Kelvin Sampson Quotes

As we have all said, we understand that electronic surveillance is a vital tool in the war on terror. We all want to know when Osama bin Laden is calling: when he is calling, who he is calling, and what he is saying.

I mean, it's not just one day you get up, bang, and you got Osama bin Laden. It's the kind of thing where an awful lot of people over a long period of time - thousands have worked this case and these issues and followed on the leads and captured bad guys and interrogated them and so-forth.

I don't think there's any question that America is safer as a result of the bin Laden operation.

The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

I mean the fact is that some of this information that we have found out that led to Usama bin Laden actually came from these enhanced interrogation techniques.

If you know where Osama bin Laden is, you lead on and we will follow you.

Here are some additional things we (the National Security Agency) can do for the War on Terror but we may not do them because we do not have the authority

More and more facts coming out about Osama bin Laden. You know, he never sleeps in the same place two nights in a row, just like Clinton.

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.

I figured out how to catch fugitives without a gun.

Al Qaeda has significance beyond its numbers, frankly. And so for us, our 24-hour-a-day objective is to seek out those al Qaeda cells. And, as we seek them out, to target them and eliminate them. And we're doing that 24 hours a day.

The more we captured, the more we learned and eventually it destroyed the organization that attacked us on 9/11 and allowed us to get bin Laden.

Spontaneous operations performed by individuals and cells here and there over the whole world, without connections between them, have put the local and international intelligence apparatus in a state of confusion, as arresting the members of aborted cells does not influence the operational activities of others who are not connected with them.

Counter-terrorism is not solely a military matter.

Before 9-11 Osama Bin Laden trained more terrorists than we trained FBI agents.

When it comes to terrorism, the only path to safety is the path to action.

With terrorism becoming the increasing tactic of choice, the military component would become a smaller component of our national security system.

Your first priority is to go after bin Laden.

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

We have an obligation to go after Al Qaeda wherever they are.

Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault....The direction is to go in and get Bin Ladin and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McCraven at approximately 10:45 AM.

There's no national strategy to deal with combating terrorism and foreign fighters.

When Abu Zubaydah was shown a series of photos of al Qaeda members by Soufan, he identified one of them as the operational commander of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

When I was working on the al-Zawahiri piece, a large part of it published in 'The New Yorker' in 2002, I had spoken to a lot of Zawahiri's friends, people who had been in prison with him, people that had been in al-Jihad with him. And quite to my surprise, they liked that article a lot.

The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.