New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) says if a center that doles out social services for the developmentally disabled can be attacked by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), then any site could be.
“If a developmentally disabled center in San Bernardino, Calif., is a target, then every place in America is a target,” Christie said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
{mosads}The Republican presidential hopeful criticized President Obama and Congress for reeling back the surveillance capabilities of the National Security Agency (NSA) prior to the attack.
“That’s why it was so wrong for Congress and the president to pull back on our surveillance capability with the NSA, so wrong to demoralize our intelligence community through the report they issued at the end of this last year,” he said.
“The fact is that we need to strengthen our intelligence, strengthen our law enforcement community, and just work as hard as we can to try and intercept this knowing that in a free and open society, we not going to be able to stop every attack,” he added.
Christie said although heightened intelligence capabilities may not have been enough to stop the San Bernardino shooting, it may have prevented the Nov. 13 Paris terror attack in which 130 people were killed.
“I don’t know as to San Bernardino. But I think certainly vis-à-vis Paris, our pulling back and our lessening our resources on intelligence, which the president has done also, has created a big problem,” he said.
“And I think we’re going to see that Paris was an intelligence failure.”
Fourteen people were killed and 21 people injured at the Regional Inland Center in San Bernardino on Wednesday.
Authorities said one of the suspected assailants pledged her allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria during the attack.