Political Quotes

“I take the floor to remind my colleagues of two home truths that may have been forgotten in the 4 years and 4 months since September 11, 2001. The first of these is that we are a Nation at war. Decades of dealing with terror networks like al Qaeda as a matter of law enforcement or criminal justice helped bring us to September 11. We passed the PATRIOT Act because we understood that we are at war with international terrorism and that wartime measures were required. The second home truth is that this war is being fought in a technological environment as different from World War II as the technology of World War II is different from the technology of the War Between the States. In a high velocity age of digital communications, the President and those most directly responsible for forestalling another attack of this sort that Osama bin Laden recently threatened must have the means appropriate to the life-or-death task at hand. If my colleagues will permit me, there has been something surreal, even unreal, about the recent debate on this front. We seem to have forgotten that the terrorists who hijacked the plane that was flown into the Pentagon on September 11 received more than a dozen calls from al Qaeda operatives in Yemen while the terrorists were living in San Diego, and that the NSA, fearful of being accused of domestic spying, did not act. Do we want a repeat of that? I do not think any of us do.…”