Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sharply criticized the Obama administration for its counterterrorism methodology and mindset Thursday on Fox News, saying the U.S. had failed to engage in the ideological battle against the world's Islamic terrorists by refusing to expressly identify them as such.
"They exist," he said. "They are radical Islamists. This administration is unwilling to even use the phrase about Islamists and training of terrorists. It seems to me that until you're willing to identify the enemy, and you're willing to continue to go after them where they are, and to recognize that it will take time ... We have to be willing to engage against the people that are training young people to go out and kill innocent men, women and children."
Host Bill Hemmer cited recent polling where 56 percent of respondents said Islamic terrorists were more of a threat now than they were right after 9/11, and Rumsfeld called that thinking an indirect result of U.S. failure to develop better metrics to track the rise of terrorist organizations, not just terrorist casualties.
"We know the number of people that may be killed or captured, but we don't know the number that are being recruited, being trained," he said. "We don't know how much money is being raised and given to them ... We don't have any reports or information on that at all."
President Obama will deliver a major speech Thursday on U.S. counterterrorism policies, ranging from efforts to combat al-Qaeda, drone strikes and his desire to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. The effectiveness of his administration's battles against al-Qaeda have particularly come into question during the ongoing investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attack and his administration's varying explanations of what went wrong.