Katie Couric ask the candidates why we haven’t been attacked since 9/11 and how to prevent another attack. Here’s the weakest answer ever:
Katie Couric: Why do you think there has not been another terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? And as president, how would you prevent that from happening again?
Barack Obama: Well … I think that the initial invasion into Afghanistan disrupted al Qaeda. And that was the right thing to do. I mean, we had to knock out those safe havens. And that, I think, weakened them.
We did some work in strengthening our homeland security apparatus here. Obviously, the average person knows that when they go to the airport, because they are goin’ through taking off their shoes … all that.
The problem is when we got distracted by Iraq. We gave al Qaeda time to reconstitute itself. And we now know, based on all the intelligence available to us that they, in fact, have set up safe havens back in Afghanistan, the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are not carrying out very aggressive actions against U.S. troops in Afghanistan and they are training to attack the United States once again. So now, my hope obviously is that we continue to prevent them from being able to move at all out of those safe havens. But our intelligence indicates … that the danger, the likelihood, of a potential attack is significantly higher now. And that has been an enormous mistake that I intend to correct when I’m president of the United States.