Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Thursday that he doesn’t know if his agency has a system in place to purge all references to radical Islamic terrorism from its official records.
“I have no idea,” Johnson said repeatedly at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in response to questions from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Johnson also said he’s unaware if the Department has conducted an investigation into those claims.
Last week, former DHS employee Philip Haney told the same committee that more than 800 border control documents were ordered scrubbed or deleted in 2009 to remove terms like “radical Islam,” “jihad,” or the “Muslim Brotherhood.” The Department was invited to participate in that hearing, but declined.
“What concerns me, and I believe should concern the Department of Homeland Security, is that because of this effort — scrubbing your law enforcement materials of any acknowledgment of radical Islamic terrorism — when you see the red flags of radical Islamic terrorism, you do not follow up on them effectively,” Cruz said. “And we have terrorist attack, after terrorist attack, after terrorist attack that could have been prevented but for this administration’s willful blindness.”
Johnson said issues like how to label terrorists make for “good political debate,” but said it “makes no difference to me in terms of who we need to go after.” He said using religious terminology to describe groups like the Islamic State risks giving them the “credence that they want, that they are a legitimate form of Islam,” but he downplayed the idea that the words being used matter that much.
“I think the labels are frankly less important, except where we need to build bridges to American Muslim communities and not vilify them so they will help us help them,” he said.
Though Johnson said the department’s anti-terrorism activities need improvement, he said, “I think we are doing a better job and our people are smart enough to identify potential terrorist behavior whether you call it Islamic, or extremist, or anything else.”
