Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from New Hampshire who has been one of the strongest voices since the day she got here in the Senate to talk about the difference between fighting a war and fighting a crime. The Senator has been the attorney general of New Hampshire, and I have been a military lawyer for over 30 years. The legal systems to fight a war are different than the legal systems to solve a domestic crime. Here is the problem: Do I believe Al Qaeda is at war with the United States and our values and our friends? Would they kill us all if they could? Yes. Why did 3,000 Americans die on 9/11/2001? They couldn't kill 3 million of us. If they could, they would have. If you believe that, then the goal of our generation is to marginalize this movement, and when we capture one of them, we need to find out what they are up to. Dying for their cause is not a deterrent. It is like first prize. So when you tell somebody who has joined Al Qaeda that you may die in the course of this attack, they say good. The goal is to prevent them from hitting us, and the best way to do that is through intelligence gathering. When you capture someone who is determined by our military and intelligence community to be a member of Al Qaeda, then under the law of war--the authorization to use military force passed by Congress over a decade ago--you can hold that person under the law of war to gather intelligence. Why is that the case? War is about winning the war.…”