Al Qaeda has overplayed their hand. What the al Qaeda do when they go into a town or village or a neighborhood inside a major city is they get a stranglehold on the people themselves. They force the men to wear beards and the women to be properly costumed and essentially completely covered up.

Aircraft are always going to be something that terrorists are interested in because you bring down an airliner, you have drawn the world's attention.

By the end of 2008, clearly, the al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the al Qaeda's mind, they were defeated. They actually said that in many of their transmissions that we were able to pick up. And the Shia militia, largely those trained by the Iranians in Basra and also in Sadr City, had been defeated.

Jack Keane Quotes