As a former career intelligence professional I have a profound appreciation for the value of intelligence. Intelligence disrupts terrorist plots and thwarts attacks. Intelligence saves lives.

I do not - I never believed it's better to kill a terrorist than to detain him. We want to detain as many terrorists as possible so we can elicit the intelligence from them in the appropriate manner so that we can disrupt follow-on terrorist attacks.

We can't gather the intelligence we need to foil future attacks if we are blindly granting terrorists the right to remain silent. But for some reason we've already done that - with the terrorist who tried to bring down Flight 253.

I strongly support the call to greatly expand our human intelligence capability to penetrate al Qaeda and gather critical intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks on our homeland.

Guantanamo allows us to secure dangerous detainees without the risk of escape while at the same time providing us with valuable intelligence information on how best to proceed in the war against terror and prevent future attacks.

Before you give up hope turn back and read the attacks that were made on Lincoln.

We've been a country that's been fortunate to be protected by two oceans to not have serious attacks on our territory for most of our history. And we were unfortunately reminded in a very devastating way of our vulnerability.

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

There is nothing new about these Republican attacks on our family planning decisions. In fact from the moment they came into power Republicans in the House of Representatives have been waging a war on women's health.

There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile to continue talking about peace and non-violence against a government whose only reply is savage attacks on an unarmed and defenceless people.