Former Sen. Joseph Lieberman urged Congress Thursday to appropriate more funding to state and local law enforcement agencies in the war on homegrown terrorists.
"We’re in a war and, as I said, it's against an ideology that is not receding; it's spreading," the Connecticut Independent told members of the House Homeland Security Committee, according to
The Hill.
"Particularly with homegrown terrorists, state and local law enforcers are in the best position to create the relationships within the communities that will allow them — and have allowed them in numerous cases — to stop terrorist attacks before they occur," he added. 'And they’re simply not going to do it without funding."
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Lieberman, the former chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, made his remarks during the first congressional hearings on the Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and wounded more than 200 others.
A focus of the panel hearings is on whether federal agencies could have prevented the tragedy, given the fact that the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers accused of carrying out the attack, in 2011 after receiving a warning from Russian law enforcement officials who suspected him of having radical ties. The agency failed to track his movements or activities, including a six-month trip to Russia in 2012, after the Russian tip.
In his testimony, Lieberman said Russia's notification "really should have raised it to a very high profile internally because of where it came from," referring to the fact that the two countries have been reluctant to share information since the Cold War.
Lieberman and several lawmakers raised the possibility of revising the guidelines for when and how the FBI can investigate people without infringing on civil liberties.
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