Quotes about September 11, 2001 attack on America

Quotes about the

attack on America,

September 11, 2001

"If there had been successful intelligence gathering, we would have thwarted. There's never going to be perfect intelligence, but we cannot afford these kinds of failures."--Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee

"This is a stunning security and intelligence failure. In both those spheres, major errors have evidently occurred. Heads should roll."--Mike Yardley, a terrorism expert and former Army officer

"It is a failure of security and intelligence collection. The clues and the investigation are going to be as difficult as the intelligence that was never there leading up to this."--John Martin, a former Justice Department official who prosecuted espionage cases

"I think the most important thing is to rebuild the intelligence community."--Sen. Bob Graham

“Perhaps the loudest lingering question was "How could this happen?" Tom Brokaw pointed to "a stunning failure of intelligence at the highest possible level" despite the fact that the United States spends "billions" on intelligence gathering each year. Later, he talked with retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who said the problem was that "many years ago we abandoned human intelligence." This wasn't cultural criticism; Schwarzkopf said that the nation had put all its faith and resources into high-tech intelligence devices, partly because Americans had bought into the myth that "‚'good' nations do not have spies."—Washington Post

"To all the Mujah: Your brothers in Palestine are waiting for you; it's time to penetrate America and Israel and hit them where it hurts the most."--a videotape that had been circulating in the Middle East for several months in which bin Laden recites a victory poem about the Cole bombing, then issues a call to arms

"He's declared war on the United States. He is suspected of being involved in a number of attacks on the U.S., going all the way back to Mogadishu [Somalia, in 1993]. . . . At a certain point, somebody's public statements deserve to be taken at face value. Bin Laden means what he says -- he's declared war with the United States."--L. Paul Bremer III, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism and former ambassador at large for counterterrorism in Reagan administration

"We can find out who these people are and then we need to be relentless. You can't mount a systematic attack like this unless you have a place to plan and train. That means a geographic space. So states that harbor terrorists, look out."--George P. Shultz, secretary of state under president Ronald Reagan

"I believe this will now be the catalyst that causes a significant change in our policy toward terrorism and that change should be to hold responsible governments that support terrorism. It's been our policy to hold individual terrorists accountable rather than the governments who support them and that policy has failed."--Richard N. Perle, a Reagan Pentagon official and currently chairman of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld

"In effect, the country's at war, but we don't have the coordinates of the enemy – yet."--Leon Fuerth, who was national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore

"This could not have been done without help of one or more governments [citing the need for passports, communications, intelligence and training for pilots for yesterday's attacks]. Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don't think that can be done without the assistance of large governments. You don't walk in off the street and learn how to fly a Boeing 767."--Richard N. Perle

"We have to make the cost to the governments that support terrorism so high that they stop supporting them."--Richard N. Perle

“I fear that all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”--

Admiral Yamamoto after the Pearl Harbor attack, December 7, 1941

"[A]s Pearl Harbor awakened the United States to a war that it was unwilling to fight, this will have a similar effect. These groups that have called for killing Americans and gone unscathed are going to pay the price. We will overcome the grief, but after the grief, there's a rage."--Larry Johnson, a former Central Intelligence Agency and State Department terrorism official

"People both inside and outside the government would think this is more the stuff of a Tom Clancy novel than reality."--James M. Lindsay, a member of the Clinton administration national security team that began issuing warnings in the early 1990s of the possibility of major terrorist attacks on American soil.

"Many terrorism cells have been rolled up in many countries, and this has often been done quietly. Unfortunately, if just one conspiracy succeeds, it looks as if America has fallen down on the job."--Daniel Benjamin, who worked with Clarke in the Clinton White House

"At this point, the intelligence community and the CIA are working to do everything possible to track down the perpetrators of these horrific acts."--CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher

"There are priorities that we need to pursue aggressively. We need to treat terrorism as our Number One priority, not as a peripheral potential. In order to do that, we must reacquire the technological capabilities that we have lost, beginning with the human intelligence."--Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla.

"It's a very sophisticated form of intelligence and it really centers around human intelligence capability. You can't pick this up from satellites. The only way to do it is to penetrate some of these organizations."-- Retired Army Gen. Dennis Reimer, now head of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism

"Our government failed the American people."--Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa

"CIA has worked diligently and relentlessly to try to counter terrorism. Our resources are being devoted to determine who is responsible for these horrible acts."--Mark Mansfield, a CIA spokesman

"Not since Pearl Harbor has the United States been attacked in its own territory as we were today. Not since Pearl Harbor has our nation been placed on the challenge that it finds its today. "We recommit as we did in 1941 that this act of terrorism will not go unpunished. This would be my equivalent of war."--Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate committee

"In terrorism, one of the greatest targets of acts of terrorism is to make a society lose confidence in its government's capacity to protect its people."--Abdelwahab Hechiche, a professor of government and international relations at the University of South Florida

"What really frustrates me is that we spent a lot of money developing overhead sensors and so forth, but we have not done the job getting human intelligence."--Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Largo

“Our enemies are intelligent – they know that the U.S. has spent all of its money on a technical collection that can be easily defeated by simply not using any electronic equipment.”--Robert Steele

"It seems to me it's really a triple failure of airport security, of intelligence and it demonstrates that for all the talk about homeland defense, it shows how little we've really done about it.”--James Traverton, former vice chair of the National Intelligence Center

“Pearl Harbor was said to be an intelligence failure. But the Japanese also exercised great secrecy involving their operation. So it’s not so simple when you look at the facts.”--Jeffrey Richelson