"Our next president will need to exercise leadership to defeat radical Jihadists, perhaps the most important national security challenge facing our nation" said Congressman Pete Hoekstra during a Michigan speaking tour for the Claremont Institute during Presidents' Day week. As director of state and congressional relations for Claremont, I coordinated the tour.
Hoekstra is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and one of Washington's most respected voices on the threat of radical Islam. Addressing small VIP meetings in three cities, as well as the editorial boards of both Detroit newspapers, the congressman from Holland spoke informally; but his prepared speech text, given below in full, captures the main points he made.
DEFENDING AMERICA IN A DANGEROUS WORLD
US Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-MI2
Remarks Prepared for Delivery at Claremont Institute Briefings
Birmingham, Michigan – Feb. 18, 2008
Lansing, Michigan – Feb. 19, 2008
Grand Rapid, Michigan – Feb. 20, 2008
I want to thank the Claremont Institute for inviting me to speak to you today on serious national security challenges facing our nation. Our next president will need to exercise leadership to defeat radical Jihadists, to deal more effectively with the challenges of globalization, and to handle exploding entitlement expenditures, and health care. These represent great opportunities as well as very difficult issues. I will focus on one today, the threat from radical Jihadists, perhaps the most important national security challenge facing our nation.
Some of you may have heard that I spent a lot of time and effort last fall on the "fence" issue. Not the one to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the border with Mexico. This one is different. It is a fence in my congressional district to keep turtles from crossing a road.
That’s right. After Governor Jennifer Granholm used a state government shut-down to force through a massive tax increase to close a $1.75 billion budget deficit, Michigan Democrats decided to spend $318,000 to prevent turtles from crossing a particular stretch of federal highway.
This would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Michigan is in crisis. Taxes have been increased on services and income, unemployment remains 63 percent higher than the national average and people are leaving the state because they cannot find work. Michigan Democrats responded by shutting down the government, raising taxes and trying to protect turtles. Michigan Democrats have failed to focus on what is most important to the people they represent: a state government that works. In short, they have failed to govern responsibly.
What Democrats are doing in Michigan is no different from what they are trying to do/or have done in Washington on national security.
Last May, the House and Senate passed versions of the 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill that directed our intelligence agencies to write a National Intelligence Estimate or "NIE" on Climate Change. At a time when there is a shortage of intelligence analysts to follow critical subjects like al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea, Democrats want to divert intelligence resources to study global warming.
The House floor debate on the climate change NIE was quite instructive. One prominent Democrat actually tried to assert a link between climate change and terrorism. Other Democrats simply insisted Republicans "just don’t get it" about global warming. House Republicans argued that the value added of the U.S. Intelligence Community has always been the production of secret information by secret means -- and that these secret means are a scarce and costly resource. We repeatedly asked why analysis of the environment needed to be done in secret.
House Republicans noted that the environmental NIE idea was a throw back to the 1990s when CIA Director John Deutch squandered intelligence funding on similar politically-correct projects like the "DCI Environmental Center," the work of which CIA officers nicknamed "bugs and bunnies" analysis. The DCI Environmental Center tasked spy satellites to take photos of sea turtle nests and volcanoes. It also produced an annual Earth Day edition of the President’s Daily Brief.
Human intelligence collection or "HUMINT" is both expensive and risky. One can imagine how the morale of CIA operations officers in the field plummeted when they received intelligence collection requirements from Langley asking them to covertly acquire "environmental intelligence." Moreover, did
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it make sense to use America’s over-tasked and extremely expensive spy satellites on issues that were not classified and easily could have been collected by commercial satellites? We still don’t know the extent to which these valuable intelligence resources were wasted in the 1990s on environmental collection or other frivolous topics.
We do know that the Clinton Administration expended scarce intelligence resources on environmental analysis while it was drastically cutting the CIA budget which, according to George Tenet, left the CIA "in chapter 11" when he became CIA Director in 1997. We also know that the CIA’s human collection effort was gutted in the 1990s due to the “Deutch Doctrine,” a politically correct policy for American intelligence implemented by Clinton CIA Director John Deutch that barred U.S. intelligence agencies from dealing with human sources with shady backgrounds or human rights abuses. Unfortunately, this was exactly the kind of person likely to have information on terrorist planning.
Every spy satellite photo taken during the 1990s of volcano plumes and every human source dropped due to the “Deutch Doctrine” meant less intelligence collection against al Qaeda, its capabilities, and its intentions. The erosion of American intelligence that resulted from “environmental intelligence” and the gutting of the U.S. intelligence budget in the 1990s not only made our nation more vulnerable to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they created a vacuum of information on terrorist leaders, planning, and activities.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration acted to fill this intelligence vacuum with aggressive anti-terrorist intelligence programs and improved intelligence cooperation with our allies. These efforts stopped over two dozen terrorist plots and protected the lives of the U.S. Homeland and American troops abroad.
It seems many Democrats want to return to the backward, politically correct intelligence policies of the 1990s. Democrats have undermined anti-terrorist programs by attempting to extend U.S. Constitutional rights to terror suspects captured abroad. Democrats also have tried to accord terrorists habeas corpus rights, safeguard the privacy of terrorist communications, and protect terrorists from unreasonable searches and seizures. Democrats have tried to close Guantanamo Bay and incarcerate dangerous al Qaeda detainees in the United States.
You also may have heard about the fierce battle waged in Congress over the last six months over allowing the Administration the freedom to conduct surveillance of al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists. Many Democrats have claimed that electronic surveillance of al Qaeda terrorists outside of the United States somehow amounts to "domestic spying" and the monitoring of foreign terrorist finances in a foreign country means the U.S. Government is prying into the financial records of ordinary Americans. Democrats have been unable to produce a single instance of an American whose privacy rights were violated by these programs.
Democrat Senator Richard Durbin recently has led the charge for a criminal investigation of the CIA over its use of the waterboarding enhanced interrogation technique against three foreign terrorist suspects. This technique was used over five years ago on just three terrorist detainees believed to possess important information on imminent terrorist attacks that would have resulted in the loss of human life. Although waterboarding is no longer used by the CIA or by any other U.S. Government agency, and has never been used by the U.S. military, a priority of the Democrats over the last month has been to investigate waterboarding and attack the Bush Administration for using it.
These cases are examples of Democrats trying to score political points against the Bush Administration by prosecuting those who carried out legal U.S. anti-terrorist programs. It is time to stop this deeply irresponsible politicization of these programs and put our nation’s security first. It is time to start protecting our nation against terrorism and stop prosecuting intelligence professionals trying to protect us.
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I want to talk briefly about the global threat from radical Jihadists, adherents to a totalitarian political ideology that disguises itself as a religion. One only has to listen to the statements by Osama bin Ladin and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, to understand the seriousness of this threat, its global implications, and the determination of radical Jihadists to strike the American homeland.
Osama bin Laden declared "war" against the United States with little fanfare in 1996 when he issued a "Fatwa" titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." He acted on this so-called declaration of war with al Qaeda attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000.
Bin Laden claims parallels between the American presence in Iraq and the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. For example, according to a strategy document posted to the al Qaeda website Alned on April 9, 2003, "With guerilla warfare the Americans were defeated in Vietnam and the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. This is the method that expelled the direct Crusader colonialism from most of the Muslim lands."
The purpose of al Qaeda’s terrorist campaign is supposedly to establish Osama bin Laden’s brand of radical Islam over what he claims is "the Caliphate," a region that in bin Laden’s mind constitutes historical "Muslim lands" extending from Morocco to Indonesia. He said in 1998 that "the pious caliphate will start from Afghanistan." Zawahiri made a similar statement in an October 2005 letter when he wrote "the goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet." In 2006, Zawahiri said, "The reinstatement of Islamic rule … is the individual duty of every Muslim … with every land occupied by infidels."
The left has asserted that Iraq is a distraction in the war against radical Jihadists and that the U.S. should withdraw to focus on the so-called "real" war on terror, which some of them assert is confined to Afghanistan. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 2004, Osama bin Laden said, "Baghdad is "the capital of the Caliphate." In July 2005, Ayman Zawahiri gave this detailed four-stage plan for Iraq in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the now-deceased head of al Qaeda in Iraq:
"The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq.
The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate – over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq …
The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.
The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity."
We have seen the world over that the threat from radical Jihadists is a global threat. It also is a sophisticated threat that has spread its message, recruited followers, and planned terrorist attacks using the internet, satellite television, and even computer games. Al Qaeda activity has been reported in dozens of countries including China, Canada, Sweden, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Yemen, and Serbia.
The UK, Spain, Indonesia, Algeria, and Turkey suffered horrible terrorist attacks by radical Jihadists since 2001. Radical Jihadist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas are terrorizing Lebanon and Israel with the backing of Syria and Iran. Recent Hamas violence in Gaza and possible new targeting of Israel by al Qaeda may point to significant security challenges in the near future for the state of Israel. Late last week the press reported these new radical Jihadist threats:
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o In Denmark, three jihadists were arrested in a plot to murder a cartoonist for drawing an editorial cartoon years ago that they found objectionable.
o In the Philippines, jihadsts with Abu Sayaaf and Jemah Islamiya, are said to be plotting the assassination of the Filipino president and bombing Western embassies.
o In Iraq, the reputed leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq posted on a jihadi Web site a call for war with Israel and for jihadist to use Iraq as a launching pad to seize Jerusalem.
o Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, raised the prospect of war with Israel declaring, “Zionists, if you want this kind of open war, let the whole world listen: Let this war be open.”
Radical Jihadists are affecting Europe’s rapidly growing Muslim population and has led to so-called "home grown" Islamist terrorists.
o Europe is also threatened by a subtle threat from radical Islamists who hope to conquer European states from the inside by setting up parallel Islamic legal systems and culture in the belief that higher Muslim birthrates and immigration will put them in the majority in many European in the next 25-50 years.
o The Dutch intelligence service has published some excellent papers in English about how radical Jihadist leaders are trying to work within the Netherlands to establish a separate Islamic society and to pressure the growing Dutch Muslim population to adhere to their leadership and strict Sharia law.
o Archbishop of Canterbury Rowlan Williams set off a firestorm of criticism when he recently suggested that the UK should accommodate Muslims by permitting a separate system of Islamic Sharia law so British Muslims would not be torn between their religious loyalties and their loyalties to the British state.
Although America has not been subjected to an attack by radical Jihadists since 2001, this has not been for a lack of trying. The United States and its allies foiled at least two dozen such attacks against the United States and U.S. citizens since 2001, including:
• An August 2006 plot by "home grown" UK Jihadists to blow up 10 civilian airliners flying from London to the United States;
• The May 8, 2007 arrest of six foreign born Muslims who planned to attack Fort Dix, New Jersey with rocket propelled grenades, mortars, and guns; and
• The September 2007 arrest of al Qaeda-linked radicals in Germany and Denmark for planning to set off hydrogen peroxide-based explosives against locations known to be frequented by Americans in Europe.
There also is no doubt that al Qaeda has long had an interest in obtaining weapons of mass destruction. Bin Laden reportedly said in a 1998 letter:
“We call for the Muslim brothers to imitate Pakistan as to the possession of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons."
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Since this letter, there have been many reports of al Qaeda’s pursuit of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, including documents found at former al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan on how to construct chemical weapons and nuclear "dirty" bombs.
Radical Jihadists are a real and undeniable global threat to our nation and the world. This is what Congress should be focusing on. The threat from radical Jihadists should be the central issue of the 2008 presidential campaign.
There are many other serious security threats that Congress and the media are ignoring.
• For example, very little attention is being paid these days to China. Last week, a Department of Defense analyst and a former Boeing engineer were arrested for spying for China. Meanwhile, the World Trade Organization last week condemned Chinese commercial practices for using a protectionist tariff to restrict the importation of foreign auto parts.
• The left sees Iran through rose-colored glasses, believing that its nuclear program can be addressed through negotiations despite numerous violations of past agreements and negotiations. There also has been little interest by Congressional Democrats in holding Iran accountable for providing deadly weapons to Iraqi insurgents, especially IEDs, that have been used to kill and maim American troops.
• Recent developments in North Korea and Iraq illustrate Democratic lack of seriousness on international security. North Korea missed three deadlines in 2007 to come clean on its nuclear program, including a crucial December 31, 2007 deadline. Press reports surfaced in December 2007 of a possible secret North Korean uranium enrichment program. Congressional Democrats have been strangely silent about North Korea’s recent behavior. However, to score political points against the Bush Administration, Democrats have not hesitated to attack the Iraqi government for not implementing governmental reforms fast enough. For example, on February 10, 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed the “surge” in Iraq had produced no gains because she claimed it had not achieved its goal of allowing the Iraqi government to restore political stability. The Speaker’s assertion was unfortunate because it ignored political achievements being made in Iraq as well as a significant improvement in the security environment and the economy. Even the New York Times admitted last week there has been political progress in Iraq in a February 14th article that noted the Iraqi parliament recently passed important legislation to end impasses, including a 2008 budget.
• In early September 2007, Israel conducted an airstrike against a building in northern Syria that the press claims was a secret nuclear facility. Since then, Syria has cleared the supposed site of all debris. The Bush administration has only briefed a handful of congressmen on this incident. I was one of the congressmen to be briefed and, based on what I was told, I believe it is important that all Members of Congress be briefed on this information. While I disagree with the Administration’s excessive secrecy on this matter, I attribute the Democrats’ odd lack of interest in this issue as willful ignorance – they don’t want to hear any "inconvenient facts" that could force them to oppose and/or review negotiations with the countries who might be implicated.
• Congress also had no reaction to the Bush Administration’s announcement last week that it was imposing financial sanctions against Syrian officials due to Syria’s efforts to undermine stability in Iraq and to undercut Lebanon’s sovereignty and democracy.
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• Congress also is ignoring instability in former Soviet Republics, the plight of democracy in Russia, and the situation in Cuba and Venezuela. Congress only woke up to the precarious situation in Pakistan after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto by radical Jihadists on December 27, 2007.
Let me now go through what we have been doing on these issues and where we should go from here.
(1) First, all Americans and Members of Congress must recognize that to defeat al Qaeda and radical Jihadism, we must employ tough anti-terrorism programs.
American needs robust intelligence collection and analysis and covert programs to track and defeat terrorist activities. Our elected leaders in Washington must do a better job explaining the worldwide terrorist threat to the American people. Politicians must stop playing “gotcha” with the CIA over legitimate and legal programs to track and capture terrorists.
(2) Second, we need to rebuild U.S. intelligence capabilities that were devastated in the 1990s. I regret to say we have a long way to go, as former 9/11 Commission Member John Lehman noted in a Washington Post op-ed. Lehman wrote:
"Since September 11 there’s been no real action to fix the government’s most glaring failure: the dysfunctional intelligence bureaucracies whose incompetence exposed us to surprise attack. Not a single person has been disciplined, and most have been promoted . . . And although the September 11 Commission identified the urgent need for better people, better collection, better analysis and better information sharing, nearly every person in this new bureaucracy has been drawn from the career services. Far from bringing in outsiders with fresh perspectives, the bureaucracy has, in effect, repelled all boarders. . . Authority is spread so thinly that no one can say yes and too many people can say no. Management becomes detached from what is going on in the field, the labs and the analytic shops. The result is delay and indecision – exactly what we saw before September 11."
The Washington Post published Lehman’s op-ed on November 16, 2005. Since that time, the problems Lehman identified have gotten worse -- and the Director of National Intelligence staff has more than doubled. If intelligence is the tip of the spear protecting America, that spear is very dull.
This is truly frightening. We urgently need dynamic, aggressive, risk taking, and innovative intelligence to deal with post-9/11 threats. Our intelligence agencies must operate with the efficiency and speed of the corporate world to keep up with al Qaeda. That’s what was the hope behind the intelligence reforms Congress approved in late 2004 when it passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. We intended the Director of National Intelligence to head a lean coordinating staff that would cut through the bureaucracy and make sure intelligence agencies worked together efficiently on urgent threats, to create a dynamic, “information age” intelligence community.
Barely two years old, the ODNI has developed into a large and lumbering bureaucracy almost entirely composed of people from the old intelligence bureaucracy. If you were to look at a chart of top ODNI officials you would see the same set of characters who ran the U.S. Intelligence Community on September 10, 2001. Instead of playing the limited coordinating role that Congress intended, these career bureaucrats are doing what career bureaucrats do best: empire building -- growing their staff and stealing turf from the intelligence agencies they are supposed to be transforming.
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Meanwhile the ODNI has failed to rebuild intelligence capabilities devastated during the 1990s, leaving us unprepared for post-9/11 threats. Although U.S. human intelligence efforts pale in comparison with that targeted against the United States by Russia, China, and Cuba, the ODNI has done very little to fix them.
A bipartisan consensus is building in the House that intelligence reform has failed and must be reworked. There also are many senators who believe this. To protect our nation against the growing threat from radical Jihadists, it is vital that we move rapidly to rebuild our intelligence capabilities and get intelligence reform right. The model that helped defeat the former Soviet Union is incapable of defeating the threats we face today. The threats have evolved. Our intelligence community has not.
(3) Third, we must enact a robust program to prosecute anyone who compromises sensitive national security information, especially highly classified details of anti-terrorism programs. Since 2001, there have been over a dozen serious media leaks against anti-terrorist programs that have made terrorists safer while underlining or rendering worthless crucial anti-terrorist program the United States spent millions of dollars to develop. Since 2001, no one has been prosecuted for these leaks. Democrats have not only failed to condemn these leaks, they have exploited them to distort anti-terrorist programs as threats to the rights and sensibilities of Americans.
(4) Fourth, we need to recognize what is at stake in Iraq/and around the world and conduct the war effectively. No issue divides Washington more than Iraq. And no issue in my time in Congress has been dealt with more irresponsibly by a political party. Senator Lieberman said in a speech last October:
"Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush."
The surge is working. Casualties are way down. Al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq. But you wouldn’t know this from what you’ve been hearing from Democrats or the main stream media. We have many challenges ahead of us in Iraq and in the Middle East. Instead of finding new ways to pound the Bush Administration over Iraq, Congress needs to focus on the way ahead and how to ensure Iraq does not fall into the hands of radical Jihadists or Iran.
Let me reiterate that I am happy we removed Saddam Hussein from power. The world and the Iraqi people are much better off that this brutal dictator is gone.
However, I believe there can be no doubt that the war in Iraq has been badly managed and very poorly staffed. The Bush team appeared to think it could transform Iraq "on the cheap" and employed far too few troops for far too long.
The State Department also has been clueless on Iraq and has changed its senior representatives and ambassadors every year since 2003, allowing no continuity or long-range planning. State’s record in mismanaging post-war Iraq was explained in detail in a February 8, 2008 resignation letter by a State Department lawyer who served in Iraq. The lawyer charged the State Department was not up to the task of performing its mission in Iraq and was hopelessly weighed down with bureaucracy, both in Baghdad and in Washington. The former State lawyer sees State officers as an impediment to progress in Iraq and believes only by bringing in more competent outside experts can real progress be made.
The President and his team to this day have not laid down a compelling vision for Iraq nor have they been able to convincingly explain how Iraq is part of the threat from radical Jihadism. The President has never fully explained the likely length of our presence in Iraq. Instead of preparing Americans for sacrifices
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and casualties in Iraq, he told them not to worry and go shopping. The President’s failure to articulate what is at stake in Iraq allowed his political opponents to do so, which undermined support both for the war and for the president himself.
I am hopeful that the success of the surge in Iraq coupled with the American public tiring of Democrat efforts to exploit the war for political gain will create an opportunity for the next president on Iraq. The next president needs to articulate and implement a strategy for Iraq that addresses American security goals that Americans can understand. This must be a collaborative strategy with Congress and with our allies.
(5) Fifth, we need to transform our national security apparatus. David Horowitz wrote on September 11, 2001, "This country is at war, and we are far behind in securing our citizens’ safety and preparing for our defense."
Six years later, we still have a long way to go to adequately protect our nation. We need to transform more than just our intelligence and defense capabilities. The State Department and other government agencies must be reformed to better deal with post-9/11 threats. We need to develop a foreign policy capability worthy of the world’s sole remaining superpower politically, militarily, and economically. These reforms must create a U.S. foreign policy capability that is more efficient, more willing to take risks, and more adept at selling American national security policies both at home and abroad, and promoting the American brand.
Major foreign policy agencies failed to reform to protect us from post-9/11 threat. The National Security Council, CIA, DNI, and Departments of State and Defense have really not been transformed to address new global threats. The Justice Department, instead of confronting extremist groups in the United States is coddling them. For example, Justice gave financial support to a conference last Labor Day weekend with the Islamic Society of North America, which has been implicated as having ties to organizations linked to terrorists. Moreover, in addition to the State Department’s incompetence in Iraq, it also had no plan on how to rebuild Iraq or how to roll back the Iranian or North Korean nuclear programs.
Much the same is true for the ODNI and CIA, which surrendered to the bureaucracy and failed to implement any meaningful intelligence reform. These agencies could not explain to me what a covert agent was when I asked them about this several months ago concerning the Valerie Plame case nor could they give me a list or even acknowledge that one existed of covert agents.
(6) Sixth, we need to transform U.S. public diplomacy and outreach. U.S. public diplomacy and foreign radio and television broadcasting must be revamped to counter the al Qaeda message. We need US Government radio and television programs targeted at Muslim lands need to provide a more effective and appropriate U.S. message instead of recordings of Brittany Spears. The U.S. Information Agency should be reestablished as a separate agency from the State Department dedicated to broadcasting the U.S. message worldwide. America must work aggressively to combat the radical Jihadist use of the internet to spread its message and recruit followers.
(7) Seventh, the United States must become energy independent. America’s national security and economy should not be subject to the whims of oil producing states, many of which are prone to instability or are current or potential supporters of terrorism and/or radical Jihadists. For example, in November 2007, America’s top ten oil suppliers were Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq, Russia, Angola, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom.
America must take the following steps to become energy independent:
* We must increase domestic production by pursuing domestic sources of energy, drawing from our broad and diverse base of options, including opening the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling.
* We must focus on energy security by shifting federal priorities to emphasize issues of energy security, particularly at the Department of Energy.
* We must promote nuclear technology by accelerating the construction of new nuclear power plants to ensure that nuclear power continues to be a part of a robust, cleaner, and reliable energy mix.
* Finally, we must invest in research by dramatically increase federal spending on research, development, and demonstration projects that hold promise for diversifying our energy supply and increasing our energy efficiency.
In conclusion, it will be the task of the next president to transform our government to deal with 9/11 era threats by forming a new administration that will clearly articulate what is at stake for our nation and take steps to defend it. To do this, the next Administration must spearhead the following priorities on a bipartisan basis to protect our nation:
* Identify, contain, and ultimately defeat radical Jihadists
* Give our intelligence community the tools it needs to be effective;
* Prevent terrorist attacks and stop prosecuting intelligence professionals for trying to prevent these attacks.
Our next Republican president, whoever he is, must exercise strong leadership, recognize and communicate the threats to America’s very survival, rebuild our intelligence community and our entire foreign policy apparatus, and build bridges to Congress and the American people so we fight and win this battle together. He needs to give his all to fulfill his most important responsibility as president: to protect the security of the United States. Thank you.