[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 82 (Monday, May 19, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H4129-H4133]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT

  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, well, here we are 
after nine months, today, May 19, and this body is yet to provide 
Admiral McConnell with the tools he's asked for in order to protect the 
American people from another cataclysmic attack against our Nation.
  When the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral McConnell, first 
came to Congress for help, he was only given a 180-day authority to 
conduct surveillance, which he described at the time as necessary to 
close critical intelligence gaps. Of course, after a short 2-week 
extension, that authority, which we called the Protect America Act, 
actually expired on February 16 at 12:01 a.m.
  So we're in day 95. Three months and 5 days later, 13 weeks later, 
22,080 hours later, 136,800 minutes after the FISA fix which we gave to 
the intelligence community of our Nation, that fix expired. 
Unfortunately, the so-called RESTORE Act, passed as a substitute by the 
majority party, repealed core provisions requested by Admiral 
McConnell.
  While the Senate passed a bipartisan 6-year extension of a new FISA 
bill based on the Protect America Act, thus responding to the real 
world concerns of our Director of National Intelligence, unfortunately 
the Members of this chamber were denied a clean up-or-down vote on it. 
The end result is that here we are, nine months from the time this 
process of fits and starts began, without an effective response to the 
most serious national security threat of our time.
  Madam Speaker, are we supposed to believe that al Qaeda has somehow 
lost its determination to kill innocent Americans? Well, as recently as 
Friday, Osama bin Laden was issuing threats against both the little 
Satan and the big Satan. I don't know about you, but I think we should 
want to remove all obstacles to listening in on his conversations.
  For there is no evidence, none whatsoever, that these homicidal 
extremists have any less desire to kill us and others perceived by 
their twisted psychotic logic to be legitimate targets. Yes, innocent 
men, women and children.
  No, the evidence is unequivocal and clear. Since 2001, attacks actual 
and premeditated have been a constant across the globe: attacks in 
Bali, Indonesia, in 2002 and 2005; a planned attack on Barcelona 2003; 
a 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 March 2004; attempted 
attacks in the Philippines 2004; a deadly London attack in July 2005; a 
plan to blow up airliners over the Atlantic in 2006; 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.
  For we no longer live in a world where wishful thinking is 
permissible, if we wish to fulfill our obligation to those who sent us 
here to represent them and to protect them and future Americans, this 
is the first obligation of government, and we no longer have the option 
of pretending otherwise. Although, pretending otherwise seems to be in 
the air these days.
  The President of the United States addressed a session of the Knesset 
in Israel. There, celebrating the 60th anniversary or birthday of the 
State of Israel, in the context of remarks made by the leader of Iran 
to wipe off the face of the earth Israel, in light of other comments 
made by others affiliated with terrorists that we should see the day 
soon where Israel will no longer exist, in the context of speaking to a 
country whose birth grew out of the terrible experiences of the 
Holocaust in Germany, the President of the United States referred to 
the failure to act at that time by America and other countries around 
the world, the failure to even admit that there was a serious problem 
of cataclysmic consequence.
  And when the President merely quoted a senator from that era who 
happened, by the way, to be a Republican, to suggest in the words of 
this senator of that time that if he'd just had a chance to talk with 
Hitler perhaps the future of the world would have been different, when 
the President merely says that in the context of the celebration of the 
60th anniversary of the State of Israel, at a time when there are those 
in this world crying for their destruction, and at a time when rockets 
are lobbed into Israel on almost a daily basis, the response by some in 
this country is to criticize the President for uttering those words, to 
suggest that he had no right to say that, and to suggest that somehow 
he was accusing others of appeasement, who he had not even named.
  Was the President suggesting that terrible circumstances in the 
world,

[[Page H4130]]

adding up to a threat against us and those who ally with us, are 
dismissed by some as insubstantial or inconsequential? I think the 
President did suggest that. I think the President thought or stated 
that people who hold that view are dangerous to themselves and others 
because they are not confronting the evil that is in the world today.

                              {time}  1800

  And sometimes that appears to be the problem we have here. Where is 
the sense of urgency about the threat that is around us?
  Sometimes, when we just talk about it, those that talk about it are 
accused of being fearmongers, trying to stir up the country, trying to 
take rights away when, in fact, they are merely reciting the facts in 
the world today.
  Our policy as a Nation must begin with the recognition of reality. 
However inconvenient or discomforting it must be for some of us, we 
must recognize that meeting the challenge posed by those who seek to 
kill us is going to be not a short-term challenge, but a long-term 
challenge. It will, therefore, require a long-term commitment to and a 
long-term investment in our security. And this must begin with the 
recognition by the leadership of this body that listening to the 
conversations of terrorists overseas is essential to our ability to 
protect ourselves and those who live in neighborhoods and communities 
across this great Nation.
  As a member of the Homeland Security Committee, I can say that over 
the 4 years the committee has been in existence we have sought to work 
together, Democrat and Republican, to try to protect and secure our 
homeland from another horrific attack. And it is my view that, although 
we are considerably safer today than we were on 9/11, we are, 
nonetheless, not safe enough.
  We must never accept the mistaken notion that we can achieve security 
on the cheap, either in money, tactics or strategy. I fear, however, 
that we have lost that sense of urgency corresponding to the real risk 
to our Nation. A proper understanding of the risk requires a vigorous 
and rigorous assessment of our vulnerability, the consequence of our 
enemy successfully penetrating that vulnerability, and the threats to 
our vulnerabilities. In other words, risk equals threat plus 
vulnerability plus consequences.
  And while all three components are important, and some would say all 
are equal, I would argue that one is more equal than the others, and 
that is threat. Why do I say that? I say that because we have it within 
our capacity of knowledge to know what our vulnerabilities are. We can 
assess a dam. We can assess this building. We can assess the White 
House. We can assess our distribution systems of electricity and see 
where the vulnerabilities are. We can run computer models. We can even 
run simulated attacks and discover what those vulnerabilities are. 
Similarly, we have it within our capacity to know the consequences. We 
can figure out what the consequence of destruction of this building 
would be, what the destruction of a particular dam would be, what the 
destruction of a distribution system for power would be in a particular 
area of this country. But what we don't have in our own arsenal of 
knowledge is an understanding of the threat, because the threat, in 
large measure, resides in the minds of those who would attack us and, 
therefore, we have to try and get into their minds. That is why I would 
suggest that the threat component of a risk assessment is perhaps more 
equal than the others.
  It remains my belief that the threat of another attack is real, not 
imaginary. You do not have to take my word for it or anybody on this 
side of the aisle or the President of the United States, for the 
murderous extremists themselves have not been shy concerning their 
purposes and objectives. Al-Zawahiri has said, ``Like their glorious 
ancestors, the Afghan jihadists believed 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.''
  In October 2001, just one month after September 11, bin Laden said, 
and I quote him directly, ``If inciting people to do that''--he's 
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. We practice the good terrorism.'' The next year, Osama bin 
Laden issued a fatwa authorizing the killing of up to four million 
Americans and specifying that half of them should be children. Those 
are not my words, those are not my threats, those are the threats of 
Osama bin Laden.
  I believe the threat to be real. And the consequences of al Qaeda 
obtaining weapons of mass destruction regrettably cannot be put in the 
category of unthinkable because of the evidence of their efforts to do 
so, thankfully unsuccessful to this point.
  My point, however, is that we cannot rely solely on our domestic 
efforts to secure the homeland, as important as they are, and thereby 
hope that we will reach a level of perfection in that we are capable of 
foiling every single terrorist plot in order to prevent a cataclysmic 
attack on our Nation. No. The consequences are simply too horrendous to 
not use every tool available to us.
  The ability to capture the communications of terrorists overseas 
before they are able to strike is a key component of being able to 
extend our defensive perimeter beyond the shores of our homeland. As 
Brian Jenkins of the Rand Corporation has pointed out, in the terror 
attacks since 9/11 we have seen combinations of local conspiracies 
inspired by, assisted by and guided by al Qaeda's central leadership. 
It is essential that while protecting the basic rights of American 
citizens, we find ways to facilitate the collection and exchange of 
intelligence across national and bureaucratic borders.
  Again, as this Rand Corporation scholar points out, if we are to be 
successful in the protection of American citizens, the collection of 
intelligence must be a central component of our strategy. Our concern 
here is not to spy on Americans, but, rather, to listen to the 
conversations of those who want to kill Americans, and to be even more 
specific, to listen in on those conversations of those who are outside 
the United States and who happen to be plotting to kill Americans.
  Now, some have said, what if such calls happen to be made by, say, 
Osama bin Laden or one of his lieutenants or some associate to someone 
inside the United States, doesn't this raise civil liberties and 
privacy concerns because of the fact that an American happens to be on 
the receiving end of the call? Again, the objective of our efforts 
remains to target a foreign terrorist. From a technical standpoint, one 
should understand that it is only possible to target one end of the 
conversation. Furthermore, our intelligence agencies have no control 
over who that overseas terrorist suspect may call. 99.9 percent of the 
time it may be, and we believe it to be, another foreign person, most 
likely someone that they are talking about their terrorist activities 
with.
  Admiral McConnell made this very point in responding to questioning 
during our Judiciary Committee hearing; the admiral responded this way: 
``When you're conducting surveillance in the context of electronic 
surveillance, you can only target one end of the conversation. So you 
have no control over who that number might call or who they might 
receive a call from.'' Furthermore, if Osama bin Laden happens to dial 
the wrong number and gets a pizza delivery boy or girl in San Diego, 
there are minimization procedures in the law, in the Protect America 
Act, in the current circumstances in which they operate these programs, 
minimization procedures to protect the privacy rights of the innocent 
American on the other end of the line. It is similar to the 
minimization processes that we use every single day when law 
enforcement in the United States, acting on a legal wiretap against a 
suspected criminal, overhears the conversation involving someone on 
that criminal's phone and somebody else. And if that person is an 
innocent actor in all of this, that part of the conversation is 
minimized. If, in fact, it turns out that the specific legal target we 
have is calling someone who also is involved in the illegal activity, 
then the process or procedure, as followed for years--I think as many 
as 50 years--is to go to court and get a warrant with respect to that 
other person. That is precisely the format that we use under the 
Protect America Act.
  The purpose of the surveillance of foreign terrorists overseas is 
nothing

[[Page H4131]]

more or nothing less than to do this single thing: to listen to the 
foreign terrorist overseas. I hasten to add, however, that if Osama bin 
Laden or one of his lieutenants happens to call somebody in the United 
States, it probably doesn't take a rocket scientist to surmise that 
this is probably a conversation that our intelligence community might 
be interested in. Nevertheless, they would have to follow the 
procedures I've just outlined because the target of the surveillance 
would be Osama bin Laden outside of the United States. The conversation 
he has with someone in the United States, if that were to take place, 
would be subject to minimization.
  I would hope that this surely would be an issue we could agree upon. 
However, here we are, 9 months after Admiral McConnell came to the 
Congress with the entreaty that we need to ``close critical 
intelligence gaps,'' 95 days after the short-term fix has gone out of 
existence--that's 3 months and 5 days ago--and here we are basically 
accepting a failure to close critical intelligence gaps as requested by 
Admiral McConnell.
  We were told that we were failing to surveil somewhere between one-
half and two-thirds of the overseas conversations that we should be 
listening to. What do we mean by that? We mean the same type of 
terrorist targets that we've been keying on for years because we didn't 
have this problem prior to a year ago March, when a FISA judge--that's 
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court judge--said that 
because the technology had changed from the time the law was originally 
passed in 1978, from most overseas, long-distance conversations or 
overseas conversations going through the air, going through satellite 
transmission and thereby capable of being captured by our intelligence 
community and therefore not under the FISA law, to the point now where 
technology actually has most of that, the vast majority of those kinds 
of conversations being carried by wire with connections that happen to 
be somewhere in the United States.

  So while the content of the conversation hasn't changed, the means by 
which the transmission of the conversation has changed, and that 
technicality was used by the judge to say you now have to get a warrant 
and go through all of those procedures necessary to protect the 
interests of someone in the United States under the Constitution. Now 
they have to be applied to these foreign conversations, not because the 
conversation has changed, not because the target has changed, rather, 
because the technology of transmission had changed. Oh, by the way, the 
judge suggested, we are told, that it didn't appear to be the intent of 
Congress when they wrote the law in 1978, and he suggested that the 
intelligence community go to the Congress for the change.
  So here we are. We have failed to provide the Director of National 
Intelligence with the tools that he told us he needs if he is able to 
do his job and able to protect the American people, the job he is sworn 
to do. In my estimation, this is surely one of the great failures of 
this or any other Congress, to live up to what is generally recognized 
to be our primary responsibility, to protect those who have empowered 
us to act on their behalf.
  And let me add at this point that such a failure appears to be 
entirely inexcusable in a post-September 11 environment. It is for that 
reason most troubling to learn that U.S. Attorney General Michael 
Mukasey and Admiral McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, have 
indicated that we have lost intelligence information as a direct result 
of ``the uncertainty created by Congress' fail to act.''
  So let me repeat, both the top law enforcement official in the 
Federal Government and the most senior intelligence officer in our 
Federal Government have told us that there have been direct 
consequences resulting from the fact that this body has dropped the 
ball since February 15th of this year.
  It should be interjected that neither of these men have a history of 
partisan political agendas. Attorney General Mukasey has a solid 
reputation as a sober-minded former Federal judge with great expertise 
in national security law. Judge Mukasey presided over the criminal 
production of Omar Abdel Rahman and El Sayyid Nosair relating to their 
plot to blow up the United Nations and other Manhattan landmarks 
uncovered in an investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 
As a testimony to his stature as a jurist, his name was one of four 
submitted by the senior Senator from New York for consideration as a 
possible United States Supreme Court nominee.
  In a similar vein, Admiral McConnell has a solid reputation of 
service to his country in both Democratic and Republican 
administrations. Along with a distinguished military career, his 
service as Chief of the National Security Agency for I believe 6 years 
during the Clinton administration is a testimony to his nonpartisan 
service. One noteworthy incident alone provides us with persuasive 
evidence of Admiral McConnell's independent judgement. Now, regardless 
of how one interprets the most recent National Intelligence Estimate 
concerning Iran, the one that was so controversial, any attempt to 
attack Admiral McConnell as a ``tool'' of the Bush administration would 
appear to lack all credibility. There should be no doubt in anyone's 
mind that Admiral McConnell is a man of honor who calls it as he sees 
it.
  Both officials have told the Congress what the country needs, and yet 
the majority of this body has told them no. Both officials have told 
the Congress that the country needs help, and yet the majority in this 
body has told them no, told them no, that they know better. Now, 
although institutional pride makes it painful for me to say it, the 
truth requires an acknowledgement that the other body did rise to the 
challenge of avoiding partisanship.

                              {time}  1815

  They did it with a bipartisan bill, which, although distinct in some 
aspects from the administration proposal, nevertheless was responsive 
to the request by Admiral McConnell. And this is as it should be. For 
the responsibility to give the intelligence community what it says it 
needs for its surveillance of foreign terrorists outside the United 
States has absolutely nothing to do with partisan politics. Our 
intelligence needs out there in the real world are critical to what 
theorists refer to as a zero-sum game. Our failure to obtain the 
intelligence we need to discover a terrorist attack planned outside the 
United States is a loss for all Americans. Those killed on 9/11 weren't 
Republicans or Democrats; they were human beings. Most were Americans 
but many were not. We owe it to those who perished, to those who live 
today, and to further generations not to allow transient political 
considerations to cloud our judgment. The Senate has shown that it's 
possible, even in even-numbered years, to do what's right.
  So how is it, then, that men and women in this body, who I know 
personally to be persons of goodwill, have resisted the call to 
bipartisanship by public servants like Attorney General Mukasey and 
Admiral McConnell? How is it that, unlike the Senate, we have been 
unable to, in my judgment, rise above partisanship?
  Let me make it clear that I have the deepest respect for my 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle who obviously love their 
country, as I do, and their patriotism is not an issue in this debate. 
So I searched to try to figure out what is it? And I have come to the 
conclusion that at its root, this terrible error can be found in the 
misgotten judgment of the Democratic leadership of this body to draw a 
line in the sand over an issue of providing lawsuit immunity protection 
for those telecommunications companies and individuals who may have 
come to the aid of their country in the aftermath of the horrific 
attacks on 9/11. The so-called Restore Act, which passed this body, did 
nothing, does nothing, to protect those who responded to the call for 
help from their government. Instead, the response of the leadership of 
this body was to throw those people into a litigation tank filled with 
plaintiff's lawyers. The grant of a waiver of the State secrets 
doctrine resembles anything but a lifeline. The companies remain in the 
tank left to fend for themselves. As one of the Members of the other 
side said in hearings that we had in the Judiciary Committee, well, 
these companies have millions of dollars' worth of lawyers, as if 
that's the proper answer. This sends the worst possible message to all 
Americans. After all this who would be dumb

[[Page H4132]]

enough to respond to the entreaties of their government in a time of 
crisis? Would corporate counsel or board of directors anywhere in the 
land conclude otherwise?
  Attorney General Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence 
McConnell frame the issue clearly in a letter to the Senate supporting 
the language in that bipartisan Senate bill: Without retroactive 
immunity the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful 
government requests in the future without unnecessary court involvement 
and protracted litigation.
  The House leadership response, unfortunately, turns the notion of the 
``Good Samaritan'' upside down and hits the delete button erasing the 
ethic of a bygone era when school children, including myself, were 
taught to type these words: ``Now is the time for all good men''--today 
we would add ``women''--``to come to the aid of their country.'' Now 
you can't say that. In the absence of action here in the House, 
conforming to what the Senate has done already on a bipartisan basis, 
you have to turn that around and say, ``Now is the time for all good 
men and women to come to the aid of their country only when they have 
their lawyers and accountants with them.''
  According to statements by the distinguished junior Senator from West 
Virginia during debate in the Senate, and he is, I believe, the 
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, these companies acted in 
response to letters, all of which stated the relevant activities had 
been authorized by the President. All but one, and that was done by 
legal counsel to the President, stated the activities had been 
determined to be lawful by the Attorney General of the United States. 
Now, that is the set of facts presented in the Senate. I believe to 
suggest that these companies should not be able to rely on such 
representations from the highest levels of our government is beyond 
comprehension. Yet instead of receiving gratitude, these modern ``Good 
Samaritans'' appear to be captive to a larger dynamic, a political 
dynamic involving the leadership of this body and the ``MoveOn.org'' 
left, which can countenance nothing which involves Bush either directly 
or indirectly. As a result, these companies and individuals have been 
caught in a political cross-fire not of their own making. People say, 
well, we disagree with what the present administration did. We suspect 
they did things that were not within the authority of the President. 
Now, I would strongly disagree with that, but that's the position that 
some take. So rather than aim at the administration through whatever 
processes we have under the Constitution, they aim at these three-party 
``Good Samaritans,'' as if they can by litigation bring them into the 
judicial doc and cause them enough pain that somehow they will stop 
doing what they're doing and in the process reveal something that the 
administration did. And yet there is no one who I believe has looked at 
the documents who's made a credible claim that the administration did 
anything without an express statement of authority.
  However, even if you don't care about the question of fairness, 
there's another overriding consideration relating to the protection of 
the American public. Again, as the Attorney General and Director 
McConnell point out:
  ``Extending liability protection to such companies is imperative. 
Failure to do so could limit future cooperation by such companies and 
put critical intelligence operations at risk. The possible reduction in 
intelligence that might result from this delay is simply unacceptable 
for the safety of our Nation.''
  In short, what they are saying is if the absence of retroactive 
liability protections leads to private partners not cooperating with 
foreign intelligence activities, we can expect more intelligence gaps.
  Now, here I might even quibble about whether we're talking about 
presenting retroactive liability protection. Some believe that these 
companies already have that liability protection but that because of 
the strange way in which the laws of intelligence and the courts of 
intelligence work, they are not able to even present those, and so we 
ought to clear this up.
  So let's stop for a moment to contemplate what we've been told by 
these public officials. If we fail to provide liability protection in a 
way that they can use it for these companies who relied on assurances 
from the highest levels of government, the result may very well be an 
absence of such cooperation in the future and more intelligence gaps.
  As a matter of fact, it goes beyond this. A number of attorneys 
general of the United States signed a letter expressing their concern 
about what this would do to the common law oftentimes framed in statute 
protections given to those people, average everyday citizens or 
companies, who respond to a request from local and State government to 
assist when local or State government officials think a crime is about 
to occur or is occurring or in a state of emergency. These State 
attorneys general feared that the action of the Congress not 
recognizing this immunity theory, which although embedded in statute 
goes back, I believe, at least 700 years into Anglo law, that a 
disrupting of this concept of cooperation by a citizen of the United 
States at the request of legitimate lawful authority, that that could 
stop in the efforts to stop crime and also investigate crimes at the 
State and local level. So as a matter of public policy, this is simply 
unacceptable. We have been warned that the failure to step up to the 
plate on the issue of immunity will mean less intelligence on al Qaeda 
and greater difficulty in ``connecting the dots.'' Maybe such a warning 
could have been ignored in a pre-9/11 environment with our naive 
feelings of invulnerability. However, we no longer live in an age of 
innocence. We know better. We know that we no longer have the ability 
to delude ourselves into thinking that everything will be okay. Today 
we live in a world where we must operate from the premise of a very 
different assumption. There are radical extremists overseas who want to 
come here with the express purpose of killing us. They have a mens rea 
of murder on their minds. That is the purpose for which they live, and 
in their twisted minds, it is only through the achievement of such an 
objective that they will realize their own expiation.

  This is their mindset. This is what drives them. This isn't what I am 
saying; this is what they say. As Hasann Butt, a former jihadist, has 
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 bombing, and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.'' 
Yet ``by blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed this 
`Blair's bombs'--he's speaking of it in the context of British 
terrorism--``those who pushed this `Blair's bombs' line did our 
propaganda work for us. More important, they helped draw away any 
critical examination of the real engine of our violence,'' which Butt 
goes on to describe concerning the attempted hijacking of Islamic 
theology.
  Madam Speaker, with this in mind, we must not allow the broader 
debate concerning the United States foreign policy or the war in Iraq 
to obscure the need for a concerted and unified commitment to defend 
and protect the American people. This is where our focus ought to be. 
Not on a food fight over whether something six degrees removed from 
President George Bush might somehow imply support for him. When it 
comes to protecting the American people, there's no room for partisan 
or ideological wrangling. With respect to our Nation's need to collect 
foreign intelligence on foreign terrorists, the maxim that 
``partisanship must stop at the water's edge'' should be our guide.
  The time has come to say ``enough already.'' Democrats and 
Republicans have come together in the other body to act in a 
responsible manner in meeting the needs expressed by the intelligence 
community relating to foreign surveillance. There's a clear majority 
within this body that would support the bill enacted in the Senate if 
they were given the opportunity to have an up-or-down vote on it. We 
know that from statements that have been made. We know that from the 
strong vote on this side of the aisle and the more than 20 Members on 
the other side of the aisle who signed a letter to the Speaker stating 
that they would support the

[[Page H4133]]

Senate bill. It has been my hope that at some time, the leadership of 
this body would perceive that they had extracted a sufficient level of 
political currency with the ``Move On'' faction of their base to, in 
fact, move on and finally allow a vote on the bipartisan Senate bill. 
Even though it might not reflect everything I would have crafted in 
another possible world where my party was in the majority, it 
nonetheless reflects a sufficient response to the entreaties of Admiral 
McConnell concerning what is necessary to protect the American people.

                              {time}  1830

  However, it does not appear at this point that my hope that the House 
leadership would find its way has in fact turned out to be the case. 
Therefore, it is apparent that the remedy afforded by this, the 
people's House, to overcome obstructionism by those who would thwart 
the will of the majority of its Members, must be used. The mechanism of 
the discharge petition to release the bipartisan Senate-passed bill 
from procedural captivity, unfortunately, must be utilized at this 
time. This is clearly where a matter of paramount concern to our Nation 
requires such action and calls us to rise above partisanship.
  There is no issue of greater importance to the functioning of 
government than the need to protect the American people from threats 
which originate outside of our borders. That is what is involved here: 
Intelligence collection relating to foreign terrorists outside of the 
United States. The willingness of this leadership in this body to allow 
our Nation to lose intelligence is inexcusable. In essence, we have hit 
the mute button. This failure has been acknowledged by both the 
Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. It is time 
for us to remove the obstructions which have been placed in the way of 
foreign intelligence collection in this great institution of the House 
of Representatives, in which we are all privileged to serve, is honored 
when the people themselves are served. We must meet our 
responsibilities as elected Members of this body to ensure that the 
safety of the American people is secure.
  Madam Speaker, there is no excuse for a day to go by that we do not 
act on this important matter. Unfortunately, 95 days have gone by. Let 
us act sooner rather than later, and let us act in a spirit of 
bipartisanship, taking a lead from the other body, even though we don't 
always like to do that, but taking a lead from the other body, that set 
aside partisan differences, did not give the administration everything 
they wanted, but came up with a bill that Admiral McConnell has assured 
us will work, Attorney General Mukasey has said will work, and that on 
the Senate side they were satisfied protects the civil liberties of the 
American people as we seek to listen in on those communications or 
capture those communications of those who would wish not to join us as 
Americans but to kill us as Americans.
  Madam Speaker, I cannot think of anything that is more important. The 
sense of urgency must be here. We should act now. We should wait no 
longer.
  With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________