[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.

                          ____________________