Howard Fineman Quotes

Our task, your task... is to try to connect the dots before something happens. People say, 'Well, where's the smoking gun?' Well, we don't want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction.

The FBI's principal priority right now is protecting the United States against another terrorist attack.

The department was set up primarily to protect us from another terrorist attack from Islamic terrorists, and yet they talk about everything but that.

And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack.

The terrorist uses surprise and stealth, and the only way to defeat that is by having accurate and timely intelligence.

The federal government has a responsibility to protect all Americans from potential terrorist attack.

It is no coincidence that our country has not been attacked since 9-11. Our initiatives to protect the homeland and aggressively take the fight to the terrorists have been factors in that success.

When these attacks occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.

I think, in the wake of Sept. 11, it's important for the American public to understand that to the extent that there are individuals within the United States who would undertake terrorist attacks, that we are doing something to address that.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, it became clear that the FBI's number one priority must be the prevention of another terrorist attack.

As has been the case throughout the history of terrorism, government anxiety centres on what to do about those against whom there may be intelligence but no usable evidence.

If we have intelligence on the location of terrorist training centers, it is insane not to act.

Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.

Counterterrorism isn't really about the nunchakus, the guns and gadgets. It's about psychology.

I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn't look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there's only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research.

In the urgent aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, with more attacks thought to be imminent, analysts wanted to use 'contact chaining' techniques to build what the NSA describes as network graphs of people who represented potential threats.

Because of the terrorist threat, the FBI and CIA have become as important as the military in preserving our freedom. Yet while thanking our military is standard practice in American life, no one thinks of thanking the FBI, the CIA, or the rest of the intelligence community for keeping us safe since 9/11.

I think the American people believe in stopping and preventing terrorism pretty much at any cost.

In the United States, it's the mandate of the FBI to gather information relating to terrorism, go out and collect it, to do the interviews, to do the investigative work.

The attacks of September 11 persuaded many Americans that what might seem to be obscure or distant potential threats can very quickly materialize and it therefore makes sense to attend to them even before they become urgent.

Since the tragedies, the Department of Homeland Security was established to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, and most importantly, to share intelligence information among government agencies and departments.

In a brave new world, a post-September 11 world, anyone is going to make certain mistakes. The mistakes that have been made on homeland security, on protecting our Nation from another terrorist attack, are mistakes of omission. We are simply not doing enough.

The prompt assimilation of that intelligence will be essential if we are to avoid another September 11th.

The FBI. is a massive culture. It's been a culture that served America well, and it's been focused on prosecution. But what we need in terms of terrorism is prevention.

One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.