[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 86 (Monday, June 21, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H4583-H4584]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     THE FORGOTTEN WAR ON TERRORISM

  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I think there is substantial agreement that 
the world, Iraq, the Middle East are better off without Saddam Hussein 
in power. But the question remains particularly as raised most recently 
and poignantly by General Zinni about the timing, necessity and the 
conduct of the Iraq war. No weapons of mass destruction, the push for 
model democracy and a vibrant capitalist free economy is not going so 
well, so the Bush administration has fallen back upon the idea that 
somehow there were substantial links between al Qaeda, 9-11 and Saddam 
Hussein.
  Unfortunately, last week the 9-11 Commission, a truly bipartisan 
commission, came out with a statement in their most recent report, ``We 
have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks 
against the United States.'' Yet, the administration insists on trying 
to put 9-11, al Qaeda, and Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the same sentence 
or run-on sentence and paragraph all the time.
  Vice President Cheney has been even more outspoken on this issue. Of 
course, Vice President Cheney is the same gentleman who in a closed-
door meeting 3 years ago told the Northwest Energy Caucus that there 
was no collusion, Enron was not manipulating energy markets in the 
western United States. These were purely market forces. We were just 
really stupid and we did not understand, but he did.
  Well, of course, he was kind of wrong and maybe even this week Ken 
Lay will be in a criminal indictment as others from Enron have gone to 
jail, and the appalling tapes that have come out.
  Then, of course, Vice President Cheney also is fond of saying that 
deficits do not matter. We are just indebting future generations of 
Americans. Working and wage earning people will pay the bill, while the 
wealthy and the big corporations skate in the future world that the 
Bush administration proposes.
  So he is not exactly infallible and, unfortunately, I believe the 9-
11 Commission is more right than he is, with one exception. There is 
one really bad guy, Abu Musab Zarqawi. He has now been blamed for more 
than 700 terrorist killings including U.S. troops in Iraq.
  Now, the interesting thing is that the United States of America 
before the war with Iraq knew exactly where Zarqawi was and they could 
have taken him out. In fact, the Pentagon asked 3 times. Now, this is 
the President who was going to go anywhere and everywhere to take out 
known terrorist threats. This guy was a known terrorist threat. We knew 
exactly where he was. In fact, when Colin Powell made his famous 
presentation full of inaccuracies to the United Nations Security 
Council, the one accurate thing he did point to with a pointer was a 
terrorist training camp way up in Northern Iraq, inside the U.S. no-fly 
zone and protected by the Kurdish area, an area, in fact, that Saddam 
Hussein could not get to, and that is where Zarqawi was. And 3 times, 3 
times the Pentagon asked to take him out.
  The first time because they had good intelligence. The second time 
because they had intelligence that he was developing ricin and other 
chemical weapons. And then the third time they asked was after some of 
his cohorts were found with ricin in England.
  They asked 3 times and 3 times the Bush National Security Council and 
the Bush administration turned down the Pentagon. This could have saved 
U.S. troops and lives and prevented a lot of the mayhem going on in 
Iraq today. But this administration was so distracted from the war on 
terror to the war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein that they let this 
guy go. They let him go. That is absolutely outrageous.
  We have got to question whether the distraction from the war on 
terror, from Osama bin Laden, who is still out there plotting and 
planning and his second-in-command, who is still out there plotting and 
planning and this guy Zarqawi, who is out there plotting and planning, 
if we could have gotten them, if we had been focussed on the war on 
terror and following the principles that the President set out, instead 
of this obsession and this distraction and diversion into a war in Iraq 
where we pulled all of the intelligence

[[Page H4584]]

out of that area and focussed it all on Iraq, they would not take out 
Zarqawi because they were afraid it might hurt their coalition 
building. Iceland might not have joined the Coalition of the Willing to 
take on Iraq, and some of those other major military powers that have 
been involved with the United States if we had taken out Zarqawi. They 
were worried that that would disturb that.
  We would take out a real threat to our troops, to the region, to 
terrorism, to go after Saddam Hussein whose own people would have taken 
care of him some day.
  He was surrounded. His military was a shadow of its former self. The 
sanctions were depleting his energies and the energies of his military 
day by day; and sooner or later, with encouragement, the Iraqi people 
would have taken care of that guy. They tried to kill him 13 times. 
They just were not successful. They might have got him on the 14th try. 
But this administration was obsessed with the war and dropped the war 
on terrorism.

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