David Rothkopf Quotes

The last thing we need to do now is reorganize and create a new department.

As with almost every significant aspect of the Bush presidency, its handling of 9/11 was a catastrophe from start to finish.

The department was set up primarily to protect us from another terrorist attack from Islamic terrorists, and yet they talk about everything but that.

Right after 9/11, I mean, every agency can give their own gradation, but a nice, popular rule of thumb is everybody doubled down. I ended up in the NSA with about twice as much money as I had prior to 9/11.

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

Many senior government officials, CIA, FBI, counter terrorism officials - when they look back at the decade, they effectively conclude that the United States overreacted after 9/11.

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

Americans rightly asked, if this is the way our government responds to a natural disaster it knew about days in advance, how would it respond to a surprise terrorist attack? How would it respond to an earthquake?

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

Organization cannot make a genius out of a dunce.

The problem with communicating without a coordinator is that everyone has to read everyone else's mind.

There was before 9-11 and after 9-11. After 9-11, the gloves came off.

Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

To the American people … nine years after 9/11, nine years of spending, and nine years of beefing up security you are still unsafe even in the holiest and most sacred of days to you, Christmas Day….

Our immediate job is defense. We will play offense soon enough, but right now it is defense…. Your job is to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again

When these attacks occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.

Any plan is better than no plan.

Washington is broken but America still works.

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

We know that terrorism is going to happen in the future, and we need to be prepared for it.

After the 9/11 attacks, I dutifully stocked up on rolls of duct tape and N-95 masks, as the government recommended.

I do think we lost some of the focus on the attacks in San Bernardino and focused on a plan that isn't really a plan and is never going to happen.

We've evolved a lot since 9/11 also, in terms of our law enforcement capabilities, our intelligence capabilities, military, counterterrorism.

Our top story, in 'Threat Matrix Reloaded' news ... Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Muller held a press conference today to announce that Al Qaeda is planning attacks somewhere inside the United States at sometime in the future. So go about your normal lives, but with a vague sense of foreboding.

There is a war on terror that must be fought. Nobody's immune... And so rather than finding fault with what Spain has done by being aggressive in the war on terror, this should redouble everyone's efforts to go after terrorist organizations of any kind... Terror has to be brought to an end.