Improving our national intelligence capabilities should remain a top priority and a continual process.
Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.
If you look at military and intelligence positions from the 1950s the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been against American national interests.
The Clinton White House today said they would start to give national security and intelligence briefings to George Bush. I don't know how well this is working out. Today after the first one Bush said 'I've got one question: What color is the red phone?'
Where the stakes are the highest in the war on terror we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing planning and collaborative enforcement.
There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington the place we learned to despise during the last administration.
When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have it is a world that moves away from unequal unstable unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities - locally nationally and globally - that share the characteristics of all successful communities.
For President Obama 'home of the brave' are not just the last words of our national anthem but also a call to action. This is why the president's policies and our platform include incentives to train and hire our troops returning home. Not only because of our moral responsibility but because it makes for a stronger more secure American economy.
The relevance for 9/11 is that what 9/11 marked was the beginning of a struggle in which the terrorists come at us and strike us here on our home territory. And it's a global operation. It doesn't know national boundaries or national borders.
Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat sleep read watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.