Robert Mueller

I didn't know the organization, but the one thing you can say about the FBI, it's tremendously professional.

In order to be successful against each of these threats, we have to have a presence overseas, work closely not only with our counterparts in the law enforcement community, but also with the intelligence community.

So there is a foreign intelligence purpose for every one of our FISA warrants.

There'll be differences of opinion in just about every intelligence analysis that you make.

Prior to the passage of the Patriot Act, it was very difficult - often impossible - for us to share information with the Central Intelligence Agency, with NSA, with the other intelligence agencies, and likewise, for them to share information with us.

In planning an attack, persons have various roles.

And from the moment that we realized it was a terrorist attack, there isn't an agent or a support person in the FBI that wasn't committed to bringing to justice those who were responsible for this.

I know that we will be judged in history by not only how we disrupt terrorism but how we protect the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all Americans, even Americans who don't wish us well. We must do all these things exceptionally well.

For most of us, fidelity is faithfulness to an obligation, trust, or duty. For the men and women of the FBI, fidelity also means fidelity to country. It means fidelity to justice and the law, fidelity to the Constitution, fidelity to equality and liberty.

But we had - I think if you look at law enforcement 10 years ago, if you look at the challenges, the FBI was focused excessively on what was happening in the United States.

I think, in the wake of Sept. 11, it's important for the American public to understand that to the extent that there are individuals within the United States who would undertake terrorist attacks, that we are doing something to address that.

And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack.