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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.

Staying in a very public fight with the U.S. is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.

Al Qaeda likes to coordinate, have a central command to be able to send out emissaries around that they have highly trained and say, 'This is the moment we're going to do a large-scale attack.'

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.

Al Qaeda operates by launching surprise attacks on civilian targets with the goal of massive casualties. Our only means for preventing future attacks, which could use WMDs, is by acquiring information that allows for pre-emptive action.

We need to understand that an open society and free speech and press... really are the best weapons against al Qaeda and extremism.

What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.

Al Qaeda is not the organization now that it was before. It is under stress organizationally. Its leadership spends more time trying to figure out how to keep from getting caught than they do trying to launch operations.

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.

Preventing radicalization that leads to violence here in America is part of our larger strategy to decisively defeat al Qaeda.