Condoleezza Rice: Mexico a security threat

DANA POINT, Calif., May 7 (UPI) -- Mexico poses a possible security threat to the United States, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says.

The southern U.S. neighbor, where some 2,000 people have died in drug violence so far this year, "is getting to be a very dangerous place," she told National Football League owners in California.

Rice made her comment when asked what region poses the biggest threat to U.S. security. She said it "comes in three flavors" -- Iraq-Middle East, Pakistan-Afghanistan and Mexico, USA Today reported.

Rice, 54, who once declared the role of NFL commissioner to be her "dream job," will shed light on her years in Washington in her memoirs due out in 2011.

She told USA Today she hoped people believe that throughout her time in the Bush administration, as national security adviser and Secretary of State, "I love my country and that I did my best under difficult circumstances."

The Bush administration "didn't always succeed, but we made the country a better and safer place," said Rice, now a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a public policy research center that studies politics and economics.

"I'm grateful that there wasn't another attack on American territory in the years that we were there," she told the newspaper. "I'll tell you, after what happened to us on Sept. 11, every other day was Sept. 12. I worried every single day that there might be another attack."

Last week, Rice told Stanford students that "we did not torture anyone" under the Bush administration and that waterboarding was safe, necessary and legal "by definition if it was authorized by the president."