This was Michael Steele's appearance on FOXNews' Neil Cavuto program. Complete transcript here.
NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: My next guest says the guidelines are fine, here, but the president should call this what it is, a war on terror. RNC Chair Michael Steele, joining me right now. Michael`s got a new book called "Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda."
Terror is a big theme.
MICHAEL STEELE, CHAIRMAN, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE: Terror is a big theme. And it`s an important issue, as we`ve seen since Christmas, that won`t go away. And it won`t go away because there are people out there who do not like the United States, who do not like, fundamentally, what we stand for when you look at our Constitution and the freedoms.
And, you know, what I find so ironic is that the very people that want to blow up that Constitution, if you will, now are going to be wrapped in it by this administration, when it comes to holding trials in civil courts here in the United States, addressing this young hoodlum, you know, terrorist as someone who has the same rights as you and I and treating him in that fashion.
This is not what Americans have invested in, in terms of the dollars spent so far, as the governor noted, through the work that the commission did on homeland security to protect this country, to have us now turn around and open up the doors to terrorists to use our very judicial system against us.
CAVUTO: But nevertheless, I mean, whether it`s -- they`re finally calling it a war on terror or what have you, I mean, there still seems something systemic in the process, whether you`re Republican or Democrat...
STEELE: Right.
CAVUTO: ... where they don`t talk to one another. They don`t communicate.
(CROSSTALK)
CAVUTO: And again and again, this reminds me of what led up to 9/11. They weren`t -- they weren`t connecting even the simplest of puzzles, here.
STEELE: Well, think about -- but think about it this way, Neil. Between 9/11 and 2008, you didn`t hear of this type of miscommunication and this type of misdirection and dismissing information that`s coming in from embassies in places like Yemen, for goodness sakes.
That`s because the Bush administration had a particular emphasis. They understood what it was they were engaged in. The battle before them was this war, as they described and defined, on terror.
CAVUTO: But couldn`t this have been a case, Michael, where -- again, I`m not casting sides here...
STEELE: Sure.
CAVUTO: These guys need to get lucky just once, right? So they could have gotten lucky just once under the last president...
(CROSSTALK)
STEELE: Exactly. But, again, I go back to the point -- look, I applaud the president for pulling in his team and sitting down and going, "What happened? Let`s figure out how we fix this so we don`t have this problem going forward."
Where my concern still remains, as I talk about in the book, is, when you refuse to call a thing what it is, then the American people and those of us outside, look at it and go, well, if you won`t call it what we see it to be...
CAVUTO: You`re talking about the war on terror?
STEELE: The war on terror.
(CROSSTALK)
STEELE: Or calling a terrorist a terrorist, as opposed to a criminal defendant.
CAVUTO: Do you think we`re trying to be too, you know, politically correct on this?
STEELE: No, I don`t think you need to be politically correct because it sets a tone...
(CROSSTALK)
CAVUTO: Let`s say you`re a TSA agent, all right, and a Muslim -- a Muslim guy is coming through the line. Would you pull him aside?
STEELE: No. Now you`re talking about something completely different.
CAVUTO: No, I`m talking about -- because that`s part of being vigilant.
STEELE: Well, but that`s -- but no, that`s not part of being vigilant. That`s something very different, which is not what America`s about and it`s not what we want to have happen here. This isn`t about singling out Muslims or those of the Islamic faith.
CAVUTO: But we do single out all the time, right?
There`s talk today that these Yemeni transfers from Gitmo are -- might ends up in Illinois.
STEELE: Yes, but to the point that you made initially, and I think that`s really where it is, when you build in the infrastructure and the network in which you`re not destabilizing central intelligence and their communications with national security and the FBI and even local law enforcement instead of -- you`re enhancing that, then the information you get flows through appropriately and you can put in place the checks and balances.
More to the point, if you build out your network on the ground in places like Yemen, in places like Afghanistan and so forth, you then enhance the opportunity to not make those mistakes going forward. You don`t have to single out someone or profile them because of their faith to get at the bad actors here. I mean, it`s pretty obvious, if you build the network in place.
But, you know, going back to the 70s, to the Carter presidency, where they destabilized the Central Intelligence Agency, where they took away the ability to collect this information, 30-plus years ago, and now you layer on top of that the inability to do the enhanced interrogations to get this information.
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