[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 66 (Thursday, April 24, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H2743-H2748]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               THE THREAT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from California (Mr. Daniel E. Lungren) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. Madam Speaker, today is over 79 
months after September 11, 2001. I rise today to discuss the grave 
matter that still lies before this Nation, now 6\1/2\ years after those 
horrendous attacks. Jihadism, or radical jihad, was with us before 9/
11, has been with us since 9/11, and unfortunately, will continue to be 
with us into the foreseeable future in this, the 21st century.
  It bears repeating what al Qaeda has done and intends to do to us, to 
our allies, to fellow nation states, and to fellow human beings around 
the globe. This is, in my judgment, the paramount issue of our time.
  As one scholar wrote 1 month after 9/11, for Osama bin Laden and his 
followers, this is a holy war between Islam and the western world. If 
that is true, if it is also true, as stated recently in foreign 
affairs, that al Qaeda is a more dangerous enemy today than it's ever 
been before, this discussion is certainly worth having.
  Let me briefly discuss what we are talking about. Who exactly are 
these jihadists? Are we referring to al Qaeda and its cohorts? Are we 
talking about Iran, Syria and the other nation states whose interests 
in the Middle East do not properly align with America's?
  Or perhaps we mean Hamas, Hezbollah, or the myriad religious 
nationalist organizations across the Muslim world that share neither 
the ideology nor the aspirations of global transnational groups like al 
Qaeda that have, nevertheless, been dumped into the same category, 
them.
  I would submit that we are primarily talking about al Qaeda and its 
minions, as well as those whose behavior is imitative of al Qaeda's, or 
any person or group which seeks to kill innocent civilian life for the 
purpose of coercing, through intimidation, fear and death, political, 
economic or cultural change.
  While their aims and purposes may be somewhat divergent, depending on 
the geographical and geopolitical location of the perpetrator, wanton 
violence, death and destruction are their trademarks.
  As the American people know, these aims and purposes did not 
originate on September 11, 2001. On February 26, 1993, murderous 
killers, using a Ryder van, bombed the World Trade Center, killing 
seven and wounding over 1,000.
  In 1996, the Khobar Towers, barracks for our U.S. Army, were attacked 
in Saudi Arabia.
  In 1998 the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed.
  USS Cole was attacked October 2000, and September 11, 2001 soon 
followed.
  Since 2001, attacks, actual and premeditated, have been a constant 
fact of life across the globe. There have been attacks in Bali, 
Indonesia in 2001 and 2005, a planned attack in Barcelona in 2003, the 
deadly attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2003, a foiled plot in 
Istanbul, Turkey in 2003, a deadly attack in Casablanca, Morocco in 
2003, a terrible attack in Madrid, Spain in 2004, March 2004, attempted 
attacks in the Philippines in 2004, the deadly London attack in July, 
2005, an attack in Algeria in 2006, an intended attack in Denmark in 
2007, and a planned attack in Germany in 2007.
  Al Qaeda has also tried to overthrow the governments of Egypt in 
2004, Jordan in 2005, and Saudi Arabia in 2007.
  Let us not forget the organization functioning in Iraq, fomenting 
violence and death as they speak, al Qaeda in Iraq.
  I found the following summation of events and actors from one 
contemporary scholar quite informative, and wanted to share with those 
of you listening this evening. He says this: 9/11 was an epic 
intercontinental version of the violence Islamists visited upon Algeria 
and Egypt in the mid 1990s. In other words, it was the culmination of 
years of failure.
  From 1992 to 1996, while Osama Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman 
al-Zawahiri, were based in the Sudan, they, like other veterans of the 
Afghan jihad, focused on overthrowing apostate, as they called it, 
Muslim regimes.
  Bin Laden's primary foe at that time was the Saudi monarchy which had 
incurred his wrath by inviting the U.S. troops, after Iraq's invasion 
of Kuwait, for protection against Saddam Hussein. Al-Zawahiri, an 
Egyptian, was particularly concerned with Hosni Mubarak, whom he had 
unsuccessfully plotted to assassinate in 1995.
  Al Qaeda tried to help Islamists take power in Chechnya, where they 
had modest success, and Bosnia, where they had none. Gradually, al 
Qaeda's leaders realized that Islamism was losing its struggle against 
the regimes of the Muslim world. And as if to underscore this point, in 
1996, Khartoum, that is, the Sudanese government, began mending fences 
with the West. And Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were shipped off to 
Afghanistan.
  It was there that al Qaeda adds a new strategy. Instead of going 
country by country, painstakingly trying to build local movements 
capable of overthrowing individual regimes, it would attack the far 
away enemy, the United States, in the hope that by humiliating the 
superpower that guaranteed political order in the Middle East, it would 
embolden the Muslim masses against their governments.
  As was explained in the book, ``The War for Muslim Minds'', al-
Zawahiri was the first al Qaeda leader to switch gears and give 
priority to the international struggle. The author continues, in an age 
of satellite television, Zawahiri reasoned, international media 
attention must replace the patient, close work of recruitment through 
Islamic charity organizations that in the past had targeted potential 
sympathizers and militants.
  The first sign of this new offensive came in June of 1996, only a 
month after Osama Bin Laden had arrived in Afghanistan, when a truck 
bomb exploded outside of the Khobar Towers, a U.S. Army barracks in 
Saudi Arabia. 2 months later, Osama Bin Laden issued a declaration of 
jihad against Americans occupying the land of the two holy sites.
  In February of 1998, Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and other Islamist 
leaders broadened the new jihad, calling, in their words, for the 
killing of Americans and Jews wherever they may be. Six months later, 
al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The date 
of the attack, August 7, was no accident, for it was the 8th 
anniversary of Riyadh's decision to allow U.S. troops on Saudi soil.
  Two years later, in October, 2000, al Qaeda operatives detonated an 
explosive-laden dinghy alongside the USS Cole, docked at a port in 
Yemen, killing 17 of our Marines.
  This strategy reached fruition, of course, with the massive attack on 
9/11, which garnered al Qaeda more media attention than it could ever 
have dreamed. Thus we have a general synopsis of al Qaeda's actions and 
behavior in recent history.
  We do not need to dissect the Koran, the Hadith, consult with the 
Ulama, the Shari'ah, or the Sunnah, to explain

[[Page H2744]]

that these actions are beyond the pale of historic civilizational 
values. Whatever their source, reason and common sense dictate that 
these actions are hideous, egregious, murderous and unequivocally 
unacceptable in a civilized world. They would lead directly to local 
and international anarchy were they to be offered the least bit of 
implicit or explicit approbation.
  Nonetheless, even those who agree with the quoted statement above 
have many times struggled to properly define our common enemy. Are they 
representatives of an Islamic insurgency? Do they symbolize a turn to 
Arabian Fascism, a totalitarian ideology inspired by a mythologic 
vision of the past which does not attract Arabs only but only those for 
whom the early Islamic wars of religion and conquest represent a golden 
age, which aims by force to restore this past not only in the world of 
Islam but ultimately throughout the world?
  Others prefer the term, Islamicism, or Islamist descriptions and 
categorizations. I don't believe that these are quite precise enough. 
As Walter Russell Mead stated 4 years ago, we must find a better name 
for what we are opposing. Islamicism is an ugly term that also silently 
concedes that Bin Laden's ideology has a claim to be regarded as a 
legitimate form of Islam.
  The phrase ``War on Terror'' has been the preferred nomenclature of 
this administration and others. I think it has its deficiencies. As one 
scholar has written, the War on Terror is a catchy phrase, but a clumsy 
and misleading one too. In fact, the United States is not fighting a 
generic war on generic terror. Our concern is with what Robert Art 
calls grand terror, terrorism like the attacks on the World Trade 
Center and Pentagon that create devastation and economic dislocation on 
a scale approximating that of a war.
  Currently, the only organizations in the world with both the will and 
the means to attack the United States on that scale are radical terror 
groups based in the Islamic world. It is this kind of terror by these 
people that we are fighting, so says Walter Russell Mead in his book, 
``Power, Terror, Peace and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World At 
Risk''.
  The al Qaeda attacks were more than a hideous act of terrorism. They 
challenged core elements of American grand strategies in ways that 
Basque and IRA terrorism never challenged basic elements of British and 
Spanish security.
  Besides endangering the security of Americans in their our own 
hemisphere and nation, the al Qaeda attacks pose a direct threat to the 
ever closer economic ties the United States seeks to built in the 
world. The symbolic choice of target, the World Trade Center, indicated 
a sophisticated mind at work, and the tactic of mass terror was well 
chosen. The attacks significantly exacerbated a damaging recession, and 
the potential that terrorists would smuggle weapons of mass destruction 
into New York or other major cities threatened the rapid flow of goods 
and people on which the American trading system depends.
  The stated goal of al Qaeda's leaders, to build a fundamentalist 
Islamic caliphate in Saudi Arabia that can unite Muslims into a common 
struggle against the west, using the oil wealth of the region as a key 
weapon, is a direct threat to the American presence in a region that 
every president, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has seen as vital to 
the national interests.
  While many of the measures that will be taken against al Qaeda and 
its allies will look more like police work, or at most, covert action 
by intelligence agencies and special forces than conventional war, the 
scale of the violence the terrorists are ready to use and the total 
nature of their demands are more like the actions of a hostile great 
power than like those of an ethnic resistance movement. Well said, I 
believe, by Walter Russell Mead.
  Because of these stark facts, as just articulated, I prefer the 
simple term jihadism or radical jihad, for that is specifically about 
which we are speaking.

                              {time}  1630

  As George Weigel argues in his new book, ``The War Against 
Jihadism,'' jihadism is the ``religiously inspired ideology which 
teaches that it is every Muslim's duty to use any means necessary to 
compel the world's submission to Islam.''
  This ideology has nothing to do with a humble commitment to bettering 
mankind, reflecting on theological inspiration or transcendence, or 
furthering a collective knowledge of the physical and metaphysical 
world. No, its identity can be judged by its actions. Its commitment to 
death, destruction, and chaos, regardless of the victims' gender, 
education, age, skin color, creed, or socioeconomic status. It is cold-
blooded and ruthless. It believes grievances, serious or superficial, 
are helped to resolve not through consultation, deliberation, and self-
government but rather through intimidation, death and carnage.
  How can one be so certain of this characterization? How can one 
attempt to perceive and interpret what guides the hearts and minds of 
others on our planet? All you or I have to do is simply listen, listen 
to the words and ideas expressed by such persons.
  So let me begin in 1993.
  As I have mentioned, it was in that year that the World Trade Center 
was bombed and several persons lost their lives and 1,000 were injured. 
The mastermind of the attack, Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik, 
referred to the cells then as emerging jihad army as the Battalion of 
Islam. Just a few weeks before the bombing on February 26, 1993, Rahman 
said at a rally in Brooklyn, New York, God has obliged us to perform 
jihad. The battalions of Islam and its divisions must be in the state 
of continuous readiness to hit their enemies with strength and power.
  Nidal Ayyad was one of the Trade Center bombers arrested in March 
1993. On his hard drive, the FBI recovered a ``claim of 
responsibility'' letter. In it, it says, ``We are the Liberation Army 
fifth battalion. Unfortunately, our calculations were not very accurate 
this time. However, we promise you that next time it will be very 
precise, and the World Trade Center will continue to be one of our 
targets unless our demands have been met.'' What a shame we didn't 
listen.
  In February 1998, Osama bin Laden published a declaration of holy war 
against America. He said this: To kill Americans and their allies, both 
civil and military, is the individual duty of every Muslim who is able. 
Those are the words of Osama bin Laden in 1998. Jihadist leaders have 
delineated a terrible difference between themselves and Americans. 
Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter this: We love 
death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.
  Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah has said, ``the 
Americans love Pepsi Cola. We love death.'' Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader 
of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached these 
words: ``We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending 
Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than 
wanting to die as a mujahid.'' Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's spiritual 
leader, said in a speech, ``It is the zenith of honor for a man, a 
young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in 
order to serve in the interest of his nation and his religion.''
  Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said, ``We are going 
to win because they love life and we love death.'' He's also said, 
``Each of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be 
killed for the sake of Allah.''
  Furthermore, jihadist leaders have been quite explicit about their 
goals and aspirations. Al-Zawahiri has said, Like our glorious 
ancestors, the Afghan jihadists believe that they, too, had brought 
down one global superpower, and now these modern-day knights must 
recommit their efforts to wreaking havoc on the remaining one, the 
United States.
  One scholar has noted that the contents of one of al-Zawahiri's texts 
depicted ordinary Muslims as passive, sickly, and devoid of conscience 
for which the only cure was an apocalyptic jihad.
  Then, following the exemplary attacks on the far enemy, unspecified 
process would lead to the collapse of apostate regimes and the creation 
of Islamic states. These states would form the core of an Islamic 
caliphate that would eventually rule the planet.
  Osama bin Laden has openly justified the brutality in the innocent 
deaths of 9/11. He said this: ``America and its allies are massacring 
us in Palestine,

[[Page H2745]]

Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack 
American reprisal. The September eleven attacks were not targeted at 
women and children. The real targets were America's icons of military 
and economic power.''
  In the same interview, bin Laden openly discussed his willingness to 
use nuclear weapons. In October 2001, one month after September 11, bin 
Laden said, ``If inciting people to do that, referring to 9/11, is 
terrorism, and if killing those who are killing our sons is terrorism, 
then let history be witness that we are terrorists.'' He said, ``We 
practice the good terrorism.''
  The next year Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa authorizing the killing 
of up to 4 million Americans and specifying in that fatwa that half of 
them should be children. This he calculated as a proportionate response 
to the number of Arabs killed by U.S. and Israeli actions, and the only 
way to really kill on this scale would be with a nuclear weapon.
  In relation to 9/11 itself, bin Laden said, ``Here is America struck 
by God almighty in one of its vital organs so that its greatest 
buildings are destroyed. Grace and gratitude to God. America has been 
filled with horror from north to south and east to west, and thanks be 
to God. God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of 
Islam, to destroy America. May God bless them and allot them a supreme 
place in heaven. As to America, I say to it and its people a few words: 
I swear to God that America will not live in peace before peace reigns 
in Palestine and before all of the army of infidels depart the land of 
Muhammad, peace be upon him.''
  He continued, ``On the blessed Tuesday 11, September 2001, they 
launched their attacks with their planes and in an unparalleled and 
magnificent feat of valor unmatched by any in humankind before them. 
Yet with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, there occurred 
an even bigger destruction, that of the American Dream and legend of 
democracy.''
  Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have been quite open about their 
desire to institute a new caliphate. Osama bin Laden has said, ``These 
attacks took off the skin the American wolf and they've been left 
standing in their filthy, naked reality. Thus, the whole world awoke 
from its sleep and the Muslims realized the importance of the belief of 
loving and hating for the sake of Allah; the ties of brotherhood 
between the Muslims have become stronger, which is a very good sign, a 
great step toward the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous 
Islamic Khilafah insha-Allah.''
  Al-Zawahiri has said, ``the war with Israel is not about a treaty, a 
cease-fire agreement, Sykes-Picot borders, national zeal or disputed 
borders. It is, rather, a jihad for the sake of God until the religion 
of God is established. It is jihad for the liberation of Palestine, all 
Palestine, as well as every land that was a home for Islam from 
Andalusia to Iraq. The whole world is an open field for us.
  ``Supporting the jihad in Palestine with one's life, money, and 
opinion is the individual duty of every Muslim because Palestine was a 
land of Islam that was occupied by the infidels. This means that its 
liberation and reinstatement of Islamic rule there is the individual 
duty of every Muslim as unanimously decided by the nation's scholars, 
and such as the case with every land occupied by infidels.''
  Examples of jihadist contempt and hatred for the infidels are. Bin 
Laden has said, ``this Is a War of Destiny Between Infidel and Islam'' 
and that ``the whole world is watching this war and the two 
Adversaries; the Islamic Nation on the one hand, and the United States 
and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery 
and humiliation.''
  He's also said, ``O, young people of Islam, follow the orders of O 
Mighty God, his messenger and kill these people. Follow the example of 
Muhammad Bin-Musallamah and his companions. Death is better than living 
on this Earth with the unbelievers amongst us making a mockery of our 
religion and prophet, God's peace and blessings upon him. Fear God, try 
to please Him, and do not consult with anyone regarding the killing of 
those unbelievers.''
  One al Qaeda stated, ``There Will Be Continuing Enmity Until Everyone 
Believes in Allah. We Will Not Meet the Enemy Halfway and There Will Be 
No Room For Dialogue With Them Until Everyone Believes in Allah. We 
Will Not Meet the Enemy Halfway and There Will Be No Room For Dialogue 
With Them.
  An al Qaeda training manual gave ``guidelines for beating and killing 
hostages: Religious scholars have permitted beating. In this tradition, 
we find permission to interrogate the hostage for the purpose of 
obtaining information. It is permitted to strike the nonbeliever who 
has no covenant until he reveals the news, information, and secrets of 
his people. The religious scholars have also permitted the killing of a 
hostage if he insists on withholding information from Muslims.''
  Again, an al Qaeda training manual says, Islam does not coincide or 
make a truce with unbelief, but rather confronts it. The confrontation 
that Islam calls for with these godless and apostate regimes, does not 
know Socratic debates, Platonic ideals, nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But 
it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, 
and destruction and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun.''
  After a group of Saudis wrote an open letter to the United States 
expressing their belief that Islam was peace and tolerant, bin Laden 
wrote in response: ``As to the relationship between Muslims and 
infidels, this is summarized by the Most High's Word: `We renounce you. 
Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us--till you believe in 
Allah alone.'
  ``So there is an enmity evidenced by fierce hostility from the heart, 
and this fierce hostility, that is, battle, ceases only if the infidel 
submits to the authority of Islam or if his blood is forbidden from 
being shed or if Muslims are at that point weak and incapable. But if 
the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great 
apostasy! Allah almighty's Word to his Prophet recounts in summation 
the true relationship: `O Prophet! Wage war against the infidels and 
hypocrites and be ruthless. Their abode is hell--an evil fate!' Such 
then is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the 
infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred direct--directed 
from the Muslim to the infidel--is the foundation of our religion. And 
we consider this a justice and kindness to them.''
  That's Osama bin Laden's response to Muslims who wrote an open letter 
to the United States describing their religion and peace and tolerant, 
and he rejected that.
  Slow debilitating attrition of will and resources in Iraq, and in 
general, are what jihadists openly desire as well as the importance of 
Iraq to the impending Islamic rule. Bin Laden said this: ``America is 
definitely a great power, with an unbelievable military strength and a 
vibrant economy, but all of these have been built on a very weak and 
hollow foundation. Therefore, it is very easy to target that flimsy 
base and concentrate on their weak points. And even if we are able to 
target \1/10\ of these weak points, we will be able to crush and 
destroy them and remove them from ruling and conquering the world.''
  Osama bin Laden has called Baghdad, ``The Capital of the Caliphate,'' 
and said, ``I now address my speech to the whole of the Islamic Nation. 
Listen and understand. The issue is big and the misfortune is 
momentous. The most important and serious issue today for the whole 
world is this Third World War, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition 
began against the Islamic nation. It is raging in the land of the two 
rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of 
the caliphate. Al-Zawahiri has stated, ``So we must think for a long 
time about our next step and how we want to attain it. It is my humble 
opinion that the jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals.
  ``The first stage: expel the Americans from Iraq; the second stage: 
establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support 
it until it achieves the level of a caliphate--over as much territory 
as you can to spread its power in Iraq . . . the third stage: extend 
the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq. The fourth 
stage: It may coincide with what came before: The clash with Israel, 
because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic 
entity.

[[Page H2746]]

                              {time}  1645

  Bin Laden added: ``Finally, I'd like to tell you that the war is for 
you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace 
forever as the winds blow in this direction with God's help.''
  So the war in Iraq, according to bin Laden, is ``a war over the 
destiny of the entire worldwide Muslim community.''
  Also in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was responsible for three lethal 
hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan, numerous beheadings, including that of 
Nicholas Berg, the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Iraq, 
where 22 perished, the murder of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, a 
revered cleric, in a car bomb that killed him and over 100 people 
outside Shia Islam's holy shrine in Najaf.
  In the background of one of this murder's filmed beheadings was the 
trademark black banner of al-Zarqawi's newest group, al-Tawhid wa al-
Jihad, or Monotheism and Jihad.
  Jihadist leaders have not been ambiguous in their characterization of 
the United States. Hezbollah leader Nasrallah has said, ``Let the 
entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan is absolute. I 
conclude my speak with a slogan that will continue to reverberate on 
all occasions so that nobody will think that we have weakened. 
Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, death to 
America will remain a reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to 
America.''
  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said, ``Undoubtedly, I say 
that this slogan and goal is achievable, and with the support and power 
of God we will soon experience a world without the United States and 
Zionism and will breathe in the brilliant time of Islamic sovereignty 
over today's world.''
  ``Open your eyes and see the fate of Pharaoh. Open your eyes and see 
what happened to the Portuguese Empire, see the final fate of the 
British Empire. I'm telling you''--referring to the major powers--``if 
you do not abandon the path of falsehood and return to the path of 
justice, your doomed destiny will be annihilation, misfortune and 
abjectness.''
  Again, Ahmadinejad said, ``The anger of Muslims may reach an 
explosion point soon. If such a date comes, they--referring to the 
Western governments--should know that the waves of the blast will not 
remain within the boundaries of our region and will engulf the corrupt 
powers that support this fake regime too.''
  In relation to America, Osama bin Laden has said, ``It's been made 
clear during our defending and fighting against the American enemy that 
this enemy's combat strategy is heavily dependent on the psychological 
aspect of war due to its large and efficient media apparatus, and of 
course its indiscriminate aerial bombing which hides the cowardice and 
lack of fighting spirit of the American soldier. Likewise, let me 
remind you of the defeat of the American forces in Beirut in 1982, soon 
after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when the Lebanese resistance was 
personified by the truck laden with explosives that struck the main 
military base of the U.S. Marines in Beirut, killing 242 soldiers--
towards hell was their destination, and what an evil destination that 
is.'' Bin Laden continued, ``We found that out from our brothers who 
fought the Americans in Somalia. They did not see it as a power worthy 
of any mention. It was the big propaganda that the United States used 
to terrify people before fighting them. Our brothers, who were here in 
Afghanistan, also tried the Americans. God gave them and the mujahideen 
success in Somalia, and the United States pulled out, trailing 
disappointment, defeat and failure behind it. It achieved nothing. It 
left quicker than people had imagined.''
  Al-Zawahiri added, ``This is the fumbling that precedes the defeat. 
Bush and Blair are hiding the true disaster they're facing in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. They know better than others that there is no hope in 
victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet.''
  These thoughts should give us pause, and they remind us of how 
irrational and bloodthirsty are enemies truly are. After all, are any 
of Osama bin Laden's complaints really meant to be sincere? He 
complained about economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein. Well, did 
he encourage Saddam Hussein to abide by the U.N. resolutions to 
accelerate the cessation of such sanctions? He complained about U.S. 
troops in Saudi Arabia. Did he offer his advice to persuade Saddam 
Hussein to change his ways so that U.S. troops could leave Saudi 
Arabia? He criticized U.S. support of oppressive regimes. Has he spoken 
out forcefully for minority rights, democratic freedoms, the 
strengthening of civil society, the rule of law and economic 
transparency?
  He criticized U.S. support of Israel. Has he in any way issued 
thoughtful statements outlining a path forward towards peace, 
articulating areas of compromise and concessions that can be worked out 
on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide?
  He has criticized American pressure on OPEC to keep oil prices low. 
Besides being contrary to the petroprofits which demand provides, which 
would be in his economic self-interest, has he spoken up for 
responsible economic policies such oil-producing states could turn to 
in order to turn their back on the need to produce oil? If he is so 
critical of America's demand, does he thus support ending OPEC's 
monopolistic tendencies so that other consumers can rightly partake in 
the legitimate capitalist practice of supply and demand?
  He has criticized the United States for being in Afghanistan and 
Iraq. Has he offered any thoughtful solutions to those two geopolitical 
challenges? Surely a man who has criticized President Bush for not 
signing the International Criminal Court and for America's campaign 
finance problems can muster the intellectual strength to offer such 
astute suggestions as must be at the brim of his cerebral storehouse of 
knowledge.
  But we know the answers to these questions. Osama bin Laden has no 
desire to do any of these obvious suggestions, they're merely a mirage 
for his murderous ideology. As Hassan Butt, a former jihadist, 
explained, ``I was a fanatic. I know their thinking. When I was still a 
member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, I 
remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV 
proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, 
the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.'' He adds, ``By 
blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed this `Blair's 
bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also 
helped draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our 
violence, Islamic theology.''
  Now, I would not call it ``Islamic theology.'' I myself would call it 
jihadism or radical jihad to make clear what Rudy Giuliani said some 4 
years ago. He said, ``Those who attacked us on 9/11 not only hijacked 
airliners, but they hijacked a noble religion.'' And we ought to keep 
that in mind.
  As we've recently been debating in this war, the nature of 
intelligence has changed, but it is still indispensable. It's an 
essential element of any effective risk assessment. If we're going to 
effectively be able to protect ourselves against terrorist attack, we 
need to be involved in risk assessment. Risk assessment simply is 
looking at threat, looking at vulnerability, looking at consequence.
  We can look at vulnerability and consequence with the information 
that is at our disposal, within our grasp, that is, when we try and 
figure out vulnerability, we look at perspective targets of the enemy, 
and we can assess what our vulnerabilities are. We can look at a dam, 
we can look at a building, we can look at the Capitol and we can say, 
what are the possibilities of attack here? How can we protect ourselves 
against those areas that we have not defended or thought of defending 
in the past?
  Consequence. We can do models ahead of time to figure out what the 
consequence of an attack would be against the Capitol, against a dam, 
against a set of highways, against a number of large buildings in a 
metropolitan area and so forth.
  What we don't have within our own information base is the third part 
of a risk assessment, that is, what is the threat? Because the only way 
we can determine the threat is by gathering information from the enemy; 
in other words, intelligence gathering; in other words, listening in on 
what the other

[[Page H2747]]

side has to say; in other words, capturing their communications.
  And it's not easy; intelligence gathering is difficult. And as 
pointed out by some in that arena, all intelligence bureaus get things 
spectacularly wrong much of the time, which just goes to the point of 
how difficult it is to be able to gather the information, analyze the 
information, draw conclusions from that information, and then make sure 
that in a timely fashion we distribute that information or the 
conclusions that we've obtained from them.
  In fact, one of the reasons we didn't prevent 9/11 is simple: Neither 
the CIA nor its intelligence agencies, Western or Muslim, had a spy or 
an informant inside al Qaeda's command structure. And the stark reality 
is that our human intelligence against al Qaeda and other Sunni 
militants will probably never be as good as what we had against the 
Soviet system during the Cold War.
  Nevertheless, the importance of intelligence is why I've been working 
so hard to find a long-term solution to our surveillance situation. As 
one distinguished Member of the other body has said, without a long-
term solution, ``the quality of the intelligence we're going to be 
receiving is going to be degraded. It is going to be degraded. It is 
already going to be degraded as telecommunications companies lose 
interest.''
  In a letter dated February 22 of this year, Director of National 
Intelligence Mike McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey both 
wrote to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. In it they 
said this: ``We have lost intelligence information this past week as a 
direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress' failure to act.'' 
What were they talking about? Well, let me explain.
  In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Admiral McConnell, 
the Director of National Intelligence, stated that prior to the 
enactment of the Protect America Act--that is the FISA fix that we did 
last August which has now been allowed to expire--``we were not 
collecting somewhere between half and two-thirds of the foreign 
intelligence information which would have been collected were it not 
for the recent legal interpretations of FISA which required the 
government to obtain FISA warrants for overseas surveillance.''
  Admiral McConnell said he came onto his job coming out of the private 
sector to return to government service with the responsibility of 
collecting information, that kind of information that would provide us 
with forewarning of what the terrorists intended to do. But he 
discovered that as a result of a decision made by the FISA court which 
changed the rules of the game because of technology changes, we were 
unable to do the job that he was given the responsibility for. Think 
about that. We had blinded ourselves to somewhere between one-half and 
two-thirds of the legitimate foreign intelligence targets that 
otherwise we would have been looking at. Now, we had the Protect 
America Act, which was the fix for FISA, Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Act, and that was in effect from the end of August until 
February 16 of this year. And what happened after it expired? Admiral 
McConnell and Attorney General Mukasey said, ``Because we've allowed it 
to expire, we have lost intelligence this past week as a direct result 
of the uncertainty created by Congress' failure to act.''
  Now, we've heard some say that really that's not true because all of 
those intercepts that were in effect as a result of the new law that we 
had from the end of August until February continue in effect for a 
year, and that happens to be true. But that only solves part of the 
problem because, unless one believes that al Qaeda and its affiliates 
and its associates around the world have put their feet up on the desk 
and said, you know something, we're not going to plan anything else 
because the Congress can't listen in on what we're doing, unless that's 
a reality, we have put ourselves at jeopardy because we don't know what 
we don't know. We don't know the kinds of information that otherwise we 
would be able to gather, the kind of information that has allowed us to 
protect ourselves. That's why many of us on this floor have come and 
said, well, why not pass the bipartisan Senate FISA bill now?
  We have almost every Member on this side of the aisle who is 
committed to it, and we have, I think, over 20 Members on the 
Democratic side who have, in writing, said they support it. Together, 
that is more than a majority in this House. So in other words, we could 
form a majority if we brought that bill up on our next legislative day 
that would allow us to accept the Senate bill. And we could have it 
signed into law by the President and we would no longer find ourselves 
as vulnerable as we are today.
  Congress should act because we are in the legislative branch and have 
the responsibility to act. Let me repeat that. Congress has the 
responsibility to act. These issues should not and were not intended to 
be left to unelected, more cumbersome aspects of our government. 
They're inherently about legislating and about us, representatives of 
the people, doing our duty to protect the people.

                              {time}  1700

  After all, as Andrew McCarthy said in a National Review article dated 
March 4 of this year, ``At bottom the dispute over the warrantless 
surveillance program is about the division of power between the 
political branches: Is it the executive or the legislative department 
that has ultimate authority over foreign intelligence collection? By 
nature that is a political question, not a legal one. In our system 
such issues are supposed to be worked out through the normal democratic 
process: legislation and elections. They are not the province of 
lawsuits in which, A, the public's interest is purportedly represented 
by groups like the ACLU, which, let's face it, holds views much 
different from those of the American people at large, and, B, the final 
policy determination is made by the judiciary, that is, the 
unaccountable nonpolitical branch . . . The genius of our system is 
that it does not draw many fixed, immutable lines between executive and 
legislative authority or between liberty and security. We have the 
capacity to rachet up or down depending on threat conditions. We rely 
confidently on our politics and the sound judgment of the American 
people. Voters can remove a President or lawmaker who strikes the wrong 
balance.''
  I have taken the time to speak on these threats today because I 
believe unequivocally that they are real threats. They are why I have 
worked so hard to pass legislation such as the bipartisan SAFE Ports 
Act of 2006. There are legitimate threats out there to which we must 
respond. But I must say there are those who take an opposite view.
  Recently one commentator, Michael Hirsh, in the Newsweek Web 
Exclusive of February 21, asked his readers this: ``Think about this 
for a moment. A small group of ragged American haters, who had one 
lucky day of mass murder nearly 7 years ago, will continue to define 
the foreign policy of the lone superpower for years, possibly decades 
to come. There's something wrong with this picture. Yes, we can all 
agree that 9/11 was one of the worst moments in American history. And 
we can certainly agree that al Qaeda must be completely eliminated. But 
the group has never come close to duplicating 9/11. Even the train 
bombings in London and Madrid that were attributed to al Qaeda-inspired 
cells were minor in comparison . . . The rational policy would be to 
replace the overblown `war on terror' with what we should have been 
engaged in every day since 9/11: a war of annihilation against al 
Qaeda, an all-out effort to rid the Earth completely of the small, 
lunatic group that attacked us on that day. This is a task we should 
apply ourselves to fully, at long last. But it is absurd to assign the 
term `transcendent challenge' to such a band of murderous anarchists, 
who have about as much hope of achieving their grand dream of turning 
the Mideast into an Islamist caliphate as scientists have of proving 
one day that the moon is made of green cheese. Terror cells may be 
spreading, but their ideology, such as it is, keeps dying every time it 
is exposed to the open air. Even in the tribal regions of Pakistan, 
safe haven to the newly regrouped Taliban and al Qaeda, voters last 
week turned out radical religious groups because of their 
ineffectiveness. Al Qaeda and related terror groups are hardly the 
`heirs' to communism and totalitarianism, as Bush has described them.''

[[Page H2748]]

  With all due respect, I profoundly disagree. Does anybody believe, 
for instance, that Libya, with its leader, gave up its nuclear weapons, 
its weapons of mass destruction, because they just wanted to sit down 
and reason together? Is it by accident that Libya, Khadafi, changed 
their position after we moved aggressively to respond to terrorism in 
the Middle East? I think not. And with all due respect, I do believe 
these threats I've outlined here today are real and that they are the 
heirs to communism and totalitarianism. And while their victims may not 
as yet add up numerically to the quantified brutality of previous 
dictators and killers, nonetheless, their potential to do equivalent 
destruction is without question. The focus on ``one lucky day,'' while 
disrespectful to the other victims of jihadism before and after 9/11, 
cannot be allowed to turn into ``many'' lucky days.
  We also have a situation today where the possibility of obtaining a 
nuclear weapon and exploding it in a metropolitan area cannot be swept 
off the table as unthinkable. In fact, we ought to be thinking about it 
every day and thinking about how we prevent it.
  We have seen and can envision without straining credulity what would 
happen in our large cities and our places of governance or commerce 
were other attacks such as 9/11 to be initiated. What would happen to 
us all, urban and rural, large and small, men and women, east and west, 
north and south, if our dams, our transportation structure, our trains, 
our subways, our purification system, our ports, our electrical grids, 
or our energy sources were to be maliciously struck? The results, both 
real and psychological, would be catastrophic.
  Nevertheless, we must not give in to fear. Instead, we must think 
about what victory will mean in this confrontation, and whatever the 
definition of our terms of multifaceted success, we must continue to 
properly consider the possibility of what success means to al Qaeda. 
Those in the United States may not have an agreed theory of victory or 
path to get there, but Osama bin Laden and his cohorts certainly have. 
Bin laden's goal, as he; his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri; and others have 
often articulated, is to drive the United States out of Muslim lands, 
topple the region's current rulers, and establish Islamic authority 
under a new caliphate. The path to this goal, they have made clear, is 
to ``provoke and bait'' the United States into ``bleeding wars'' on 
Muslim lands. Since Americans, the argument goes, do not have the 
stomach for a long and bloody fight, they will eventually give up and 
leave the Middle East to its fate. Once the autocratic regimes 
responsible for the humiliation of the Muslim world have been removed, 
it would be possible to return to the idealized state of Arabia at the 
time of the Prophet Muhammad. A caliphate is in vision from Morocco to 
Central Asia, sharia rule prevailing, Israel destroyed, oil prices 
skyrocketing, the United States recoiling in humiliation and perhaps 
even collapse just as the Soviet Union did after the mujahideen 
defeated it in Afghanistan. These are their goals, and these are the 
goals we must understand if we are to be successful in defeating al 
Qaeda.
  Remember, they warned us prior to 9/11 as to what they intended. They 
issued a fatwa. They said they would go after the World Trade Center 
once again. And we, as a Nation, didn't take them seriously enough.
  We are facing a strange ruthless ``hydra-headed'' enemy. As some have 
recently demonstrated in their research into the biographical 
backgrounds of jihadists, many of these individuals are simply driven 
by individual alienation and group dynamics, while, as I have pointed 
out, the leadership often has more ideological views. These differences 
must be exploited. Also, as the RAND Corporation has recently reported, 
our ability to help states with their counterinsurgency measures has to 
be greatly enhanced.
  So, Madam Speaker, whatever the means, whatever the solutions, 
whatever the minor delineations between the terror-using groups, 
whatever the tactics we must use, we must take this jihadist threat 
seriously. It is our first duty as representatives in a constitutional 
government and as trustees charged with preserving and protecting our 
Constitution, which upholds our equal natural rights as citizens in 
this great land and as a part of this esteemed republic. Let us be 
wise. Let us be discerning. Let us be steadfast. Let us uphold our 
Constitution. And in the end, let us be successful.

                          ____________________