Condoleezza Rice Quotes

But it is equally incontrovertible that if our intelligence gathering process is seriously flawed, we had better find out and find out fast if we are to avoid another Sept. 11.

There's every reason to believe there will be further attacks attempted against the United States. For us to spend so much time patting ourselves on the back because we got bin Laden that we miss the next attack would be a terrible tragedy.

You ask every conceivable question after Sept. 11 in terms of what more could have been done, what could have been done differently. My impression from working on these cases and investigations for almost nine years was that an awful lot of people were working over time to connect dots.

One of the amazing things about September 11 is that we lacked the imagination to connect the dots and foresee it.

The country was not focused on terrorism before September 11th.

A big challenge in combating terrorism is learning how to think about things that we can't imagine.

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.

Well, our position, and our chairman has talked about this extensively, is that we had a lot of intelligence prior to 9/11. We knew that two al Qaeda operatives who ultimately participated in the 9/11 disaster were in the United States. We didn't find them.

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 terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the way we think about security.

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.

Prior to the PATRIOT Act, the ability of government agencies to share information with each other was limited, which kept investigators from fully understanding what terrorists might be planning and to prevent their attacks.

We will have to continue to improve our human intelligence system-something that was, unfortunately, lacking in the years which led up to September 11. This is going to be a continuing process of change.

We could have prevented the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon if we had 20,000 troops shoulder to shoulder.

Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11.

There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

In the aftermath of September 11, and as the 9/11 Commission report so aptly demonstrates, it is clear that our intelligence system is not working the way that it should.

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.

I think the important thing to remember here is that we haven't been attacked again at home since September of 2001.

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.

I think a lot of programs, policies have been put in place since 9/11, have prevented a 9/11-style attack. On the other hand, I think the threat has become greater, not lesser.

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

The backbone of our nation's domestic defense against terrorist attacks will continue to be the men and women in local law enforcement and emergency services.

The central role in the fight against terrorism is with national authorities.

But clearly, this is what this is about. It's about pushing the security bubble out. It's about rooting out every last guy, so that there's not even somebody who can fire a single, solitary RPG round from some little qalat out here.