[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 27 (Monday, March 4, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H1644]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 OUR DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY MUST BE APPLIED TO TERRORISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I must say this is a day where all of us 
shudder at what is going on in the Middle East. While we were so 
optimistic about the whole peace process, today is a day where it looks 
like the terrorists are willing to risk anything to get it derailed. 
You know, making peace is not for cowards. It is for the toughest and 
the strongest because they will test you and test you and test you 
because lesser beings and the demons that are around there want so much 
to continue the turmoil. If they can continue the turmoil and the 
terror, then they feel they are in charge.
  The thing I think is so important to point out on these last horrible 
incidents is clearly the people doing this are not acting alone. These 
are not just somebody who is going out and doing this by themselves. 
There is a tremendous infrastructure supporting them, and that 
infrastructure must be sought out and destroyed. These are not mere 
happenstance. These are not independent contractors. These are folks 
who belong to some well-organized group that is putting a lot of 
thought into how to be as destructive of human life as possible, and 
these people are despicable, and we should do everything we can to go 
at them.
  Today I would like to ask Attorney General Reno and the wonderful 
National Institute of Justice to get to the Israelis anything we have 
in the technology that would help crack that infrastructure.
  When I chaired the Research and Development Committee for the 
Department of Defense, we took all of their top-of-the-line research 
and put it at the National Institute of Justice so they could get 
together with our law enforcement people and see what they could take 
and apply to law enforcement and to antiterrorism, antidrugs, 
antianything, because when you look at our law enforcement technology, 
it has lagged way behind our national security and defense technology. 
So this is up and running, and we have some very exciting things there, 
things that can detect plastics which clearly could be very helpful and 
many other things.
  So I know that this country will be opening their doors immediately.
  Necessity is the mother of invention, and we must take all of this 
very, very high-technology stuff the American taxpayer purchased for 
the Defense Department and apply it in this situation as rapidly as 
possible. The analogy is when the Scuds hit Israel during the gulf war, 
all of us were horrified and suddenly realized we had to get Patriot 
missiles there as soon as possible to help deflect those Scuds. This is 
similar. We must scurry around, get our antiterrorism groups, our law 
enforcement groups and everybody helping Israel get through this crisis 
because, if the peace process is derailed, which is the goal of these 
terrorists, then they win, they win, and we all lose.
  So, civilized nations must stand shoulder to shoulder in this time 
where we are all being tried. We are being tried to see if we are 
really strong enough to stay on this road. We are, and we must stand 
together, and we must make sure that the course is set and we will not 
deviate. We will bring peace to the Middle East and throw everything we 
have got toward that goal.

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