[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 149 (Thursday, November 1, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H7709-H7715]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                BORDER, DRUG AND ANTI-TERRORIST POLICIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Putnam). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, tonight I would like to focus on our border 
policies and drug and anti-terrorism policies and want to share a 
number of things that we have been working on, and hope to continue to 
do this as we are in session the rest of this year.
  First, I want to begin with a series of hearings that we are working 
with on the north and south borders. The actual conception for this 
idea came out of the U.S.-Canada Parliamentary Conference last May. 
Some of the Canadian legislators had expressed concerns that the 
slowdowns at our borders, much like on the Mexican border, were 
impacting commerce.
  We have become so interconnected in all of our border states, 
particularly you think of California and Texas, but in the Midwest, 
Michigan, as well as my home State of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, New York 
State and all of New England, are very interconnected with the Canadian 
trade. We have gained almost as many jobs in our trade with Canada as 
we have lost to Mexico in Indiana, and in Texas they have gained from 
Mexico, but lost some to Canada. That is what the North American Free 
Trade Agreement was originally conceived to do, and ironically seems to 
in a way that many of us were skeptical about, be working, but only if 
our borders work.
  At the same time, I as cochair with Susan Whalen of the House side of 
the Transborder Sub Group in our Canadian Parliamentary Conference, as 
I pointed out, we are not going to back off on our drug war, we are not 
going to back off on illegal immigration because of the trade thing.
  We have to figure out how we can have adequate means to move commerce 
and the people moving across the border and still protect our borders. 
That was long before September 11. We had agreed to hold a number of 
hearings on the border. After talking with the gentleman from Arizona 
(Mr. Kolbe) and the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) and 
those in the U.S.-Mexico Parliamentary Exchange as well, we decided to 
do some on the south border.
  At this point, we are at least going to do the Detroit-Windsor 
corridor, the Buffalo-Toronto corridor, the Seattle-Vancouver in the 
north, as well as the New York-Montreal, Boston-Montreal corridors, and 
on the Mexican border, the California crossings, Nogales to El Paso-
Juarez and the Monterey zone.
  To get a picture of what is happening on our borders, our first 
hearings were held this past weekend at Highgate Springs in Vermont, 
which is the I-89 corridor where Montreal, Quebec City come down and 
into Boston and New England, and at Champlain, New York, on Monday 
morning on the I-87 corridor where Montreal comes down to New York 
City.
  We also visited the border control regional command center. Twenty-
four states are coordinated out of Burlington, Vermont, the U.S. Coast 
Guard Center on Lake Champlain, and the southern border crossing 
between I-89 and I-87.
  The first zone highlights from these first hearings highlighted 
certain things that are likely to be repeated as we do other hearings. 
One, there is insufficient staffing for customs, INS and Border Patrol. 
Two, the current staff is working overtime and having vacation leave 
canceled, which is exhausting them and also reaching the overtime 
limits in some cases. You can do that

[[Page H7710]]

for a short period, but not for 10 years, if we are in a long-term war 
with terrorists. Three, because of the pay grade and benefit 
restrictions, many INS agents are leaving the agency. Four, few receive 
language bonuses, some even who are bilingual.
  We have a different kind of problem. We have looked at this in 
different ways, but the State Department test difficulty, which is one 
of the ways we give language bonuses, is probably too stiff for what we 
need for conversational language at the border. Thus, we had one case 
of a person I talked to, because with Quebec there at that northern 
border, French becomes critical. Yet at the same time one person who 
grew up in Quebec, whose first language was French, could not pass the 
State Department test.
  This leads us to the question of we are not even sure whether our 
government employees, including maybe Members of Congress, could pass 
the State Department English test, because it is testing things beyond 
conversational level. What we really need at the boarders are 
conversational level, to be able to identify things and certain key 
phrases, like, for example, anthrax. So we have fewer people taking 
language training where we actually need it because of this difficulty.
  For example, in this north zone, and I am going to point out later it 
is important because Montreal has been a center for a lot of these 
terrorists to move around at different border crossings and different 
ways in the United States, we do not have anybody in the entire zone 
who can speak Farsi. We only have one at a regional headquarters who 
can understand Arabic. For that matter, you could conceivably have 
anthrax or illegal narcotics sitting in your front seat and as long as 
it is in a language that the Border Patrol or the INS agent cannot 
read, theoretically it could get through. We need to have more language 
understanding, certainly like Spanish on the southern border, or French 
on some of our borders as well.

  Also infrastructure needs are significant, but they differ by 
station. Trade we also learned is the lifeblood of the border 
communities, and it is down and it is going far beyond just the border 
communities.
  Let me step back for a minute and look at the border perspective in a 
bigger way. The U.S. customs has, along with INS, border crossings from 
basically Seattle or the Blaine crossing, all the way up to the 
northeast corner of Maine. There are hundreds of crossings. In 
addition, some of those run along water, such as the St. Lawrence River 
or Lake Champlain or Puget Sound. Some of them have natural barriers, 
and some of them are just woods or open space like in Maine and 
Montana.
  The major ones, as I mentioned, that we are looking at on the 
Canadian side are Vancouver, Seattle, Toronto as it goes to Buffalo and 
Niagara, Montreal as it comes down, and Detroit-Windsor. Then if you 
look at it from the perspective of border security, Winnipeg, 
International Falls, as well as Thunder Bay and Grand Portage at the 
top of Minnesota flows down toward Minneapolis-St. Paul, going toward 
Chicago. You also have the Edmonton and Calgary areas in Alberta that 
come across all that open space in Montana, and then Maine and North 
Dakota.
  On the southern border with Mexico, you have San Diego-Tijuana moving 
east all the way to Yuma. Then you have a sector of where Tucson and 
Nogales moving through New Mexico towards El Paso-Juarez, and then 
another heavily crossed area that feeds into Monterey and the zone 
where so many American industries have located across the Mexico 
border, crossing at Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville.
  You have one gap running from El Paso down to Laredo where Eagle Pass 
is that is a kind of a no-man's zone, and no major highways connecting, 
and a lot of Desert, but has also been a pressing point.
  So when you say your goal is to seal the border, it is not that easy 
when you look at the total number of mileage. In this description that 
I just gave you, it is not just that, it is the airports and it is the 
water. We have major customs facilities obviously watching the Gulf of 
Mexico, the entire East Coast of the United States, as well as the West 
Coast of the United States, all of the airports.
  Let me give you an example as I alluded to earlier. In the specific 
crossings we worked in Vermont and New York, you have a crossing at I-
87 that is the Maine corridor. Then you have a little bit of land and 
water from Lake Champlain. Then you have a small station that up until 
we went on high alert only had one person there and was only open for 
part of a day. Then you have more Lake Champlain. Then you have a 
crossing at I-89 that is a major crossing. And then a whole series of 
small crossings, some of which are unmanned and some of which have one 
person and now have a little bit more pressure on them.
  You look and say, boy, that water in there, I wonder if somebody 
could move through the water? Or think of the St. Lawrence River and 
the area called 10,000 Islands. Or at the Great Lakes, anybody who has 
crossed at Souix St. Marie, you see Manitoulin Island in there and the 
crossing from Manitoulin Island and jumping over to some of the 
northern Michigan places is basically a row boat.
  Similarly, in Puget Sound, anybody from the Northwest can understand 
that there are lots of islands there. And if you have any doubt that we 
are vulnerable there, remember had it not been for an extremely 
vigilant customs officer highlighted in the PBS special aired last 
weekend, that one of the millennium bombers targeting LAX Airport was 
captured at Port Angeles, who, by the way, was coming from Montreal. He 
crossed clear across Canada and tried to slip in through a ferry boat 
to Port Angeles, Washington, coming across the water, in the Straits of 
Juan de Fuca.
  This is not easy, and those who think we can easily seal the border 
are making a serious mistake. But it is not to say it is impossible.
  Let me get into some of the specific challenges at the border 
hearings we had this week. At Highgate, Vermont, they have new 
facilities but not enough personnel to staff them. So they were looking 
at our backups on a Sunday night, even though there are estimates 
ranging of commerce being down approximately 30 percent right now. The 
question is if we continue to tighten the boarders, particularly if we 
have any other terrorist incidents, and the terrorists are not American 
citizens, they are people who are coming in from outside.

                              {time}  2230

  Furthermore, we have this Quebec Gold BC Bud marijuana as well as 
Ecstasy and methamphetamines heading to New York and Boston through 
these border crossings, they are not things that come from inside the 
United States. And this Quebec Gold and BC Bud is selling in many 
places higher than cocaine, it is not marijuana, it is much more potent 
than traditional marijuana, and is as dangerous as cocaine.
  So if we are going to seal these borders, at least to some degree and 
keep the commerce going, we have to have enough personnel to open more 
lanes. We cannot simultaneously say that we want commerce to work, we 
want more American jobs, we do not want to depress our economy; and, by 
the way, we do not want terrorists, illegal drugs and illegal products 
in the United States and immigration problems; we want the border 
secure, without saying then we are going to put sufficient people to 
keep all the lanes open where we have built the facilities and able to 
do that. Now, at Champlain, they still need more personnel, but they 
have more personnel; their backups were less, substantially less, but 
their traffic is way down as well. The question is what will happen 
when the traffic picks up, but there they do not have the facilities. 
There the trucks were backing up and they need a new truck facility to 
be able to process the trucks. At Highgate they have new equipment 
coming in for scanning and they are making some progress with that as 
well at Champlain, but those are important things, because in the 
trucks is a great place to stick illegal narcotics. They find them in 
the axles, they find them in tires, they find them packaged inside 
other containers. But among other things, you can hide illegal 
immigrants and terrorists in the back of those trucks as well. Often 
they find people sneaking in inside those trucks too.

[[Page H7711]]

  Third, single-person staffing and not 24 hours is not acceptable at 
key border crossings. Short term, we are double staffing and keeping 
them open 24 hours. But unless we get more agents, this is not going to 
work.
  Fourth, we have lots of unmanned roads in a variety of ways and we 
cover them with a variety of mixes: Of monitors, of roadblocks, of 
local people identifying, and it actually works pretty well, but we 
need some additional help. The news media has been really fond of 
particularly picking on the Vermont border right now as well as, to 
some degree, the New York border because of some incidents that have 
occurred. But what has not been told is that in almost all the cases, 
the news media has been caught. Even though they originally did not 
think that they were being caught, they were being tracked and 
eventually caught. Part of the argument is how fast they were caught. 
But in some of the places, they are actually legal, because the road 
runs along the border on the Canadian side, and only if one takes a 
right turn or a left turn, depending on the place into U.S. territory 
and then do not report, is one violating the law. So it can take, even 
when we are doing the right thing and tracking appropriately, 10 to 15 
minutes before somebody catches you, because you were not illegal most 
of the time, and some of the media has been reporting has, quite 
frankly, been inaccurate. We have done a better job of protecting the 
border than one would think, but we still need additional things, 
because as we put the pressure on, so will those who want to violate 
the law, including terrorists.
  Fifth, the water. In Lake Champlain we obviously need a little bit 
better protection, but in fact we have a pretty good method of 
watching, we just need a little bit of additional protection on the 
eastern part of the lake, the northeast part of the lake.
  Sixth, we have an Indian reservation over by Mecina to the west that 
is cooperative, but because it is in effect an independent Nation, we 
treat Indian reservations differently than other areas as far as border 
crossing, and even though the local tribal council has cooperated, it 
is problematic how to deal with this, particularly when there is, in 
Canada they call them the first nations, when they have a reservation 
on the other side, because the law enforcement policies are different. 
So it takes excellent cooperation.
  Seventh is just walking in the woods. Because they have caught a lot 
of people carrying these potent drugs in backpacks just walking through 
the woods across the border. Now, this becomes problematic. But 
remember what I said is we caught many of them.
  The interesting thing here is the reason, and this could depress us 
to listen, because this is just the Vermont and the New York zone here, 
but the encouraging thing is if we can concentrate the pressure at the 
major crossings and fan them out so that they have to go wider and 
wider, just like we have worked with immigration policy along the 
Mexican border, it is easier to catch somebody going through open 
desert than it is when they get lost in a crowd at San Ysidro at the 
San Diego crossing.
  The same thing in the north country. You may think you can walk 
through the mountains or in the woods of Maine or Vermont or upstate 
New Hampshire, but there are several things working against you. One, 
it is cold there a lot of the year. You are going to leave foot prints, 
even snowshoe prints. You are going to have to eventually hook up with 
the car, and we are monitoring, and the other thing are the locals. 
Just like on airplanes, where the private citizens on the plane need to 
be watchful as well, the same thing is true on the borders. It is 
amazing in these tight knit local communities, they know when somebody 
strange is coming across and they report it. To the degree that 
American citizens join in, we can, in fact, make many of these borders 
much more secure than one would think at first glance.
  Now, on October 17, our subcommittee also held a hearing entitled, 
Keeping a Strong Federal Law Enforcement System that featured U.S. 
Immigration and Naturalization Service, the INS Director James Zieglar, 
as well as Assistant Commissioner at U.S. Customs and the Assistant 
Director of U.S. Marshals. They made several key points. Because bottom 
line is, we cannot control or seal the border if we do not have the 
agents.
  In Congress, we passed this really bold bill. We said we want 3,000 
new Border Patrol and INS agents. Well, that sounds real great until we 
get to the point of last week, we did not add agents, we lost 5 agents 
just before we had one meeting. What we were told at these hearings is 
up to 67 percent of the agents are looking at leaving in the next 
couple of years, and we are talking about adding them. This is our 
frontline of defense.
  Well, what are some of the problems? We have 6,000 miles of border 
and 300 points of entry. The budget calls for 3,000 to 3,500 new Border 
Patrol agents and immigration inspectors. In 1999, INS had to attract 
75,000 applicants to fill 2,000 positions. Of those 2,000 positions, 37 
percent were former military. Now, they say they do not recruit from 
the military, but, in fact, they recruit from people who are retired, 
and many people who retire are looking at whether it is going to be a 
satisfactory job, so people who have job options will leave the 
military, and re-enlistment has become a big problem. 30 percent come 
from local law enforcement. That was one of the debates we had here 
tonight on the Airline Security Act. If the Federal Government 
nationalizes all security at the airport, where are the guards going to 
come from?
  Last week, last Sunday, to be exact, Philadelphia reported that they 
had 37 murders compared to 25 last September and directly attributed it 
to the fact that so many policemen had been taken off of traditional 
law enforcement and moved towards antiterrorism efforts. Twelve people 
died because we were chasing things that did not happen in 
Philadelphia. That has been repeated all over America. We cannot do 
more things with the same number of people without diverting resources 
from one place to another. People are dying daily because of drugs; 
children are being abused, wives are being beaten, all sorts of things 
are happening in our country. If we do not have adequate law 
enforcement or if that law enforcement is chasing anthrax hoaxes or 
worried about things they previously did not have to deal with, and we 
have to reconcile this that if we are going to do more law enforcement, 
then we are going to need more agents. And if we are going to get more 
agents, given how hard it is to hold, retain, and recruit agents now, 
some changes are going to need to be made.
  Well, like what? One, for the INS Border Patrol, they need a waiver 
of the overtime cap. I mentioned earlier at the borders that we visited 
this past weekend, they are nearing the overtime cap. They have people 
with no vacations and they are working overtime, and yet we capped them 
out of overtime, so that is not even going to be an option. Then, what 
are we going to do? In late November, early December, we are going to 
say okay, we have used up all of our overtime, we do not have any a 
little, I guess we will now just open up the borders completely. I do 
not think so. We have to address this rapidly.
  Secondly, we need comprehensive pay reform. Part of the problem is 
that INS and Border Patrol they are topped out at a G9 and anybody who 
has been there a while if they have an option like oh, tonight, more 
sky marshals, where do sky marshals come from? They come from Border 
Patrol and INS, but we just said we are going to hire 3,000 more of 
them but we are taking them and moving them to sky marshals. We have to 
figure out how we are going to get people in both places, which means, 
for example, recruitment bonuses.
  In San Francisco, because of the cost of living and the shortage of 
applicants, they had to have $5,000 bonuses and then they got the 
applicants. In the year 2000 they used $2,000 recruiting bonuses. Just 
sitting on the border is not the most exciting thing and then being 
held accountable if one person in every 500,000 slip through, it is 
difficult. If we do not pay adequately, we are not going to be able to 
recruit people. We also need law enforcement status for INS inspectors. 
They are expected to do law enforcement work; they are expected to 
catch criminals, and yet at the same time, we do not pay them that way.
  We also need to really raise the earnings caps, and we also need 
language

[[Page H7712]]

bonuses. I referred to that earlier. We need some changes in how those 
language bonuses are worked. It is not that they are not good, they are 
3 percent of their salary. But if they are viewed as unachievable and 
not relevant to your job, then nobody seeks the bonuses. We should be 
seeking that, and if we tie that to people's pay; if we say, look, we 
will give you 5 percent more if you learn Farsi. It would make me feel 
more secure if we had people on the borders who speak Farsi, and if we 
are going to give them a pay raise, let us tie it to something, but let 
us make it achievable. They do not have to be a teacher in Farsi; they 
need to be able to understand it and have basic communication with 
somebody who is crossing the border, or Arabic or Spanish or French or 
whatever language we need, the Asian languages on the West Coast in 
particular, but increasingly across the country.
  We also had a hearing this week student on visas in the Committee on 
Education and the Workforce, and let me make a couple of points with 
that. First, let me put it in context. The only real way we are going 
to stop terrorists and, for that matter, illegal drugs, is before it 
gets to the United States. One of the chief planners of the September 
11 attacks was on a student visa, was not a student. How can we protect 
ourselves if people are here on visas that they have jumped, and nobody 
reports it? So I would suggest several things. First, let me state one 
other problem.
  Foreign students, of which we have hundreds of thousands, or we have 
at least several hundred thousand plus, apply to multiple universities, 
just like we do in the United States and our kids do. Presumably, the 
student may tell the university, I think most of them either put a down 
payment down, they pay it, they get a dorm, they get their classes, but 
right now, the government requires that the student, when they get 
their visa, say what university they are going to, but the university 
is not told they are coming, so the university could have a student 
headed for UCLA or Indiana University, the University of Notre Dame, 
and they might have it on the student visa, but the university may very 
well not know they are coming. So one thing we need to fix is to let 
the university know that the student got the visa in that university's 
name.
  Then, the university has an obligation to let the United States 
Government know: did the student actually check in and start classes? 
Did the student drop out? And/or did the student graduate? In other 
words, once they have completed the criteria on their visa or fail on 
the criteria of their visa, they are the first line of defense to let 
the government know. They do not have to be a law enforcement agency. 
It is not their job to go out and find the student, but the government 
does not know where to find them or whether they have even jumped the 
visa if the university will not help. The only way we learn usually is 
after they have committed a felony. That is how we learn whether 
somebody has violated their visa. So we need to get a better system 
with that.
  What I would suggest, because not every student is obviously a case 
at risk here, and we are not talking about American citizens or 
immigrants who have come to America and are going to college, let us 
get this straight. We are talking about people who are here because of 
the free nature of our country. Just like when our students go 
overseas, they are a guest in that country, and when they go overseas, 
there are certain criteria that they have to follow.
  For example, let me tie this to another incident, and I mentioned one 
of the terrorists. A number of years ago, when we were looking at 
stolen Chinese secrets which basically made us much more vulnerable to 
attack from China, the son of the equivalent of the head of the CIA of 
China had come to the United States. The way we turned this up in the 
Committee on Government Reform is we were investigating Johnny Chung 
and he worked for him. He was a lower level in the process of where the 
money got laundered and he was very open with us, and it may be, I am 
not saying the son was a risk, but the plain fact of the matter is he 
was enrolled at a university in Los Angeles, did not show up, we lost 
him. We lost the son of the CIA.

                              {time}  2245

  Now, do Members think China, when George Bush, Senior, was head of 
the CIA, and George W., if he had visited in China to be a student, do 
Members think China would have lost George W., being a student there? I 
do not think so. It is incredible that at a time in the very period 
when our secrets were stolen, we did not know where the son of the head 
of their CIA was in the United States because it was not reported that 
he did not show up on a student visa.
  So this has happened before. It is not new, and it happens a number 
of times, but we are looking for a needle in a haystack in the 
terrorist question unless, what I would suggest is that they start with 
a simple process.
  The INS does not have enough people to look up everybody who jumps 
their visa. This is not just students, it also applies to workers and 
when somebody sponsors a visitor. They ought to be held accountable for 
notifying the government if they have jumped.
  We need to give additional dollars then to the INS. I said, we cannot 
get the borders covered, the basic work covered even for felons, so if 
we are going to put a new thing on them, we have to give them the money 
to be responsible.
  It is a waste of money to do this for everybody right now because 
everybody is not at risk, but how about if we start something simple: 
If you are a student from a terrorist nation, one that the State 
Department listed as funding or supporting terrorism, and there are 
seven, then those students ought to be tracked, those workers ought to 
be tracked, and those guests ought to be tracked.
  We ought to know if they have overstayed or violated the terms of 
their visa, and it ought to be reported to the government by their 
sponsor if they know that they have violated it. It is not their 
sponsor's responsibility to track them, but it is to let the government 
know, and the INS will track. There ought to be a penalty if you do not 
report.
  Furthermore, in addition to those terrorist countries, we ought to 
add Afghanistan. Right now Afghanistan is not on the terrorist list. It 
kind of surprised me when I heard that, because we do not recognize the 
Taliban. Since we do not recognize there is a government there, they 
are not on the terror lists.
  It would not be too hard to come up with another list, and that is if 
the country is not themselves a terrorist threat but there is reason to 
believe that that country is the home nation of a lot of terrorists.
  Let us take, for example, Saudi Arabia, where I believe 15 of the 17 
were from; that then students from that country, even though their 
government may be completely innocent, that we track them. In other 
words, let us look at the facts. If you are a terrorist nation and 
certified as such by our State Department, or you are Afghanistan with 
the Taliban, or you are from Saudi Arabia right now, you are at much 
more likely risk if you have violated your visa, and we are not talking 
about people who are following the law.
  I would place a bet right now that the average American thought this 
was already happening. We would have thought that if there was a 
student from a country certified for terrorism and they had a work visa 
or a student visa or a tourist visa, Members probably thought that once 
they were here longer than they were supposed to be, or were not doing 
what they were supposed to be, that we know. Well, we do not. It is 
time we fix that right away.
  I also want to comment on the role of the Canadian parliament, the 
Mexicans, and the commerce.
  As I mentioned, we started this process through the parliament 
groups. Both sides of the border are interested in fixing this. We know 
the importance. The Plattsburgh Chamber of Commerce leader said that 
$1.4 billion in trade in that community of 80,0000 people.
  Fourteen percent of the people who work in the area work for a 
Canadian-owned companies. I have multiple Canadian-owned companies in 
Fort Wayne, which is 140 miles from the Windsor-Detroit border.
  We have become totally interconnected in big cities, and in Michigan 
Texas, Arizona, far more than Indiana. We all know there needs to be a

[[Page H7713]]

stake. The Canadian parliament now is working on an antiterrorism law 
and are working on their immigration laws, but they have different 
traditions and we have to work through it.
  If we are going to have accelerated border passes, background checks, 
fast passes, they need to understand they are going to have to make 
changes in their countries just like we are, because the American 
people as well as the people in their countries are not going to 
tolerate living in fear of nuts.
  Now, I want to also talk tonight, in addition to the terrorism on the 
border, a little bit about our anti-narcotics efforts. In our 
subcommittee, we have oversight of narcotics. It is a lot like 
terrorism. We are going to learn how difficult it is to fight 
terrorism, because if Members think the drug war was hard, the 
antiterrorism war is going to be even harder because there are fewer 
people and they have more targets. At least in drugs we know the 
networks and know where it is coming from.

  Number one, it is coming from Colombia, the heroin and cocaine. It is 
then coming either through the Caribbean corridor or the Pacific 
corridor or by air. Depending on our successes, sometimes when we put 
the pressure on the Caribbean, it moves to the Pacific. When we put 
pressure on the Pacific, it moves to the Caribbean.
  It used to be all through the Andean Indian region, but Bolivia got 
most of theirs eradicated. We need to make sure that stays firm. In 
Peru, they got most eradicated but it is coming back. It has moved to 
Colombia. Chances are overwhelming, about 90-some percent, if you have 
heroin in your community, as every community basically does, if you 
have cocaine in your community, as every community basically does, it 
is coming from Colombia. We know where it is at. We have to get it 
there.
  They are having a war in that country. We have had a big controversy 
in this Congress about the so-called Plan Colombia. We passed over $1 
billion, and if I have heard it once, I have heard it 50 times on this 
floor when we debated the Andean initiative this year, how can we keep 
pouring money into Colombia. Plan Colombia did not work.
  As we heard in our drug task force today from Rand Beers who heads 
international narcotics for the State Department, I am going to have to 
recall this from memory because I do not have it written down, but of 
the Blackhawks that we put in our package, four arrived in September, 
two for the CNP and two for the military, and six more will arrive by 
the end of the year.
  Of the Huey helicopters that we had in the budget, they are arriving 
in January.
  In other words, how can Plan Colombia fail when it is not there yet? 
I am tired of hearing how Plan Colombia failed. When we budget for a 
helicopter, we do not just pull it out of a Wal-Mart. We have to build 
it. There is a backlog of orders because we do not have right now as 
big a military establishment as we have had before. It takes a while to 
get the helicopters built, and the new Huey IIs, we do not just all of 
a sudden ramp up an assembly line like G.I. Joe. These are not little 
plastic toys. I did not mean a real person G.I. Joe, which we cannot 
ramp up, either. We have to do training.
  It is not a plastic toy. These are real helicopters which are 
complicated. It takes a while to get there.
  We do not know whether Plan Colombia does not work. We will know more 
in 6 to 12 months. What we know is the Colombians were bravely fighting 
a battle, and we had aid there, but not the size of the aid we are 
talking about.
  If we are successful in putting pressure on Colombia, we know the 
pattern. They are going to move to Ecuador, move to Bolivia, move to 
Peru, move to Brazil. So that is why this year the House appropriated 
$670-some million out of the President's $707-some million request, the 
bulk of which goes first to Colombia, that is the biggest battle; 
second to Peru; third to Bolivia, where we know they have been before 
and could potentially come back; and fourth to Ecuador, which is on a 
watch list.
  So what did the other body do? The other day they cut it another 
couple hundred million dollars, and they cut Colombia first, Peru 
second, and left in for Bolivia and Ecuador, which is fine, but they 
are three and four.
  If this budget does not get fixed, we will have put $1 billion into 
Plan Colombia, then cut the follow-up plan, and wasted the money, 
basically.
  What is the point? Can we not ever see past our nose? Are we going to 
be inevitably constantly repeating our Vietnam problems, where we get 
into, and this is not exactly like Vietnam, but when I say that, it is 
like the antiterrorism war or the war on drugs. We do just enough to 
fail. When we finally get ahead of the curve, we somehow decide we are 
going to be off on another adventure and do not finish the job.
  In the case of Colombia, we need this assistance because, first, we 
have to stop the terrorizing before we can plant alternative crops. 
People say they want to plant alternative crops. It is just like a kid 
on a street corner. If he can make $600 an hour as a lookout, he is not 
going to take minimum wage at McDonald's unless the risk of being a 
lookout is too high, and then maybe he will take the job at McDonald's. 
But we are not going to pay him $600 an hour at McDonald's.
  The same calculation goes into a coca grower. If they are going to 
plant palm hearts, they are not going to make the same as coca, but 
they want to plant legal things. They want a decent living for their 
family.
  If they are going to get shot, and when we were in Colombia and we 
talked to one of the members who had left the FARC, I will never forget 
this, Mark Sanford and the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Blagojevich), 
two other Members, we were waiting for the gentleman from Illinois 
(Speaker Hastert), then Congressman, to arrive in his helicopter.
  We were talking to this young kid who just left the FARC. He was an 
enforcer. We asked him if he had ever shot anybody. He said yes. We 
asked, ``Why did you shoot him?'' He said, ``The guy was behind in his 
payments.'' What do you mean? ``He was a coca grower and he was not 
paying us the amount that he was supposed to pay us. I warned him twice 
and then shot him. He did not pay his bills.'' ``What do you mean, he 
did not pay his bills? You do not shoot him for that.'' We were told 
that, yes, we told him if he did not pay the tribute money we were 
going to shoot him. What did you do? He was an older man. We went to 
the restaurant. I went up behind him and we killed him. And he said, 
``Look, he did not pay his bills.''
  Now, if you are a farmer and they are coming in killing your family 
or kidnapping them or maiming them, it is pretty tough to walk in and 
say, by the way, we want you to plant palm hearts.
  First, we have to get order. Then once we get order in Colombia, then 
we need to go in and help them get or make a living, because if we do 
not help them make a living, they are going to go right back to what 
they were doing before. That is why we have money to help build the 
legal system.
  Right now the judges are intimidated. They killed one-third of them 
back in the days when the movie Clear and Present Danger highlighted 
it. At the same time, they shoot the judges, and they have destroyed 
and killed much of the legal system. People are intimidated. There are 
brave souls fighting away, but we have to rebuild a respect for law and 
work with the people.
  Colombia is the oldest democracy in South America. Because of our 
drug habits, they have had serious problems in their country. We need 
to get the Andean initiative because if this process works in Colombia, 
it is going to move as it always does.
  People say if you legalize drugs in the United States it is going to 
go away, like the people who are making all this money are going to 
say, right, I am going to go broke now. No, they are going to step 
people up to other things. We are not going to legalize cocaine and 
heroin, even if we legalize marijuana, which would be a huge mistake.
  So it is important now. We are having a big debate in Congress. We 
understand if we cut back the Andean initiative, that the net result of 
this is going to be more terror on our streets at home, more cases like 
what we have heard in our hearings from mothers whose husbands were 
whacked out on drugs and came home and beat them

[[Page H7714]]

and their kids, or used up all their money for health care and for 
education to fuel their drug habits; or as I have talked to former and 
current drug addicts, when they need money, they just go out and rob 
somebody, mug them, or kill them if necessary to get the money.
  We visited juvenile detention centers and had some young guys tell 
us, one of them had killed somebody when he was stealing his car to 
fund his drug habit. The question was, why did you kill the person? He 
said, what does it matter? I will be dead by the time I am 25, anyway.
  So when we look at that, it is a tough thing. If we cannot get it in 
the source countries, then it moves out into the Pacific and the 
Caribbean. Then we come back to the border question I was talking about 
before. Once it gets to the border, it is like looking for a needle in 
a haystack in a city.
  We dare not cut back the Andean initiative any further than we have 
already cut it back. I know there are many money pressures, but we have 
to simultaneously say if we are going to go after terrorism, we are not 
going to go after terrorism at cutting back on illegal narcotics.

  Alcohol and illegal drugs account for, in every district, every city 
in this country, 70 percent to 85 percent of all crime, including child 
abuse and domestic violence. If we are going to get at other sins in 
the society, we have to get rid of the enablers.
  Let me talk a little further about a couple of other things. The DEA 
has finally started to crack down on some of the medicinal marijuana 
problems. We have had a huge problem in this country with so-called 
medicinal marijuana. There is nothing medicinal about marijuana. Lots 
of poisonous things have some good ingredients in them.
  There is no medicinal marijuana. There are components inside 
marijuana, as there are in arsenic and other things, that are healthy. 
But in California, this has become a way, for example, they got into 
one housing addition where it looked from the air like it was a housing 
addition, but they were all fake homes growing quantities of marijuana.
  In my home State of Indiana, where they have what is more commonly 
called ditchweed, they have now been bringing in BC Bud and mixing it 
with Indiana ditchweed. Indiana has become the fifth largest exporter 
in the United States of marijuana, and it is shipping to the east and 
west coast mixed with this BC Bud, and we are talking about in Indiana 
a raid just like in Colombia.
  They plant it in the corn and it is not even necessarily that the 
farmer knows it is there. They plant the marijuana inside the corn. It 
is hidden under there. You have to catch it with different screening 
methods from the air or ocean, or from tips. It is extraordinary how 
wishy-washy some of our leaders back here are. And my favorite chart 
that I do not have with me tonight showed directly that in 1992 to 
1994, with the combination of the signals we sent from our top down of 
``I did not inhale,'' and joking about it, to the movies, to the music, 
and then, combined with our reduction in source country interdiction in 
the drug budgets from 1992 to 1994, the drug use in the United States 
soared at such a level that to get back to that in 2001, we have to 
have a 50 percent reduction from where we are at to get back to where 
it was when President Clinton first took office in 1992, a 50 percent 
reduction.

                              {time}  2300

  A 50 percent reduction. That is how bad it was. And it was directly 
correlated. In 2 years it soared that much. And what we saw was the 
purity soar. We saw the price go down, and we saw the use go up. In 
1995 and 1996 it started to stabilize. In the last years of the Clinton 
administration with General McCaffrey as drug czar we started to make 
progress again; but we have challenges.
  I want to read from The New York Times Magazine from this past 
weekend about a man named Adam Sorkin, who is the key person behind 
``West Wing''; and I am just going to read out of this magazine. As you 
may know he was busted again. This article talks about how he has a 
drug habit. It also shows the problem with our drug treatment program 
because he has been through a treatment program, and he is cynical 
about ever being cured; yet they keep saying he is cured.
  Quote: ``While Sorkin seems to derive a very similar kind of relief 
from writing hyper-articulate dialogue and from inhaling crack, he 
keeps his two worlds separate. That is not to say he never writes about 
drugs. His teleplays are sprinkled with roach clips and bong pipes and 
all the references are slyly appreciative. Five weeks into the West 
Wing pilot this year, a high priced call girl whom we will soon come to 
appreciate for her intelligence and strength of character, greets the 
day by lighting up a joint and saying, `It is not like I am a drug 
person. I just love pot.' ''
  We in Congress can work and work at it, but if we have the producers 
of ``West Wing'' and other people, ``West Wing,'' by the way, is a 
tired, formerly creative TV show that is basically trying to rehash 
what former President Bill Clinton would do if he was facing the crises 
that they can develop each week; and it is starting to become old, but 
it is entertaining in many ways. But it is also here from the producer 
bragging about working in pro-drug statements.
  What kind of example is this? How are we supposed to fight it on the 
one hand when our TV producers glamorize drug use on television. Then 
we wonder why we are failing the drug war when people call it medicine, 
when TV producers glamorize it.
  Furthermore, to quote an article this week in the Washington Post, 
which is something we have been talking to the South American and 
Central American countries about, our drug habits because of 
irresponsible leaders in the media and in political offices and people 
in the TV industry, because of our usage, they now have produced such a 
supply in these countries that the use is increasing and doubling in 
many of these countries.
  This article this week in the Washington Post, which I would ask to 
be inserted in the Record, says ``Mexico finds drug abuse is now its 
problem too.''
  Let me read from one of the paragraphs: ``Mexico used to think that 
people like this Arellano were an American nightmare. By Mexico's 
reckoning, Americans were the ones using drugs. And their insatiable 
demand was the reason that violent cartels, which continue to conduct 
daily assassinations on the border, existed here. Places like Tijuana, 
where people did not even use drugs, were suffering because coke-heads 
from Malibu to Maine could not get enough, it was said. But that is 
changing fast. Mexico is not now the only major transit point for drugs 
shipped into the United States. It has a growing demand problem of its 
own.''

               [From the Washington Post, Oct. 31, 2001]

            Mexico Finds Drug Abuse Is Now Its Problem, Too


               tijuana streets teem with addicted youths

                            (By Mary Jordan)

       Tijuana, Mexico.--Berenice Arellano Gil celebrated her 29th 
     birthday by doing what she does most days: She slipped $3 
     into another addict's hand on a downtown street corner and 
     bought a two-inch vial filled with crack cocaine.
       ``I feel like a dog running wild on the freeway, not 
     knowing if I am going to make it off the road alive,'' she 
     said, cupping her hands around the smoking white powder and 
     inhaling deeply, letting the crack fill her lungs and surge 
     into her brain.
       She opened her glassy eyes, looked toward the United 
     States, beyond a metal fence a few yards away, and her story 
     tumbled out. She had a good life once in Los Angeles, 
     installing carpet for $10 an hour, but she got caught and 
     deported and despair led to crack, and at least now she has 
     cut back and is spending only $10 a day on her habit instead 
     of the $100 she used to waste, and she hates her job making 
     $5 a day working in a restaurant but will never, never, never 
     again have sex with a stranger to make a few bucks for crack, 
     and you just can't believe how hard it is to get unhooked.
       ``It's my birthday, you know,'' she said.
       Mexico used to think that people like Arellano were an 
     American nightmare. By Mexico's reckoning, Americans were the 
     ones using the drugs, and their insatiable demand was the 
     reason that violent cartels--which continue to conduct daily 
     assassinations on the border--existed here. Places like 
     Tijuana, where people didn't even use drugs, were suffering 
     because cokeheads from Malibu to Maine couldn't get enough, 
     it was said.
       But that is changing fast. Mexico is now not only the major 
     transit point for drugs shipped into the United States, it 
     has a growing demand problem of its own. While drug 
     consumption in Mexico is still far below that in the Untied 
     States, it began climbing in the mid-1990s at an alarming 
     rate.

[[Page H7715]]

       This gritty city of 1.2 million is Mexico's drug-use 
     capital. Between 1993 and 1998, government surveys found a 
     five-fold increase in the number of people saying they had 
     used drugs in the past month. For 1998, the last year the 
     survey was conducted. 15 percent of Tijuana youths said they 
     had tried cocaine, heroin or other drugs--three times the 
     national average.
       Since then, far more people have begun trying drugs, 
     particularly crystal methamphetamine. There are now hundreds 
     of Tijuana crack houses, alleyways and street corners where 
     people gather to snort, smoke or inject drugs.
       ``It's a dramatic problem affecting the quality of life 
     here.'' said Victor Clark Alfaro, a prominent human rights 
     advocate. ``Many of these people steal to get money for 
     drugs. People are afraid of what people will do when they are 
     high on crack and crystal meth.'' He said poor addicts are 
     most visible because they often use drugs in the street. But 
     he said middle-class children are taking them, too--in homes 
     and discos at parties, out of their public eye.
       The increasing drug use is generally traced to a change in 
     the practices of Mexican traffickers who ship drugs into the 
     United States. In the mid-1990s, according to Mexican law 
     enforcement officials, the traffickers started paying local 
     employees--those who handled such jobs as fueling planes and 
     renting warehouses--partly in drugs. Those people needed to 
     create their own market, and they began selling drugs in 
     their home towns.
       At the same time, the price of cocaine and other drugs has 
     fallen. Drugs used to be beyond the means of poor youths from 
     the Tijuana barrios, but a vial of crack now sells for as 
     little as $2--and a heroin injection costs a $5 to $10, 
     depending on quality, according to interviews with addicts 
     here. They said the most popular drug is the cheapest: 
     crystal methamphetamine, or ``ice,'' a synthetic drug that 
     goes for $1 to $2 a hit.
       Some Mexican law enforcement officials say the problem has 
     become far worse since the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the 
     United States. U.S. border security has sharply increased, 
     making it harder for the cartel to move their cocaine, 
     marijuana and heroin across the border. That has led to 
     concern that the backlog is being dumped in Mexican towns, 
     where youths have a growing appetite for drugs.
       U.S. law enforcement officials say they doubt the border 
     security has curtailed drug trafficking. They note that U.S. 
     street prices for drugs have not risen, a sign of steady 
     supply.
       But Pedro Jose Penaloza, who oversees crime prevention 
     efforts in Mexico's attorney general's office, recently said 
     that ``the consumption of cocaine in the entire country has 
     risen alarmingly since the Sept. 11 attacks.'' He said the 
     ``sealing of the northern border by the United States'' has 
     led traffickers to drop the price of cocaine and other drugs 
     normally destined for the United States and flood the market 
     in Mexico.
       In Mexico, drug consumption is seen largely as a health 
     problem and is rarely prosecuted. In most places it is not a 
     crime to consume small amounts. But despite concern over 
     health, the government has devoted little money to treatment 
     or rehabilitation, focusing instead on prevention efforts, 
     which are far less expensive.
       Clark Alfaro said there are about 80,000 addicts in Tijuana 
     and the city's 50 private rehabilitation centers have room 
     for 3,000. To many, these places, often run by former addicts 
     or church workers with no formal training in rehabilitation, 
     are notorious for harsh treatment.
       Two people who have been treated in such centers said in 
     interviews that techniques there include dousing addicts with 
     ice-cold water, beating them and chaining them to make sure 
     they don't flee. Several Tijuana newspapers recently ran 
     photos of teenage addicts chained down in one of the centers. 
     The youths had been placed there with the permission of their 
     parents, who said they didn't know where else to turn.
       Such techniques are ``not uncommon'' in the private 
     centers, said Enrique Durantes, a psychiatrist who heads 
     Tijuana's drug prevention program in the city's health 
     ministry. ``We are totally against this method.''
       He said more federal funding is desperately needed to open 
     rehabilitation centers that use accepted treatment 
     techniques. Last year the federal government issued national 
     regulations and guidelines for drug rehabilitation centers, 
     but officials said there has been little effort to enforce 
     them.
       ``The government is leaving in the hands of [private 
     groups] the process of rehabilitation,'' said Clark Alfaro. 
     ``They are closing their eyes to human rights violations that 
     occur there.''
       Arellano, the crack addict, said she would not enter a 
     private rehabilitation center. ``They are horrible. It's not 
     like you have in the States. No, no, never, never, will I go 
     into one of those places. I must try to get unhooked 
     myself.''
       A recent tour of open-air drug markets in Tijuana found 
     many people inhaling crystal meth or crack and a new 
     injecting heroin. Most of the users were in their twenties. 
     One man sat on the curb on Ninos Heroes Street, the hood of a 
     parka pulled over his face on a day when the temperature was 
     near 80 degrees, a vial of crack supped in his hands.
       A half-block away, Manuel Lopez, 32, slouched against an 
     abandoned house, high on a combination of crystal meth and 
     crack, known as a ``speedball.'' He was too incoherent to 
     speak. Another man in much the same condition wandered into 
     traffic on International Highway, nearly getting run over 
     before his friends pulled him back.
       Police in Tijuana have long been connected to major drug 
     traffickers. Now those corrupt links extend to street-corner 
     drug dealers, who say that association has created new 
     bribery patterns.
       Money paid to the police by drug cartels is often carefully 
     orchestrated. High-ranking officers decide how big the bribe 
     should be, and how it should be distributed within the ranks. 
     But now cops on the street are taking ``express bribes'' from 
     local dealers, pocketing a relatively small amount of money 
     without consulting or sharing with other officers. One dealer 
     said that as the recession has set in, more police officers 
     have become open to taking bribes to look the other way.
       Mexican police officials deny publicly that their officers 
     take bribes. But many officers on the street readily admit 
     that they take bribes to augment their low salaries.
       Clark Alfaro said a man who manufactures crystal meth in a 
     Tijuana laboratory recently complained to him that he had 
     paid the police a $9,000 bribe because they threatened to 
     shut down his lab. the man was upset because the cops wanted 
     $20,000 and he had to bargain hard to bring down their price.

  Our problem has now spread throughout Central and South America and 
throughout other parts of the world because we could not get control of 
our problems; it has now spread. And so the blood on the hands of those 
who die to illegal narcotics, of those who say marijuana is not a big 
deal, doing crack is a cool thing, who write songs like the song 
``Heroine Girl'' that was supposedly an anti-song that turned out not 
to be an anti-drug song at a second level, that people who do that type 
of thing are responsible not only for the deaths in the United States 
but elsewhere too because much of this is psychological in whether 
behavior that is seen is approved or not approved.
  There is another wave that we are trying to address. Clearly 
methamphetamines and Ecstasy have become a huge problem in the United 
States, and we are doing the best we can to address these things as 
well. We will continue to work at that as they come in from countries 
like the Netherlands. There they say legalization has worked well. Yes, 
they are shipping it to us. We would not have the stuff coming through 
Canada and through our borders and through other ways in the United 
States if they were not doing that.
  The New York Times, ``Violence rises as club drug spreads throughout 
the streets.'' In Fort Wayne, Indiana, ``War on meth, number of labs 
raised to record highs.'' Here is from Fresno: ``Meth dump 
discovered.'' There they have a law because so many little kids have 
been burned to death with labs exploding, these giant labs. USA Today: 
``Ecstasy drug trade turns violent.''
  Just the other night there was a ``Dateline'' special on some of this 
potency. We have a huge problem in the United States. We do not just 
have problems with anthrax, which is scary, where four people have 
died. We have people overdosing, terrorizing their families, 
terrorizing their neighborhoods every day because of illegal narcotics.
  The ranking member of the subcommittee from Maryland (Mr. Cummings) 
has said it well. We are already under chemical attack. The chemical 
attack is illegal narcotics. The way we address trying to protect our 
borders from the terrorists, from coming up with strong law enforcement 
and in tracking and anti-drugs is going to be the same way we catch the 
terrorists coming in our midst.
  We are working in multiple ways. This week in the committees alone we 
have done the postal. We did the student tracking. We have done field 
hearings at the border. We did airport security tonight. We are doing 
the best we can to try to address it. We cannot stop every terrorist. 
We cannot stop every illegal drug. But we will do the best we can and 
with the cooperation; and the support of people in their home 
neighborhoods, we in fact can make progress. We will never eliminate 
sin in America; but if we work together, we certainly can limit it.

                          ____________________