Jack Keane Quotes

Either Al Qaeda is a threat worth acting against or it is not. CIA leadership has to decide which it is and cease these bi-polar mood swings.

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.

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

The president of the United States let the consulate in Libya become a death trap.

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

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

But it is equally incontrovertible that if our intelligence gathering process is seriously flawed, we had better find out and find out fast if we are to avoid another Sept. 11.

There's every reason to believe there will be further attacks attempted against the United States. For us to spend so much time patting ourselves on the back because we got bin Laden that we miss the next attack would be a terrible tragedy.

The parallels between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are striking. In each instance there were warning signs before the attack, and in each instance our government failed to connect the dots.

On September 4, 2001, the Principals Committee met in the White House Situation Room. CIA Director George Tenet and the DOD leadership both spoke out against the use of armed Predators tp get bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership. They were not overruled [by President George W. Bush]. A week later we were attacked [on September 11].

Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11.

In the aftermath of September 11, and as the 9/11 Commission report so aptly demonstrates, it is clear that our intelligence system is not working the way that it should.

The September 11th, 2012, attacks on the State Department compound in Benghazi, Libya, is important and should be studied because in the big picture, it represents a failed foreign policy that spans across both Bush and Obama Presidencies.

One of the amazing things about September 11 is that we lacked the imagination to connect the dots and foresee it.

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

With terrorist groups like al Qaeda, you can't learn what you want to learn about their capabilities and their future plans by taking a picture of it, and they've learned not to use the telephone.

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.

All around the world one heard or read that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

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.

But clearly, this is what this is about. It's about pushing the security bubble out. It's about rooting out every last guy, so that there's not even somebody who can fire a single, solitary RPG round from some little qalat out here.

Among all the upheavals of war with al Qaeda, the surest indicator of the historic stakes is the ongoing rotation of top U.S. government managers - scores at a time - into a bunker deep underground and far from Washington.

Counterterrorism analysts have known for years that al Qaeda prepares for attacks with elaborate 'targeting packages' of photographs and notes.

In a brave new world, a post-September 11 world, anyone is going to make certain mistakes. The mistakes that have been made on homeland security, on protecting our Nation from another terrorist attack, are mistakes of omission. We are simply not doing enough.

The real question was, here we had this information, Bin Laden intends to strike in the United States. We knew they had struck before in 1993 at the World Trade Center in the first bombing of the trade center.

The mission - the overall mission is to dismantle and defeat and disrupt al-Qaeda. But we have to make sure there's not a safe haven that returns in Afghanistan.