Marco Rubio Quotes

I promise you, the next time there is attack on - an attack on this country, the first thing people are going to want to know is, why didn't we know about it and why didn't we stop it? And the answer better not be because we didn't have access to records or information that would have allowed us to identify these killers before they attacked.

The bottom line is we are pursuing every single possible action to keep our country safe from terrorism.

How do we prevent attacks? How do we protect our people?I think we've got to have an intelligence surge, where we are looking for every scrap of information.

To protect us from terrorism, we must have the best, absolutely the best gathering of intelligence anywhere in the world.

A terrorist can attack at any time at any place using a range of techniques. It is physically impossible to defend at every time in every location against every conceivable technique of terrorism. Therefore, if your goal is to stop it, you cannot stop it by defense. You can only stop it by taking the battle to the terrorists, where they are and going after them.

What I'm OK with is protecting the American people. What I'm OK with is, when people have the intent to come to this country and take American lives, that we are prepared to do what's necessary to gain the information to protect the people of this country.

It's hard to plan and plot attacks against America if you're on the run, and that's exactly what our brave professionals are doing.

Terrorists and criminals are increasingly adept at exploiting cutting-edge technologies to carry out or to mask their crimes. To counter current and emerging threats, the FBI actively deploys a wide range of technology-based tools, capabilities, and training that enable and enhance intelligence, national security, and law enforcement operations.

And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack.

The central role in the fight against terrorism is with national authorities.

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 federal government has not been effective enough monitoring and surveilling bad guys.

Most people inside the bureau believe that the blown opportunities to head off 9/11 would not recur today. Even among the FBI's doubters, few disagree that the bureau has come a long way.

You ask every conceivable question after Sept. 11 in terms of what more could have been done, what could have been done differently. My impression from working on these cases and investigations for almost nine years was that an awful lot of people were working over time to connect dots.

Since 2001, the Patriot Act has provided the means to detect and disrupt terrorist threats against the U.S. Prior to enactment of the law, major legal barriers prevented intelligence, national defense, and law enforcement agencies from working together and sharing information.

In counter terrorism it is usually easier to go for a clean strike than to determine what the reasons are for the terrorists to attack us.

The counterterrorism strategy known as CONTEST aimed to reduce the risk to the UK and its interests overseas from terrorism, so that people can go about their lives freely and with confidence.

How many terrorist attacks has TSA thwarted? We're never going to know the true answer to that question.

The nature of Homeland Security is that no news is good news. And no news sometimes means somebody got interdicted at the border, somebody got interdicted before they could get on an airplane, somebody was arrested providing material support to terrorism. Homeland Security means very often something you never hear about.

We must have the approach of 'zero tolerance' against any type of terrorism.

Enhanced interrogation gleaned information that saved American lives and - I was informed - prevented incoming terrorist attacks on this country from being successful.

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

The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.

And if you have a law that isn't working, and you have thousands and thousands and millions of people, then the terrorists hide among them. And we have to have a law that makes sense.

Once we got hit by - on 9/11 and lost 3,000 people that day, we recognized, and it was one of the key decisions President Bush made, that this is not a law enforcement problem, it is a strategic threat to the United States. It's a war. And based on that, we then adopted a whole set of policies that flowed out of that proposition.