Breitbart reports:
A US security official on Wednesday said the country was capable of withstanding another terrorist attack and bouncing back, saying Americans needed to put extremist threats in “perspective.”
Michael Leiter, head of the Nationa Counterterrorism Center, said despite recent successes there was no guarantee that intelligence and law enforcement agencies could prevent every attempt by extremists to attack the United States.
“We’re not going to have a perfect batting average and its important that Americans understand that,” Leiter told a conference on intelligence reform.
I was at that same conference yesterday (more to come in this week’s upcoming column) and I would add that not only was Leiter not the only US official charged with protecting national security to get this point across, but there was another, even more disturbing implication. It isn’t just that officials consider a “perfect batting average” impossibile “for the duration,” as they used to say. It’s that they believe this is the New Normal Forever. They are perfectly satisfied to manage this condition of jeopardy for all of our lifetimes and our children’s lifetimes, as one panelist put it. Forever.
So, for as long as these defeatists stay in office, our national security will exist as a state of siege.
And they even seem to extract a measure of honor from the ordeal:
“It’s important that we approach this with national resilience that in fact shows that this country is not going to be defeated by” extremists, Leiter said.
“We do have to put the threat in perspective,” he said.
Leiter went on to say regarding the conference discussion, “This is an incredibly important conversation to have before an attack occurs and not after.” Because attacks will occur, was the idea. “We have to do everything possible to stop them,” he added. But we shouldn’t see them as “cutting into the very fabric of this society,”
Um, if this is the consensus on national security, I think they already did.