Republican Presidential Candidates on Future Terrorist Attacks (ContributorNetwork)

During the 2000 presidential debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the words Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida were not mentioned once, according to The Huffington Post. And yet, in less than a year, they would stand at the epicenter of a national crisis and shape national security and foreign policy discourse for a decade. As a result, the candidates seeking the Republican presidential nomination were asked at the CNN-sponsored, GOP debate which security threats, receiving little national attention, posed the greatest risk to Americans.

Here is what they said, according to 2012presidentialelectionnews:

* Newt Gingrich: "I helped create the Hart-Rudman Commission with President Clinton, and they came back after three years and said the greatest threat to the United States was the weapon of mass destruction in an American city, probably from a terrorist. That was before 9/11. That's one of the three great threats. The second is an electromagnetic pulse attack which would literally destroy the country's capacity to function. And the third ??? is a cyberattack. All three of those are outside the current capacity of our system to deal with."

* Herman Cain: "Having been a ballistics analyst and a computer scientist early in my career, cyberattacks, that's something that we do not talk enough about, and I happen to believe that that is a national security area that we do need to be concerned about."

* Mitt Romney: "Immediately, the most significant threat is, of course, Iran becoming nuclear. But I happen to think ? the one that may come up that we haven't thought about ? is Latin America. Because, in fact ... we have been attacked. We were attacked on 9/11. There have been dozens of attacks that have been thwarted by our security forces. And we have, right now, Hezbollah, which is working throughout Latin America, in Venezuela, in Mexico, which poses a very significant and imminent threat to the United States of America."

* Jon Huntsman: "I have to say that our biggest problem is right here at home. And you can see it on every street corner. It's called joblessness. It's called lack of opportunity. It's called debt. That has become a national security problem in this country. And it's also called a trust deficit, a Congress that nobody believes in anymore, an executive branch that has no leadership, institutions of power that we no longer believe in. How can we have any effect on foreign policy abroad when we are so weak at home? We have no choice. We've got to get on our feet here domestically."

* Ron Paul: "I worry most about overreaction on our part, getting involved in another war when we don't need to, when we have been attacked, and our national security has not been at threat. And I worry a lot about people never have come around to understanding who the Taliban is and why they are motivated. Taliban doesn't mean they want to come here and kill us. The Taliban means they want to kill us over there because all they want to do is get people who occupy their country out of their country, just like we would if anybody tried to occupy us."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20111130/us_ac/10558755_republican_presidential_candidates_on_future_terrorist_attacks

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