Michael Chertoff Quotes

We may have to force people to get together in terms of picking a particular type of technology and starting to build to that technology, as opposed to everybody exercising their right to buy their own system, you know, at will.

We've done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA.

We don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective ... We haven't been able to require every employer to enter a system in which they check the work status of their employees and determine whether they're legal, and without that, we don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective. And that would be the single greatest additional weapon we could use if we're serious about tackling this problem.

Well, I think first of all there was a failure to have real, clear information at our disposal. There was a real lack of situational awareness. We didn't have the capabilities on the ground to give us real-time, accurate assessments of the physical condition of the city.

And if we make the process political, if we start to make it personal, we're actually going to frustrate good public policy, in terms of managing this money.

First, we did rank everybody by risk, and New York comes out number one.

Even the kinds of ingredients you can find in your own kitchen can be used to make bombs. So the problem is with the people and not with the tools.

Now, I'm not suggesting we're going to wait 40 years or even four years, but I think we have to put in perspective the fact that we've come quite a distance. We have quite a distance to come - go, as well.

I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water.

There really is no vacation from the world in which we live.

We now have capabilities in science and technology that raise the very realistic possibility that a small group of terrorists could kill not only thousands of people, as they did on September 11th, but hundreds of thousands of people. And that has changed the dimension of the threat we face.

Al Qaeda is very media-savvy and very focused on what goes on in the global media.

We always monitor the flow of information, intelligence, threat streams to see whether we have any indication there's some imminent. We work hard to identify potential cells and disrupt them. This is one of the reasons we put so much emphasis on intelligence gathering.

I'm sometimes asked why it is that for 30 years we seem to have trouble in the United States enforcing the rules against illegal immigration, and I'll tell you what the answer is. The answer is that when the television cameras turn off and the spotlight moves to something else, there are a host of interest groups and advocacy groups who work very, very hard to make it difficult to enforce these rules. I'm not commenting adversely on their motivation, but I can tell you the effect of all of this is to wear down the ability of an agency to enforce the law ...

The second is there are some communities that we thought originally would take mobile homes that have decided they don't want them. And we're not going to cram mobile homes down the throats of communities in Louisiana and the Gulf - and other parts of the Gulf Coast.

The Department of Defense took 40 years to get where it got.

So, all during the '90s and, you know, for the first half of this decade, we had opportunities to get evacuation plans in place, better communications in place.

So that's why I said, if you look at the average, you would see the money New York got this year was in line with the average across the prior three years and substantially more, by a country mile, than the money given to any other city.

And one of the things I want to say, Wolf, is we're 100 days from hurricane season, and we've got to start focusing on what we're going to do to make ourselves ready for the next hurricane.

And here where the fact that we've given over half a billion dollars to New York really plays a role, because New York has already made a lot of investments in the kinds of things which you'd expect to have as basic security.

But one thing that we have done in the last four years is we have really put pressure on the leadership of this organization [Al Qaeda]. We have killed a significant number of leaders. We've captured others. Those that remain have to look over their shoulders, they have to be on the run. So that even if we don't manage to kill or capture them all within four years, what we do do is put the kind of pressure on them that makes them focus on their own skins, as opposed to carrying out attacks.

You don't bargain with terrorists. You don't appease terrorists. And anybody who believes that this is about something we've done has to ask themselves why it is, on September 11, 2001, before we were in Afghanistan, before we were in Iraq, he committed a dastardly attack killing over 3,000 people. I mean, this is not a matter of negotiation; it's a matter of victory.

And it seems to me correct then, and I think it's correct now, that job one is get the planning done, make sure the buses are there. When that's done, it's completely appropriate to go around and tour around and look at the damage.