Capturing any member of any terrorist cell or any insurgent cell that we may happen to come across is always very, very valuable, and the thing that interests me is that in most instances after a time people talk and they tell us what they know.

Clearly the Secretary of Defense, my boss, would like nothing better than to get Osama bin Laden and to get... to ensure the complete defeat of al-Qaida, because we know that al-Qaida is planning operations against the United States even as we speak here.

It's clear to me now that we've got to reach out to the Arab Sunni community in particular in an effort to cause some moderate political activity to take place so they join the future of Iraq.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

You don't build a new power plant in the United States overnight. It takes years to build.

Nobody's more mindful of the sacrifices of our troops than those of us that command them.

But my Arabic is pretty good. It's good enough to have conversations with people, to understand what they say, to understand what they're feeling.