WASHINGTON – The heads of Congress’ intelligence committees warned Sunday that America is less safe from terrorism today than it has been in recent years.
The dire warning came from both sides of the aisle, with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) agreeing that the threat is worse.
“Terror is up worldwide. The statistics indicate that,” Feinstein declared on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“The fatalities are way up. … There are new bombs, very big bombs — trucks being reinforced for those bombs,” she said. “There are bombs that go through magnetometers. The bomb maker is still alive. There are more groups than ever. And there is huge malevolence out there.”
She said the threat to the US has grown with the rise of “more groups, more fundamentalist, more jihadist, more determined to kill to get to where they want to get.”
On the same show, Rogers said that he would “absolutely agree that we’re not safer today for the same very reasons.”
“The pressure on our intelligence services to get it right to prevent an attack are enormous. And it’s getting more difficult,” he cautioned.
He also warned against letting the Obama administrations successes killing top al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, lull Americans into a false sense of security.
“People think that, well, we’ve got this thing beat. And that’s just not the case,” said Rogers.
He said that the public needs to stop focusing on the National Security Agency programs disclosed by spy-secrets leaker Edward Snowden, and worry about the real threat.
“We’ve got to shake ourselves out of this pretty soon and understand that our intelligence services are not the bad guys,” he said. “The bad guys, the al Qaeda affiliates, Russian intelligence services, Chinese intelligence services, the Quds Force [in Iran] that operates terrorism events all around the world, those are the folks we need to focus our attention and our energy on in order to keep America safe.”