Frances Townsend

Frances Townsend, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, is a self-described worrier.

At a breakfast Monday with reporters she quipped, "If we were going to go through the long list of things that bother me and that I worry about, we would be here for lunch."

Given the life and death issues she oversees, Townsend's concerns are understandable. Her assignment is coordinating efforts to battle terrorists and protect the nation by a host of disperate government actors, including the fledgling Homeland Security Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department.

The youthful and outgoing Townsend is a rarity in Washington – someone who worked in the top reaches of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. President George Bush has entrusted her with a crucial portfolio. During Bill Clinton's presidency, Townsend rose through a series of increasingly influential Justice Department positions and ended up as counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno for Intelligence Policy.

Townsend spent much of Monday morning responding to a spate of terrorism related stories that broke over the weekend.

On Saturday, the New York Times website reported that the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said that the war in Iraq had made the overall problem of terrorism worse by fueling a new generation of Islamic radicalism. The document is a consensus view produced by the 16 spy agencies within the US government.

Townsend's response: "It is not clear to me that the headline we saw ... that America is less safe, is actually contained in the NIE. The statements that were leaked, once again it was classified information, and that is always damaging. And secondly, what I would say ... is most damaging, frankly, as the director of national intelligence said yesterday, [is that] it is taken out of context. This was a multi-page report which looked at the course of the developing enemy and [is] not inconsistent with what the president said, that ... this network is changing. We have not only a centralized structure where Al Qaeda is the most dangerous enemy, but we also have these more dispersed networks."

Townsend was asked why the US should stay in Iraq if the war there makes the problem of terrorism worse. Her response: "To leave Iraq would make us less safe. There is no question based on the statements by [Osama] bin Laden and [Ayman] Zawahiri. They very much view Iraq as the central front on the war on terror."

A number of the questions at the breakfast were triggered by the stormy interview Fox News anchor Chris Wallace had with former President Clinton. The interview aired on Fox News Sunday.

During the interview, Clinton said that the current administration "thinks Afghanistan is one seventh as important as Iraq." He also said that if he were president, he would have more than 20,000 troops looking for Osama bin Laden. "I got closer to killing him than anybody's gotten since. And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him," a visibly angered Clinton told Wallace.

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