We worked to develop our own operations to advance U.S. counterterrorism objectives by penetrating terrorist safe havens and collecting intelligence that would inform policy and enable our own operations.

The terrorist uses surprise and stealth and the only way to defeat that is by having accurate and timely intelligence.

We can no longer expect an Intelligence Community that is mostly male and mostly white to be able to monitor and infiltrate suspicious organizations or terrorist groups.

I want to improve TSA's counterterrorism focus through intelligence and cutting edge technology support the TSA workforce and strengthen the agency's relationships with stakeholders and the traveling public. All of these priorities are interconnected and are vital to TSA's mission - and I would say all of our collective mission.

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.

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.

According to Richard Clarke the former White House counterterrorism chief Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts.

Terrorists continue to exploit divisions between law enforcement and the intelligence communities that limit the sharing of vital counterterrorism information.

One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community and especially the counterterrorism community is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.

The E.U. has moved to combat global terrorism by instituting common European arrest and evidence warrants and creating a joint situation center to pool and analyze intelligence.

The PATRIOT Act brought down the wall separating intelligence agencies from law enforcement and other entities charged with protecting the Nation from terrorism.

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 That responsibility has waned in the last year as military and intelligence resources were withdrawn from Afghanistan and Pakistan to be used in Iraq.

As a former career intelligence professional I have a profound appreciation for the value of intelligence. Intelligence disrupts terrorist plots and thwarts attacks. Intelligence saves lives.

The actions that we take on the counterterrorism front again are to take actions against individuals where we believe that the intelligence base is so strong and the nature of the threat is so grave and serious as well as imminent that we have no recourse except to take this action that may involve a lethal strike.

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.

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.

The original PATRIOT Act greatly increased our nation's ability to share intelligence information made better use of technology and provided terrorism investigators tools that have long been available in cases involving illegal drugs and organized crime.

In the fight against terrorism national agencies keep full control over their police forces security and intelligence agencies and judicial authorities.

The war on terror I believe will be waged by effective intelligence and police work and cruise missiles.

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.

Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.

Guantanamo allows us to secure dangerous detainees without the risk of escape while at the same time providing us with valuable intelligence information on how best to proceed in the war against terror and prevent future attacks.

I can tell you that the Canadian intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been providing outstanding co-operation with our intelligence and law enforcement agencies as we work together to track down terrorists here in North America and put them out of commission.

These are Canadian and United States intelligence and law enforcement offices who are working in teams and who are using good intelligence and good law enforcement to really stop the criminals and terrorists before they ever get to the border.