Political Quotes

“It appears there is an effort in the Senate to use the September 11 Commission and its work as an effort to point fingers, to say--in this instance, by the minority leader-- somehow President Bush and his administration were responsible for the September 11 attack. I took a post on the Senate Intelligence Committee this past year because I believe the most important thing we can do to safeguard the United States and our citizens from further terrorist attacks is to figure out how to improve the intelligence-gathering system. There is no question there were flaws, there were holes in the intelligence system, that we did not get as good intelligence as we should have. Some of those were legislatively mandated. We had walls between the CIA and the FBI that prevented them from sharing information. We took those down in the PATRIOT Act. We had problems with inadequate funding for intelligence, particularly human intelligence. We found a lot of areas with sophisticated electronic surveillance and aerial surveillance. While they could tell us the movements on the ground and pick up conversations, they were not good at knowing what was going on.”