Thank you to the committee for inviting me here.
I want to say this with as much humility as possible. I want to say this as one of the world's top 10 experts recognized in counterterrorism in the western world. I want to say this as the author of the countering violent extremism strategy that the U.S. has adopted, originally the PVE strategy in the U.K. I want to say this as an adviser to four and a half British prime ministers. I say “half” because one of them didn't last very long—bipartisan. I want to say this as the former adviser to the head of counterterrorism in Europol, Gilles de Kerchove. I want to say this as somebody who was not directly involved in Mr. Fowler's case, although he was in my orbit and my team's orbit. If my team and I—and I've been doing this for over 20 years now on the ground and in policy—had had these tools, we'd have saved more lives and would have been able to disrupt potential terrorist financing in the U.K. We would have been able to not only save lives but be proactive.
It doesn't mean that every single tool in the tool kit would have been used for every single case. That's why I was shaking my head.