The United States government does not authorise or condone torture of detainees. Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under US law, wherever they may occur in the world.

America's still a very, very powerful symbol and a very important place of leadership for the world.

I will never forget the bright September day, standing at my desk in the White House, when my young assistant said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center - and then a second one - and a third, the Pentagon.

Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us, in the administration, that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to.

We [USA] need to deal with our problems here at home if we're going to be strong enough to lead abroad.

Everybody in the world is capable of democratic development. Some people in the world are unlucky enough to get stuck with really bad political leadership and with really bad political institutions.

It's important to Russia to be able to attract capital and to attract technology to develop their oil fields, their oil and gas fields, many of which suffer from lack of access to the very best technologies. And it's also important, and this has been the US government's view to have diversification of supply, diversification of supply roots and, of course, diversification in terms of alternative energy.