John Ashcroft Quotes

It is money that fuels the enterprise of terrorism …. You can stop the killing if you stop the flow of money.

Money is the lifeblood of terrorist operations.

After 9-11, we found that there were organizations throughout the country who under the guise of Islamic charities have raised tens of millions of dollars for Islamic terrorist organizations. They use the non-profit status to shield themselves from prosecution.

The way you really stop Al-Qaeda is by stopping their funding. It's not by carpet-bombing or land invasions or anything.

With a certain amount of simplification, money laundering and terrorist financing are opposites. In money laundering, dirty money becomes clean; in terrorist financing, clean money becomes dirty.

Those who bank terrorism are equally culpable with those who commit it. I’d feel a lot better if the Saudis were not auditing the Saudis We have had our own experiences where the auditors had a conflict of interest.

I can’t join the military. It would be impractical for me to go abroad. But if I can put a stranglehold on their finances, it assists our President in the War on Terrorism.

Saudi Arabia [is] the epicenter of terrorism financing.

Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.

I had to deal with terrorist finance. And we had to, if you like, ensure that the accounts of people who were guilty of terrorist finance or using their accounts for terrorist finance were closed down. So we had to do asset freezing.

We spoke at endless cabinet meetings about the need to stop the flow of money to the families of terrorists and to the terrorists in jails.

Switzerland is part of the fight against terrorism. There is no neutrality against this threat.

We are well aware from which countries and through which countries the terrorists are receiving support. In the immediate future I shall be calling upon the leaders of these states to put a stop to this kind of activity.

I was appointed United States attorney on September 10, 2001. And I spent the next seven years of my career fighting terrorism and putting terrorists in jail.

Never, ever deal with terrorists. Hunt them down and, more important, mercilessly punish those states and groups that fund, arm, support, or simply allow their territories to be used by the terrorists with impunity.

I frankly don't think it's going to be a successful war on terrorism until law enforcement agencies like the FBI are willing to share with other law enforcement agencies. If they can't share information, there's no way this war can be won.

In the fight against terrorism, national agencies keep full control over their police forces, security and intelligence agencies and judicial authorities.

The President should spend his time going after the terrorists rather than sharing sensitive counter terrorism information with countries that sponsor terrorism.

We have struggled with terrorism for a long time. In the Reagan administration, I was a hawk on the subject. I said terrorism is a big problem, a different problem, and we have to take forceful action against it. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan agreed with me, but not many others did.

America decided we were going to stand by and let Americans die at the hands of terrorists a long time ago.

People should think of the war on terror as being like the war on crime--- a struggle in which success is measured not by final victory but by declines in incidence and seriousness of attacks.

We won't make concessions [to terrorists] but other governments can make them on our behalf.

We will pursue terrorists everywhere. At an airport – okay, at an airport. If we catch them in a lavatory, in an outhouse, we will take them out there with their pants down.

Successful counter-terrorist strategies are based on accurate and detailed intelligence on terrorist networks and activities

We will not give immunity to any terrorist anywhere.