Terrorists are waging war on western civilization, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said Sunday, and they are "out to kill innocent people."
"When you look around the world, whether it's in Yemen, whether it's in Syria, whether it's in Iraq or Afghanistan, or in north Africa with Boko Haram, we've got terrorist elements that are carrying out terrorist acts," the North Carolina Republican told ABC's "This Week." "If you put that collection together, what you've got is a war on western civilization."
And it doesn't matter "which terrorist group we insert into the blank," Burr continued, as "the commitment is that they're out to kill innocent people. And whether it happens in Paris or London or New York, we've got to collectively do our best to make sure that we thwart those attacks."
Burr said that he is most concerned about the buzz on social media, because whether it comes from a terrorist group such as the Islamic State, or is just on chatrooms, "the target is to just go out and kill law enforcement and other officials," [and] that's a very difficult thing to detect."
He predicts that the investigation into last week's attacks on the Charlie Hebdo publication and the subsequent killings in a Jewish supermarket and of police officers will go on for some time, and hopefully, those leads will allow the United States to thwart a terror attack.
Burr has voiced concerns that attacks like those in Paris could happen more often, given the extent that terrorists are going in and out of Syria and into places like Yemen.
"I think what we've got to do is be vigilant at home to make sure we keep in place those tools that give us the ability to triage that data in a way that we can track down anybody here in the U.S.," said Burr.
But the United States' capabilities are stretched, said Burr, pointing out that "we're the best in the world from from an intelligence-gathering capacity and from a standpoint of the law enforcement capacity."
The French, though "have many more tools from a standpoint of law enforcement and how they can detain people, [and] the interrogations they can put people through, than we do in the United States, said Burr, but still, the terrorists were able to slip through.
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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