??????: Well, we do have a tendency to underrate the talents of our security people. I mean FBI, CIA do a much better job than they're generally credited with.

But the fact is that there is a much less of a risk of terrorism today than there was 15, 20 years ago. I mean 15, 20 years ago we had the Soviet empire. It was financing, training, arming, smuggling, equipping terrorists all over the world, plus all the satellite countries, plus rich Iraq, rich Libya and Iran and so forth. And today the Soviet empire is gone.

Iraq is a shadow of what it was. Iran has less money to spend. Libya actually looks like it's in fear of terrorism itself. So there's less terrorism today. And we're less at risk today than we were in the past. And I found frankly all the rhetoric and all the fear talk and all the how-to-do-it shows on the media forecasting scenarios of chemical weapons attacks in Washington and so forth to be a bit irresponsible and quite overblown.

[...]

??????: Well, nothing's changed for 20 years so far as I can tell, except this ghastly terrorism bill that was passed by this administration, which...

TONY SNOW: Hold on; ghastly why?

?????: Because it creates these star chambers where people are accused of things: they never see evidence, they don't know what they're accused of, they're thrown out of the country. I mean, if we have evidence against people we should introduce it. We shouldn't just say, ``Well, we made a mistake and let you in the country and we're throwing you out, we won't tell you why.''