Richard Ben-Veniste Quotes & Sayings

“Were there contacts over time between Iraq and al-Qaeda? Yes, there were efforts made to communicate. We found no evidence of collaboration in any effort to mount any kind of operation against the United States' interests.”

“Gerald R. Ford was a decent and honorable man. Under his steady hand, the nation began the process of recovering from the terrible trauma of Watergate - the lies, distortions, cover-ups, misuses of federal agencies to exact political revenge, illegal wiretapping, burglaries.”

“Well, changes have been made. The question is whether we've done enough by way of change.”

“The real question was, here we had this information, Bin Laden intends to strike in the United States. We knew they had struck before in 1993 at the World Trade Center in the first bombing of the trade center.”

“Our mandate expects that we will build on the Joint Inquiry's investigation and we will not be re-inventing the wheel. But we go to places which the Joint Inquiry was not permitted to explore.”

“When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.”

“Without the tape-recorded evidence demonstrating irrefutably, in Nixon's own voice, his knowledge of and active involvement in obstruction of justice, it is likely that Nixon would have escaped impeachment and removal from office.”

“No connection between Iraq and the 9/11 catastrophe.”

“Only the last two planes, I think, had any shot of being intercepted and taken down on 9/11.”

“We've got a daunting enough task to provide a definitive account of what happened in 9/11, without fear or favor, something that will last and will survive criticism over time. And we think we can do that with integrity in a bipartisan report.”