To those who scare peace loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends.

Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.

We're going to protect and honor the Constitution, and I don't have the authority to set it aside.... If I had the authority to set it aside, this would be a dangerous government, and I wouldn't respect it.

The FBI. is a massive culture. It's been a culture that served America well, and it's been focused on prosecution. But what we need in terms of terrorism is prevention.

The way the terrorist is trained to operate, especially the suicide terrorists, makes punishment and the threat of punishment far less valuable to those who would prevent the crime

We need to strengthen our analytic capacity in Washington, we need to centralize the anti-terrorism effort

Frankly, the president, during the first opportunity I had to be in a Cabinet meeting, before we started the meeting, he said, Folks, before we begin this meeting, I'm going to call on General Ashcroft and ask him invite the wisdom and presence of God in what we do. And I thought to myself how ashamed I'd been that so many times in my life I had entered upon great important tasks and I had cheated myself and those that I had served of a blessing.