Thursday on MSNBC, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) was asked about “the necessity of the NSA and some of the surveillance” and she said the Paris terror attacks should not be an excuse for “torture that we oppose.”
Host Tamron Hall asked if the attacks were “proof of the necessity of the NSA and some of the surveillance that many might disagree with?”
Jackson Lee replied, “I am well aware that we are in a new time, and we cannot fight wars as we did in the Revolutionary War. We need sophisticated tools. We need better intelligence. And we need some of the resources that would allow us to penetrate some of these cells or individual actions. But the one thing we made a commitment to after 9/11 is that we would not allow the terrorists to terrorize us. I, frankly, believe that we cannot use an excuse. These are franchise terrorists, and how could we possibly know what they’re doing? I don’t want to use that excuse anymore on behalf of the American people or in fact, in fighting global terrorism. So we have to be able to frame a pathway forward with our international allies as to how we weed out the likes of those who did that devastating deed yesterday. But I wouldn’t say that we need to pull back on the concepts of torture that we oppose.”
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