Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to meet with you today.
Last week, we commemorated the one-year anniversary of the most devastating attack our nation has ever experienced—more than 3,000 innocent people killed in a single day.
Today, I want to discuss the task of preventing even more devastating attacks—attacks that could kill not thousands, but potentially tens of thousands of our fellow citizens.
As we meet, state sponsors of terror across the world are working to develop and acquire weapons of mass destruction. As we speak, chemists, biologists, and nuclear scientists are toiling in weapons labs and underground bunkers, working to give the world’s most dangerous dictators weapons of unprecedented power and lethality.
The threat posed by those regimes is real. It is dangerous. And it is growing with each passing day. We cannot wish it away.
We have entered a new security environment, one that is dramatically different than the one we grew accustomed to over the past half-century. We have entered a world in which terrorist movements and terrorists states are developing the capacity to cause unprecedented destruction.
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