[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 167 (Monday, November 9, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11285-S11286]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               COMMERCE, JUSTICE, SCIENCE APPROPRIATIONS


                  Economic Development Administration

  Mr. BROWN. Madam President, I would like to engage my colleague, the 
Senator from New York, in a colloquy.
  I would first like to take this opportunity to commend Senator 
Mikulski and Senator Shelby and their hard working staff for crafting a 
responsible, commonsense funding measure, the Commerce, Justice, 
Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010.
  I would like to highlight one piece of this bill, and that is the 
funding allocation for the Economic Development Administration. Madam 
President, the country is facing the highest unemployment rate we have 
seen in more than 20 years. There are too many hard-working Americans 
without a paycheck.
  Mrs. GILLIBRAND. That is true in my State, as I know it is in the 
Senator's. Last week, the Labor Department reported 263,000 more jobs 
lost in September, leaving 15.1 million workers unemployed. The number 
of underemployed is even greater.
  Funds for EDA are critical to our economic recovery, especially funds 
for Economic Adjustment Assistance, which is more flexible spending 
that enables EDA to respond quickly and forcefully to regions hit with 
an economic catastrophe.
  Mr. BROWN. I agree with Senator Gillibrand that the Economic 
Adjustment Assistance account is critical for responding to sudden and 
severe economic hardship in a region. One proven strategy for economic 
development in these regions is business incubators.
  In Ohio, there are more than 30 business incubators that help foster 
regional economic development and spur small business expansion. Recent 
studies show that business incubators are an effective public-private 
approach that produces new jobs at a low cost to the government.
  Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Yes, I thank the Senator. In fact, a 2008 study 
conducted for the Economic Development Administration found that for 
every $10,000 in EDA funds invested in business incubators, an 
estimated 47-69 local jobs are generated. In rural areas, business 
incubator projects are the most effective type of EDA project.
  The National Business Incubation Association, NBIA, estimates that in 
2005 business incubators supported more than 27,000 start-up companies 
providing full-time employment to more than 100,000 workers--generating 
more than $17 billion in annual revenue.
  NBIA also points to research showing that every dollar of Federal 
funds devoted to a business incubator generates approximately $30 in 
local tax revenue.
  Mr. BROWN. I was proud to introduce with the Senator the Business 
Incubator Promotion Act last month, which defines the types of 
incubator services proven to be most effective, and targets Federal 
funds to the most economically distressed regions.
  It is my understanding that the CJS appropriations legislation 
provides $200 million to EDA, with $90 million of that to Economic 
Adjustment Assistance. I would like to see an additional $20 million in 
this account to promote the revitalization of economically distressed 
communities and encourage the development of business incubators. This 
increase would mean jobs--for Ohio, New York, and for other States with 
high unemployment.
  Mrs. GILLIBRAND. I understand the administration would also like to 
see these funds increased. In fact, in the Statement of Administration 
Policy issued for the CJS Appropriations measure, the administration 
urges Congress to provide increased funding to fully implement the 
administration's proposals to promote regional innovation clusters and 
create a business incubator network.
  Mr. BROWN. I would like to join Senator Gillibrand in working with 
Senator Mikulski and Senator Shelby in boosting these funds. Now more 
than ever, Congress must give EDA the tools to help entrepreneurs drive 
the economic revitalization of towns, cities, and regions all across 
Ohio, New York, and the country. The CJS Appropriations is an important 
step, one upon which to build.
  Again, I commend the work of Senator Mikulski and Senator Shelby and 
look forward to working with them to increase funding for EDA in 
conference.


                           Amendment No. 2669

  Mr. GRAHAM. Madam President, I am disappointed that on November 5, 
2009, the Senate voted to table my amendment to prohibit the use of 
funds to prosecute individuals involved in the September 11, 2001, 
attacks in article III courts. As I stated at the time of the vote, it 
would be a grave mistake to prosecute these detainees in civilian court 
instead of the newly revamped military commissions.
  Two hundred forty-nine family members of the victims of the September 
11 attacks wrote a letter in support of my amendment. They know better 
than anyone that the attacks that took their loved ones were war crimes 
and that criminalizing this war would be dangerous and unwise.
  I would like to submit their letter in support of my amendment for 
the record, and I would like to give a special thanks to Debra 
Burlingame for her leadership on this issue. While I am disappointed in 
the vote on this amendment, I hope that in the future we will heed the 
counsel of those who lost the most in the terrible attacks on our 
country--the family members of 9/11 victims.


[[Page S11286]]


                                                 November 5, 2009.
     U.S. Senate,
     U.S. Capitol,
     Washington, DC.
       Dear Senators: On September 11, 2001, the entire world 
     watched as 19 men hijacked four commercial airliners, 
     attacking passengers and killing crew members, and then 
     turned the fully-fueled planes into missiles, flying them 
     into the World Trade Center twin towers, the Pentagon and a 
     field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 3,000 of our fellow human 
     beings died in two hours. The nation's commercial aviation 
     system ground to a halt. Lower Manhattan was turned into a 
     war zone, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for days 
     and causing tens of thousands of residents and workers to be 
     displaced. In nine months, an estimated 50,000 rescue and 
     recovery workers willingly exposed themselves to toxic 
     conditions to dig out the ravaged remains of their fellow 
     citizens buried in 1.8 million tons of twisted steel and 
     concrete.
       The American people were rightly outraged by this act of 
     war. Whether the cause was retribution or simple recognition 
     of our common humanity, the words ``Never Forget'' were 
     invoked in tearful or angry rectitude, defiantly written in 
     the dust of Ground Zero or humbly penned on makeshift 
     memorials erected all across the land. The country was united 
     in its determination that these acts should not go unmarked 
     and unpunished.
       Eight long years have passed since that dark and terrible 
     day. Sadly, some have forgotten the promises we made to those 
     whose lives were taken in such a cruel and vicious manner.
       We have not forgotten. We are the husbands and wives, 
     mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and 
     other family members of the victims of these depraved and 
     barbaric attacks, and we feel a profound obligation to ensure 
     that justice is done on their behalf. It is incomprehensible 
     to us that members of the United States Congress would 
     propose that the same men who today refer to the murder of 
     our loved ones as a ``blessed day'' and who targeted the 
     United States Capitol for the same kind of destruction that 
     was wrought in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, should be 
     the beneficiaries of a social compact of which they are not a 
     part, do not recognize, and which they seek to destroy: the 
     United States Constitution.
       We adamantly oppose prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in 
     Article III courts, which would provide them with the very 
     rights that may make it possible for them to escape the 
     justice which they so richly deserve. We believe that 
     military commissions, which have a long and honorable history 
     in this country dating back to the Revolutionary War, are the 
     appropriate legal forum for the individuals who declared war 
     on America. With utter disdain for all norms of decency and 
     humanity, and in defiance of the laws of warfare accepted by 
     all civilized nations, these individuals targeted tens of 
     thousands of civilian non-combatants, brutally killing 3,000 
     men, women and children, injuring thousands more, and 
     terrorizing millions.
       We support Senate Amendment 2669 (pursuant to H.R. 2847, 
     the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Act of 2010), 
     ``prohibiting the use of funds for the prosecution in Article 
     III courts of the United States of individuals involved in 
     the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.'' We urge its 
     passage by all those members of the United States Senate who 
     stood on the senate floor eight years ago and declared that 
     the perpetrators of these attacks would answer to the 
     American people. The American people will not understand why 
     those same senators now vote to allow our cherished federal 
     courts to be manipulated and used as a stage by the 
     ``mastermind of 9/11'' and his co-conspirators to condemn 
     this nation and rally their fellow terrorists the world over. 
     As one New York City police detective, who lost 60 fellow 
     officers on 9/11, told members of the Department of Justice's 
     Detainee Policy Task Force at a meeting last June, ``You 
     people are out of touch. You need to hear the locker room 
     conversations of the people who patrol your streets and fight 
     your wars.''
       The President of the United States has stated that military 
     commissions, promulgated by congressional legislation and 
     recently reformed with even greater protections for 
     defendants, are a legal and appropriate forum to try 
     individuals captured pursuant the 2001 Authorization for the 
     Use of Military Force Act, passed by Congress in response to 
     the attack on America. Nevertheless, on May 21, 2009, 
     President Obama announced a new policy that Al-Qaeda 
     terrorists should be tried in Article III courts ``whenever 
     feasible.''
       We strongly object to the President creating a two-tier 
     system of justice for terrorists in which those responsible 
     for the death of thousands on 9/11 will be treated as common 
     criminals and afforded the kind of platinum due process 
     accorded American citizens, yet members of Al Qaeda who 
     aspire to kill Americans but who do not yet have blood on 
     their hands, will be treated as war criminals. The President 
     offers no explanation or justification for this 
     contradiction, even as he readily acknowledges that the 
     9/11 conspirators, now designated ``unprivileged enemy 
     belligerents,'' are appropriately accused of war crimes. We 
     believe that this two-tier system, in which war criminals 
     receive more due process protections than would-be war 
     criminals, will be mocked and rejected in the court of world 
     opinion as an ill-conceived contrivance aimed, not at 
     justice, but at the appearance moral authority.
       The public has a right to know that prosecuting the 9/11 
     conspirators in federal courts will result in a plethora of 
     legal and procedural problems that will severely limit or 
     even jeopardize the successful prosecution of their cases. 
     Ordinary criminal trials do not allow for the exigencies 
     associated with combatants captured in war, in which evidence 
     is not collected with CSI-type chain-of-custody standards. 
     None of the 9/11 conspirators were given the Miranda warnings 
     mandated in Article III courts. Prosecutors contend that the 
     lengthy, self-incriminating tutorials Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 
     and others gave to CIA interrogators about 9/11 and other 
     terrorist operations--called ``pivotal for the war against 
     Al-Qaeda'' in a recently released, declassified 2005 CIA 
     report--may be excluded in federal trials. Further, unlike 
     military commissions, all of the 9/11 cases will be 
     vulnerable in federal court to defense motions that their 
     prosecutions violate the Speedy Trial Act. Indeed, the judge 
     presiding in the case of Ahmed Ghailani, accused of 
     participating in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in 
     Kenya, killing 212 people, has asked for that issue to be 
     briefed by the defense. Ghailani was indicted in 1998, 
     captured in Pakistan in 2004, and held at Guantanamo Bay 
     until 2009.
       Additionally, federal rules risk that classified evidence 
     protected in military commissions would be exposed in 
     criminal trials, revealing intelligence sources and methods 
     and compromising foreign partners, who will be unwilling to 
     join with the United States in future secret or covert 
     operations if doing so will risk exposure in the dangerous 
     and hostile communities where they operate. This poses a 
     clear and present danger to the public. The safety and 
     security of the American people is the President's and 
     Congress's highest duty.
       Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently wrote in 
     the Wall Street Journal that ``the challenges of terrorism 
     trials are overwhelming.'' Mr. Mukasey, formerly a federal 
     judge in the Southern District of New York, presided over the 
     multi-defendant terrorism prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abel 
     Rahman, the cell that attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 
     and conspired to attack other New York landmarks. In addition 
     to the evidentiary problems cited above, he expressed concern 
     about courthouse and jail facility security, the need for 
     anonymous jurors to be escorted under armed guard, the 
     enormous costs associated with the use of U.S. marshals 
     necessarily deployed from other jurisdictions, and the danger 
     to the community which, he says, will become a target for 
     homegrown terrorist sympathizers or embedded Al Qaeda cells.
       Finally, there is the sickening prospect of men like Khalid 
     Sheikh Mohammed being brought to the federal courthouse in 
     Lower Manhattan, or the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, 
     just a few blocks away from the scene of carnage eight years 
     ago, being given a Constitutionally mandated platform upon 
     which he can mock his victims, exult in the suffering of 
     their families, condemn the judge and his own lawyers, and 
     rally his followers to continue jihad against the men and 
     women of the U.S. military, fighting and dying in the sands 
     of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan on behalf of us all.
       There is no guarantee that Mr. Mohammed and his co-
     conspirators will plead guilty, as in the case of Zacarias 
     Moussaoui, whose prosecution nevertheless took four years, 
     and who is currently attempting to recant that plea. Their 
     attorneys will be given wide latitude to mount a defense that 
     turns the trial into a shameful circus aimed at vilifying 
     agents of the CIA for alleged acts of ``torture,'' casting 
     the American government and our valiant military as a force 
     of evil instead of a force for good in places of the Muslim 
     world where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are waging a brutal war 
     against them and the local populations. For the families of 
     those who died on September 11, the most obscene aspect of 
     giving Constitutional protections to those who planned the 
     attacks with the intent of inflicting maximum terror on their 
     victims in the last moments of their lives will be the 
     opportunities this affords defense lawyers to cast their 
     clients as victims.
       Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators are asking 
     to plead guilty, now, before a duly-constituted military 
     commission. We respectfully ask members of Congress, why 
     don't we let them?
           Respectfully submitted,
       (Signed by 249 Family members).

                          ____________________