The United States needs to avoid creating “bulletin board recruiting material” for terrorist organizations, Sen. Chris Murphy said on Sunday.
The Connecticut Democrat said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the United States “shouldn’t be full of such hubris” that it takes actions that lead to more attacks like the ones in Paris and Belgium.
He said drone strikes in the Middle East is one example of the actions he’s warning against — and that putting U.S. ground troops in Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS, rather than just conducting air strikes, would also help terrorist groups recruit.
He said the recent attacks “should create a conversation here in the United States about being careful about conducting a foreign policy in a way that ends up creating more of the very kind of people and organizations that we’re trying to fight.”
His comments came as lawmakers pay extra attention to how terror suspects are identified and monitored.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, said on “State of the Union” that one key question is whether there is “a point where you stay on them 24/7.”
In the United States, he said, “we’ve got dozens of individuals that we know went to Syria. I would guess that we’re surveilling 100% of them right now, but that’s in addition to everybody else that we may have reasons to suspect.”
He said the attacks on the Paris satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has intelligence agencies going “back to chapter one” and writing a “new book as far as what we’re going to do.”
