AUSTIN, Texas — U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul said he remembers watching the second plane strike the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, with his daughter. Twenty years later, McCaul has spent most of his professional career in national security.
“It changed everything,” McCaul said. “It woke up the American people to the threats that are still out there today.”
McCaul is currently the Republican leader of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and former chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. He represents Texans from Austin to Houston.
He said the bad news on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is that Afghanistan is now under Taliban rule.
“What saddens me is that on 9/11, the 20-year anniversary, we’re going to see the Taliban have their inaugural ceremony in a celebration of their defeat of the United States of America,” McCaul said. “They will raise the Taliban flag over our United States embassy and, to me, that makes me very sad.”
McCaul said during his time on the Homeland Security Committee, he received monthly briefings on terror threats so they could be eliminated. However, with a complete evacuation of Afghanistan completed, he said intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability on the ground is needed to “stop threats from occurring.”
Over the last 20 years, McCaul said counterterrorism funding has increased in the U.S. He emphasized the importance of grants to state and local law enforcement.
“At the end of the day, you know, our intelligence community and our FBI, they can do a lot,” McCaul said. “But it’s our local law enforcement that’s on the ground that can really see things as they are occurring.”
McCaul said there are a “myriad” of other national security threats to the U.S. other than radical Islamist terrorism.
“It's really freedom and democracy versus a very dictatorship, countries that oppress their own people and take away their people’s own freedoms and violate human rights, and we have to be the beacon of hope for human rights across the globe and stand for that,” McCaul said. “That is America as I know it, as we know it, and that’s our value. Our values prevail at the end of the day over that darkness.”
McCaul said everyone should say thank you to veterans, law enforcement officers, firefighters, first responders and military members on Saturday. He said national security should not be a partisan issue.
“It’s a rallying cry for us to come together as a nation, as Americans, to honor those who lost their lives that day,” McCaul said. “No one knows of the 3,000 whether they were registered Democrat or Republican. It doesn’t matter because they were Americans, and they lost their lives on a very tragic, dark day to a very dark force.”
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