A former CIA officer warned that President Donald Trump has drained the government’s counterterrorism ranks just as new terror plots surface abroad.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a 26-year CIA veteran, made the case during an interview with national security reporter Michael Weiss for a Wednesday episode of “Bulwark Takes.” The pair were discussing the attempted hijacking of a flight bound for Tel Aviv and a suspected plot targeting a British air base the U.S. has used for military operations.
More than two decades after 9/11, Polymeropoulos said he worries the country has grown complacent about the threat he spent his career fighting.
“I do wonder, you know, are we safe?” Polymeropoulos said. “And I think Americans should worry.”
He praised the FBI’s rank-and-file counterterrorism agents as “very good,” but said their bosses have other priorities.
“You have a leadership which is more worried about taking these FBI agents and chasing migrants at Home Depot, doing immigration arrests,” Polymeropoulos said.
He argued the shift comes at a direct cost.
“The U.S. government has finite resources, and if we’re pulling things such as ISR, that’s drones, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, out of places like Africa where there’s ungoverned spaces, if you’re pushing them down towards Mexico and Central America, if you’re taking personnel off of the CT mission, that’s going to make us less safe,” he said.
Polymeropoulos noted that terrorism “isn’t a problem until it is,” pointing to the Bush administration downplaying the threat before the 9/11 attacks.
“Money and people matter,” he said. “My old friends who used to run counterterrorism, who are still in the intelligence community, are not working that issue anymore, and that actually gives me a lot of pause.”
He also mocked the Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy, which he said “landed for a lot of us several months ago like a big dud.”
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