Repeated attempts Tuesday to reach former U.S. Sen. and Defense Secretary William Cohen were unsuccessful. However, Cohen made the following comments to CNN via telephone early Monday afternoon:

“We don’t know at this point exactly which group it is, but there aren’t many that would have this degree of sophistication, the ability to calibrate it so that you would have nearly simultaneous attacks on three important symbols and sites in the United States.”

“I think we’re talking about a handful of groups that would have this capability. Again, we don’t know all of the facts yet, in terms of how they were able to gain access to the aircraft, what sort of weapons they had onboard. Much of that information, hopefully, will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.”

“But at this point, we simply have to gather all of the information we can to make sure that we can carry out President Bush’s vow, to hunt down and punish those responsible for this … dastardly act. There are few acts in our history that certainly measure up to the magnitude of the loss of life and what it means to this country.”

“We are entering a new period and it’s going to cause us to focus our efforts, in terms of reconciling what kind of society we can continue to have, where we have a persistent threat against innocent civilians in a Democratic society. We’re going to have to engage in a very constructive and intense debate on how we measure the trade-offs between protecting our people and protecting our civil liberties. And that’s a debate that has yet to the begin in earnest, but I’m sure that it will.”

“It [the bombing of the USS Cole] flashed backed in my mind, but also the bombings in east Africa, I see even more vividly before me, because they were, again, nearly simultaneous explosions directed against innocent civilians. We indeed did gather together and vow to have the long arm of justice reach out and hunt those down who are responsible for it.”