I think, in the wake of Sept. 11, it's important for the American public to understand that to the extent that there are individuals within the United States who would undertake terrorist attacks, that we are doing something to address that.
We cannot go up on a wire. We cannot do a search without a judge on the FISA Court approving it and determining that we have met the standard that has been set forth by Congress in order to utilize these techniques.
I remember... seeing the first plane go into the towers and thinking: 'It's a beautiful day. Somebody really must have gotten off course to have the plane go into the towers.'
I was in my office when - on 9/11. I think I had a number of meetings scheduled. I was just getting to know the bureau. And somebody walked in and said the first plane had - or a plane had struck the World Trade Center, one of the towers.
I love doing bank robberies, drug cases, homicides - as a prosecutor, that's what I thought I was going to be overseeing when I got to the bureau.
I know that we will be judged in history by not only how we disrupt terrorism but how we protect the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all Americans, even Americans who don't wish us well. We must do all these things exceptionally well.
Leaking of classified material is a concern.
And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack.
I think around the world, our agents are the best collectors of information you'll find.
The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America.
In order to be successful against each of these threats, we have to have a presence overseas, work closely not only with our counterparts in the law enforcement community, but also with the intelligence community.
Secondly, not only have we put additional agents on counterterrorism, but we've also built up our analytical structure so that we're better positioned to analyze the information we have.
My admonition is, 'No counterterrorism lead goes uncovered.'
We need to take lessons learned from fighting terrorism and apply them to cyber crime.
I am confident that every action we took as the FBI detained individuals in the wake of 9/11 was appropriately done.
I know when I was here prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, one of the most effective units here was the cold case squad, which had on it FBI agents, as well as Metropolitan Police Department homicide detectives working together.
As I said before, there are often disagreements as to what a particular set of facts mean. That is not at all unusual, and one shouldn't read into it more than is there.
All I'm going to tell you is investigations, whether it be this and others, where you have partial facts, analysts, agents are always trying to interpret what those facts mean, extrapolate from them what they mean.
For most of us, fidelity is faithfulness to an obligation, trust, or duty. For the men and women of the FBI, fidelity also means fidelity to country. It means fidelity to justice and the law, fidelity to the Constitution, fidelity to equality and liberty.
In the context of September 11, there were so many that lost their lives that - how do you single out one person? There were so many acts of heroism that day from so many people, whether it be firemen and police officers in New York and our agents also.
