I think there’s no question but what the tail end of the Bush administration, Bush-Cheney administration, that we took steps specifically geared to try and free up the financial sector.

The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

We were trying to get all of the planes down out of the sky. And we watched as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed - something no one expected and anticipated. And you could sit there and see and be aware that thousands of people were at that moment being killed as a result of the terrorist attacks that struck the United States.

I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it.

There's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.

You can't fall back on the private sector and say, 'You take care of the nation's banking system.' That's a fundamental function of the government, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC, etc. All of those agencies have a major role to play there.

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.