On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R, GA) said that the terrorist “chatter” is very much like what the U.S. heard, and did not act upon, in the days prior to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that brought down the World Trade Center, severely damaged the Pentagon, and sent a jet slamming into a field in Pennsylvania killing all aboard.
On the August 4 NBC broadcast, Chambliss , the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that there has “been an awful lot of chatter out there,” and characterized it as “very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11.”
Noting that this chatter has revealed many details of what terrorists are planning, Chambliss assured that the government is taking it all very seriously. “We’re paying very, very close attention to the chatter that’s going on and I can tell you, David, this is the most serious threat that I’ve seen in the last several years,” Chambliss told host David Gregory.
In response to this chatter the United States has closed down embassies across Africa and the Middle East.
Chambliss also defended the various U.S. intelligence programs that have been under close scrutiny since the revelations of the NSA surveillance programs.
The Georgian told Gregory that the chatter being picked up has been discerned through the very programs that have come under fire recently.
These programs are “controversial, we understand that, they’re very sensitive, but they’re also very important because they are what allow us to have the ability to gather this chatter,” Chambliss said.
Without these programs, Chambliss said, we would not have the capability to learn of these communications among terrorists. Chambliss also went to pains to note that the most effective program was the 702 program, one that “allows us to listen overseas, not on domestic soil” that led to the most current revelations.
In the same segment, Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) also characterized the de-funding plans Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) is touting to hamper Obamacare.
“I can just tell you,” Durbin said at the end of his segment. “Senator Cruz is a part of a few extreme people in the Senate when it comes to this subject. Calling for shutting down the government of the United States, even shutting down the American economy to make his political point. That’s not the right way to go.”
This is simply a false characterization of what Cruz, Lee and the more than two dozen other Senators are proposing.
Cruz, Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) and others are pushing plans whereby the Senate approves of federal spending on everything but Obamacare. But neither Lee nor Cruz are not looking to “shut down the government” regardless of how Durbin is trying to phrase it.
What they are proposing is to defund Obamacare but continue to fund the rest of the government. Even Cruz is saying that shutting down government will not shut down Obamacare.