Ted Cruz

Thank you. Mr. Bergen, how has in your opinion the Obama administration focused on targeted killings affected our ability to gather intelligence and analyze situations in the Middle East such as in Libya or Egypt?

It seems to me that there is no serious question that if a foreign national is overseas and is actively taking up arms against the United States, that lethal force can and probably should be used against that foreign national in those…

Would you agree that on any analysis it is a greater potential violation of someone's rights to take their life than it is to capture and interrogate them?

Do you see any tension between the Obama administration's position that U.S. citizens who are captured aiding Al-Qaeda must be tried in Article III courts instead of military commissions but that nonetheless they can be summarily killed…

I wish the Obama administration had accepted this Subcommittee's repeated invitations to send a representative

The real scope I believe of this hearing, and of the concern, is on the scope of Federal power, and in particular the scope of Federal power to engage in targeted killings.

It should be absolutely not.

I am hopeful that they will provide witnesses at subsequent hearings.

The risk of error is such that if that individual is not who we think it is, there is no process to correct that mistake.

Indeed, Federal overreach is what was at the heart of the March 6th filibuster led by Senator Rand Paul which I was quite proud to participate in a significant manner.

In my view, we need greater protections than simply a letter from the administration and I am hopeful that Congress will pass legislation making very clear the limits on Federal power.

Unfortunately, it is the only hurdle that matters because receipt of this RPI status is the amnesty.

I want to thank my colleagues and the millions of Americans who have lifted up the citizens of West who have been suffering through that tragedy.

Can you describe a circumstance in which the evidence would be such that DHS would say the trigger is not satisfied, that border security is not there?

I guess I am always a little skeptical of a statistic that regardless of what it demonstrates proves the end being put forth.

The Boston bombing is not an excuse for delay of considering this immigration bill, but it is an illustration of certain problems that exist with our immigration system.

Unfortunately, S. 744 puts the legalization of the illegal population before the completion of the necessary tools to avoid the creation of a new illegal alien population in the future.

The legalization provisions of the bill make widespread fraud very likely if this, in fact, goes into effect.

I think we should all be champions of legal immigrants, making the system work, and not just welcoming but celebrating legal immigrants.

I want to understand. It goes back to the point I said that sometimes saying apprehensions are down is signs of success and at other times the argument seems to be apprehensions are up.

Thank you for the excellent work that you and your agency have done, in particular over the last week in dealing with and apprehending the Boston bomber.

There may actually be circumstances under which amnesty for certain illegal aliens can make sense.

If a trigger is certain to occur, then I would suggest it is not a meaningful trigger that is measuring anything.

I wanted to go back and revisit the topic we discussed earlier of border security, which is proponents of this legislation argue that it provides for real metrics for border security and triggers that are meaningful.

With respect, the legislative language, as I understand it, is triggered whenever there is any form of advertising, be it on the Internet or on Craigslist or The Greensheet or anything else, and that sweeps in a whole category of new…