Qaeda's Quotes

#1. The gravest risks from al Qaeda combine its affinity for big targets and its announced desire for weapons of mass destruction.

Barton Gellman

#2. I fear that our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy; about the failure to destroy Al Qaeda and about revenge.

Dave Matthews

#3. In Nigeria, Hillary Clinton amazingly fought for two years to keep an Al-Qaeda affiliate off the terrorist watch list.

Chris Christie

#4. Turkey's solidarity with Hamas is not, of course, based on Arab nationalism, which as a non-Arab nation it does not support. It is instead based on a definition of the Mideast conflict as one between Jews and Muslims, precisely the position of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Elliott Abrams

#5. Al Qaeda has declared war on the Somali pirates. That is awesome! Evil against evil. Like Alien versus Predator or Cheney versus his lawyer.

Craig Ferguson

#6. When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,

Dick Cheney

#7. Let me say what I actually believe. I believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, by Al Qaeda, and Osama Bin Laden, and no one else trying to hurt America.

Van Jones

#8. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

Kurt Vonnegut

#9. Al Qaeda's message that violence, terrorism and extremism are the only answer for Arabs seeking dignity and hope is being rejected each day in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and throughout the Arab lands.

Elliott Abrams

#10. I am encouraged by the news today that United States special operations personnel found, identified and killed the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the operational commander of the al-Qaeda led insurgency in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was the public face of the insurgency.

Mike Fitzpatrick

#11. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, a whole host of networks that are bent on attacking America, who have a distorted ideology, who have perverted the faith of Islam, and so we have to go after them.

Barack Obama

#12. I've been a military lawyer for 33 years. A member of al Qaeda or their affiliate group can be detained under a law of war as long as their threat to our nation without a trial.

Lindsey Graham

#13. God told me to strike at Al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.

George W. Bush

#14. There are many causes of violent deaths in America - murders and traffic accidents - that we do not approach with the same 'no price too steep, no task too difficult' approach that we take toward al Qaeda.

Dennis C. Blair

#15. You snitch!" It's 6:45p.m. and I am being held hostage by terrorist extremists with a list of demands that make Al-Qaeda look like preschoolers playing pirate.

Julia Kent

#16. Al-Qaeda's resurgence brings out the worst in the Bush Administration's math and logic.

Jon Stewart

#17. Personally, I do not think that torture is necessary. But it may be the case that interrogation methods that go beyond questioning, but do not arise to the level of torture, may be necessary to get actionable intelligence from high-ranking al Qaeda leaders

John Yoo

#18. The CIA was always looking to tie every kind of criminal activity in the Middle East to al Qaeda.

Kenneth Eade

#19. I would guess, I would surmise that some of the more spectacular bombings are done by al Qaeda suiciders.

George W. Bush

#20. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of Sept. 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who masterminded the Sept. 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein, who did not.

Robert Byrd

#21. By releasing these five top Taliban commanders, the U.S. is demonstrating that it is throwing in the towel in the long struggle against the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies in Afghanistan.

Jonathan S. Tobin

#22. Al-Qaeda's obituary has been written countless times over the decade. Each iteration has proved to be ephemeral, as the moment has continually shown itself to have a deeper bench than we imagine.

Bruce Hoffman

#23. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it's fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.

John McCain

#24. Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda - worse for our society. It's as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.

Keith Olbermann

#25. Saddam, as most tyrants, was a total control freak. He wanted total control of his regime. Total control of the country. And to introduce a wild card like Al Qaeda in any sense was just something he would not do.

Bob Simon

#26. The attack on Americans in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 is a stark reminder that our nation must remain vigilant in protecting our citizens from the threat of Al-Qaeda and similar extremist terrorist entities around the world.

Bob Corker

#27. Al Qaeda has come back. Al Qaeda is a resilient organization. But they're not here in large numbers. But al Qaeda doesn't have to be anywhere in large numbers.

John R. Allen

#28. I think a cyber-terrorism attack is overblown, though the threat exists. I think al Qaeda and other groups are more interested in symbolic terrorism, like what they did to the World Trade Center - suicide bombers or something that really has an effect and is meaningful to people.

Kevin Mitnick

#29. ISIL is not your parents' al Qaeda. It's a very different model.

James Comey

#30. If Islam opposes terrorism, then Saudi Arabia should announce that no one supportive of ISIS or Al Qaeda is welcome in Mecca to make Hajj.

Bob Enyart

#31. Mr. Speaker, we are a blessed Nation. We have not suffered another attack on our soil since September 11, and we are grateful. We have killed or captured dozens of members of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Our military and intelligence forces are working both hard and smart.

Marsha Blackburn

#32. If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.

Peter Bergen

#33. I was against the Iraq war I was against the Afghan war I was against bombing Libya and Syria but to be quite honest and with a heavy heart because more innocent people are gonna be killed....We have to step in and help wipeout ISIS!

Cal Sarwar

#34. Searches of al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, undertaken since American-backed forces took control there, are not known to have turned up a significant cache of nuclear materials.

Barton Gellman

#35. There is evidence that some of al Qaeda's nuclear efforts over the years met with swindles and false leads.

Barton Gellman

#36. The US military has achieved a decisive blow against al-Qaeda with its commando action against Osama Bin Laden and his killing.

Angela Merkel

#37. The people who illegally cross into the country are from countries that have very close ties to al Qaeda, whether it's Yemen or Afghanistan, Pakistan, China. It is an absolute national disgrace.

Rick Perry

#38. The mission - the overall mission is to dismantle and defeat and disrupt al-Qaeda. But we have to make sure there's not a safe haven that returns in Afghanistan.

Michael Mullen

#39. Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed.

Barton Gellman

#40. I would show up at a party for Al Qaeda if you said there's going to be a dinner.

Gilbert Gottfried

#41. Staying in a very public fight with the U.S. is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.

Richard Engel

#42. We know that al Qaeda is seeking radioactive materials and technology to launch a devastating attack, and that hundreds of radioactive sources have been lost or stolen in the U.S. and around the world.

Ed Markey

#43. The way you really stop Al-Qaeda is by stopping their funding. It's not by carpet-bombing or land invasions or anything.

Adam McKay

#44. Punishing abuse in Iraq should not return the U.S. to Sept. 10, 2001, in the way it fights al Qaeda, while Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants remain at large and continue to plan attacks.

John Yoo

#45. It is very important to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all means possible

Osama Bin Laden

#46. Leaders at the top of al Qaeda's hierarchy, the evidence shows, completed plans and obtained the materials required to manufacture two biological toxins - botulinum and salmonella - and the chemical poison cyanide.

Barton Gellman

#47. We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda's attacks on America launched the nation into three wars - against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.

Tom Brokaw

#48. The change we need is fixing this broken economy from the bottom up.. not tax breaks for the wealthy and huge corporations that ship U.S. jobs overseas. We need to focus on defeating al Qaeda and the Taliban and restoring America's standing in the world.. not an unending commitment in Iraq.

Joe Biden

#49. What could be better in al-Qaeda's mind than to have India and Pakistan going at each other? What more to further their aims?

Richard Armitage

#50. It has never demonstrated any desire to provide humane treatment to captured Americans. If anything, the murders of Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl declare al Qaeda's intentions to kill even innocent civilian prisoners.

John Yoo

#51. No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable.

Michael Scheuer

#52. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.

Thomas Friedman

#53. Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

John Yoo

#54. And I know your next move, I watch you so much, 'There's been no proven link between the secular state of Iraq and al-Qaeda!' Come on. They both think we're Satan. Isn't that a nice starting point? Why are you so loathe to believe they might have each other on lunatic speed dial?

Dennis Miller

#55. That's Al Qaeda's new plan: to destroy America one period at a time.

Chelsea Handler

#56. There's no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

George Clooney

#57. ISIS and Al-Qaeda and whoever else, that is the only way they stop is after we convert. That's what they say. The only way this stops is when the infidels convert.

Rush Limbaugh

#58. Now, al Qaeda's on the run. Afghanistan is no longer a base of operations. The Afghan government is a friendly government that is trying to bring democracy to its people.

Condoleezza Rice

#59. It's time to refocus our global fight against terrorism. We must move away from the Iraq-centric policies that are draining our resources and focus on Al Qaeda and its affiliates who are reportedly operating in some 60 to 80 countries around the world.

Russ Feingold

#60. There's overwhelming evidence ... circumstantial and otherwise, to suggest a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Mike Pence

#61. Shortly after news of Zarqawi's death reached the media, al-Qaeda stated its intention to continue its oppression of the Iraqi people.

Mike Fitzpatrick

#62. I think the real target of al-Qaeda is Saudi Arabia by the way. They hate us and we're a vehicle to get at Saudi Arabia. I think Osama bin Laden really wants to topple that regime and have his people move in, but that's a whole other story.

Frank Carlucci

#63. There's more evil in the charts than an Al-Qaeda suggestion box.

Bill Bailey

#64. We know that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has some very dangerous, very important leaders who are tied directly to the top leadership of al Qaeda central, including a man who was formerly Osama bin Laden's secretary.

Richard Engel

#65. Among all the upheavals of war with al Qaeda, the surest indicator of the historic stakes is the ongoing rotation of top U.S. government managers - scores at a time - into a bunker deep underground and far from Washington.

Barton Gellman

#66. Fox News is worse than al Qaeda. It's as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan.

Keith Olbermann

#67. Al Qaeda attacked the U.S.S. Cole and bombed several U.S. embassies in East Africa in the late 1990s. We knew who did it, but we didn't go after them. Instead, we beefed up security at our embassies and changed the Navy's rules of engagement. It only served to embolden Al Qaeda.

Kathleen Troia McFarland

#68. We remember the specter of sectarian violence
al Qaeda's attacks on mosques and pilgrims, militias that carried out campaigns of intimidation and campaigns of assassination. And in the face of ancient divisions, you stood firm to help those Iraqis who put their faith in the future.

Barack Obama

#69. If there's been any use of nerve gas it's the rebels that used it. If there has been a use of chemical weapons it was Al-Qaeda that used the chemical weapons - who gave al-Qaeda the chemical weapons? Here's my theory, Israel gave them the chemical weapons.

George Galloway

#70. You know who's upset now with ISIS? Al Qaeda. It's because ISIS is getting more attention than Al Qaeda. So now, Saturday night will be Ayman al-Zawahiri bobblehead night.

David Letterman

#71. ISIS has leadership, just like al Qaeda has leadership. It's important to be able to eliminate the individuals that are leading the organization.

James Lankford

#72. [Al-Qaeda's supporters] are aware of the cracks in the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their own hands

Osama Bin Laden

#73. But there have been many news reports that water-boarding has been used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the major al Qaeda figures that we have in U.S. custody.

Jane Mayer

#74. The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home.

Elliott Abrams

#75. In October 2008, American commandos launched a cross-border raid into Syria to capture an Islamic militant known as Abu Ghadiya. He was accused of being one of al Qaeda in Iraq's main smugglers of fighters and money between Iraq and Syria.

Richard Engel

#76. The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That's why al Qaeda was there in the first place.

Sebastian Junger

#77. There's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government

Dick Cheney

#78. Al Qaeda's central political objective is the creation of an Islamic republic, not the progressive realignment of American foreign policy.

Simon Cottee

#79. When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's secret.'

Noam Chomsky

#80. Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001.

P. J. O'Rourke

#81. Trying to stop suiciders
which we're doing a pretty good job of on occasion
is difficult to do. And what the Iraqis are going to have to eventually do is convince those who are conducting suiciders who are not inspired by Al Qaeda, for example, to realize there's a peaceful tomorrow.

George W. Bush

#82. It was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001, not Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Peter DeFazio

#83. Applying different standards to al Qaeda does not abandon Geneva, but only recognizes that the U.S. faces a stateless enemy never contemplated by the Conventions.

John Yoo

#84. Accusations fit on Greenwald really sounds like he's against all surveillance unless you can find a guy with the Al Qaeda card, wearing an Al Qaeda baseball cap, an Al Qaeda uniform.

Alan Dershowitz

#85. How did you not know they broke up? You usually monitor his social media like he's al-Qaeda and you're the CIA.

Heather Cocks

#86. 'Islamism' itself is such a broad and nearly meaningless word as used by the mainstream Western press, including everything from Turkey's AKP party to al Qaeda.

Pankaj Mishra

#87. To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt's is a slur on the poor.

P. J. O'Rourke

#88. It's clearly established in terms of training, provision of bomb-making experts, training of people with respect to chemical and biological warfare capabilities, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Iraq for training and so forth.

Dick Cheney

#89. (Terrorists) are planning to disrupt our democratic process. It's scary I know, but we're not going to let al Qaeda tell us what to do. In fact, our government has decided that if al Qaeda attempts to disrupt our democratic process, we are going to respond by disrupting it first.

Jon Stewart

#90. On one level, bombing ISIS is easy. The U.S. knows where the group operates. There's no need for a ten-year hunt like the one for Osama bin Laden. The terror group has two capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda never had such an obvious home address.

Richard Engel

#91. I write about things that are important for us as Americans. I'm concerned about al-Qaeda sneaking across the border with the illegal immigrants that are using the coyotes to get across the border. And that's not a Democrat or Republican issue, that's a national security issue.

Brad Thor

#92. Al Qaeda has no place in Pakistan. It's a threat to Pakistan. And there should be a convergence of interests between the Pakistani state and the West on security issues, but also on wider economic and social issues.

David Miliband

#93. There clearly are contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented; there clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship here

Condoleezza Rice

#94. Al Qaeda's vision of global jihad doesn't resonate in the rugged highlands and windswept deserts of southern Afghanistan. Instead, the major concern throughout much of the country is intensely local: personal safety.

Anand Gopal

#95. There are extensive contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda.

Joe Lieberman

#96. President Bashar Assad's regime is in the unique position of being targeted both by Israel and supporters of al Qaeda.

Richard Engel

#97. Initial incompetence is not a reason to be dismissive of capabilities. Al Qaeda itself was incompetent when it started as a terrorist organization. And clearly it's gone from blowing themselves up to knocking down the World Trade Center.

Michael Scheuer

#98. I'm going to tell you, what's good for al Qaeda is good for the Democratic Party in this country today.

Rush Limbaugh

#99. Assange is not a 'journalist' any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine 'Inspire' is a 'journalist.' He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.

Sarah Palin

#100. John Walker, while he was in Afghanistan, told people his goal was to have four wives ... Do we need any further proof that this guy is out of his mind? Four wives? That's how al Qaeda gets you to become a suicide bomber.

David Letterman