[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 127 (Wednesday, September 26, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9845-S9846]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Mr. TORRICELLI. I thank the Chair.
Mr. President, I want to engage my colleagues and the American people
in a discussion of the events of September 11, 2001. All of us
recognize that much of our lives have been touched and some things have
been changed forever. If it is axiomatic to say that about our country
and the communities I represent and where I live in northern New
Jersey, it may be as true as anywhere in the Nation.
There is not a small town or a city in northern New Jersey that has
not been touched or changed. At the time the final body has been found
and the search has concluded, 2,000 to 3,000 people in New Jersey may
have lost their lives. It is estimated there are 1,500 orphans in my
State. It struck everywhere.
In Middletown, NJ, 36 people have been lost. It is estimated it could
go as high as 70. In Basking Ridge, where Jon Corzine and I visited a
few days ago, 14 people were lost, two more than in all of World War
II. In a single elementary school in Ridgewood, NJ, 6 children lost
their fathers.
The loss of lives in Korea or Vietnam or World War II took years to
accumulate. In my State of New Jersey, lives were lost in minutes.
We say the Nation will never be the same. We say that life has
changed. Those are words. We do not know what they mean. All we can
attest is that it is large, it is dramatic, and things will be
different. Now we fill in the blanks. How will it be different and why?
The pain is so great and the loss is so enormous that our instinct is
to strike immediately, overwhelmingly with the power in our possession,
and, indeed, we will strike, but it must be thoughtful and it must be
careful because it must be successful.
Our instinct is, because we understand there is no liberty without
security, that we must immediately enhance law enforcement with money,
with people, and with new powers. Indeed, many of these new powers are
justified and must be required. Everything from increasing electronic
surveillance to expanding wiretap authority to giving the CIA greater
access to grand jury materials is being proposed. Some of it is long
overdue, and already I think the Congress can justify acting.
There is no reason to have a 5-year statute of limitations on
terrorist activities. The Nation has no statute of limitations for
treason or for murder. Terrorism is every much as insidious and the
statute of limitations should be lifted.
The Government clearly needs to have greater powers for dealing with
money laundering. We recognize this from our fight against the
narcotics trade, and it is true with terrorism. The laws are antiquated
and must be changed.
The electronics telecommunications revolution has probably
necessitated change in electronic monitoring as well.
These things we can justify, but it is here where I urge caution
because we are in pain, because we are vulnerable, and because we
recognize that our security is in such danger there is a rush to
judgment on issues of civil liberties. It is here where I draw the
line.
Everything can be discussed, and the Congress should be willing to
listen to many, but it is the responsibility of this Congress, under
the architecture designed by the Founding Fathers, and primarily the
duty of this Senate where passions cool, better judgment reigns, civil
liberties which are compromised. A Constitution which is changed to
deal with the necessities of an emergency is not so easily restored
when the peace is guaranteed and a victory won.
If this Congress surrenders civil liberties and rearranges
constitutional rights to deal with these terrorists, then their
greatest victory will not have been won in New York but in Washington.
Any administration can defeat terrorism by surrendering civil
liberties and changing the Constitution. Our goal is to defeat
terrorism, remain who we are, and retain the best about ourselves while
defeating terrorism. It is more difficult, but it is what history
requires us to do.
The history of our Nation is replete with contrary examples, and we
need to learn by them. They are instructive. For even the greats of
American political life have given in to the temptation of our worst
instincts to defeat our worst enemies and lose the best about
ourselves. Indeed, the very architect of our independence, John Adams,
under the threat of British and French subversion, supported the Alien
and Sedition Acts, compromising the very freedom of expression he had
helped to bring to the American people only a decade before. He lived
with the blemish of those acts on his public life until the day he
died.
Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, the savior of our Union
suspended the Constitution, its right of habeas corpus, imprisoning
political opponents to save the Union.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had the honor of saving the Nation not
once but through the Great Depression and the Second World War,
imprisoned Japanese Americans and some German and Italian Americans in
a hasty effort at national security which has lived as a national
shame.
If these great men, pillars of our democracy, compromised better
judgment in time of national crisis, it should temper our instincts.
Their actions should speak volumes about the need for caution at a time
of national challenge.
There is another side. There are better instincts among us. The
American people are speaking of them all across the Nation. They
recognize the need to balance security and civil liberties, to change
that which is required to assure victory, but recognizing that victory
is measured not only by security but also by our liberties.
Across the Nation, the American people have provided us many measures
of their strength as they exercise those liberties, engaging in open
debate about how the Nation responds, giving unprecedented levels of
donations--$200 million to the Red Cross alone.
They reached out across races and religions to express concern about
each other and for the safety of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans.
They are reminders of how much the Nation has grown from previous
successes.
I rise in recognition of these national strengths and these concerns
and commend in particular Senator Leahy who has extended, on behalf of
the Senate, our desire to work with the administration to enhance the
powers of law enforcement and to provide the necessary resources. But I
think he speaks for many Members of the Senate--he certainly speaks for
me--when he also asks that we act deliberately and prudently.
I ask we expand that debate because history will require, and I
believe the American people will demand, that we not merely review what
new powers must be given to law enforcement and the intelligence
community, we must not simply debate what new resources financially are
required, but there is some need for some accounting of those previous
powers and resources.
At a time when we are still seeking survivors and counting the dead,
no one wants to cast blame. I do not rise to cast blame, but I do ask
for accountability.
I may represent 3,000 families who lost fathers and mothers and
sisters and brothers and children. They demand military protection by
bringing our forces abroad. They ask that we strengthen law enforcement
at home. But somebody is going to have to visit these cities and small
towns and answer to these families, where are the resources we gave in
the past? What of the enormous intelligence and security and law
enforcement apparatus we have built through these decades? What
happened?
This is not to assess blame. It is so we can only learn how to
correct these
[[Page S9846]]
errors and improve these systems if we understand the failures.
It is reported in the media that the United States, in what would
otherwise be a classified figure, may spend $30 billion per year on
intelligence services, including the CIA and the NSA.
The Washington Post reports the FBI counterterrorism spending grew to
$423 million this year, a figure which in the last 8 years has grown by
300 percent. It is not enough to ask for more. It is necessary to
assess what went wrong. Did leadership fail? Were the plans inadequate?
Did we have the wrong people, or were they on the wrong mission?
Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that over the past 2
years the Central Intelligence Agency had provided to the FBI the names
of 100 suspected associates of Osama bin Laden who were either in or on
their way to the United States. Yet the Washington Post concludes that
the FBI ``was ill equipped and unprepared'' to deal with this
information.
Some of the allegations reported in the media are stunning and deeply
troubling, not simply about what happened but revealing about our
inability to deal with the current crisis. Previous terrorist
investigations, it is alleged, produced boxes of evidentiary material
written in Arabic that remained unanalyzed for lack of translators.
During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, agents discovered
that photos and drawings outlining the plot had been in their
possession for 3 years, but they had not been analyzed.
Since 1996, the FBI had evidence that international terrorists were
learning to fly passenger jets at U.S. flight schools, but that does
not seem to have obviously raised sufficient concern, and there was no
apparent action.
In August, the FBI received notice from French intelligence that one
man who had paid cash to use flight simulators in Minnesota was a
``radical Islamic extremist'' with ties to Afghani terrorist training
camps. Regrettably, this intelligence information was apparently not
seen in the greater context of an actual threat that has now been
realized.
On August 23 of this year, a few weeks before the World Trade Center
was attacked, the CIA alerted the FBI that two suspected terrorist
associates of Bin Laden were in the United States. The INS confirmed
their presence in the United States, and the FBI launched a search. It
was obviously unsuccessful.
It is hard to know where to begin. Life goes on, but not so quickly.
Who here will come to New Jersey with me and visit these thousands of
families who pay their taxes and ask little of their country, maybe
nothing of their Government, other than to keep them secure, protect
their liberties, and let them live their lives? Somebody failed the
American people.
I know my constituents will ask me, as their representative in the
Senate, to authorize foreign military adventures to find those
responsible, and I have done that, and the President has my support.
They will not want this pain to be shared with other Americans, so they
will ask my support financially and by changing Federal statutes to
ensure this never happens again, and that will have my support. Some of
these children, some of the widows or widowers, are going to ask:
Senator, how did this happen? All of this money and all of these
resources. Why was somebody not watching to defend my family, my
country, my child?
We can postpone that accountability, but it has to happen. These
terrorist cells that consumed these lives and shooked our Nation to the
core and now send us into foreign battle were not organized last month.
This attack was not planned on the morning of September 11, 2001. Many
of those arrested or detained for this terrorist attack were from the
same area and may have had the same relationships to the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center in New York. What level of surprise could
this represent? There needs to be an explanation.
On behalf of the people of my State, if I need to return to this
Chamber every day of every week of every month, this Senate is going to
vote for some board of inquiry. I joined my colleagues after the
Challenger accident, recognizing that that loss of life, the failure of
technology and leadership, indicated something was wrong in NASA. The
board of inquiry reformed NASA and the technology and gave it new
leadership, and it served the Nation well.
After Pearl Harbor, we recognized something was wrong militarily. We
had a board of inquiry. We found those responsible, we held them
accountable, and we instituted the changes.
Indeed, that formula has served this Nation for years in numerous
crises. Now I call for it again. First, review the circumstances
surrounding this tragedy, the people responsible, the resources that
were available, where there was a failure of action, and make
recommendations and assign responsibility. Second, develop
recommendations for changes of law or resources or personnel so it does
not happen again. I cannot imagine we will do less. I call upon us to
do more. I will not be satisfied with new assignments of powers or
appropriating more money. I want to know what went wrong, and why, and
who.
Just as we have moved forward, we need to give one glance back over
our shoulder and give these families some answers.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
Mr. MURKOWSKI. Having had the opportunity to visit New Jersey last
week, I listened intently to the comments of my good friend and must
say I was very moved with the presentation made by the various mayors
who saw fit to share the extent of that tragedy--not only the residents
of their communities, but the tremendous burden put on these areas to
address the recovery efforts associated with the reality that nearly a
third of the estimated number lost were residents of the State of New
Jersey.
I extend my sympathies and assure my colleague of my willingness to
assist him and his constituents in this terrible tragedy.
____________________