Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square ... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the kinds of things that our enemy is trying to do.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards

I think that what I'm doing is right. And election-year politics, which intensifies everything, is not going to drive me off that course.

I'm not going to let people who work in the United States Department of Justice have their characters be assailed without any basis.

At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community, I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message.

One cannot understate the importance of eliminating Bin Laden. He was a symbolic head of the organisation and, as we now know, an operational head of the organisation.

Let's deal with reality. The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom.