American lawmakers took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to express sympathy with the victims of the grisly attack on a satirical Parisian publication. But some rushed to use the “Charlie Hebdo” tragedy to criticize efforts to reform draconian national security policies. .
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, the families, and the French people in the wake of this horrendous attack,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) in the first of a series of tweets on the issue. “Here at home, we must use this horrific attack as an opportunity to reevaluate our own national security posture,” he pivoted.
Graham eventually took aim at efforts to reform the National Security Agency.
“I fear our intelligence capabilities, those designed to prevent such an attack from taking place on our shores, are quickly eroding,” he said in a third tweet.
In a statement released shortly after he published a series of tweets, Sen. Graham’s office claimed that “a combination of poor policy choices made by the Obama Administration regarding detention and interrogation policies, and budget cuts approved by the Congress with President Obama’s support” leave the US vulnerable to similar attacks.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) echoed her colleagues criticism of the President, tweeting, “Lawfully detaining and interrogating the terrorists we capture helps gather the intelligence needed to prevent future attacks.” She added, “To fulfill a misguided campaign promise to close Gitmo, POTUS is releasing dangerous high-risk terrorists.”
She then called for a ban on further Guantanamo detainee transfers to Yemen, although there’s no indication that the Paris attack has any connection to the prison facility at Guantanamo.
Sen. Graham also blamed the sequester, and said Congress should “restore the necessary funding to our intelligence-gathering and national security operations.”
In 2013, documents provided by NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden show that US government’s “black budget” for intelligence operations was $52.6 billion.
Despite more than a year of bombshell revelations about the NSA’s spying apparatus—a program that one federal judged deemed likely unconstitutional–Congress failed to pass any sort of legislation to rein in the intelligence agency.
In the first weeks of the lame-duck session of Congress last month, the Senate fell two votes shy of breaking a mostly-Republican filibuster on a bill that would reform the NSA’s bulk phone metadata collection program.
The President has made some executive actions since the leaks, including limiting the number of “hops” investigators can take from a surveillance target before collecting others’ communications, and requiring FISA approval before each query of NSA databases that store collected communications, some of which belongs to Americans.
But these reforms fell well short of demands from civil liberties groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Members of Congress, including Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) also wanted much stronger restrictions on the NSA codified into law.
Still, what few changes have been made to the NSA have left Sen. Graham fearing an imminent terrorist attack, he said on Wednesday morning.
“I fear we can expect and must prepare for more attacks like this in the future,” he said, claiming that the Islamic State is “actively inspiring terrorist attacks throughout the world.”
Speaking to CNN, Sen. Graham said that people working in journalism “need to be concerned.” When asked by a reporter if his concerns were based on intelligence, Graham claimed they were, “based on common sense.”
He added “even though it’s in France, it’s an attack on us.”
Sen. Graham’s hawkish views on counter-terrorism are well-documented, and existed long before Snowden’s revelations first impacted the debate on national security in June 2013. During a May 2013 Senate hearing, he made no distinction between military operations abroad and operations within the United States, claiming “the battlefield is wherever the enemy chooses to make it.”
A defense department official concurred, saying, “Yes, sir, from Boston to the FATA [tribal areas of Pakistan].”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Graham, intoning that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was an act of war, and not just a crime.
Although hawkish defenders of the intelligence community have long stated that limits on certain national security policies threaten the safety of Americans, both they and members of the intelligence community itself have struggled to credibly identify how spying and torture have prevented terrorist attacks.
UPDATE: This post was updated in light of information that Paris shooters had ties to Yemen.
