I want to emphasis again, Governor (Thomas) Kean and Congressman (Lee) Hamilton pointed out that congressional oversight also was a major contributor to our failures prior to 9/11 and that has to be fixed as well.
Before September 11, terrorism was viewed as something ugly but you lived with it.
Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11.
Well, our concern has to do with the period prior to 9/11, up to and including the catastrophe that occurred. And thank goodness, we're not obliged to make assessments of what's going on now and deal with these current events.
The country was not focused on terrorism before September 11th.
Before 9/11, absolutely, there were concerns about terrorism; but the world fundamentally changed.
With the death of bin Laden, it's finally time for Congress to bring back the pre-9-11 legal norm, before we decided it was okay to toss out our civil liberties if the 'bad guys' were scary enough.
People should go about their daily lives, to work, to live, to travel, to shop, to do the things people did in the same way as they did them before 11 September.
My career divides in two: before and after 9/11. In the first part I was trying to show that Islam is relevant to political concerns. If you want to understand Muslims, I argued, you need to understand the role of Islam in their lives. Now that seems obvious.
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.
Before 9/11, al-Qaeda was an organization of global reach.
Even before September 11, there was a debate in the administration about whether or not military force should be used to oust Saddam Hussein. You're not going to find one person in the top echelons of the foreign policy and national security establishment in the U.S. government who's going to say that Saddam Hussein should not be out of power.
Bush administration officials, of course, deny that they didn't take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating that in their public utterances, private meetings, and actions, the al Qaeda threat barely registered.
And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.
Prior to September 11, we thought the world beyond our shores was one world of risk and the world in our continent was another world of risk.
I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?
Some people think it's because '24' was jump-started by what happened on 9/11. That was never why we made the show. We started production six months prior to 9/11, and we'd already done ten episodes.
