[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 144 (Thursday, October 25, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H7329-H7331]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   LONG-TERM TERRORIST STRATEGY SHOULD BE DEVELOPED WITH HIGH-LEVEL 
                    STATEMENT OF NATIONAL OBJECTIVES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Culberson). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Connecticut 
(Mr. Shays) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, on September 11 we were brutally awakened to 
the harsh realities we dreamed might never reach our shores. With the 
thousands of dead, we buried forever any illusion the scourge of 
transnational terrorism could not strike here.
  Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it our 
``wake-up call from hell.'' We have awakened to a recurring nightmare 
of escalating brutality and carnage unfettered by moral or political 
constraints.
  Each attack is practice and prelude for the next. Global terrorism 
turns our strengths against us, exploiting the freedom, pluralism and 
openness we cherish to spread hate, fear and death.
  On that day, our world changed in ways we are still struggling to 
understand, our vision still blurred by disbelief and tears of grief.
  Since then, there have been times I find myself longing for a return 
to the Cold War. The numbing calm of mutually assured destruction seems 
in retrospect more tolerable than the unnerving wait for the next 
random act of barbaric terrorist mayhem.
  But if the global upheavals of the last century yield one lesson, it 
is this: the dynamic triumphs over the static, and we dare not indulge 
the urge to pause and reminisce.
  To be sure, the post-Soviet Pax Americana is not quite what we 
expected. The Cold War is over, yet the world is a more dangerous 
place. Hard on the heels of hope, we are entering a new world order of 
growth and cooperation, intractable regional conflicts and the rise of 
radical Islamic militancy

[[Page H7330]]

bringing, instead, the prospect of chronic, even cataclysmic disorder.
  On the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill's ``Iron Curtain'' 
speech at Westminster College, former British Prime Minister Margaret 
Thatcher described these ``other, less appealing consequences'' of the 
global situation.
  She said, ``Like a giant refrigerator that had finally broken down 
after years of poor maintenance, the Soviet empire in its collapse 
released all the ills of ethnic, social and political backwardness 
which it had frozen in suspended animation for so long.''
  In 1996, she was prescient enough to warn of the threat posed by 
radical Islamic movements and the middle-income countries, Iraq, Iran, 
Syria and others, shopping for chemical and biological weapons in the 
post-Soviet toxic bazaar.
  The Iron Curtain has been replaced by a poison veil that shrouds the 
world in dread and terror. We also find our economic, military and 
cultural dominance fostering vocal, sometimes violent resentment to 
which we seem unaccustomed and unprepared to rebut. Former Senator 
Warren Rudman, who served as the co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on 
National Security 21st Century, recently said acknowledging and 
managing that resentment would have to become a central element of U.S. 
public diplomacy in the years and decades ahead.
  That is not all that will have to change. The Nation's fight against 
terrorism will remain fragmented and unfocused until there is a 
thorough assessment of the threats we face and overarching national 
strategy articulated to guide planning, direct spending and discipline 
bureaucratic balkanization.
  President Bush instructed the Director of the White House Office of 
Homeland Security, former Governor Tom Ridge, to formulate that 
strategy based on the most current threat intelligence.
  When pressed for a national strategy, the previous administration 
pointed to a pastiche of event-driven Presidential decision directives 
and the Department of Justice's 5-year spending plan.
  Reactive in vision and scope, that strategy changed only as we 
lurched from crisis to crisis, from Khobar Towers to the Cole, from 
Oklahoma City to Dar es Salaam.
  President Clinton's National Security Council Coordinator for 
Counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, scoffed at our committee's request 
for a comprehensive threat assessment. He told us the threat came from 
the groups on the State Department's list of designated terrorists and 
the strategy was to hunt them down like criminals.
  As recently as a month ago, threat assessment and security strategy 
were still viewed in some quarters as academic or bureaucratic 
exercises.
  Today, as we worry about access to crop dusters and anthrax exposures 
by mail, a clear-eyed, fully informed view of the threat, particularly 
the threat posed by chemical agents and weaponized pathogens, is a 
national security imperative.
  Assessing the threat of bioterrorism requires a sober judgment about 
the motives, intentions and capabilities of people so intoxicated with 
hate and evil they would kill themselves in the act of killing others.
  These are the questions that confound the assessment process: When 
and where will terrorists use biological weapons against us? How will 
the agent be dispersed? For what type and magnitude of attack should we 
be prepared?
  Available answers offer little comfort and less certainty in 
assessing the threat. Some conclude the technical difficulties of large 
scale production and efficient dissemination reduce the likelihood 
terrorists will use lethal agents to inflict mass casualties any time 
soon. Others think those barriers have been or will soon be overcome. 
Stills others believe neither large quantities nor wide dispersion are 
required to inflict biological terror.
  From this cacophony of plausible opinions, those charged with 
formulating a national counterterrorism strategy must glean a rational 
estimate about the irrational possibility of biological attack.
  Perhaps the most difficult dimension of the threat to assess is the 
deep-seated, almost primal fear engendered by the prospect of 
maliciously induced disease. For the terrorist, that fear is a potent 
force multiplier, capable of magnifying a minor, manageable outbreak 
into a major public health crisis. Failure to account for this unique 
aspect of biological terrorism understates the threat, increasing our 
vulnerability. Overstating the threat based on fear alone invites 
overreaction, in which we waste scarce resources and terrorize 
ourselves with Draconian security restrictions.
  The changes wrought by the events of September 11 have also brought 
into sharper focus just how much of our national security apparatus is 
now irrelevant or ineffective.
  Last week, Ambassador Paul Bremer, our Nation's first diplomat in 
1986 to combat the spread of global terrorism, and chairman of the 
National Commission on Terrorism, noted that two of the four pillars of 
U.S. counterterrorism policy were already obsolete.
  The first, to make no concessions to terrorists and strike no deals, 
has been made irrelevant by the rise of radical Islamic groups. Their 
only demand being the demise of the West, there can be no deal to 
strike.
  The second pillar of our policy, bring terrorists to justice for 
their crimes, has been rendered ineffective by perpetrators willing to 
die with their victims. We can no longer indulge the tidy, familiar 
mechanics of solving the crime and punishing individuals when the crime 
offends humanity and the individuals are eager to be martyred.

  That approach has been compared to battling malaria by swatting 
mosquitoes. To stop the disease of modern terrorism, the swamp of 
explicit and tacit state sponsorship must be drained and disinfected.
  That leaves the final two precepts of current policy, isolate state 
sponsors of terrorism and enlist other Nations in that effort.
  Like its totalitarian forebears, terrorism is not incorporal. Its 
practitioners must make anchor and draw sustenance through contact with 
the people, places and institutions susceptible to the pressures of 
military and political statecraft.
  So building a coalition to punish state sponsors is now being pursued 
in earnest. But that was not always the case, and it is by no means 
clear what longer-term strategy should be pursued in this regard beyond 
Afghanistan.
  That long-term strategy should be developed with a high-level 
statement of national objectives. It should be coupled logically to a 
statement of the means that will be used to achieve those objectives. 
Only then can we hope to resist the drift of the events thrust upon us 
by others and be prepared to confront terrorism in our time and on our 
terms.
  It will not be easy. David Abshire, from the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies, CSIS, recently noted this critical strategic 
discussion occurs in the context of a greatly weakened State 
Department, a traumatized intelligence community, a disorganized NSC, 
and a reactive national security posture left over from the Cold War.
  With regard to our intelligence capabilities, I would add the 
observation their trauma is in part self-induced. Self-satisfied and 
for the most part self-policed, intelligence agencies tend to see 
information as an end, not a means. We are partially blinded by the 
lack of human intelligence in key parts of the world. Classification 
standards and jurisdictional stovepipes all but guarantee critical 
observations, and analysis will not reach those who need them.
  Ironically, a community so heavily dependent on technical means of 
intelligence-gathering has not been able to embrace the data mining and 
threat profiling tools others are using to glean important knowledge 
from open-source material.
  Increasingly sophisticated terrorists are becoming adept at hiding 
their secrets in plain view. Our intelligence agencies are too busy 
protecting Cold War sources and methods to find them.
  Similar institutional dynamics were present the last time the United 
States was coming to grips with a profound strategic paradigm shift: 
the emergence of the Cold War and the nuclear threat. President 
Eisenhower wisely tasked the bureaucracies to do what they often do 
best, compete with each

[[Page H7331]]

other. Strategic options were identified, studied and urged on the 
President. Conceived in the White House sunroom, the Solarium Exercise, 
as it came to be known, produced the long-range strategy that guided 
U.S. national security policy for the next 5 decades.

                              {time}  1400

  To meet the current threat, our strategy must be more dynamic and 
more open. Security is not a sedative, not a state of rest, but the 
level of vigilance required to protect, and advance, what we hold 
essential to life and liberty. Advocating for human rights and human 
freedoms is not cultural hegemony; it is our God-given right and duty.
  Nor can we afford to be squeamish or patronizing in public discourse 
about the zealots who target us, or the weapons they wield. A naive or 
blurred perception of the threat fragments our defenses and leaves us 
avoidably vulnerable.
  The inconveniences and sacrifices required to protect national 
security and maintain public safety will be more readily accepted if we 
are brutally honest about the true nature of our peril. The threat must 
be confronted with the same clear-eyed focus, steely intensity and 
unflagging vigilance with which the terrorists pursue their malignant 
cause.
  Since September 11, we have shown we are up to the task.
  In another age, another generation faced the prospect of another 
evil. Winston Churchill, addressing his besieged nation over the BBC in 
1940, spoke to the timeless challenge of defending freedom. This is 
what Churchill said:
  ``And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face 
the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves 
humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we 
are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is 
threatened.
  ``We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for 
ourselves alone. Here in this strong city of refuge which enshrines the 
title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian 
civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy 
reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen, 
we await undismayed the impending assault.
  ``Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. 
Perhaps it will never come.
  ``We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent 
shock, or what is perhaps a harder test, a prolonged vigil. But be the 
ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall 
tolerate no parley; we may show mercy, we shall ask for none.''
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your willingness to take the dais and give 
me this opportunity.

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