Joe Lieberman

A lot of what you are now doing, in my respectful opinion, is simply not working to protect our security, and it is diminishing our credibility in areas of the world way outside of the Middle East.

If you are talking about homeland security, you have got to in the post 9/11 age protect your borders, all of them, air, sea, land.

The enemy is violent Islamist extremism, a political ideology that seeks to justify totalitarian governance by perverting religion.

In my opinion, we do have friends in the countries throughout the Middle East who essentially share our goals.

The zero option for Afghanistan is the worst option for the United States of America.

No system is perfect. But, I will tell you, the American Government has stopped a lot of terrorist plots against us because of these methods of surveillance.

In my opinion, part of what you are talking about is the so-called metadata that the NSA goes after. That is one excellent way in which we can get to target.

There should be tweaks, my view, to the laws that we have.

I look back first at Afghanistan during the 1990s when... that led right to the 9/11 attacks against us.

Probably no one has done that as much or certainly not more than Joe Lieberman did during the time that he was in the Senate.

I wish some of the people who rally against the NSA would spend equal time rallying against al-Qaeda.

What is happening now is really a remarkable historic development in the Arab world, which is an uprising against dictators, autocrats, by the people.

I believe in a whole-of-Government approach, but that has to, in these cases, include the U.S. military because al-Qaeda is not a social organization.

If we sit back, frankly, it can only get worse.

Sometimes, the world doesn't cooperate with a Presidential narrative.

But we cannot let these sanctuaries take hold and fester because they will be predator in nature on their neighbors and then eventually potentially dangerous to the American people.

I was amazed and moved by the families saying, please make sure that our son, daughter, husband, whatever, didn't die in vain.

We should have supported them from the beginning.

Still it was terrorism. It is not as if, if you were affected by an awful grotesque anti-Muslim video and your response to that is to attack the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and burn it down and kill the U.S. ambassador, that is not…

It was obviously a terrorist attack by any generally-held definition of terrorism, which is the use of violence to achieve a political end or convey a political message.

I agree with Congresswoman Harman. This is a whole-of-Government approach, and it is largely nonkinetic.

Because of the failure, in my view, of American leadership, the term 'radical Islam' or 'Islam extremism' is not mentioned in U.S. policy, which is quite astounding.

There are no easy solutions to this threat. But there are smart, strong steps we can take.

In Afghanistan, we can choose not to squander the gains of the past decade and dishonor the brave Americans who risked and lost their lives there.

In Iraq, we can and should make clear to the government that we are willing to support Iraqis against al-Qaeda with U.S. air power.