House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) reported that ISIS has “found this influx of people and resources in a way that we’ve just never seen before … [not even with] al Qaeda pre-9/11. They had that time and space, but not this size. And they didn’t have access to the Western passport holders” on Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”
“They’ve found this influx of people and resources in a way that we’ve just never seen before. And the longer you let it go, again, the more time, the more space, the more trouble for us,” Rogers said. And that even pre-9/11 al Qaeda had people and resources “not at this size, and we certainly saw al Qaeda pre-9/11. They had that time and space, but not this size. And they didn’t have access to the Western passport holders…And so this makes it much more difficult, and much more easy for them to try to plan attacks in the Western world.”
Rogers contrasted al Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001 with ISIS by stating al Qaeda was “small cell, very surreptitious, operated in the remote lands of Afghanistan, at least at the end of it, before the 9/11 attack. And so they never really were connected to thousands and thousands of people in a very open way. Well, with ISIS, what you see now is a terrorist organization that has a functioning army. And it is a functioning army. They have command and control to a large extent, more than you would see in any terrorist organization. They have tanks. They have artillery pieces. They actually named a few weeks ago an oil minister to try to make sure that they were taking full advantage of the oil refineries that they had captured, and how to sell it and disburse it in a way that they could see a daily revenue stream.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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