In 1970 Tancredo appealed his 1-A draft status, which would have put him at the top of the list for draft eligibility during the Vietnam War. Tancredo said he was diagnosed with depression when he was 16 or 17 and received medication for five years for panic attacks and bouts of anxiety and depression. During a 2005 radio interview on Orlando talk-radio station WFLA AM 540, Tancredo responded to a questioner asking about the hypothetical U.S. response to a nuclear attack on U.S. cities by al-Qaeda, by saying that one possible response would be to retaliate by "taking out" Muslim holy sites (specifically, Mecca) if it were clearly proven that Islamic terrorists were behind such an attack. Several days later, in an interview on CNN together with James Zogby, Tancredo said that the attack was mentioned merely as a hypothetical response and insisted that there was nothing for which he should apologize. During the Republican Presidential Debate broadcast on Fox on May 15, 2007, Tancredo made a statement in passing that the root cause of Islamic terrorism is "a dictate of their religion". In September 2007 Tancredo defended his remarks: "I still believe it is something we must consider as a possible deterrent because at the present time there are no negative consequences that would accrue to the people who commit a crime such as a nuclear, chemical or biological attack." During a July 31, 2007 townhall meeting in Iowa, Tancredo said that a threat to bomb Mecca and Medina was "the only thing I can think of" that could deter a nuclear terrorist attack. This statement drew substantial criticism from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, as well as State Department spokesman Tom Casey, who stated that "To somehow suggest that an appropriate response to terrorism would be to attack sites that are holy and sacred to more than a billion people throughout the world is just absolutely crazy." Tancredo became one of the outspoken conservative opponents to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. On May 28, 2009, he made an appearance on CNN to voice his opposition and claimed that Sotomayor was a racist. When CNN's Rick Sanchez asked him if Sotomayor was a racist, Tancredo replied "certainly her words would indicate that that is the truth." He then compared the Hispanic-American advocacy group La Raza to the Ku Klux Klan by saying "it's a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses." On February 4, 2010, Tancredo spoke at the National Convention for the Tea Party movement where he told attendees that Barack Obama won because of "people who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English".