Informant38

How worried should we still be?

QUESTION: Over the last several days, the President has given a number of a speeches in the run-up to the anniversary of 9/11. One of the things that he has done is he has again talked about Iraq in the context of the war on terror. But Democrats disagree about the relevance of Iraq in this context and in fact Senator Jack Reed said yesterday that U.S. action in Iraq was always a goal for the Administration even before 9/11. So whatever Iraq has become now, is that true? Was action in Iraq always a goal?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it depends on how you think about the need to respond to September 11th. If you think that September 11th was simply the 19 hijackers who ran the planes into buildings and perhaps the al-Qaida network and their safe haven in Afghanistan, and that if you've dealt with that you've dealt with the causes of 9/11, then of course you don't see Iraq as a part of the war on terror.

But of course, if you see instead, as the President does, that there is an ideology of hatred that has been born of the problems in the Middle East, then you see that going to the source of that, dealing with the root causes, is very important. And in that context it's very hard to imagine a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein still in power. Iraq is, like the young democracies that are being -- that are growing up in Afghanistan and in other places, those young democracies are the answer to the ideologies of hatred that the terrorists drew upon to cause September 11th. And that's the link between Iraq and the 9/11 events.

Interview With Laurie Kinney of Hearst Broadcasting Corporation
-

QUESTION: How worried should we still be?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, of course, we have to know that the terrorists could strike at any time, and that they may succeed. But that's not how we think about it. We go through every day, the President goes through every day, starting out with a report on his senior intelligence advisors about threats to the homeland. When there is a threat to the homeland, they're a threat of a kind that we saw just recently in the London plot. The President now has an apparatus that can really stay on top of that in follow-up information. But as I said, we're safer, but not yet safe.

[...]

QUESTION: Do you think they'll try to strike here again?

SECRETARY RICE: I think there's no doubt that practically every day terrorists are planning and plotting to try to hurt the United States again. Washington is obviously a prime target, because of its symbolic meaning. But we've seen that it's not just the United States, it's Great Britain and it was Madrid and it was Bali and it was Jordan. This is a worldwide threat, a worldwide network that wants to attack nations everywhere. So we have an obligation to work with our international partners on intelligence sharing, on getting information from detainees because the real long pole in the tent for stopping the next attack is can you find out before that attack happens, and that means getting to terrorists and getting to know what they know because they know best what's being planned.

[...]

QUESTION: Last quick question. The argument's been made that if we're not going to fight them here; we're fighting them overseas. And the reason we're fighting them over there is so we don't have to fight them here.
Many people say that's just kind of a false argument.
What's your response?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it is absolutely the case.

Interview With Morris Jones of Sinclair Broadcast Group
-

Condoleeza Rice
-
ScoopNZ 09.09.06