"Osama bin Laden's own words stated he has a war against the United States. He declared that American civilians should be considered as combatants."

"The plan we developed to deal with al Qaeda depended on developing sources of human and technical intelligence that could give us insights into his plans at the tactical level. This is easy to say but hard to accomplish."

"Al Qaeda is not the organization now that it was before. It is under stress organizationally. Its leadership spends more time trying to figure out how to keep from getting caught than they do trying to launch operations."

"I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker."

"We operate under the law. Covert action authorities are communicated in a memorandum of notification."