Michael Chertoff
Michael Chertoff
Michael Chertoffis an American attorney who was the second United States Secretary of Homeland Security under Presidents George W. Bush andBarack Obama, and co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act. He previously served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a federal prosecutor, and as Assistant U.S. Attorney General. He succeeded Tom Ridge as United States Secretary of Homeland Security on February 15, 2005...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth28 November 1953
CountryUnited States of America
We have made a lot of progress in the first year of Community Shield.
What it means is that a lot of communities were working from a very low base. They either had very small grants the prior year or even no grants.
We're now starting to see the fruits of seeds that were harvested when we started talking about this strategy a year or so ago.
The fact that we have not had a terrorist attack in this country in the last six years is not a cause for complacency or a time to celebrate the end of the struggle. The threat is not going away. The enemy has not lost interest. ...Fundamentally, we're in a struggle about ideology. Terrorists want to remake the world in their own image and it is the image that is intolerant of the kinds of institutions that we cherish.
But one thing that we have done in the last four years is we have really put pressure on the leadership of this organization [Al Qaeda]. We have killed a significant number of leaders. We've captured others. Those that remain have to look over their shoulders, they have to be on the run. So that even if we don't manage to kill or capture them all within four years, what we do do is put the kind of pressure on them that makes them focus on their own skins, as opposed to carrying out attacks.
The Department of Defense took 40 years to get where it got.
By the end of this year our department anticipates issuing a new inexpensive secure travel card for land border crossings.
We're going to need more than just brute enforcement,
We're going to go back and look at all of this after-action, when we have time, but I've got to emphasize something: We are still in the middle of an emergency.
We're going to make sure that victims of this disaster, whatever their economic circumstances, get the necessary financial assistance to ensure that they can obtain a temporary residence for the time being, ... These programs have been designed to give families the maximum amount of flexibility and freedom to decide where they want to relocate and what they want to do over the next few months.
We're going to make sure help is on the way immediately to those who need it,
We're going to have to go house to house in this city. We're going to have to check every single place to find people who may be alive and in need of assistance,
Unless it can be credibly established that a mobilizing Federal resource ... is not needed at the catastrophic incident venue, that resource deploys,
We face an extraordinary threat to our national security and physical safety of the American people of a character that, at least in my lifetime, we have never faced before,