The fact that the Boston Marathon bombings were the work of "homegrown terrorists" shouldn't surprise anyone in the United States, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani says.
"This has been going on since 2005, 2006," Giuliani said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday. The London attack in 2005 was the result of homegrown terrorists, he noted. "That should have said to us, we’re going to have the same problem here."
Though he thinks investigators have done an excellent job since the bombing, Giuliani said too many signals were missed beforehand.
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"We shouldn’t be claiming, 'Oh, my goodness, we just found this out,'' Giuliani said. "We should be trying to figure out why the heck didn't we react to this faster — three, four, and five years ago.
"You have to go where the evidence takes you," he said when asked about ethnic profiling. Profiling is perfectly legal and legitimate when following leads and objective evidence, he said.
"If somebody tells you that the person who committed the crime is 6-foot-4 and he's white, you don't go look for a 5-foot-4 Asian," he said. But he was quick to add that profiling shouldn't be used "to smear someone."
A significant number of terrorist attacks come from a "distorted Islamic extremist ideology. So you can't ignore it."
There is no need to sacrifice privacy, he said, "But we also shouldn't sacrifice common sense."
President Barack Obama should have designated the Fort Hood shooting as a terrorist attack rather than workplace violence he added.
"I think that sent the wrong signals to the bureaucracy. And I think it makes a lot of people in the bureaucracy afraid to really call it as it is."
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