John Brennan Quotes

I believe, based on the activities, and I am not an expert on terrorism by any stretch, but I believe that when they attacked the United States and they attacked New York and Washington, D.C., they thought they could defeat us.

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.

Osama bin Laden organized an attack that was carried out against the United States, New York, Pentagon, and the other aircraft, with 19 attackers, 19 guys with box cutters. An attack that probably cost almost nothing.

The reality is that al Qaeda has been trying to attack the United States since long before Iraq.

Bin Laden, who was in his country, attacked and damaged our Pentagon, and killed our soldiers right out here at the Pentagon. But his pentagon no longer exists. It is rubble.

Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.

There is no way you're going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would've killed 300,000.

The United States was attacked on 9/11/12, and we know who attacked us.

The relevance for 9/11 is that what 9/11 marked was the beginning of a struggle in which the terrorists come at us and strike us here on our home territory. And it's a global operation. It doesn't know national boundaries or national borders.

Before 9/11, absolutely, there were concerns about terrorism; but the world fundamentally changed.

On the subject of Osama bin Laden... we will track him down. We will capture him. We will bring him to justice, and I will follow him to the gates of hell.

Osama bin Martin

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

Before September 11, 2001, it was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist organization.

Your biggest threat is bin Laden!

Al-Qaeda, which means 'the base' in English, lost its base and training camps in Afghanistan, while its leaders were on the run, captured, or dead. One year after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda was still on life support.

The 9/11 attack itself played out around the world, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, and money transfers from Dubai - activities overseen by al-Qaeda's senior command from secure bases in Afghanistan.

As Michael Scheuer, who ran the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit until 1999, has pointed out, if bin Laden believed in Christmas, the Iraq war would be his perfect present from Santa Claus. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan severely damaged bin Laden's organization.

As early as 1993, members of bin Laden's group had been planning an attack on the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

None of us, remember, knew that 9/11 was gonna happen. We didn't live in a state of anxiety and fear about Osama Bin Laden. The CIA might have, and they failed to prevent it. But the general public didn't have any knowledge. Now we have knowledge of it, and it's a very clear and present danger in our lives.

In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott.

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

Russell Defreitas plotted to commit a terrorist attack that he hoped would rival 9/11.

We saw when those World Trade towers came down what these terrorists will do.

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.