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When it comes to terrorism, governments seem to suffer from a collective amnesia. All of our historical experience tells us that there can be no purely military solution to a political problem, and yet every time we confront a new terrorist group, we begin by insisting we will never talk to them.

There is a terrorist threat to this country that remains, and I believe that counter-terrorism needs to be the cornerstone of our mission, our vast mission... and aviation security is something that we still have a fair amount of concerns about.

We know that terrorism is going to happen in the future, and we need to be prepared for it.

Aircraft are always going to be something that terrorists are interested in because you bring down an airliner, you have drawn the world's attention.

We can't gather the intelligence we need to foil future attacks, if we are blindly granting terrorists the right to remain silent. But for some reason, we've already done that - with the terrorist who tried to bring down Flight 253.

We continually evaluate the world situation, and we not infrequently make changes to aviation security. We either step it up or we feel sometimes we're in a position to dial it back, and so this is something that happens periodically, and people should not overreact to it or over-speculate about what's going on.

We're told another large-scale terrorist attack is inevitable by those people who have committed so many resources to preventing it. They likely know what they're talking about.

The men and women who make up a plane's crew put their lives in jeopardy each time they fly. It's our job as much as anyone's to make sure we make it as safe as possible up there for them.

Terrorism has once again shown it is prepared deliberately to stop at nothing in creating human victims. An end must be put to this. As never before, it is vital to unite forces of the entire world community against terror.

Since the events of September 11, we've rightfully changed our military strategy so we're now taking the fight to those individuals who aim to do us harm, rather than waiting for another atrocious attack to happen.