John Yoo Quotes

I believe, based on the activities, and I am not an expert on terrorism by any stretch, but I believe that when they attacked the United States and they attacked New York and Washington, D.C., they thought they could defeat us.

I think it is important for Europe to understand that even though I am president and George Bush is not president, Al Qaeda is still a threat.

We have an obligation to go after Al Qaeda wherever they are.

None of us, remember, knew that 9/11 was gonna happen. We didn't live in a state of anxiety and fear about Osama Bin Laden. The CIA might have, and they failed to prevent it. But the general public didn't have any knowledge. Now we have knowledge of it, and it's a very clear and present danger in our lives.

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

For a generation, terrorists learned they could make war on free nations without fear of war in return. On September 12, the terrorists got war in return.

There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 11 September attacks. There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it.

From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we're engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there.

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.

So we mustn't lower our guard in any sense because of what has happened in terms of the death of Osama Bin Laden and we are certainly not doing that. The terror threat level here in the U.K. remains at severe and we're very conscious of the need to continue that.

We barely missed killing Bin Laden. There were numerous findings issued by the President to kill him. We rolled up terrorist cells. We stopped the millennium bombings.

We have to be mindful that there is the certainty that terrorists will attempt to launch multiple attacks against their enemy, which is us and our allies.

This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of 'cowards' perpetuating 'senseless acts of violence' is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such.

We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda's attacks on America launched the nation into three wars - against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.

Since the events of September 11, we've rightfully changed our military strategy so we're now taking the fight to those individuals who aim to do us harm, rather than waiting for another atrocious attack to happen.

Any American who joins al Qaeda will know full well that they have joined an organization that is at war with the United States. Any American who did that should know well that they in fact are part of an enemy... and that the U.S. will do anything that is possible to destroy that enemy to save American lives.

We don't have a war on terror - that's a technique. We didn't have a war on blitzkriegs, and we didn't have a war on surprise attacks.

Al Qaeda has significance beyond its numbers, frankly. And so for us, our 24-hour-a-day objective is to seek out those al Qaeda cells. And, as we seek them out, to target them and eliminate them. And we're doing that 24 hours a day.

Islamic law is clearly against terrorism, against any kind of deliberate killing of civilians or similar 'collateral damage.'

I would show up at a party for Al Qaeda if you said there's going to be a dinner.

We owe it to the victims of the suicide bombers who struck London on 7 July 2005 to find out how the attacks happened and to learn the lessons that will spare lives in the future.

Spontaneous operations performed by individuals and cells here and there over the whole world, without connections between them, have put the local and international intelligence apparatus in a state of confusion, as arresting the members of aborted cells does not influence the operational activities of others who are not connected with them.

Osama bin Martin

They may be rich, they may be powerful, they may have atom bombs, but Americans and British are no longer safe anywhere in the world…. They may perhaps be able to put Al-Qaeda out of commission, but that does not mean that there will not be other groups. They have been killing so-called terrorist all these years, but there'll simply be more and more terrorists

Al-Qa’ida members -- including some who are US citizens --have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.