CNN "The Situation Room"- Transcript: Terrorism
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Joining us now, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican congressman, Mike McCaul of Texas. He also serves on the foreign affairs committee.
Mr. Chairman, thanks very much for joining us.
REP. MIKE MCCAUL (R), TEXAS: Thanks, Wolf.
BLITZER: Let me get your quick reaction to what we just heard from the NATO supreme allied commander, General Breedlove. He says Russia's involved in Syria, the equipment is deploying. The anti- aircraft equipment, air-to-air equipment, nothing to do with ISIS. What does it have something to do with?
MCCAUL: I think Russia's feeling the power vacuum. We've had a failure in foreign policy in the region. We have not dealt effectively with Assad or ISIS, and I think Mr. Putin now sees an opportunity to move back into the Middle East since the first time really since the Afghan War. And now we have the Russian, Iran, Syrian geopolitical alliance. I think Mr. Putin has really kind of called checkmate now on the United States in this power move into the region.
BLITZER: It's not surprising they've worked out this intelligence cooperation with Syria. They support Bashar al-Assad's regime, or Iran, for that matter.
What is surprising is that the Iraqi government is part of this Russian intelligence cooperation right now, despite all the U.S. support, military equipment, economic aid and everything else the U.S. has done for Iraq. Are you surprised by that?
MCCAUL: Not really. When I was in Baghdad last May, meeting with the prime minister a week before Ramadi fell, he told me that they are relying almost completely on the Shia militias to fight ISIS. Remember that Shia militias are really a proxy of Iran.
And so Iran is very intent, I think, in moving into the region, into Iraq to control Baghdad. And it's again, been a complete failure of foreign policy and completely withdrawing from the region that has allowed this power vacuum to exist, which I believe created ISIS, created this problem, and now the most disturbing thing is that Russia now is in Damascus, in Syria. They are propping up Mr. Assad.
And I think Assad eventually has to be part of the solution. He is a magnet for the jihadists. And if we can't effectively deal with him, then we cannot solve the political problem in the civil war in Syria.
BLITZER: Mr. Chairman, your committee, the Homeland Security Committee in the House, today released a task force report -- and I've got it here. I've gone through it. A very strong report, bipartisan, not only Republicans. Democrats on board, as well.
And among the various conclusions, and there are many, there are several dozen of the 250 plus Americans who went over there, to work with ISIS, to support ISIS and Syria and Iraq, who are now back in the United States. Are these people at large? Are they operating? Are they under surveillance?
MCCAUL: Well, I have to be somewhat careful in my response. This is the report that we issued. It was a bipartisan report, as you mentioned. The terrorists don't check our partisan affiliation, but again, the numbers are startling. Thirty thousand and growing foreign fighters from 100 different countries, 5,000 with western passports that could possibly get into the United States and hundreds of Americans, many of whom have traveled back into the United States.
We obviously charge anybody that we can who have returned under our Constitution, if we have evidence.
The problem is, in Syria, we don't have a lot of good human intelligence on the ground to provide that evidence as a former federal prosecutor, to charge them. And if we can't charge them, we have to monitor them here in the United States to make sure that we don't have a terrorist event.
I will commend the FBI and homeland security for the 67 arrests of ISIS followers over the last year alone, and some of these being foreign fighters, many of them radicalized over the Internet out of the Syria directives coming into the United States, over the Internet.
BLITZER: Mr. Chairman, we have a lot more to discuss. This is a scathing report, eye-opening report. And one of the conclusions is the U.S. lacks a national strategy in dealing with these foreign fighters, a strategy that has not been in place for a decade now.
Much more with the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee when we come back.
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BLITZER: We're back with the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican Congressman Mike McCaul of Texas. We're talking about a chilling new bipartisan report on the threat posed by foreigners who have gone off to join ISIS, including about 250 Americans.
Mr. Chairman, this report, among other things, it says -- and I'm quoting now -- "that the United States lacks a national strategy, a national strategy, for combatting terrorist travel and has not produced one in nearly a decade." Why hasn't that happened?
MCCAUL: Well, that's -- this is six months of investigations, and to find out we don't have a national strategy is very disturbing, given the high-threat environment that we're in now. Not only to eliminate the threat over there, as the president's been talking to world leaders to deal with ISIS and Mr. Assad, but also a strategy to deal with the countering violent extremists here in the United States, the radicalization of individuals in the United States who we know individuals in Syria are directing through the Internet to activate people, followers, that they have, to kill Americans, to kill and attack military installations.
I don't know why we haven't had a strategy, but that was one of the most glaring errors that we found. I think it's one of the single, biggest recommendations coming out of this report. There are a lot of security gaps in foreign travel, from the region of Syria and Iraq through Istanbul and Turkey into western Europe, and possibly into the United States that we're very concerned about, as well.
But we need to take a very close look at. That's a route that they take.
Every one of these foreign fighters are really a ticking time bomb that could go off anywhere, anytime. And the ones that have returned to the United States are just the ones that we know about, Wolf. I think the problem is, without the adequate human intelligence on the ground, there's a lot that we don't know about, and that's what keeps me up at night.
BLITZER: The fact that there's no strategy and hasn't been a strategy for ten years, nearly seven years of the Obama administration, then the Bush administration before that. I understand the executive branch of the U.S. government has a problem there. What about Congress? Could Congress come up with some strategy?
MCCAUL: Well, that is one of the legislative recommendations that we have in the report is for Congress to direct what the strategy should be in terms of dealing with this crisis. We've never seen numbers like this. We've never seen, you know, this sort of global jihad movement that we have seen expand across Northern Africa and the Middle East and other parts of the world. And as that threat grows over there, so too, are the threats to the homeland that concern me a great deal.
BLITZER: The whole issue of these terrorists, the report also says that Americans are being radicalized, authorities are too strained now. They're having difficulty monitoring, intercepting suspects. What's the problem?
MCCAUL: We have, you know, on the -- we have spent billions of dollars to attack militarily, to keep them out of the country. But we spend very little and have little manpower looking at the prevention side of this piece, to de-radicalize people, get them on the off-ramp, if you will, like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber was kicked out of his mosque for being too radical. Yet, we didn't know about that.
[17:20:14] And I think reaching out to these communities and having those types of programs in the United States could go a long ways. But the resources are stretched very thin within the Homeland Security Department and the FBI. They have to prioritize.
And the fact is, the threat is getting worse, not better. The numbers are getting higher, not lower. And the chatter and the volume is getting extremely high right now. And that's what concerns me, I think, the most.
BLITZER: Yes, it concerns a lot of people. James Comey, the FBI director, told me a few months ago, ISIS now represents the most significant threat, terror threat, to the U.S. homeland.
Very quickly, a journalist with the U.K.'s "Daily Express," supposedly embedded with ISIS, now saying that ISIS is planning on trying to get a hold of nuclear weapons to kill hundreds -- hundreds of millions of people, several hundred million people, supposedly. I guess the bottom line question is, could ISIS get a hold of nuclear weapons?
MCCAUL: I think it would be difficult. I have had briefings on this. But their intent is very clear. They do want to obtain a nuclear device.
Wolf, if you look at the last issue of the ISIS magazine, they actually talk about their intent to obtain a nuclear weapon, use transnational criminal organization and corrupt officials to move that device into the western hemisphere and then across the border from Mexico into the United States. That's in their words, not mine. And when I read that piece, coming straight from ISIS's own publication, it was very chilling.
BLITZER: Very chilling, indeed. I recommend our viewers who are interested in this -- they should be interested -- go online, read your report, final report of the task force on combatting foreign fighter travel. It's, what about 60, 70 pages or so. It is chilling, eye-opening, important work done not just by Republicans but by Democrats, as well.
Mr. Chairman, thanks very much.
MCCAUL: Thank you so much, Wolf.
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