Michael Chertoff Quotes

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.

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

A number of the major terrorist captures we have made, the terrorist operations designed for the United States that we have interrupted, were enabled by the terrorist tracking program.

I think soon after I became director of the CIA - President Obama pulled me into the Oval Office and said: 'Look, I just want you to know that your top priority is to go after Osama bin Laden.'

The actions we took in the aftermath of 9/11 were harsh but necessary and effective. These steps were fully sanctioned and carefully followed. The detention and interrogation of top terrorists like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi yielded breakthroughs which have kept this country safe.

I strongly support the call to greatly expand our human intelligence capability to penetrate al Qaeda and gather critical intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks on our homeland.

Al Qaeda is not the organization now that it was before. It is under stress organizationally. Its leadership spends more time trying to figure out how to keep from getting caught than they do trying to launch operations.

We need spies that look like their targets, CIA officers who speak the dialects terrorists use, and FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women who might be intimidated by men.

If you want to know what a terrorist is doing, you have to put an agent in their camp.

I was a case officer, otherwise known as an operations officer. My role was to go out and convince Al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us as well as to convince people and officials in foreign governments to work on behalf of the U.S. government secretly.

I spent over ten years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an undercover operations officer serving overseas after 9/11 where I carried out covert operations against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as other countries who are 'hostile to liberty,' as I like to say.

Al Qaeda has been placed on the run, but not destroyed.

The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.

We didn't say that 80% [of terrorists], for example, or the majority or the vast majority, are foreigners. We said the vast majority are Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda offshoot organizations in this region.

I'm glad that the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country. I'm glad that activity is going on, but it is limited to tracking people who are suspected to be terrorists and who they may be talking to... Yes, I am sure that that's what they're doing.

Since terrorists are pouring into Iraq in response to calls from international terrorist networks, the number of those who are killed is especially important, for these are people who will no longer be around to launch more attacks on American soil. Iraq has become a magnet for enemies of the United States, a place where they can be killed wholesale, thousands of miles away.

They found a scrapbook with photos of Osama bin Laden from the '90s, and they're studying each and every photo very, very closely. My favorite shot of Osama bin Laden was right between the eyes.

Well, one thing that has changed is the number of people killed by terrorists in Pakistan. Civilians killed has gone down really quite dramatically. There was a newspaper article here about a month ago that got big headlines which said that civilian deaths from terrorism were down something like 80 percent or 90 percent from their peak of two or three years ago.

My core goal is to dismantle, defeat, destroy al Qaeda and its allies that killed Americans and are still plotting to go kill Americans.

In Nigeria, Hillary Clinton amazingly fought for two years to keep an Al-Qaeda affiliate off the terrorist watch list.

Ask Osama bin Laden is he is better off now than he was four years ago.

We need American Muslims to be part of our eyes and ears on our front lines.

Defeating ISIS. If we do not defeat them abroad, we will be facing more and more of a threat at home. This does not require an occupation or an enduring ground operation.

We've got this arc of instability from North Africa to South Asia, and we have to pay close attention to it. And we have to build coalitions, something that I did to take on the Iranian nuclear program, and what I will do as president to make sure that we defeat these terrorist networks.

We will not be able to meet the challenges of integration and the threats posed by international terrorism. If we want to prevent attacks, we'll need more information and better integration.