Richard Fadden Quotes

After 9/11, we did see Palestinian terrorism in the context of all terrorism.

Briefly after the 9/11 attacks, Republicans and Democrats were united in identifying the evil of the radical jihadists and fighting it.

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.

After 9/11, whatever the evidence of intelligence failures, many people still saw that attack as almost unimaginable, so brutal and brazen an assault.

We know that after September 11, there were still terrorists around. We do get continuing information that they're intent on causing some damage and harm to not only U.S. interests but allied interests.

The relevance for 9/11 is that what 9/11 marked was the beginning of a struggle in which the terrorists come at us and strike us here on our home territory. And it's a global operation. It doesn't know national boundaries or national borders.

After America won the Cold War, some believed we had come to the 'end of history,' and budget-cutters celebrated the so-called 'peace dividend.' As a result, we ignored the toxic mixture of militant Islam and terror that ultimately led to 9/11.

Our country was hit on 9/11, 2001. Everybody in the world knows that. It hasn't been easy to deal with a different kind of enemy, but that is what we have, a different kind of enemy.

I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.

9/11 was a sort of hinge event in American history, and all jihadi terrorist plots or attacks are kind of filtered through that lens.

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

There is no way you're going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would've killed 300,000.

We saw when those World Trade towers came down what these terrorists will do.

There is a direct line relationship between what happened in Afghanistan in the work up to 11 September 2001 and what we're doing in Afghanistan today.

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.

September the 11th was a huge shock in the United States. It was the first time you had been hit at home in your own territory by terrorist on this scale.

We know from the material that was recovered from the bin Laden compound that bin Laden was looking at the 10th anniversary of 9/11 as an opportunity to strike yet again at the U.S. homeland.

I know the pain of having to deal with terrorism. And that's why, after 9-11, I was one of the first to join the international coalition to fight terrorism.

9/11 was basically caused by box cutters, and that changed the world.

We are in a war on terrorism. We need to conduct that war and take it to the terrorists, not here at home.

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

It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, 'This is not a criminal act,' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan, kill 3,000 Americans, blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.

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.

There is no doubt that our nation's security and defeating terrorism trump all other priorities.

What happened I think on Sept. 11 was we were given graphic and clear evidence that things had changed.