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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I certainly believe that improving our intelligence is of important national interest.
Preventing radicalization that leads to violence here in America is part of our larger strategy to decisively defeat al Qaeda.
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.
Intelligence is our first line of defense against terrorism, and we must improve the collection capabilities and analysis of intelligence to protect the security of the United States and its allies.
I want the American people to understand, we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I am committed to ensure that our intelligence community, law enforcement, medical professionals, and military have the information and funding needed to protect the American people from threats at home and abroad.
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.
Any American who joins al Qaeda will know full well that they have joined an organization that is at war with the United States. Any American who did that should know well that they in fact are part of an enemy... and that the U.S. will do anything that is possible to destroy that enemy to save American lives.
We will use all lawful tools at our disposal, and that includes authorities under the renewed PATRIOT Act. We firmly believe that our intelligence gathering tools must enable us to collect the information we need to protect the American people.
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.
No opposing quotes found.