[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 66 (Tuesday, May 21, 2002)]
[House]
[Page H2808]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          A FAILURE TO IMAGINE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, today I went up before the Committee on 
Rules and, not knowing the rule that would be allowed on the 
supplemental appropriations bill that will be coming up later this 
week, I asked that I be allowed to offer a motion to strike $6 million 
that is included in the supplemental appropriation bill to fund the 
Colombian Army to protect the pipeline, the oil pipeline owned by that 
country, but operated in conjunction with Occidental Petroleum and two 
other multinational oil companies. I am hoping I will be able to offer 
that amendment here on the floor, because I do not think that U.S. 
taxpayers should be paying for the protection of private oil when in 
fact Occidental, for example, made over $2 billion over the last 2 
years. Why should the American people be asked to pay $6 million or 
$100 million to protect that particular facility?
  I was reminded of how very difficult it is to get America and certain 
decision-makers to think beyond the petroleum age. Sometimes you wonder 
if you can ever win this fight and wean us off our terrible, terrible 
strategic vulnerability to imported petroleum.
  Then I come upon an article this past Sunday in the New York Times by 
Thomas Friedman that is so good I want to read it into the Record 
tonight. It is called ``A Failure to Imagine.'' Wherever Mr. Friedman 
is in the world, believe me, he has my thanks, because he is an ally in 
our cause to get America refocused on what is really important and to 
no longer use oil as our proxy for foreign policy in the Middle East or 
Venezuela or Colombia or anywhere else.
  He says: ``If you ask me, the press has this whole story about 
whether President Bush had a warning of a possible attack before 9-11, 
and didn't share it, upside down.
  ``The failure to prevent September 11 was not a failure of 
intelligence or coordination. It was a failure of imagination. Even if 
all the raw intelligence signals had been shared among the FBI, the CIA 
and the White House,'' Mr. Friedman writes, he is convinced that 
``there was no one there who would have put them all together, who 
would have imagined evil on the scale that Osama bin Laden imagined it.
  ``Osama bin Laden was (or is) a unique character.'' He says, ``He is 
a combination of Charles Manson and Jack Welch, a truly evil, twisted 
personality, but with the organizational skills of a top corporate 
manager who translated his evil into a global campaign that rocked a 
superpower. In some ways, I am glad that America (outside Hollywood) is 
not full of people with bin Laden-like imaginations. One Timothy 
McVeigh is enough.
  ``Imagining evil of this magnitude simply does not come naturally to 
the American character, which is why, even after we are repeatedly 
confronted with it, we keep reverting to our natural, naively 
optimistic view. Because our open society is so much based on trust, 
and that trust is so hard-wired into the American character and 
citizenry, we can't get rid of it, even when we so obviously should.
  ``So someone drives a truck bomb into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, and 
we still don't really protect the Marine barracks there from a similar, 
but much bigger, attack a few months later. Someone blows up two U.S. 
embassies in east Africa with truck bombs, and we still don't imagine 
that someone would sail an exploding dinghy into a destroyer, the 
U.S.S. Cole, a few years later. Someone tries to blow up the World 
Trade Center in 1993 with a truck bomb, and the guy who did it tells us 
he had always wanted to slam a plane into the CIA, but we still 
couldn't imagine someone doing just that to the Twin Towers on 9-11.
  ``So I don't fault the President for not having imagined evil of this 
magnitude. But given the increasingly lethal nature of terrorism, we 
are going to have to adapt. We need an `Office of Evil' whose job would 
be to constantly sift all intelligence data and imagine what the most 
twisted mind might be up to.''
  No, the author, Mr. Friedman, does not blame President Bush at all 
for his failure to imagine evil, but he blames him for ``something much 
worse: his failure to imagine good.'' Mr. Friedman blames him for 
``squandering all the positive feeling in America after 9-11, 
particularly among young Americans who wanted to be drafted for a great 
project that would strengthen America in some lasting way, a Manhattan 
Project for energy independence. Such a project could have enlisted 
young people in a national movement for greater conservation and 
enlisted science and industry in a crash effort to produce enough 
renewable energy, efficiencies and domestic production to wean us 
gradually off oil imports.
  ``Such a project not only would have made us safer by making us 
independent of countries who share none of our values. It would also 
have made us safer by giving the world a much stronger reason to 
support our war on terrorism.''
  Mr. Speaker, I will include the remaining part of this article in the 
Record and would say that America, our country and the planet would be 
a whole lot greener, cleaner, and safer in the broadest sense if 
America were truly energy independent.
  Mr. Speaker, I include the balance of the article for the Record.

       There is no way we can be successful in this war without 
     partners, and there is no way America will have lasting 
     partners, especially in Europe, unless it is perceived as 
     being the best global citizen it can be. And the best way to 
     start conveying that would be by reducing our energy gluttony 
     and ratifying the Kyoto treaty to reduce global warming.
       President Bush is not alone in this failure. He has had the 
     full cooperation of the Democratic Party leadership, which 
     has been just as lacking in imagination. This has made it 
     easy for Mr. Bush, and his oil-industry paymasters, to get 
     away with it.
       We and our kids are going to regret this. Because a war on 
     terrorism that is fought only by sending soldiers to 
     Afghanistan or by tightening our borders will ultimately be 
     unsatisfying. Such a war is important, but it can never be 
     definitively won. Someone will always slip through. But a war 
     on terrorism that, with some imagination, is broadly defined 
     as making America safer by also making it better is a war 
     that could be won. It's a war that could ensure that 
     something lasting comes out of 9/11, other than longer lines 
     at the airport--and that something would be enhanced respect 
     for America and a country and a planet that would be greener, 
     cleaner and safer in the broadest sense.
       Too bad we don't have a president who could imagine that.

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