Donald Rumsfeld Quotes

In counter terrorism it is usually easier to go for a clean strike than to determine what the reasons are for the terrorists to attack us.

Well, when people talk about interrogating terrorists, they're acting like this is some sort of law enforcement function. Law enforcement is about gathering evidence to take someone to trial, and convict them. Anti-terrorism is about finding out information to prevent a future attack so the same tactics do not apply.

The use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.

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

When it comes to terrorism, the only path to safety is the path to action.

A terrorist can attack any time, any place using any technique and you can't defend everywhere against every technique at every moment.

Preventing terrorist attacks is of the highest important, but trashing the Constitution is not the right way to do it.

A broad base of knowledge is critically important to our ability to investigate terrorism.

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.

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

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.

It is just not enough to strengthen the secret services for the fight against terrorism but it's also necessary to advance dialogue between cultures.

Governments in countries across the world have a duty to do everything possible to keep the public safe from terrorist attacks.

We're told another large-scale terrorist attack is inevitable by those people who have committed so many resources to preventing it. They likely know what they're talking about.

We save limited resources in terms of who we are physically screening. The approach will allow us to pay more attention to those potential terrorists.

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.

Fighting terrorists does not require half a trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces.

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

The primary goal of the War on Terror is to prevent an attack from happening.

Defeating a terrorist organization is like fighting a forest fire; there's never a clear moment of victory, and even after you've won, you have to watch carefully.

To protect us from terrorism, we must have the best, absolutely the best gathering of intelligence anywhere in the world.

It is true, we should not be discussing in a wide spread way the exact tactics that we're going to use because that allows terrorist to know to practice how to evade us.

You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done.

Most of the people who were responsible for 9/11 are now in custody or have been killed. But there are others, and they plot and they plan, and they hope to pull it off again. And while we have to be right 100 percent of the time, they only have to be right once. So there's no way to overreact to that.