White House Press Corps.org: Press Gaggle by Tony Snow and Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Frances Townsend (Topic: War On Terror)

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Press Gaggle by Tony Snow and Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Frances Townsend (Topic: War On Terror)
— Tuesday, September 05, 2006 —

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Q Five years removed from 9/11, as you go about your work, do you sense a complacency in the American people about the possibility of attacks?

MS. TOWNSEND: Thank you for asking me that. People often will ask me what I think the greatest threat to the American people is, and putting aside the quite obvious threat from Islamic extremism, I do worry about complacency.

Look, I think we should be very -- we should take great pride and satisfaction in the fact that we've not seen an attack in the last five years, and that's a result of both our offensive actions overseas -- a combination of the offense overseas and our defense here at home. But we should not take that to mean -- and it would be tragic for us to take that to mean that we have been wholly successful, and that we will not see another attack.

The best recent example we've seen is this U.K. plot, which was absolutely intended and designed to be an act of mass murder, a second September 11th. And so there should be no doubt in anybody's mind, while we have enjoyed safety over the last five years, there has been a lot of work and a lot of effort gone into it by men and women whose faces and names will never be known, and this is a long war. This is a long effort in which we need not just the federal government, we need our state and local partners and the American people to sustain it.

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Posted by WhiteHousePressCorps.org @ 7:31 PM

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