Lee Hamilton Quotations

We're getting better at this. But we still haven't proved we are safe.

What we can do is prevent terrorists from obtaining the materials needed to build a nuclear weapon, most notably highly enriched uranium.

No one could order the troops in, they couldn't get the equipment in, they couldn't evacuate the people who needed to be evacuated, ... that was glaringly absent.

I do not remember a president having less criticism from Congress than Bush had in his first term.

If after sanctions, if after a refusal to let inspectors in, you still don't have action, it might very well be at that point that the United States would have to consider a pre-emptive strike, ... That's something we haven't done in the past. Or at least we haven't done it very often and it would have to be carefully considered.

He hasn't got much of what he wanted. But on the other hand, Congress hasn't done much of anything this year.

We take for granted in this country the voting process. It's really a very elaborate complicated process, but it lies right at the heart of the democratic system.

He chose not to do that. He chose to act by himself.

It is a glaring error four years after 9/11. Still exists. Not resolved. There are bills pending in Congress but they're far from enactment,

Just because we cannot accept what's going on in East Timor, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're the ones that charge in there. I think others can probably do that better than we -- the Australians (or) the New Zealanders, for example.

Our recommendations are good, and they're urgent, ... they are not intended to be a final solution and they need to be deliberated.

I think Senator Baker and I want to do a very careful, a very thorough, and as the secretary said, very expeditious review, and we will do that,

We had a marvelous meeting with the president, ... The president's comments were very candid, very forthcoming and he was interested in what we had to say.

was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring poisons and gases.

Without good voter registration data, you simply cannot conduct a good election.

We certainly learned from Katrina that we remain very vulnerable to an incident of this kind, whether it's a terrorist attack or a natural disaster,

You go back to the drawing board, start all over again,

Now he's making a lot of assumptions there as far as almost instantaneous communication, and it's almost a hypothetical -- it is I guess a hypothetical question. But I heard that statement with some surprise,

That's just not something that fits in here.

Congress is not working hard enough at the business of legislating. They do work hard at politicking and spend a huge amount of time raising money.

Tackling long-term challenges can do more than help us avert the kinds of crises that stack up on a National Security Advisor's desk.

It's important to both Secretary Baker and me that we not raise expectations here. We know that whatever we do will be difficult. We really do not yet know how difficult this task will be.

I've had an uneasy feeling for a long time that the government simply was not acting with a sense of crisis, with a sense of urgency.

That's an extraordinary occasion and an historic one,

that most people would back away from. I know I would.

The intelligence community goes around the authorizing committees because they don't have control over the money. You need a subcommittee that focuses exclusively on intelligence to have robust oversight.

I'm surprised, I'm disappointed and maybe even a little depressed that we did not do better four years after 9/11. It says we're still very vulnerable.

I hope Indiana and a lot of other states now move to begin to focus not just on the putting together of a voter registration list but maintaining the quality year after year.

I do not find anyone today really in charge. You cannot possible argue today that the director of central intelligence is in charge.

I do not believe the president should have ignored the statute.

You want to disavow labels and project centrist attitudes. Hoosiers pride themselves on being people of moderation and common sense.

The disadvantage is that you have a report that might dribble out, and you don't know what parts will dribble out, and you can get a very distorted view of what the commission actually decided.

A miscall like that has a lot of consequences,