We did not choose this war. It was thrust upon us by terrorists who are determined to destroy our way of life.

I know it is probably not realistic to promise the American people that we will stop every attempted terrorist attack on our homeland, but I feel very strongly that must be our goal.

That is not how I read the law.

Intelligence failures, calls for reform, lack of accountability, failure to connect the dots.

The law is clear on who is in charge of the intelligence community.

The President must empower his senior officials to use every authority available to them to defeat the terrorist threat.

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 fundamentally changed our intelligence community.

The government should immediately identify and suspend the visas of all persons listed in the broadest terrorist database.

Our government's efforts to detect and disrupt terrorist plots must be strengthened.

It is my understanding that the request has been in your office for a year.

It sounds deja-vu all over again.

I certainly hope that somehow the sense of urgency in our institutions is not sublimated into bureaucratic quagmires.

I mean, you don't create it, but you can nominate individuals, based on your acquisition information.

I think that it's a fair presumption--then once that information has been disseminated--that it has to be evaluated before anybody gets on the plane.

It is simply unacceptable that the same gaping holes that have persisted since the tragedy of September 11, 2001, continue to plague our efforts to mitigate the threat against commercial aviation.

the information that was available to analysts, as is usually the case, was fragmented and embedded in a large volume of other data.

But, what information did you have--that Customs and Border Protection had--to warrant further questioning?

If somebody's a threat, they're a threat. I don't know how you make a distinction between a threat and an aviation threat.