 Verbatim partial
transcript:
Secretary Chertoff remarks delivered
July 10, 2007, Chicago, IL
We could easily be
attacked. The intent to attack us remains as strong as it was on
September 10, 2001. We've done a lot to degrade the enemy's
capability but the enemy has also done a lot to retool its
capability. You look at their activities around the world-bombings
in North Africa from Al Qaeda, conflict in Somalia with radical
Islamist groups contending for control over Somalia, training
activity taking place in South Asia, the Taliban continuing to try
to regain control of parts of Afghanistan.
I think if you look
at that picture you see an enemy that is improving itself just as
we're improving ourselves. They can't afford to remain static just
as we can't afford to remain static. Our edge is technology and the
vigilance of the ordinary citizen. The foundation of all we do is
our determination to continue to pay attention to this issue and be
willing to tolerate a reasonable amount, not an excessive amount,
but a reasonable amount of inconvenience and cost in order to
maintain homeland security.
If we get into a
road where everybody's attitude is, 'I'm interested in homeland
security but not if it's going to cost me anything, not if it's
going to inconvenience me, not if it's going to be in my backyard,'
then we get complacency and I guarantee we will lose the race with
the terrorists. The one thing they have in abundance is fanatic
devotion to their cause. They continue to harbor grievances over
events that happened six or seven hundred years ago, and if we go
into the attitude of 'let's get over it, it's time to move onto
something else,' then we will lose this competition about our
ability to secure ourselves from those terrorist attacks.
Official
resistance
We've got a host of
measures in place, but we're starting to get some resistance. The
9/11 Commission said that in the hands of a terrorist, a phony
document is a weapon. Yesterday someone brought into my audience
four North Carolina driver's licenses that had been picked up. Each
of them looked valid to anybody except someone who had a lot of
sophisticated tools. They all had the same picture of the same
person and they had four different names. As long as we allow
driver's licenses to be at a level of security where you can
basically get one made on any college campus in the country, we are
throwing the door open for people who want to pretend to be somebody
else.
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 Summer risk
I believe we're
entering a period this summer of increased risk. We've seen a lot
more public statements from Al Qaeda. There are a lot of reasons to
speculate about that but one reason that occurs to me is that
they're feeling more comfortable and raising expectations. In the
last August, and in prior summers, we've had attacks against the
West, which suggests that summer seems to be appealing to them. I
think we do see increased activity in South Asia, so we do worry
about whether they are rebuilding their capabilities. We've struck
at them and degraded them, but they rebuild. All these things have
given me kind of a gut feeling that we are in a period of increased
vulnerability.
Radicals and
Iraq
People who were
going to become radicalized and who were going to becoming suicide
bombers did not need the war in Iraq to do that. It may be a good
rhetorical device now, but in the absence of that, they would have
been radicalized over Afghanistan, or as Bin Laden was, they would
have been radicalized over Armenia and Saudi Arabia, or over the
existence of the state of Israel.
There are many
excuses for radicalization. That's not to say they're an
explanation, but I don't think that our going into Iraq created,
suddenly, a rationale that didn't exist before. I do think that
obviously we're mindful that obviously there is Al Qaeda in Iraq,
there are operatives who are becoming battle-hardened and getting
more experience. We do worry, particularly if we were to take the
pressure off there, that they would begin to look elsewhere for a
fight. Whatever your views about the war, in the situation where we
currently find ourselves, it would be Pollyannaish to believe that
our departure from Iraq is going to settle all those people down and
they're going to say, now we can get back to picnicking. They're
just going to carry the fight elsewhere.
[Text copied from
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