Laden Quotes

You would have thought that after 9/11 the president would have finished the job in Afghanistan, and kept the focus on capturing Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda deputies, but he and his team gave top priority to their original plan to invade Iraq.

I don't think there's any question that America is safer as a result of the bin Laden operation.

On the subject of Osama bin Laden... we will track him down. We will capture him. We will bring him to justice, and I will follow him to the gates of hell.

As we have all said, we understand that electronic surveillance is a vital tool in the war on terror. We all want to know when Osama bin Laden is calling: when he is calling, who he is calling, and what he is saying.

The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That's the reality. He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he's not captured by us. We know that.

Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.

As president of the United States, my top priority will be to keep America safe. We're going to go after the terrorist networks. We're going to go after Osama bin Laden. We are not going to live in fear in this country.

I mean, it's not just one day you get up, bang, and you got Osama bin Laden. It's the kind of thing where an awful lot of people over a long period of time - thousands have worked this case and these issues and followed on the leads and captured bad guys and interrogated them and so-forth.

People can say whatever they want about you without knowing the facts. They can criticize you without even knowing you, and hate you when they don't even know you. All of a sudden, you're, like, the bin Laden of America. Osama bin Laden is the only one who knows exactly what I'm going through.

The most striking thing is that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed largely irrelevant to the Arab Spring.

The more we captured, the more we learned and eventually it destroyed the organization that attacked us on 9/11 and allowed us to get bin Laden.

If bin Laden is in fact publicly killed, then the US military will find itself standing around with its hands in its pockets, wondering what's supposed to come next.

Now that we have a democracy and you can go back and the airport air is not laden with evil any more, you can actually breathe oxygen when you land in Johannesburg.

Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about.

I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.

Without the connotation good or bad, bin Laden's a great man in the sense that he's influenced the course of history.

I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

The decision he made with Usama bin Laden was a tactical decision. It wasn't a strategic decision. The strategic decision was made by President Bush to go after him. What President Obama has done on his watch, the issues that have come up while he's been president, he's gotten it wrong strategically every single time.

I do support enhanced interrogation techniques. Obviously their value is shining through with respect to the bin Laden killing.

There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.

On a day when Osama bin Laden again threatened the United States and our allies, it is disturbing to realize that John Kerry neither recognizes nor understands the murderous ideology of our enemies and the threat they pose to our nation.

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born revolutionary who is believed by most Arab and Iranian observers to be the inspiration of the attacks in New York and Washington, is the best known of the Islamic militants to have emerged in the past 20 years and the least difficult to fathom.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.

I don't think that the war serves U.S. interests. I think Osama bin Laden's interests and the Iranian interests are very much served by it, and it's becoming a huge drain on our resources both material and political.

The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions.

We got a lot of information from the detainees that eventually led us to bin Laden.

I think soon after I became director of the CIA - President Obama pulled me into the Oval Office and said: 'Look, I just want you to know that your top priority is to go after Osama bin Laden.'

In 1995, sanctions led Sudan to cut its ties with terrorists and expel Osama bin Laden.

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.