Cofer Black Quotes

In the difficult fight against the new menace of international terrorism, there is nothing more crucial than timely and accurate intelligence

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

The thing we've learned from the last 20 years of counterterrorism is the significant value you get from removing leadership from the battlefield in degrading the organization.

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.

Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work.

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.

High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa'ida organization that was attacking this country.

The use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.

I do not - I never believed it's better to kill a terrorist than to detain him. We want to detain as many terrorists as possible so we can elicit the intelligence from them in the appropriate manner so that we can disrupt follow-on terrorist attacks.

A number of the major terrorist captures we have made, the terrorist operations designed for the United States that we have interrupted, were enabled by the terrorist tracking program.

Since the tragedies, the Department of Homeland Security was established to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, and most importantly, to share intelligence information among government agencies and departments.

The terrorist uses surprise and stealth, and the only way to defeat that is by having accurate and timely intelligence.

Legislation passed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 enhanced our intelligence capabilities and strengthened our national defense, but until now our nation's immigration policies have not adapted to the needs of a post-September 11th world.

The prompt assimilation of that intelligence will be essential if we are to avoid another September 11th.

I think they should take everyone who works for The National Enquirer and the Star, and everyone who works for Us Weekly, and put them all to work looking for terrorists. I think they would find the terrorists. All of them. It would be genius!

There is no doubt that counterterrorism takes time because it is not action against a regular army.

One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.

The plan we developed to deal with al Qaeda depended on developing sources of human and technical intelligence that could give us insights into his plans at the tactical level. This is easy to say but hard to accomplish.

The battle against terrorism is not only a military fight but primarily a battle of information.

I strongly support the call to greatly expand our human intelligence capability to penetrate al Qaeda and gather critical intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks on our homeland.

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.

Since September 11th Congress has created the Department of Homeland Security, more than doubled the homeland security budget and implemented a bipartisan overhaul of our intelligence systems.

On average, since 9/11, the FBI reckons that just over 100,000 terrorism leads each year have come over the transom. Analysts and agents designate them as immediate, priority or routine, but the bureau says every one is covered.

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.

As president of the United States, my top priority will be to keep America safe. We're going to go after the terrorist networks. We're going to go after Osama bin Laden. We are not going to live in fear in this country.