[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 46 (Friday, March 29, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H3222-H3228]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PROTECT OUR AMERICAN TROOPS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May
12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for
60 minutes.
Mr. DORNAN. Let me adjust my gig line here for this prestigious well
of the world's greatest legislature, straighten my First Armored
Division pin, still thinking about bringing the men and women home from
Bosnia, where European men and women should be doing the miserable
ground duty while we do everything else, like air power, sea power, all
the airlift, 99 percent of it, 99 percent of the ships at sea, most of
the hospital supplies, the food, the fuel, most of the munitions, and
of course 100 percent of the intelligence from our satellite
architecture down to unmanned aerial vehicles like the fantastic
predator program.
{time} 1600
Why do American men and women have to be on the ground missing Easter
with their families as they missed Christmas? So I guess we can free up
European young people to work on the assembly line at places like
Ferrari and Fiat, Jaguar, Rover, Rolls Royce, and the big-five in
Germany, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, and who am I forgetting?
Porsche. We do not want to take people from those assembly lines,
shipping products over here.
Let us just bankrupt the American people and pour our money into
Haiti. The money we sent to Rwanda, they are back killing one another.
Somalia, the fighting goes on without the BBC or the CNN cameras. And
in Bosnia, 19 young people have died, two of them Americans, one from
an accident, one a hero, Sergeant Donald Dugan of--his initials are D-
A-D, dad. He left four sons behind. Donald A. Dugan. First Sergeant of
the First Squadron of the First Battalion of the First Cavalry of the
First Brigade of the First Armored Division, and he was an A troop to
boot and was one of the first Bradleys. A picture of him in the turret
crossing the Sava River right after Christmas.
Mr. Speaker, his last words--I learned this in Bosnia about a few
weeks ago. His last words were to some children. He did not know
whether they were Muslim heritage children, who are really Serbians who
adopted the Islamic faith so that the Turkish
[[Page H3223]]
Ottoman empire would not confiscate their property. He did not know if
they were Serbs of the Muslim faith or Serbs of the Orthodox Christian
faith, or Croatian children of the Roman Catholic faith. He did not
know what they were. He just knew they were children. His nickname was
MacGyver, after the television series hero Richard Dean Anderson who
played the swashbuckling expert with munitions, that was his proud name
in the First Division, MacGyver. And Don Dugan, his last words to these
children, he motioned them back, and he said mino, probably his own
ethnic universal word for mine, mine. He says mino, boom, boom, boom,
and then indicates get back. And the next boom was a real one tearing
part of his face off.
And he had told his friends, they told me over there because I did
not like the way the Clinton administration was putting a spin on this,
that he had dome something wrong so do not blame Bill Clinton. He had
told his friends, our job here is to make this battlefield safe for
children. We are going to get rid of these mines.
Now, that is not what he was sent there for, and he did not die in
vain if all the other young men and women there take Donald Dugan's
heroic death to heart and stay on the roads and stay out of the mine
fields. He had marked this mine earlier, cut a trip wire from the mine
set waist high in a tree to a barricade. There were cattle in this
field. Kids are out. He cut that, marked the mine with a white flag.
But then this thought kept coming back to his MacGyver nature, and he
went back to the mine while his friend was around behind a building
answering nature's call. And when his friends came back around, there
was Don in the prenatal position bent over. The mine he tried to
disarm, almost instantly killed by the blast.
Now, why in the name of heaven other than campaigning was Miss
Hillary and their beautiful teenage daughter, Chelsea, what were they
doing in a dangerous combat theater, graciously received by our troops,
of course, as the President was graciously received and the men telling
me, is he not here just to get reelected? Are these photo ops for him?
Well, she was there. It is election year.
And we have not seen the end of Air Force One at tremendous expense
to the American taxpayers, all the administration does this is a
bipartisan, shameful way. I think that during the election year, there
should be a hired campaign plane, as Bob Dole, the majority leader,
does, not use a congressional airplane. He uses a fully paid for
campaign airplane. And when Mr. Clinton is going out on a fully paid
campaign trip, it should be a hired, safe, four-engine, two-engine 757,
767, paid for by the millions of dollars flowing into the Clinton
coffers by Republican businessmen saying, just in case you win, do not
hurt us too much with your socialist liberal beliefs.
It is outrageous that all he pays, Clinton, is a first-class air
ticket, and his purely campaign staff pays a first class air ticket,
like 750 bucks from here to California. But all the rest of the people
on this 747, and he has five others, six 747's at the disposal of the
President.
Mr. Speaker, I told Mr. Bush when we flew from Chicago to here that
it was excessive. He agreed. I said you ought to dump these 747's. You
should have one or two E-4's, command and control birds, and one 747
for international trips only kept at Andrews and for domestic flying.
You should have a Presidential 747, 757, not going to buy a French
Airbus, and you should use Lear jets. Not Lear jets, the Gulfstream.
And President Bush said, well, that is my favorite airplane. I like to
fly on the C-20 Gulfstream because then I do not have the press on the
airplane with me all over my back. Let them charter their own DC-10 as
they do as backup, but selected press at a first-class air ticket paid
for by the networks that are all money machines. They make so much
money, they all get on the airplane in favored status.
I remember when I went at the 50th anniversary in Omaha Beach and the
Normandy D-day landings and first we went down to Anzio to the Anzio
cemetery. Bob Dole spoke there the next day because that is where a lot
of his friends were buried. And here at the airport at Naples were to
747's nose to nose, that beautiful Air Force One paint job on both,
filled with prepubescent staffers who never served in the military,
ditch the ceremony at the Anzio cemetery and went into Naples.
Then the same thing up in France. Half of the 700 people that went
with the Presidential group to Normandy, half of them went into Paris
and never made it to the 50th anniversary of D-day. Another one of
those photo opportunities using our fine young men and women in
uniform. And they say now that the Clinton campaign plan is to surround
him with uniforms, school children in uniform, police, law enforcement
people in uniform, and to use our U.S. military forces to get him
around people in uniform and then maybe the triple draft dodging issue
will never come up. Not as long as I am alive, have my health and have
this well and various other media outlets around the country.
Now, Mr. Speaker, a friend of mine, Owen Frisbee, passed me in the
hall and said, did you hear Paul Harvey in the last few days? He said,
here is something that he said on his radio show recently that I think
is worth a House resolution, a Senate resolution, a joint resolution to
let the whole country know this before all the 50th anniversaries of
the end of World War II are gone.
This is the year of the anniversary of Winston Churchill's great
speech at a small college in Missouri named after Westminster, England,
Westminster College. It was there on my dad's birthday in March 1946,
50 years ago this month, that Churchill created that memorable
sentence. He said the Communists have drawn a line from Stetyn in the
Baltic down to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has fallen. And
fall it did. And more people died under the heel of Stalin before,
during and after World War II times multiple factors than died under
the tyranny of Hitler's vicious demonic 12-year Reich. Fifty-five
million died because of the warlords in Japan, Mussolini's facism,
Hitler's Nazism, but there were a lot of Americans naive enough to
believe that Uncle Joe Stalin was not the fourth tyrant, creating the
bloodiest century in all of civilization's history.
Here is what Paul Harvey said, for perspective. Hitler's Nazis must
not be forgotten for their slaughter of some 6 million Jews. Six
million other people, including Protestant ministers like Dietrich
Bonnhover or Catholic priests like St. Maximillian Colby. I was there
at the Vatican when he was elevated to sainthood, standing next to the
man he saved in Auschwitz. Said to the German guards he spoke 10
languages, in German. Let me go, this man is married and has 10
children. His children were there with him. His wife was still alive.
The man is still alive.
They said to Colby, the Nazi Gestapo guard was so taken aback, or SS
guard, he said: Fine, you die in his place. And they put him in a cell.
I went to that room. There is a beautiful bas relief, marble relief on
the wall. There were some votive lights burning, a few aging flowers.
The very bunker cell where they locked up Maximillian Colby, Father
Colby and 10 others, and they allowed them to just starve over 10 days
to 2 weeks. There were so skinny, it did not take the usual 3 weeks of
you starving. And they came in and Father Colby was the last one still
alive. And they injected him with air into his veins and he expired,
dying in Christ's footsteps that he would give his life, John 15:13, so
that another man may live.
While I am holding Mother Teresa's hand, I looked at this man. What
day was that? October 10, 1982. Priest, priests, ministers, not just 6
million Jews were killed, 6 million other nonJews. But the Jewish
slaughter has this ring of the Holocaust because they were targeted for
death only because of what God had made them, people of Hebrew
heritage. Unbelievable.
So I digress. Let me come back to Paul Harvey and start at the top.
For perspective: Hitler's Nazis must not be forgotten for their
slaughter of some 6 million Jews. For perspective, let history not
forget that Russia's Communists, since the Bolshevik revolution of
1917, have killed over 100 million people, 6 million European Jews
slaughtered by Hitler, men, women, and tiny little babies, children,
100 million, including women and children and little babies slaughtered
by Russia's Communists.
[[Page H3224]]
So an effort is underway in Washington, DC, a memorial honoring
Communism's victims and a reminder of another evil which free people
must ever oppose, still oppose. Today in Russian, today in Vietnam, as
I testified this morning, not to put another nickel into the U.S.
embassy in Hanoi. Not another dime into our diplomatic mission there
until the Communists in Hanoi account for our missing in action.
They can solve hundreds of cases out of the 2,140, hundreds of cases,
3,400 at a minimum this very day. They could solve these cases and
bring instant relief to these heroes' families who are heroes
themselves, the missing in action families, Communist Cuba. You notice
the Communist Cubans out of Hanoi withdrew their protest at the United
Nations that those three American aircraft were in Cuban waters. Not.
They were in international waters. We proved it with hard copy from
radar images and they withdrew their complaint, which means that Fidel
Castro, through his officer corps of Communist officers, sell-outs,
Judases every one. He ordered American aircraft, licensed in America,
built in America, flown by Americans of Cuban birth and heritage,
ordered them murdered.
That is the style of Castro, first degree murderer. And that is what
Paul Harvey is saying to the largest radio audience on the planet
Earth, a reminder of another evil, Communism, which people must ever
oppose. In Point du Hoc, North Korea and that part of the Korean
peninsula that they still crush with human rights violations, the sad
little islands of Cuba, those 11 million people who bathe in sunlight
and no freedom. And an emerging Communist Party crawling out from under
the bloody rocks of most of this century of death trying to rebuild
itself in Russia, and in a few other countries in that area. And the
Communism of Vietnam and the Communism of the world's largest nation.
The United States will soon pass 266 million people. China has 266
million plus a billion. Five times the size of the United States. Go to
a store at Disneyland or Disney World. Pick up the expensive china.
Made in China, where china comes from. Pick up the tiniest little
refrigerator magnet, made in China.
{time} 1615
Pick up a pencil curled in Mickey Mouse's ears, China, China, China,
the most expensive toys, the cheapest toys, the stuffed animals, the
expensive sweaters, shirts. China, China, China, where women work at
slave labor wages exactly like the worst scandals in Dickens's England
or the turn of this century and child labor as bad as any of the worst
periods of this century or during the industrial revolution in Europe.
Excellent, excellent commentary, Mr. Harvey.
Then not to be commenting upon tragic world-sweeping issues, Paul
Harvey delivers the following short essay that is worthy of repeating
in the well of the U.S. House of Representatives. Paul Harvey, again,
the new protection racket, I want to mimic that inimitable great style
of his that has become an institution, he says, Mr. Harvey, fear-
mongering is unforgivable, whether by pessimistic politicians or
unscrupulous booksellers or by scientists. Anybody who tries to come
between you and your money by scaring you is a con man.
The winter of 1996, unprecedented blizzards marched across our
Nation. Vast areas disappeared under a blanket of white, and airports
became refugee centers and firefighters had to locate fire hydrants
with metal detectors. It was so cold in Minnesota, somebody used a
frozen banana to pound a spike into 5/8ths plywood thickness, yet
undoubtedly, some scientists were insisting that our planet is
threatened with global warming.
If Mr. Harvey will allow me, the inimitable Jay Leno, closet
conservative, opened his show in New York one night in the middle of
the blizzard, saying, by the way, an announcement New York's global
warming conference is canceled until further notice. Big laugh, of
course, from the audience. Mr. Harvey continues, anybody involved with
government grants or private foundation money is constantly besieged by
the fear-mongerers. They have learned that if they can frighten us
enough we will pay whatever it costs for protection.
Mr. Patrick Michaels is an exception, Virginia State climatologist,
Mr. Patrick Michaels has researched global climate for many years. He
expects that there will never be an agreement among scientists on
anthropogenic climate change. He notes a 1990 report about global
warming in which scientists were utterly unable to agree on why our
Earth had warmed one half a degree Celsius over the past 100 years.
Quote, they still cannot agree, unquote.
I hope my classmate, Al Gore, who served in this House for 8 years, I
hope he is listening tonight. Vice Presidents sometimes have afternoons
to kill, and maybe out of sheer nostalgia he tunes in the House floor
or the Senate that he went off to 1984.
Satellite records, Mr. Harvey continues, are our present best way to
measure the Earth's temperature. They, in use since 1979, show that our
world has in fact been cooling further. The Arctic, which, by the way,
I sailed under the North Pole with the aforementioned Al Gore when he
was a lowly Senator just the two of us, on codel Dornan, went up there.
I put him in the cockpit of a B-1 at Grand Forks, ND. He had never seen
one. He was described on Meet the press as an expert in strategic
areas. I took him down into a missile ICBM silo. This was in 1989. He
had never seen an ICBM armed, armed, cocked, fired ready to go at some
target on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and that I mentioned
Churchill's description of what was behind the Evil Empire, and Al and
I learned a lot on that Arctic trip.
So further, the Arctic, where scientists say most warming should be
happening, has seen no warming whatsoever in the past 50 years. The
polar ice caps are not, not is underlined for Harvey's emphasis, not
melting.
Now, the disciples of global warming, unquote, to perpetuate their
profitable false alarm, are trying to contend that this year's record
cold and snow are actually the result of global warming. Now, how are
they going to explain this? They say their computers show global
warming causes blizzards and extreme cold. Well, Harvey says, any
computer geek, expert or novice, knows that computers are programmed by
people. They do what humans direct them to do, and because scientists
are feeding their own measurements into the computers their predictions
are no more accurate than their own fuzzy logic.
The science of global climate change is complex. We are still
learning how parts of our atmosphere interact. Yet all human experience
suggests that there would be fewer major snowstorms in a greenhouse
world. Somewhere up the road ahead other scholars may decide that
planet Earth is cooling instead, but presently they have far too much
invested in global warming theories to let go. Fear begets money, money
to fund hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of research work being
done by universities, by environmental organizations, and Government
Agencies with U.S. hard-working taxpayers' dollars. Their jobs depend
on keeping you scared.
Al Capone's enforcers used fear to force shopkeepers to buy
insurance. Should you, the taxpayer, refuse to pay, they might smash
your knees with a baseball bat. Today, you pay protection money in
research grants, organization dues, or taxes. You are threatened with
an impending apocalypse.
Perhaps the most negative of the new protection rackets is the degree
to which eventual public disillusion may discourage investment in more
legitimate research. Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Frisbee, for giving me
what I missed on Harvey's broadcast.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you saw Meet the Press last Sunday, you were
stunned, as I was, the two main guests were our colleague here, John
Kasich of Ohio and Pat Buchanan. But at the end of it Tim Russert, who
mercifully escaped the acid tongue of Don Imus, at the most peculiar
banquet, roast or dinner ever held inside the Beltway. Somebody taped
it for me. I can hardly wait to see it given some of the bloodthirsty
descriptions of what New York City's longest-running talk show host did
to everybody in both parties from the White House down to Tim Russert.
He said Tim Russert's job, somebody told me when he worked for a
Senator, it was to hide the booze bottle. House rules and good taste
prevent me from
[[Page H3225]]
repeating the name of my Senate friend in the other party, and they
said his job for the former Governor of New York was to hide the
bodies. He left no dignity, I guess, with Bill Clinton and Newt
Gingrich sitting on one side. Imus, I understand, absolutely dumped a
load of concrete all over the dais and the various Senators and media
people in the audience. I understand he lectured one of the people on
60 Minutes that he was a newsman and not a pirate, so stop wearing an
earring. I understand they laughed at that. But other than that they
were pretty frozen by that point in the program. Anyway, he dumped on
Russert more gently than others, I think. I think Tim Russert is
probably one of the better hosts on Meet the Press that they have ever
had. He is fair and a loyal Catholic, pro-life. I am a little
prejudiced in his favor. At the end Mr. Russert says through an
unidentified man, do we believe American values in some sense need
reforming? He cuts to a very young Jerry Brown with a full head of dark
hair, not the shaved head we see today in the prison denim shirt that
is Jerry Brown's new image.
During the campaign for the Presidency, 4 years ago, it was white
turtlenecks and a 900-number. Now it is a shaved head and a prison
shirt, a bright guy, Jesuit-trained, just like yours truly. I must give
you the date first: October 5, 1975, 20 years and 5 months ago. He
says, I think American values need reassertion in terms of their
fundamental roots. I think there has been an overemphasis on the
ability of material comfort, on the ability of our economic machinery
to provide human happiness. Sounds more like Pope John Paul or Billy
Graham than the youngest Governor ever to serve in our biggest State,
which had become the biggest State during the prior Governor, Ronald
Reagan. Let us see, Jerry Brown was 36 when he got elected; he was in
office 1 year. So he is 37 years old, he says, and I would not call it
a reform in the sense it is something new, but it is a returning to a
traditional view of human nature, that looks to fundamental principles,
to right and wrong, to ethics, to morality, to a sense that human
nature is constant. It, human nature, is weak. This is the reflection
of our Jesuits in that period teaching us about original sin. It needs
a type of government that recognizes that mankind is really brought
down by its own instincts, and we ought to recognize that. Jerry Brown
closes, ``We are not going to create a new man or a new person in this
country, and every civilization that has gone to a sensate, sensual
culture has fallen.'' And I think that is a real possibility here, and
to that extent I would like to see, here comes the rough Jerry Brown
message, an austere, leaner commitment on the part of the people of
this country. Yes, end of videotape. And Mr. Tim Russert, just a few
days ago, comments, economic insecurity, fundamental values, sound
familiar? The same issues raised two decades ago, and we hear them
today. We will be right back.
Now, I am coming to the end of what I described in this well on
February 7, 1995, the 40th anniversary of my getting that ring and my
wings of silver in the Air Force 41 years ago. Now on February 7, 1995,
I declared for the Republican nomination for President in this well.
That is almost 14 months ago. That is a special date for me, February
7, because a quarter of a century ago, 26 years now, on the 15th
anniversary of my getting my pilot wings, I pointed to this Montagnard,
proper name, ethnic name is Hmong, Hmong people of the mountain people,
the French called them, Montagnard is the French name, there long
before the Vietnamese, the Lao, or the Yeo or any ethnic Chinese were
there. I pointed to this bracelet on the very first Robert K. Dornan
Show. I was 37 years of age, 36 years of age. I had just won two Emmys
for a local show. My reward was 90 minutes live on Saturday night in
the second biggest market on the planet, Los Angeles, and environs. I
pointed to this bracelet and said I will wear this, to the first guest
on my first show. I stayed on the air for 6 years straight, combining
both shows. I said I will wear this for your heroes, for your missing-
in-action, heroes, one Marine, three Air Force. They never did get
back. They are heroes, those 4 wives and friends of mine who had just
come back from a 5-week trip around the world, locked up in Moscow in
an old hotel with no heat, 4 of us, including myself, became sick out
of the 5. Bill Clinton was in Moscow that very week, January 1970, at a
banquet called the Mir Banquet, same name of the Russian space
satellite that is up in the sky right now, Mir means peace, a peace
banquet. The guest of honor was a Senator who lasted 12 years, Eugene
McCarthy, otherwise a loyal Catholic, there he is in the Evil Empire in
the heart of it, in Moscow, in the shadow of the Kremlin, literally
across the street from the Kremlin in the National Hotel.
{time} 1630
Twenty-three year old Bill Clinton ditching class at Oxford, where he
never went to school, never earned his degree, just demonstrated
against his country in a foreign land. He is in town. Ross Perot is in
Copenhagen with a plane full of medicine for our POW's, which he had
just flown in from Vientiane, Laos, home of the Montagnard people. He
was told he could fly into Moscow if he would go into Copenhagen.
Moscow keeps him on the ground, never does let him in.
I am under arrest with four wives, Pat Hardy, Pat Burns, Carol
Hanson, now Carol Hanson Hickerson, and Connie Hessel, an African-
American lady whose Colonel husband was head of academics at our
gunnery school. Said he did not have to go. Did not have to go. Said it
was his duty to go. Never heard from again. Direct hit from a SAM on
his F-4 Phantom.
I am with these wives, locked in a hotel. Clinton is in town being
wined and dined as one of the sympathetic students who had organized
the fall offensive named by the Communists for sympathetic
demonstrations in Finland, Stockholm, Oslo, Norway, Paris, Clinton ran
the ones in London, New York, here in the District of Columbia, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. All around the world, a huge pro-
Communist outpouring of love and affection for the Communist killers in
Hanoi who meant to conquer, and eventually did, the freedom loving
people in South Vietnam. What a week.
And I come home from that trip a month later, and God rewards me with
the Robert K. Dornan Show, which led to me in the district that was the
prime aerospace district in the country, represented then by the
wealthiest man in the House, tough district, that show obviously gave
me the name recognition to come to Congress 20 years ago.
So that date, February 7, the debut of the Robert K. Dornan Show, was
special. So, of course, when it fell on a House day, in session, the
25th anniversary bracelet, 40th for my Air Force wings, I said ``Today
is the day I come to the well.''
I do not live in the green room at ``Meet the Press'' like certain
Senators. I did not have a nickel in the bank at that time. But I said,
I think my words were, I am going to launch a mission that will be one
of the great adventure of my life. And I am still a declared candidate.
Buchanan, Jesuit educated Catholic, Keyes, the same, loyal Catholic,
and Dornan. And the winner, a hero of mine, Bob Dole, always said he
would win from day one. That is why I never raised much money. But I am
still in.
It has been that great adventure I expected. I came in, announcing
February 7, 1995, and then the formal announcement on Jefferson's
birthday, April 13, at the Law Enforcement Memorial up here in
Judiciary Square, to begin a trip up the east coast so that on Easter
Sunday at the church where I was baptized, St. Patricks Cathedral, 7th
biggest church on Earth, where my parents were married in 1929, I would
renew my wedding vows, because it was my 40th anniversary, on my wife's
birthday. I married her on her 21st birthday.
It was quite a day, ruined a little bit by Connie Chung and a weird
show called ``TV Nation,'' pretending they were the BBC, lying in my
face, tracking us all day with cameras in our face, out to the Statue
of Liberty, ruining a day with 9 grandchildren, now 10. And we went up
to New Hampshire, went to the birthplace of the Republican Party, nine
grandkids running all over, Sally and I in the glow of our 40th
anniversary and Sally's birthday. It began the formal part of the
campaign.
I announced at Jefferson's Memorial that I had a message for my
country. It
[[Page H3226]]
was very similar to Jerry Brown's message that man does not live by
bread alone, we had a moral crisis in the White House, and that we had
a moral crisis in our country. That we were heading toward financial
bankruptcy, and that is what we have been debating here all day long
and passed by voice vote, both sides are so exhausted and the White
House is a little unsure of their polling numbers and their focus
groups, by voice vote a few minutes ago, we continue the Government for
another 2 or 3 weeks with a continuing resolution.
We still have half the Government unfunded by last year's
authorization bill, and we are already into markup. I am the chairman
of two subcommittees here, only two of us chair two subcommittees,
because the two intelligence subcommittees do not count. That is the
dark secret world. But I am the military personnel chairman, and I have
had my hearings all jammed together and rushed in 6 weeks, and now I
have to write, ``markup'' we call it, for next year's defense
authorization.
Clinton signed this year's defense authorization on February 10. He
took out three of the things that I worked on here for the last 20
years. He took out national missile defense, SDI is what Reagan called
it, strategic defense initiative. Clinton took it out.
We are told by careful polling that 80 percent of the people who
visit this Chamber, 80 percent of intelligent, educated, Americans
across this country, do not know that if some radical state, a
communist state like Cuba or Korea, or a terrorist state like Iraq or
Iran, launched one, uno, O-N-E, one nuclear missile, we could track it
from the time the heat appeared on the launch pad through its
accelerating trajectory, its mid-course, and its final trajectory, to
wiping out a total American city, a medium-sized city like Raleigh,
Sacramento or Anaheim, or an entire megalopolis, like New York, this
whole Beltway and all the surrounding suburbs and areas in Maryland and
Virginia, or all of the whole Los Angeles area, with fallout killing
people, depending on the winds, in Santa Barbara or San Diego. One
missile, We can track it from launch to impact. And the death of more
Americans than every earthquake, fire, down to a single home fire,
every hurricane, every flood, every natural disaster, for the entire
last 15,000 years, since Asia man came down the Alberta Channel between
the glaciers and populated this whole hemisphere from the Bering
Straits to Patagonia in Argentina. More deaths in one instant of a
flash of radioactivity than every natural disaster in the history of
this hemisphere, all put together, times 3 or 4. And we cannot stop
that missile.
And Clinton and his Secretary of Defense, Dr. Perry, say it is too
soon to defend ourselves. It is not ready yet. Let the next President
do it after my second term.
Then he takes out the biggest applause standing-ovation trigger for
any one of the 11 Republicans, when Wilson was hanging on and Forbes
came in, they sort of replaced one another, we had 10 then, when we had
10 candidates, what I wrote for the Contract With America with John
Doolittle of California, what was passed on this floor, what I helped
put into the authorization bill, what Clinton vetoed, what we fought
through two long arduous conference committees, and he finally demanded
be taken out, was no U.S. troops under foreign command. When Governor
Lamar Alexander said it, former governor, or Buchanan or Keyes, or
Senate Leader Bob Dole or me, it was an instant standing ovation from
the crowd. No U.S. troops under U.N. or any foreign command.
Senator Dole put it in on the other side, on the north end of this
building. I put it in here. I used to sit there and somebody would
whisper to me they are all taking credit for it, but you wrote it. I
used to tell people, you know what Ronald Reagan had on his desk, a
little sign that said if you do not care who gets credited, there is no
end to what you can accomplish. But Clinton took that out, takes out
defending our Nation.
By the way, we fought to get in theater missile defense. Now, what
does that mean? That means that we are building a system to protect our
men, now that we are putting women in combat, our women, in the field.
And we also are going to protect our allies in the field as we send
Patriot missiles to shoot down Scuds. You do not need to be told who is
the good guys when the defense system is called Patriot and the evil
system is called Scuds. But we gave that to Israel. We will protect,
and Israel is working on a system we hope will work, called Arrow, a
theater missile system, TMD, theater missile defense. He signed that.
No, he is no fan of it, but he signed it. But he took out homeland
defense.
So we defend allied foreign troops in the field, and we should, and
our own troops, that is a moral obligation, but we do not defend their
wives and their children or if it is a fighting mom, we do not defend
Mr. Mom, who is taking care of the kids back home. Or their parents, or
their grandparents, or everybody else's family. That is naked to
attack. That comes out. And then we put people under foreign command.
He says that is his prerogative and constitutionally it is not.
Then the third one he takes out, just as unseemly as the others, is
Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia, where 19 better men than he ever dreamed of
being, died, two of them winning the Medal of Honor posthumously, dying
to save Michael Durant, giving two lives for his one life. Another man
was captured alive and beaten to death, their bodies torn apart,
horrible story.
Clinton thinks he can do that without this House weighing in or the
Senate. Clinton believes in his mind he can send us to Tibet tomorrow,
and we have no role. He thinks he can send the 82d Airborne to bail out
Tibet and recapture the big temple there and send the Dalai Lama home.
Now, it sounds absurd. He is not going to do it. He probably never
thought about it. But constitutionally, he thinks he can send the 101st
Airmobile, a former paratrooper unit, back to Rwanda. He has not sent
them there, but he thinks he can send them there again. He thinks he
can go back to Somalia in an election year if he feels like it, to get
rid of that 19-man death and the 104 others wounded in his adventure
there when Bush said we are through, we are finished, we fed 3,050,000,
we are out of there. Operation Hope is closed down. And Clinton said
let us help the U.N., let us avenge the 29 Pakistanis who were
disemboweled. Let us go back and arrest Aideed.
Two weeks after our heroes were killed. They would not dare ask Army
men to defend him. Aideed was ordered to be defended by U.S. Marines,
but put on an armed C-12 Beachcraft and sent down to a seminar in Addis
Ababa, the man whose people just murdered and cut the bodies apart of
19 of our heroes, the helicopter crew with the five dragged through
television, desecrated before our eyes. The worst, mercifully not shown
on American or some European channels, showed the full horror of it.
What is it that he thinks he can do this, because of one line in the
Constitution? One line in this small Constitution of ours that says no,
that the President's job is the commander-in-chief, period. That means
when we declare war, when we decide what foreign operation will be
undertaken, a smart war hero Senator actually said, Jefferson set the
precedent. He sent a naval force and Marines over to the Barbary Coast.
The Marines still sing about going to the shores of Tripoli. The truth
is 180 degrees the opposite. Get educated, U.S. Senate.
Our Congress ordered our second President, John Adams, our third
President, the aforementioned Thomas Jefferson, and the following
father of our Constitution, 5-foot dynamite James Madison, we ordered
them from this Chamber and the U.S. Senate 10 times with public law, go
get the Barbary pirates. Jefferson is recorded, you can find it in his
own handwriting in the archives or our Library of Congress, where he
says as President, No. 3, as President, I cannot order our military to
do anything but defend these 13 colonies if attacked, unless the
Congress orders me to do something else. And now I came across a story
refreshing my memory that the dean of Washington reporters, I believe
it was Sarah McClendon, said to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, you do
not have the constitutional right to have 400 young men die every week
in Vietnam. The Tonkin Gulf thing was a resolution. It is 6 years old.
You cannot continue this. That was 1964, he was out by 1968. She said
it is 3 years old.
[[Page H3227]]
{time} 1645
You cannot continue this. He says, I have got the constitutional
power. And that is what Clinton thinks. So he takes No. 3 out of the
bill that he says that we infringed upon his constitutional power to
demand that the U.S. Congress, under its constitutional authority,
article I, section 8, says, we shall raise armies, build navies, and
maintain them. Do you know that I am the chairman of the military
personnel committee, Mr. Speaker? I know you know this. And Senator Dan
Coates of Indiana, replaced Dan Quayle, is the military personnel
chairman over there. Do you know we have the authority to change the
color of the military uniforms, override the Joint Chiefs? We decide
how much they will be paid, what their housing will be like, how big
the units will be, how many ships will sail, whether we are going to
buy the F-22, whether we are going to make more F-15's, 14's, 16's,
18's, what we are going to do with the Harrier, the AV-8B, the vertical
takeoff aircraft we are rebuilding, 10 to 20 of them, for night radar
capability, an amazing system that after three decades walks away with
every air show. We decide what kind of basic allowance for quarters. I
just raised it 5.2 percent, got the Senate to go along with it and it
is law now.
I put into the last bill that people who have the AIDS virus, are
infected with the AIDS virus, and will probably die, not before 10
years, we hope, that is what we have extended it to if they live a
clean life, exercise, and eat nutritious food, there are 1,049 in the
military. They are not deployable. The three surgeons general said they
must be brought home from Bosnia or Haiti or other misadventures. They
can never be assigned to Korea, to Japan, to Europe. They cannot be a
marine guard in an Embassy in any of the 191 nations in the world, 185
in the United Nations, including us, 7 others, 192 nations, including
us, our status of treaty says that not a single nation in the world,
191, including the 6 not in the United Nations, that is like Taiwan,
Switzerland, Tonga, Nauru, no nation wants an HIV-infected American
citizen in uniform in their countries. And they will never go in combat
again.
If a person tests HIV positive in Bosnia, he is brought home. He is
grounded from his helicopter or his aircraft; he will never fly again.
All of the technical schools, the training, it is all flushed. It is
gone. Then we put out of the military, or do not recruit someone out of
high school new, and give him the job of somebody we have let go who
did not get infected with the HIV virus. It is an unbelievable story.
I passed it in the House, in subcommittee, committee. They would not
debate it on the floor. Nobody would try to challenge me. They thought
they would do it in the other Chamber. It got through two hard-fought
conferences. And when Clinton vetoed the bill, he griped about national
defense, stopping him from these adventures like Somalia, Bosnia, and
Haiti, and United States troops under foreign command. He said that is
his constitutional right. It is not. Even somebody as smart and as
excellent a leader as Bob Dole slipped and said, I know it is his
constitutional right to send the troops to Bosnia. It is not. He said,
but I do not think they should go. We should arm the Moslems. But even
he did not understand fully the history of this. So when Clinton
finally signed the defense authorization with 10 things in it that I
had worked on, no more abortions in military hospitals. I won that
battle. The staff did not even want me to do it. Do not, it is too
contentious. We will lose on the floor. We won on the floor, 7 times.
We won. The Senate tried to take it out. We beat them in conference
twice. And Clinton with his own pen, I wish he would send me that pen,
undid one of his five culture-of-death Executive orders. He had to undo
it because of this Congressman from southern California. One down, four
to go of the culture of death. They did not gripe about that one.
But guess what? Clinton says, you took out defending the homeland,
the heartland of America or its big cities. I get to put people under
U.N. foreign command. I get to send people to Bosnia, Somalia, Tibet,
or any cockamamie place I darn well feel like, but I feel bad about
this HIV thing. This is mean-spirited, bigoted. Goes on and on and then
says, you people out there who want to sue this, sue the Government,
sue the military, do it. My Justice Department, Janet Reno, will not
counter it. You can sue with impunity. Meanwhile, homosexuals in the
military, Janet Reno's Justice Department people are supporting the
military policy, as screwed up and contradictory as it is, thanks to
Les Aspin, Lord rest his soul and this confused President on this
moral, cultural issue.
He is not going to, he is going to support the military orders there
in this dumb mixed up policy on homosexuals in the military, but go
ahead and sue on HIV.
So guess what, 3 hours ago, the conference of Senators and House
Committee on Appropriations members still cannot decide whether they
are going to try without a hearing, try without a hearing, without a
bill, without an amendment on the Senate side, without any voting over
there, they are going to try and strip out the Dornan language and keep
HIV-AIDS-infected people on active duty who are jerked out of all their
jobs that have anything to do with combat, even combat support, and who
cannot go anywhere in the world, not even Hawaii or Alaska, let alone
possessions like Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, stay in
the American States.
The figures here, most are in California and Virginia, two States
with the highest land values and the highest tourist budgets.
Unbelievable that he would make an issue out of that, February 10. But
that is the constitutional power of Congress under article I, section
8, to decide the total parameters of the size, pay and composition, and
equipment of our military.
Clinton thinks they are his toys to be used for photo ops. I will
make a charge on the floor right now, Mr. Speaker, that I have been
studying for months. The entire intelligence process at the highest
levels in Haiti has been politically debauched and compromised. The
Aristide government, this man that the Vice President, Mr. Clinton
tried to lionize, Aristide, this defrocked cleric, this man who
publicly, I have heard it on tape, bragged about how the smell of
burning flesh was exciting, telling people to put tires around people's
necks and burn them alive with those tires, this defrocked cleric
Aristide ordered through his Interior Ministry the death, the
assassination of competitors in the recent Presidential election down
there.
We found out about these assassination threats. And through a
political destruction, and I cannot go any further than this, because
of certain responsibilities I have here, because in the politicizing of
our intelligence, people died. There are still reports bottled up on
Somalia and Bosnia, 17 men dead, NATO Allies, 15, 2 of them our people,
dozens injured, land mine accidents, bobby trap bombs in the buildings
in Sarajevo, which I drove through a few weeks ago, thinking about my
trip there in 1991 on the eve of the dissolution of the Communist
cobbled together 8 provinces of the former Yugoslavia. I could hardly
recognize this beautiful city of Sarajevo, the Olympic city of the same
year that we had the Olympics in my Los Angeles, the Winter Olympics of
1984. Went by the beautiful stadium where Scott won the gold medal, I
forget his last name. Now he is a narrator for skating events. That
whole stadium collapsed, became a graveyard, the Olympic areas and
fields mass graves, unbelievable what they did to themselves there. But
3 years before we used the air power, which I supported, to stop this
sniping of women and children, killing mothers in front of their sons
or vice versa.
I told George Bush, put a helicopter raid on those concentration
camps. Look at this cover of Newsweek, Mr. President. What is this,
Auschwitz all over again? What about the ringing words from the
Holocaust, ``never again.'' Put about 20 Blackhawks in there. Give them
20 Apaches or Cobra gunships to give them cover. Shoot up the gun
towers. They will all run for the tall grass when they see 20 Apaches
coming over the nape of the land and put all those prisoners whether
they are Moslem-, Bosnian-, or mostly Serbian-held prisoners, put them
in helicopters and take them to Strasbourg, France, dump them on the
steps of the European Parliament. Not dump them, with great dignity and
respect, after we fed them and clothed them, ``present'' them is the
word I want for the European Parliament. And tell
[[Page H3228]]
them, you vowed never again, these are European human beings. What are
you doing? Good idea, Bob, good plan. Cannot get involved. Not our
deal.
I said, what are you going to do, wait for the Europeans until the
death toll is so bad that we will have to get involved. Then Clinton
fritters away 3 years. Now we are in there when there are so many blood
debts built up over the last 4 years and they are still killing one
another, still burning homes in the suburbs, that I drove through, of
Sarajevo. Unbelievable that we are involved also on the ground to
relieve what I said when I opened up, European young men and women to
work in their industries, to build Airbus aircraft at Air France in
Toulouse, France so they can sell them to our big airlines here.
Let me close, Mr. Speaker, on a few notes on the greatest health
tragedy to ever hit the United States of America.
Mr. Speaker, nobody has made as many speeches on the floor of the
House or on the floor of the Senate about AIDS as I have. Not Mr.
Dannemeyer, who is retired, 4 years ago, not Mr. Waxman, when he was
chairman of the Health Committee and Subcommittee of Commerce, no one
has made as many speeches as I have.
My speeches have been rooted in mercy and compassion, and I have
voted for every AIDS money appropriation in my last 10 years that I
have been here because this is young people dying in their prime, where
cancer and cardiac problems hit people generally at the later end of
their life. Here are the new figures that I got out of the Atlanta
Centers for Disease Ccontrol.
Mr. Speaker, you are an historian. You know that depending on your
encyclopedia, 295,000 people died in combat in World War II or 312,000
is the high number. AIDS deaths, as of New Year's Eve, 315,928. We have
513,486 infected with AIDS and over 1 million positive with the human
immunodeficiency virus, 1 million infected, half a million with AIDS
and 62.3 percent dead. Let me add to that, children, almost 4,000,
3,921, for a cumulative total of 319,849.
You can add to that Dr. Koop, the former surgeon general, told me 30
to 40,000 who died in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, where the doctors,
mercifully to protect the family, only put down the proximate cause of
death, heart, lungs, pneumonia, cancer, and did not say it was caused
by a breakdown in their immune system.
So the figure is closer to 350,000, 50,000 more than died in the
jungles, the deserts, the Arctic, the sea, the air, all over this
planet in World War II, Americans. Now we are heading toward the Civil
War figure. We have already passed Civil War combat deaths, but
pneumonia, disease, and Andersonville, the Auschwitz of its time, we
lost 618,000, another half a decade and we will pass the Civil War
death toll. Never has a disease ever cut down so many young Americans,
and it has always been handled as a public relations problem, never as
a pandemic, that is a worldwide epidemic, a pandemic killing plague,
because people's reputations are more important than saving those
innocent victims, those 4,000 children.
My heart goes out to the 1,049 people in our military. I am going to
find out who is an innocent victim. I will prevail over Mr. Clinton
again. During this break I am going to become a walking encyclopedia
with visits to Walter Reed, Bethesda, and maybe to San Antonio's
Wilford Hall, Air Force. I will not be beaten on this by Senator
Kennedy who does not have a clue of what this is all about.
____________________