"So I would ask that you balance what you call an indictment, and which I don't agree with at all, with the two primary findings of your staff. One is that there was a lack of resources. And two, there were legal impediments." - Former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, pictured April 13, 2004. He was responding to panel chairman Thomas Kean's remarks that two 9/11 commission reports amounted to, "an indictment of the FBI."
"A war footing means we seal borders. A war footing means we detain people that we're suspicious of. A war footing means that we have statutes like the Patriot Act...the fact of the matter is we didn't do it and we were using grand jury subpoenas and arrest warrants to fight an enemy that was using missiles and suicide boats to attack our warships." -- Freeh, pictured, testifying April 13, 2004
"I cannot recall whether I specifically talked to him [Ashcroft] about al Qaeda. But what I did talk about was reflected in the memos which I gave him, which is: If we don't put the pieces together and connect the dots, there's going to be something that happens. And there is so much information out there, it is so important that we get this done." - Former Attorney General Janet Reno, pictured April 13, 2004
"The FBI didn't know what it had. The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing." - Reno, pictured, testifying April 13, 2004
"He [Vice President Cheney] was surprised that al Qaeda was here in the United States, as was the attorney general. We told them we had coverage on them. And as I explained earlier, we also have Hamas, Hezbollah, many other terrorist groups." -- Former Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard, pictured, discussing a spring 2001 briefing he held with the vice president, in testimony April 13, 2004
"On the one side, you have catastrophic failure, more than 3,000 people dead. And no one is more bothered by this than us. But we engaged these targets. You'll never hear from us, oh, you know, we didn't get it. Oh, we got it all right. We knew what we were up against. We gave it all we had." - Former CIA counterterrorism center Director J. Cofer Black, pictured, testifying April 13, 2004
"After the millennium threat was over, we spent our time trying to get the money to make up for that which we spent, or - and I'm just not going to go into that kind of language I use, which is very graphic - but, unfortunately, when Americans get killed it would translate into additional resources. It was a constant track: Either you run out or people die. When people die, you get more money." - Black, April 13, 2004
"When the Senate Appropriations Committee met on May 9, in the summer of 2001, I told the committee that my Number One priority was the attack against terror; that we would protect Americans from terror. I wrote later to them a confirming letter saying that we had no higher priority." - Attorney General John Ashcroft, pictured, in testimony April 13, 2004
"Acting Director Pickard and I had more than two meetings. We had regular meetings. Secondly, I did never speak to him saying that I did not want to hear about terrorism. I care greatly about the safety and security of the American people and was very interested in terrorism and specifically interrogated him about threats to the American people and domestic threats in particular." -- Ashcroft, in testimony April 13, 2004
"The simple fact of Sept. 11 is this: We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions and starved for basic information technology. The old national intelligence system in place on Sept. 11 was destined to fail." -- Ashcroft, in testimony, April 13, 2004
"The implication of the intelligence community can't talk to each other is wrong. There is architecture, data flow and movement of data across our agencies every single day." - CIA Director George Tenet, pictured, in testimony April 14, 2004
"It will take us another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs. There is a creative, innovative strategy to get us there that requires sustained commitment and funding... The transformation is well under way, but our investments in capability must be sustained." - Tenet, pictured, in testimony April 14, 2004
"I do not believe that the American public has lost confidence in the men and women of the FBI... If you go overseas - and this is a critical component of the success, our success in the future - you will find that our counterparts, in whichever country you go to, have a tremendous respect and affection for the FBI." - FBI Director Robert Mueller, pictured, testifying April 14, 2004