Counterterrorism Chief Defends Record

By A.J. Swartwood

In response to rising criticisms that the American counterterrorism team has been more lucky than good in the last year, Michael Leiter, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, argued Wednesday morning that good intelligence, hard work, and dedication help officials make their own luck.

“No single tool… will stop all the attacks, but as a whole they create a system that reduces the likelihood of terrorist success, and that is the luck that we are working to create,” said Leiter, who invoked Thomas Jefferson’s quote, ” I find the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”

With the recent arrests in Portland related to attempted terrorist plot and a seemingly constant stream of threats, Leiter acknowledged the “frenetic” pace of attempted attacks over the last year, but reiterated that the pieces are in place to reduce the risk of attacks to the fullest extent possible.

Leiter conceded that counterterrorism will never be perfected, nor can a terror free future be expected, but that does not mean the NCTC or the American government does not set that as their goal.

“We aim for perfection, but perfection will not be achieved,” he conceded. “But to say that we will not successfully stop all terrorist attacks is certainly not to say we are not trying to stop all attacks, we are.”