Ted Cruz's call for additional surveillance in the nation's
Muslim communities, along with anti-Muslim statements from rival GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, "create a clear and present danger," and they "don't make us more safe," former CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said Wednesday.
"We don't have radicalized communities in the United States," Hayden told MSNBC's
"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough, agreeing with strong statements the one-time Florida lawmaker had just made on the show about Cruz.
"We have some radicalized individuals. We have it within our ability, however, to create radicalized communities and we ought to take every step not to do that."
The United States has a "cultural bent" toward assimilation that is a strategic and operational advantage that makes the United States more safe than Europe, Hayden continued, even putting aside the question of American values.
Scarborough, just before Hayden came on, said that he does believe that "far more aggressive" interrogation techniques are needed, but that he wasn't talking about waterboarding.
But meanwhile, he believes Cruz's call for advanced surveillance on American Muslim communities "makes us less safe."
"If we are going to win the war against Islamic terrorism in the United States, if we're going to make sure we don't end up looking like Europe, we do that by continuing to do what Americans have done for over 200 years, accept immigrants into this country and integrate," said Scarborough.
Further, he commented, Muslim-Americans have more successfully integrated into the United States than in any other non-Muslim country in the world.
"They're pursuing the American dream," Scarborough said. "One percent of Americans are Muslim. Ten percent of doctors in this country, I've read, are Muslim-Americans.
"Muslim-Americans are entrepreneurs. They are leaders in this country. Ted Cruz could not have it more wrong."
And, he continued, "you beat ISIS by having Muslim-Americans embrace the American dream."
Hayden said in Europe, there are some good intelligence services, such as England, France, and Germany, but most of the rest are "under-resourced and over-regulated by their governments."
But he does think that a more aggressive approach needs to be taken about collecting intelligence.
"We need a redo of the conversation we've had with Europeans over the past couple years based upon the distortions that have come out of the [Edward] Snowden revelations and then finally, we need to play offense, too," said Hayden.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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