| WASHINGTON – Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, joined CNN’s Chris Cuomo to discuss the state of homeland security on the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The interview follows Tuesday’s hearing on current threats to the homeland.
On the state of our national security:
“I feel proud we’ve made great strides…we have a great intelligence apparatus…We’ve done a great job of training and equipping our first responders. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly. We’ve got a very dangerous world out there, not just domestically but internationally, with more threats than we had 18 years ago, so that’s pretty sobering.
On an emerging threat to the homeland:
“While we have to keep our eye on these foreign threats, the growing threat [of domestic terrorism] here at home is disturbing…These [groups] are starting to use recruitment techniques that foreign terrorists used to use internationally, now these people are using to radicalize here in this country. We had a report from the FBI in may that they currently have over 1,000 cases open on people on our soil that are terrorists; [people] that may be radicalized by foreign terrorist organizations or from right-wing or left-wing groups here in the country.”
On keeping homeland security bipartisan:
“I’ve been on the [Homeland Security] Committee since it was established, when it was still a select committee. We generally aren’t very partisan. In yesterday’s hearing, there was no partisanship. We took…a very sober approach and at the end of the hearing both the chairman and I made the comment this was one of the best hearings we ever had.”
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