Hoekstra: Homegrown Jihad Threat Growing

July 22, 2010 06:40


“This is a bureaucracy that is more concerned with growing itself than its ultimate mission, which is keeping America safe, a bureaucracy that doesn’t communicate with other parts of the bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that is more concerned with its lifeblood than the lifeblood of the country,” he responds.

By: Jim Meyers at Newsmax.com


Rep. Pete Hoekstra tells Newsmax that Americans should be “very worried” about al-Qaida’s new efforts to recruit Muslims in the United States to commit terrorist acts at home.

The Michigan Republican, who is running for governor this year, also says proponents of a mosque close to Ground Zero in New York should be “more sensitive” to people with emotional ties to the site.

Rep. Hoekstra was first elected in 1992 and is the Ranking Republican on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. A critic of the intelligence bureaucracy in the past, he was asked about a recent Washington Post report stating that since 9/11, top-secret intelligence gathering has grown too big to manage.

“This is a bureaucracy that is more concerned with growing itself than its ultimate mission, which is keeping America safe, a bureaucracy that doesn’t communicate with other parts of the bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that is more concerned with its lifeblood than the lifeblood of the country,” he responds.

“So I’m not surprised that we’ve moved to this point. We’ve been fighting it for the last four or five years. Those of us who have watched and worked on the Intelligence Committee know that it’s too big and it’s not as effective as it should be.”

To streamline the intelligence apparatus, Hoekstra says, “what you need is leadership out of the Director of National Intelligence. We created that position in 2004 and had the first director approved in 2005. We’re now soon going to be on our fourth director.

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