We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary.

If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the U.S., has developed that capability, harbours those aspirations, then I think the U.S. is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force.

Once we got hit by - on 9/11 and lost 3,000 people that day, we recognized, and it was one of the key decisions President Bush made, that this is not a law enforcement problem, it is a strategic threat to the United States. It's a war. And based on that, we then adopted a whole set of policies that flowed out of that proposition.

The biggest threat we face is the possibility of terrorist groups like al Qaeda equipped with weapons of mass destruction, with nukes, bugs or gas. That was the threat after 9/11 and when we took down Saddam Hussein we eliminated Iraq as a potential source of that.

In terms of asking questions, I plead guilty. I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That's my job.

[Saddam Hussein is aggressively seeking nuclear and biological weapons and ] the United States may well become the target.

Everyone knows that you're not really a real man unless you own a gun.