[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 194 (Tuesday, December 18, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15826-S15827]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 FISA REAUTHORIZATION AND TROOP FUNDING

  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, we are in a little bit of a lull here before 
we reach the final conclusion of this session of this Congress. But 
much of the debate is revolving around two pieces of legislation, one 
of which has been at least temporarily removed from the floor, the 
reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the 
other one which is critical for us to act upon before we can leave 
Washington, DC, and return to our home States, and that is the ability 
to fund the troops whom we have sent on missions abroad in places such 
as Afghanistan and Iraq.
  That funding has basically come to an end. The Defense Department has 
had to rob Peter to pay Paul, moving money from different accounts in 
the Defense Department in order to pay the ongoing effort of our 
troops. That is not the right way, the most efficient way, to ensure 
that our troops have what they need when they are fighting abroad. It 
is critical that we get the funding to the troops. The President has 
had a request out now for more than 10 months to try to get the funding 
on an emergency basis to them. Our minority leader will have an 
amendment later on this afternoon that will seek to add money to fund 
the troops, at least through sometime next spring. It is critical that 
we achieve that objective. That is the critical piece of business we 
have to attend to before we can leave.

  I thought, in connection with both of those national security issues, 
that some comments that our friend, the former Speaker of the House of 
Representatives, Newt Gingrich, made back in September to the American 
Enterprise Institute were of special relevance and we might well 
consider

[[Page S15827]]

some of the things he said in thinking about how to move forward with 
this funding. Representative Gingrich said that to some extent the 
debate we are having right now is the wrong debate about what is 
necessary to defeat our enemy and win the war against the terrorists. 
The bottom line is, it cannot be done on the cheap. War is kill or be 
killed. You risk everything in war. As a result, what we have to do is 
think anew about the kind of bold effort and difficult undertaking this 
really entails. It does entail real risks, and we have to recognize 
that there are significant requirements for change in the way we 
operate.
  Congress can't continue to provide money, just dole it out a few 
weeks at a time, hoping that will be sufficient for the troops. They 
have to be able to count on Congress to back them when we send them on 
a mission.
  To some extent, as Representative Gingrich said, it is important to 
adopt a spirit that in some cases it is better to make a mistake of 
commission and then fix the problem than it is to avoid achievement by 
avoiding failure. In this regard, we have to have a national dialog 
about the true threat we are facing from this irreconcilable wing of 
Islam and what is necessary for us to defeat it, both in the ongoing 
conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as other places around the 
world where intelligence becomes our key tool in helping to defeat the 
enemy.
  One of the things Speaker Gingrich did was to refer to some remarks 
Daniel Pipes, an expert on the Middle East, made about Islamists. He 
made it clear that they have significant assets at their disposal. They 
have potential access to weapons of mass destruction, a religious 
appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than 
the artificial ideologies of fascism and communism. They have an 
impressively conceptualized and funded and organized institutional 
machinery. They have an ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of 
every size and shape anywhere in the world. This is problematic. 
Finally, these militant Islamists have a huge number of committed 
cadres, some estimate as many as 10 percent of the Muslim population of 
the world, which, of course, is a far greater total than all of the 
fascists and communists combined who ever lived. As Daniel Pipes would 
say, this is a significant and impressive array of assets and potential 
against the Western world against which these Islamists have declared 
war.
  Specifically, with reference to the intelligence I mentioned we have 
to focus on, the CIA Director, GEN Michael Hayden, testified a couple 
of months ago about his own judgment of these strategic threats facing 
the United States. Among the things he said was that our analysis with 
respect to al-Qaida is that its central leadership is planning high-
impact plots against the U.S. homeland. They assess this with high 
confidence. So this is not just a guess about what might happen. With 
high confidence, they believe al-Qaida is planning high-impact plots 
against our homeland, focusing on targets that would produce mass 
casualties, dramatic destruction, and significant economic aftershocks. 
So our very survival as a free people is challenged by this large 
threat, and defeating it on a worldwide basis is inherently going to 
involve a very large effort, a degree of change we have yet to face.
  We need a debate about the genuine risk to America of losing cities 
to nuclear attack or losing millions of Americans to engineered 
biological attacks. We also need a very calm dialog about the genuine 
possibility of a second Holocaust if the Iranians were to get nuclear 
weapons and use them against Tel Aviv or Haifa or Jerusalem.
  All of these larger issues are sometimes lost in the debate about 
arcane provisions of something like the Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Act that we are seeking to reauthorize. We have to keep in 
mind what the object is. We have to defeat a very capable enemy which 
not only has the means but the will to defeat us in a war literally to 
the end.
  We also need some realistic examination of the progress--or lack 
thereof--we are making in the larger war. I think we have to 
realistically assess where we are with respect to that. In the last 
year or so, Hamas has won an enormous victory in Gaza; Hezbollah has 
won a substantial victory in south Lebanon; Iran, Syria, Lebanon, 
Afghanistan, the Taliban sanctuary in the Waziristan, substantial 
instability in Pakistan, even in the Philippines and, to some extent, 
even in Great Britain. The estimates of terrorist sympathizers and 
potential sympathizers are far greater than the resources being applied 
to monitor them.
  Again, to summarize this point with respect to intelligence 
surveillance, we have, even here in the United States, the spread of a 
militant extremist radical vision. It is funded by money from the 
Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. It is on the Internet, on 
television, it is in extremist mosques and schools. This advocacy of 
martyrdom, of jihad, suicide bombing, and violence against a modern 
civilization is not restricted to places abroad; it exists even in the 
United States.
  At the end of our conflict in Iraq and of the debate about our 
intelligence collection activities, there is a simple test, and that is 
whether a free people are celebrating because the American people have 
sustained freedom against evil or, God forbid, violent evil enemies of 
freedom are celebrating because Americans have been defeated. Life 
would be easier if there was a more modulated answer, but there is not.
  In war, there is a winner and a loser. If the American people will 
sustain this effort, we will win. But if American politicians decide to 
legislate defeat, then, of course, America could be defeated.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.

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