Janet Napolitano and I hadn’t planned to spend New Year’s Eve together.

But there we were on this soggy Thursday, sitting in her office on the outskirts of the city, beside a big, black leather saddle that was a gift from the governor of Sonora, Mexico, when Napolitano was governor of Arizona.

I was working on the last night of the decennium horribile dictu, so I had tried to think of who else might also be burning the midnight oil instead of clinking the midnight bubbly.

The answer was obvious.

The homeland security chief’s terrible week began on Christmas Day when she got a call at her brother’s house in Danville, near San Francisco, telling her about the foiled terrorist attack.

It continued to deteriorate on Sunday when she was pilloried for saying “the system worked” on CNN — even though Robert Gibbs said the same.

After many billions spent, new departments created, the system seemed as permeable as it had prior to 9/11. Once more, the C.I.A. dropped the ball. And once more, information was not collated, which should mean a bad day at Kinko’s, not at counterterrorism headquarters.

On Tuesday, John McCain and Jon Kyl, the two Republican senators from Arizona who had praised Napolitano at her confirmation hearings, stood together, with Kyl saying he no longer felt “totally safe” with her in command.

“He and I spoke and he explained to me that that’s not what he meant,” she said. “And he was misconstrued.”

She said she, too, was misconstrued, and that in other interviews she did on Sunday, she made it clear that she meant the system worked “after the incident.”安全工程师考试 安全工程师考试试题 安全工程师考试报名 安全工程师考试时间 安全工程师考试内容 安全工程师考试试题 安全工程师考试成绩查询法律知识:法律知识热点 安全工程师法律知识热点 法律知识热点辅导 法律知识热点问题法律知识试题 安全工程师法律知识试题 法律知识试题及答案 法律知识试题下载 历年安全工程师法律知识试题 法律知识模拟试题 法律知识模拟试卷管理知识： 管理知识测试安全工程师管理知识 安全工程师管理知识试题安全工程师试题 安全工程师题及答案 安全工程师试题下载安全工程师模拟题 安全工程师模拟试卷生产技术：安全工程师生产技术指导 安全工程师生产技术技巧生产技术试题 安全工程师生产技术试题 安全工程师生产技术真题及答案生产技术模拟试题 安全工程师生产技术模拟题案例： 安全工程师案例 案例成绩查询案例试题 安全工程师案例试题 安全工程师案例试题及答案 安全工程师案例经验技巧安全工程师案例模拟试题

“No excuses, but I was a little focused on what we were doing operationally,” she said. “We were working to deal with the airports and the airliners, so perhaps I was a little distracted.” The important message, she said, was “to immediately tell the American people we were not just cowering somewhere but we were taking this on very, very forcefully.”

Asked about the frustrations of some on the 9/11 Commission, that the description of what went wrong this time was disturbingly similar to what went wrong that time, Napolitano argued that “we are safer now than before 9/11.”

“What this brings home is that we can’t be complacent,” she said. “We have a determined enemy and you can’t put the United States in a big Tupperware container. That’s not our nation. Those are not our values.”

Later she picks up the same theme: “I think we do a disservice if we tell people there are 100 percent guarantees. I think we tell them we’re doing everything we can to reduce risk. I think we tell people that they are also part of the system. I mean, the passengers on this plane were a line of defense, the flight crew were a line of defense. So everybody has a shared responsibility here. You can’t just say, well, this government department or that government department’s got the whole shebang.”

She said criticism that her department had been on auto-pilot before the sky scare was “misguided.”

Asked if her job is particularly thankless, given that only mistakes are recognized, she smilingly made a “don’t feel sorry for me” gesture, rubbing imaginary tears away from her eyes.

I noted that Dick Cheney had gone squirrelly seeing the avalanche of daily threats coming in, and asked how she kept paranoia at bay.

“There’s a lot of it out there,” she said. “I try to keep focused, really trying to ascertain who needs to be our targets.”

Why is it so hard for those charged with keeping us safe to be as imaginative and innovative as filmmakers like James Cameron? “We do have some great technology, but this is not a movie,” she said. “The reality is much more complex and nuanced, and you can’t take human judgment out of it.”

She said that “one of the things that may come out of this awful day is perhaps a renewed sense of urgency,” and that it has spurred her department to “accelerate” talks it was already having about collaborating with the Department of Energy — “which has a phenomenal research budget and capacity.”

She laughed when I wondered if she wished she’d lobbied harder for that Supreme Court spot.

Does anything keep her up at night? Her voice got lower and more serious. “This one has,” she said, “because I want to know how this individual got on this plane with this material. I want to know so we can figure out what we should be doing to defeat that.”

As I left, I asked the secretary if she’d had to cancel her New Year’s Eve plans.

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

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“I guess you’re not going to tell me what they were,” I wondered.

“No,” she replied, her brown eyes twinkling. Just another classified matter at the Department of Homeland Security.

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