Political Quotes

“I want to go back in time a little more than 12, 13 or 14 years ago, to 9/11. One of the lessons learned by the committee on which the Presiding Officer and I serve, now the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was learned from former Governor Tom Kean of New Jersey, cochair, along with former Congressman Lee Hamilton from Indiana, former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. They were the cochairs of the 9/11 Commission. One of the things they brought to our committee and to the Congress, after a lot of work by a number of good men and women who served on that commission, was the root causes for how that disaster occurred: How could those four aircraft take down the Twin Towers, crash into the Pentagon, and crash into a field in Shanksville, PA, instead of this building right here? How could that have happened? There are a number of reasons why it happened. But one of the reasons why it happened is that we had stovepiped our intelligence services. What the folks over at the FBI knew wasn't necessarily known or shared with the Department of Homeland Security. What the folks at the National Security Agency knew was not shared with either of the other two agencies.…”