Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by Michael McCaul - Page 2

First and foremost, my job is to protect the American people.

What is our capability when someone posts a public social media posting that says that they're going to conduct attacks on the United States on behalf of the Islamic State. Why can't we pick up that information and then stop that act of terror?

I'm over here with the French counterterrorism experts talking about the 'Charlie Hebdo' case, how we can stop foreign fighters from coming out of Iraq and Syria to Europe, but then we have this phenomenon in the United States where they can be activated by the Internet, and, really, terrorism has gone viral.

I know there's a lot of discussion about building a 2000-mile wall. I think we need to complete the Secure Fencing Act, but we need greater technology and aviation aspects down on the Southwest border so we can see the threat from the sky. Until you can see it, you don't know where it's coming from and how to correctly stop it.

We are ramping up security in the United States but also looking at visa applicants, visa waiver applicants - and looking at travel manifests on the airplanes trying to come into the United States.

This is the new wave, the new generation of terrorism. It's gone viral. It's very dangerous, and it's very hard to stop.

The pope is a very... passionate man. He likes to get out with the people, and with that comes a large security risk.

One of the chapters outlined in my book talks about the Iranian influence with Venezuela, these terror flights that go back and forth that we don't manifests on, and then nuclear material smuggled across our unsecure southwest border from Mexico into the United States.

I cannot support a program that could potentially bring jihadists into the United States.

Anything I can do to help destroy ISIS, I will support that.

It is time for President Obama to admit that - in this new age of peer-to-peer terror - we need a real strategy to combat radicalization at home and destroy extremist safe havens abroad.

In Europe, you have very different situation than you do in the United States. In Europe, it's very segregated. And you have the diasporas in Belgium that I saw. And they're being radicalized because they're not assimilated with the culture. I don't think we have that same situation in the United States.

We need to look at how we can better fortify our force protection at military installations. But also, how can we deal with these mental health issues with our returning veterans? And our suicide rate in the military is twice as high as the average population.

The threat is real, and it comes from the Internet. This is a new generation of terrorist. This is not Bin Laden in caves with couriers anymore. This is what the new threat of terrorism looks like.

We didn't take the words of Vladimir Lenin seriously until Communism spread across the globe. And unfortunately, the president didn't take the words of groups like ISIS seriously until they established a sweeping self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate.

What you're seeing is tension that we've seen for years between President Erdogan and his military, his military being more secular, President Erdogan being a little more in the Islamist side of the house.

I think a lot of people don't realize that our military that defends our freedoms abroad, when they come home to the military base, are not allowed to carry weapons.

The sad fact is, because we've had a failed policy and failed leadership, now we're having to rely on Russians and the Iranians to go into Syria to fight and destroy ISIS.

Our United States military is not our threat.

We have a failed state in Syria.

We're a compassionate nation.

I want to give the American people assurances that we are protecting them.

What I'm concerned about are two things. I think one that John Miller talked about, and that's the radicalization over the Internet that ISIS is very adept at doing. The other one is a foreign fighter threat.

Now we're dealing with a younger generation of terrorists that are very, very savvy with computer skills, very savvy over the Internet, and very savvy with social media of the likes that we have never seen before.

The phenomena here is the foreign fighter threat, the revolving door from Europe to the region in Iraq and Syria and back through Turkey, back into Europe. And that's what happened in the Paris attackers.

You can have the best technology, but you if have a corrupted, radicalized, bribed official that has access to the plane to put the bomb in the cargo, as what happened in Sharm el-Sheikh, that's a real problem.

I take ISIS at its word. When they said, in their words, 'We'll use and exploit the refugee crisis to infiltrate the West,' that concerns me.

I think there is a failure in foreign policy. And you have to acknowledge that under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton was the architect of that foreign policy. Whether it was malevolent or not, I don't know.

Our adversaries no long fear us, and our enemies are plotting against us.

This is an unprecedented pace of terror in modern times. And so, to say they're on the run absolutely defies reality.

A Trump administration will take on this fight and send a clear message to the Islamist terrorists: you may have fired the first shot, but rest assured, America will fire the last.

Social media campaigns and the savviness of ISIS and propaganda is what greatly concerns us Homeland Security officials.

We're seeing Iran now through the Shia militias in Iraq. We're seeing Iran in Syria; we know the Quds Force is in there.

The dark space is one of the biggest concerns on the part of counterterrorism officials right now. Comey did a good job of explaining how they jump into a direct messaging box and then go into platforms designed specifically to be secure. There's no way, even if we have a lawful court order, to be able to access those communications.

In the radical Islamist jihad world, you're seeing more and more recruits going to ISIS rather than al-Qaida.

I'm a big supporter of our United States military.

Terror threats to the U.S. homeland have reached unprecedented levels.

We think there should be a better countering-violent-extremism effort, that there should be a lead agency tasked to handle that.

I predict you're going to see more and more of this shifting of al Qaeda fighters going over to ISIS because they are the game in town.

When you project weakness throughout the world, and you have a failed foreign policy, this is what you get. And now we have chaos in the Middle East, have ISIS taking over Iraq, Syria, Northern Africa, Egypt.

We have entered a new phase in Islamist terror. Fifteen years after 9/11, our enemies have regained their momentum.

I think Syria is now the training ground for the world... These rebel forces are more of a threat than anything.

We need a military strategy to defeat terrorists on the ground.

There's a conspiracy going on online every day between these top U.K. individuals within ISIS leadership out of Syria.

It's one thing for someone to travel over to Syria and Iraq and come back. But, boy, it's a lot easier if they activate someone who's already here.

200,000 ISIS tweets a day, 1,000 investigations in all 50 states. It's really hard to stop all of it. But we have to get control over this Internet propaganda that is poisoning the minds of the United States.

We talk a lot about operational control, and that's having a better understanding of who's coming in and who's leaving, what the threat really is. We're never really going to get that.

I think Mrs. Clinton has a lot of weaknesses because she was the architect of the Obama administration's foreign policy.

We cannot stop what we cannot see.

I was a federal prosecutor when we exercised powers under the Patriot Act or under the FISA court.

We should be careful not to vilify encryption itself, which is essential for privacy, data security, and global commerce.

I'm very disturbed about the uptick in shootings and violence at our military installations across the nation.

I think there's kind of a simplistic, kind of knee-jerk response that all you have to do is build a 2,000-mile wall, and problem solved.

ISIS is the greatest threat.

I don't think Mr. Snowden woke up one day and had the wherewithal to do this all by himself. I think he was helped by others.

I would advise Donald Trump to try to bring and unify this party together.

We've had to pull out of so many countries in Northern Africa.

We have about 200,000 ISIS tweets per day that hit the United States. The chatter is so loud and the volume is so high that it's a problem that's very hard to stop and disrupt in this country.

We know there are terrorists communicating with individuals in the United States. We just can't see what they're saying.

Churchill didn't dance around the Nazis; he called it fascism.