Retired US General says Republicans are undermining our national security

Since the arrest of alleged terrorist Faisal Shahzad in New York, a number of Republican politicians have expressed outrage that the naturalized American citizen is being afforded the constitutional rights of citizenship.

Major General (ret.) Paul Eaton told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday, "I am a little surprised that we're here to defend our Constitution against a Republican senator and a Republican representative's attack on it."

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Representative Peter King (R-NY) have both suggested that it was an error to read Shahzad his Miranda rights and to keep him in the civilian justice system rather than immediately handing him over to the military.

"From a national security perspective, it's damaging," Eaton said of their statements. "Right now, the FBI and our police forces are looking over their shoulder every time they hear a Republican come off with a remark like that. ... Since January of 2009, we have seen a relentless attack on our FBI, on our armed services, on our policemen by the Republican Party. Any opportunity that they can find ... they have pursued. ... I want them to cut it out."

"It's a purely partisan approach," Easton said of the Republican criticisms. "They're after trying to frustrate the president in his role as providing for the national security. And in so doing, they're actually attacking the viability of the national security of the United States.”

Similarly, Republicans have been politicizing national security issues in numerous other instances. Last fall, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins testified before Congress that after eight years of constant assault, al Qaeda has been reduced to "a strategy of weakness," which "envisions an army of autonomous terrorist operatives, united in a common cause, but not connected organizationally."

In a recent article Jenkins later cautioned that his warnings to Congress were misappropriated by Republicans to criticize the Obama administration and call for harsher measures. 

Jenkins wrote, "The past decade also saw an unprecedented assertion of presidential authority, electronic surveillance without warrants, the detention of individuals solely on the basis of their having been declared enemy combatants, secret and indefinite imprisonment without trial, and the use of coercive interrogation techniques that before 9/11 would readily have been labeled torture. These were the greatest dangers posed by terror: that it would erode our own democracy, our traditional respect for human rights, our commitment to the law itself. Fortunately, these excesses were challenged in the courts, in Congress and by the electorate, and they are now being corrected."