before he had left the office the night before, Charlie had ordered the satellite to image those elite armor divisions. Now, looking at the results of the imagery collection, he did not like what he saw.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Almost a hundred years later, after numerous studies, including sequencing the virus’s RNA, scientists still do not know exactly why the Spanish flu was so deadly, and that ignorance obviously makes experts uncomfortable.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“For a period of several years in the mid-1990s the Chinese talked very openly, for a Communist police state, about what they had learned from the Gulf War. They noted that their strategy had been to defeat the U.S. by overwhelming numbers if a war ever happened. Now they concluded that that strategy would not work. They began to downsize their military and invest in new technologies. One of those technologies was wangluohua, “networkization,” to deal with the “new battlefield of computers.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It

“We want to make our defenses so good, and our architectures so strong, that we do not care about whether we are being attacked most of the time because the attacks have no serious effects.”
― Richard A. Clarke, The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

“Beginning in 1918 and lasting less than three years, the Spanish flu epidemic killed up to 5 percent of the earth’s population”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes