 And from the moment that we realized it was a terrorist attack, there isn't an agent or a support person in the FBI that wasn't committed to bringing to justice those who were responsible for this. |
| If you look at the 19 hijackers who came to the United States in Sept. 11 to commit those acts, if you'd looked at them before they got onto a plane, you could probably say the same thing. There were various levels of expertise, various levels of competence. |
| We cannot go up on a wire. We cannot do a search without a judge on the FISA Court approving it and determining that we have met the standard that has been set forth by Congress in order to utilize these techniques. |
| I think around the world, our agents are the best collectors of information you'll find. |
| I would say in just about every investigation we have, there will be differences of opinion, where you have partial facts, as to what those facts mean. |
| In the context of September 11, there were so many that lost their lives that - how do you single out one person? There were so many acts of heroism that day from so many people, whether it be firemen and police officers in New York and our agents also. |
| All I'm going to tell you is investigations, whether it be this and others, where you have partial facts, analysts, agents are always trying to interpret what those facts mean, extrapolate from them what they mean. |
| The 19 hijackers that came over here to commit the attack on Sept. 11, there were those that were at the bottom of the line. There were those who were the principal conspirators. There were those who were the pilot. Everybody has a role. |
| It's because we need to determine who in this country is poised, positioned to commit terrorist acts. |
| In the United States, it's the mandate of the FBI to gather information relating to terrorism, go out and collect it, to do the interviews, to do the investigative work. |
| The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America. |
| But we had - I think if you look at law enforcement 10 years ago, if you look at the challenges, the FBI was focused excessively on what was happening in the United States. |
| Prior to the passage of the Patriot Act, it was very difficult - often impossible - for us to share information with the Central Intelligence Agency, with NSA, with the other intelligence agencies, and likewise, for them to share information with us. |
| In planning an attack, persons have various roles. |
| And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack. |
| They're - FBI agents are some of the finest people you'll find anyplace in the country or the world. And I'm lucky to have the opportunity to work with them. |
| We had to address information technology in the ways we had not before and give the agents the tools that they need to do their job more efficiently and more expeditiously. |
| Leaking of classified material is a concern. |
| I didn't know the organization, but the one thing you can say about the FBI, it's tremendously professional. |
| And at that point, I think we all realized it was something tremendously tragic, probably a terrorist attack, and the next step was to go down to our command center and get things going. |
