[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 129 (Wednesday, September 18, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H10570]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




[[Page H10570]]



 CONCERNING THE APPROPRIATE PLACEMENT OF RESPONSIBILITY REGARDING THE 
                       ATTACK ON KHOBAR BARRACKS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Hefner] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HEFNER. Mr. Speaker, I have served on the Subcommittee on 
National Security of the Committee on Appropriations. We seem to have 
gotten in a mode here to where we want to take the House floor and we 
want to blame the President for everything that happens all across the 
country.
  I just want to bring back something that happened a few years ago 
when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, and we lost 240 
men in their sleep in Lebanon. We were in real secret negotiations and 
hearings upstairs in this Capitol, it was so secret. We had Navy people 
there, and we had these people, they had been informed there were three 
pickup loads of explosives in the area, and nobody acted on that. We 
did not blame President Reagan for being derelict of duty in that, 
because that was in Lebanon. We lost 240 Marines in Lebanon.
  Mr. Speaker, it just seems that everybody is in the mood here, 
anything that happens in the world is a problem of the President of the 
United States. Mr. Speaker, down here in the well yesterday, one day 
last week, the gentleman from Pennsylvania said if we lose one person, 
if we lose one person in Iraq, we are going to hold the President of 
the United States to blame for losing that one person. Mr. Speaker, to 
me this is going a little bit far.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. HEFNER. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague.
  First of all, we did not mention the President today. We mentioned a 
hearing with the Secretary of Defense, and the fact that we do want to 
find out, as the Secretary has said, who was responsible.
  What we are saying is we do not just want to go from the middle down, 
we want everyone in the chain of command to be looked at. In terms of 
what happened with President Reagan, I was not here then, so I cannot 
speak about what you all did when President Reagan was President.
  Mr. HEFNER. Let me tell my colleague what we did. When the hearings 
got real tight, heads were going to roll, guess what we did? We invaded 
Grenada. All the focus of the hearings went to the invasion of Grenada. 
We did not hear any more into the investigation of the people who were 
derelict in Lebanon.
  It seems to me when we are kind of getting in the area of politics 
where elections are coming up, that it is in vogue here to blame the 
administration or the Secretary for everything that happens on somebody 
else's foreign soil. We cannot tell the Saudis, they tell us to some 
extent, because if you remember, when we were trying to keep the 
Persian Gulf open a few years ago they would not even let us fuel our 
ships and planes there. The same for Kuwait.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. HEFNER. I yield to the gentleman from California.
  Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding, Mr. Speaker.
  Let me just tell my friend, as a guy who went over to Lebanon shortly 
before the bombing and who stayed to work with Colonel Garrity, because 
I thought there were security problems, our problem is this, and not 
in terms of assigning blame, but you have two bombings. We see that 
truck bombs are the weapon of choice in the Middle East for terrorists. 
We had the Riyahd bombing 6 months ago. That showed us where we had 
public areas, public drive areas near troop concentrations, we were in 
danger of being hurt.

  If this hearing today made people upset, if we got after people and 
we embarrassed them or made them feel uneasy, if that results in the 
Pentagon going back and saying, we will not have a troop concentration 
in the Middle East that is within 85 feet of a public road, then that 
is good.
  Mr. HEFNER. Mr. Speaker, I take back my time.
  I am not questioning the fact we need to have hearings, but it seems 
to me we oversimplify when we say we are going to decide right here 
what is going to be the policy of the Saudis as far as allowing us to 
do things for the protection of our troops. To me this goes just beyond 
where foreign policy ought to end.
  Everybody, I do not know of any person in this building that does not 
want to support our troops and see that they are not put in harm's way. 
But I just wanted to remind the Members that there was not a hue and 
outcry in this body when 240 of our fine Marines were killed in their 
sleep. And we did not personally hold President Reagan, as we should 
not have done, we did not personally hold him responsible for the 
deaths of these fine young men.
  In this well the other day, the gentleman from Pennsylvania said, if 
we lose one person, we are going to hold the President of the United 
States, we are going to hold him personally to blame for losing these 
lives.

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