As alleged Boston bomber Dzhohkar Tsarnaev was about to be arraigned, Rudy Giuliani told Congress Wednesday that “political correctness” by the Obama administration may have thwarted efforts to stop the Boston attack.
Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, the former New York mayor complained that the administration has become too cautious about identifying potential Islamic terror threats.
“You can’t fight an enemy you don’t acknowledge,” Giuliani told the hearing, which was called to examine intelligence breakdowns that might have allowed the Boston bombers to carry out their attack.
“To confront this threat effectively, we have to purge ourselves of the practice of political correctness when it goes so far that it interferes with our rational and intellectually honest analysis of the identifying characteristics the help a discover these killers in advance.”
Michael Leiter, former head of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, dismissed the claim that political correctness has compromised the fight against terrorism.
The idea “is simply beyond me,” he testified.
Leiter noted that fewer than 20 people have died in Islamist-inspired attacks in the U.S. since Sept. 11, “so our record is far from perfect but it’s very good.”
Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) argued that based on its rhetoric, the Obama White House “seeks to return to a pre-9/11 approach to fighting terrorism on our soil.”
The Obama administration abandoned the term “war on terror” soon after Obama’s election, and during his reelection campaign Obama asserted that al-Qaeda was “on its heels.”
In February, however, Obama spokesman Jay Carney said that the U.S. is at “war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates.”
In his testimony, Giuliani argued that, “We have by no means conquered well-organized Islamic terrorist groups. And whether we recognize that we are at war with them is almost completely irrelevant, because they are at war with us.”
He added, “The real question is: Are we going to recognize that they are at war with us, or are we going to fool ourselves into a very dangerous state of denial?”
Giuliani echoed claims by a member of the committee, Rep. Pete King (R-Long Island), that political correctness trickles down to investigators in cases involving religious extremists.
Giuliani cited red flags leading up to Army Maj. Nidal Hasan’s alleged killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009.
“For example — and this is with the benefit of hindsight — there would have been a much greater chance of preventing Fort Hood, and possibly — and this I emphasize is possibly — the Boston bombing, if the relevant bureaucracies had been less reluctant to identify the eventual killers as potential Islamic extremist terrorists,” Giuliani said.
“The elevation of political correctness over sound in investigative judgement certainty explains the failure to identify Maj. Hasan as a terrorist. That political correctness has been extended so far that the current administration describes his act as ‘workplace violence.’ This isn’t just preposterous. What we fail to realize is, this is dangerous.”
Giuliani claimed that the FBI’s failure to track Dzhohkar Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan, might have been caused by being too cautious on civil liberties issues. It was a reference to Tamerlan’s return to his native Dagestan, an area associated with Islamic extremism, for six months last year.
Authorities charge that the two bothers carried out the Boston bombing in April. Tamerlan was killed while trying to evade authorities after the attack, leaving his brother to facce the charges alone.
“The fear of incorrectly identifying Tsarnaev as a suspected Muslim extremist might have played a role in not taking all the steps that seemed prudent given his suspicious behavior,” Giuliani maintained. “He obviously wasn’t going back to listen to the Moscow symphony.”
Later in the day Wednesday, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty to all charges in the case. It was his first appearance in public since he was captured after the Boston attack.