Quotes About Intelligence

The NSA is not listening to anyone's phone calls. They're not reading any Americans' e-mails. They're collecting simply the data that your phone company already has, and which you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, so they can search that data quickly in the event of a terrorist plot.

If we have intelligence on the location of terrorist training centers, it is insane not to act.

I spent over 10 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, serving overseas, serving in the Middle East. And let me tell you, if you're a terrorist and you want to come to the United States, the worst possible way to do it is as a refugee. You'll go through a year and a half to two years of vetting.

We're told another large-scale terrorist attack is inevitable by those people who have committed so many resources to preventing it. They likely know what they're talking about.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, it became clear that the FBI's number one priority must be the prevention of another terrorist attack.

There is only one 'retirement plan' for terrorists.

The terrorists that we are up against today do not rely upon cell phones and SAT phones and emails. They rely on couriers. You cannot intercept what a courier is telling somebody.

National security is not just things that go boom. It is not just terrorists and foreign adversaries.

It does surprise me that intelligent people in the 21st century could claim that if you respond to the terrorists with force, you spawn terrorism, but if you appease them, you somehow tame them. This argument, as I said, is very interesting, and very surprising.

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

Identifying terrorists on the battlefield is relatively simple.

We ought to recognize that we have an offensive responsibility to take the war to the terrorists where they are. That responsibility has waned in the last year as military and intelligence resources were withdrawn from Afghanistan and Pakistan to be used in Iraq.

We can't gather the intelligence we need to foil future attacks, if we are blindly granting terrorists the right to remain silent. But for some reason, we've already done that - with the terrorist who tried to bring down Flight 253.

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.

I do think we need more cameras. We have to stay ahead of the terrorists, and I do know in New York, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, which is based on cameras, the outstanding work that results from that.

And I believe only with a strong America will we defeat this radical group, this apocalyptic group called ISIS. That's why when I'm president we are going to rebuild our intelligence capabilities. And they're going to tell us where the terrorists are. And a rebuilt U.S. military is going to destroy these terrorists.

The Russians continue to say that they'll still go after terrorists, but that's a very elastic term. They're going after anybody they want. I don't trust them.

The intelligence community agrees 30 percent of the terrorists released from Guantanamo are known or suspected to have already re-joined the fight against Americans_- a statistic that translates to a horrific reality.

We know there are terrorists communicating with individuals in the United States. We just can't see what they're saying.

Renditions before and since 9/11 share some basic features. They have been conducted lawfully, responsibly and with a clear and single purpose: Get terrorists off the street and gain intelligence on those still at large. Our detention and interrogation programs flow from the same inescapable logic.

The homegrown terrorists are the most significant because any fighter returning from Syria to the United States would likely be identified and detected by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Our folks at the FBI are working their tails off every day to stop and find criminals, terrorists, and nation-state adversaries.

No amount of intelligence or security can stop terrorists who are willing to give up their lives. They can only be stopped if their motivation is eliminated.

Terry Gilliam is one of the greatest brains I ever met.