[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 56 (Tuesday, April 23, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H2242-H2244]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    RADICAL ISLAM AND THE ``T'' WORD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Yoho). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  I must say how proud I am of the Members of Congress from the class 
that came in 2 years ago and of those who are coming in now. It's an 
honor to serve with folks who care so much about the country and where 
we're going; but to know where we're going, it's important to know 
where we've been.
  Of course, over the last week or so, we have endured terrible 
heartache because it wasn't just Boston that was attacked, and it 
wasn't just the little town of West, Texas, that lost so many people. E 
pluribus unum--``out of many, one.'' When tragedy strikes, we come 
together as one people to mourn. That has been true in the past. That's 
why it's so heartbreaking when Americans note that some gloat when 
other Americans are killed. Thank goodness it's such a rare thing. But 
with the tragedies in Boston and with the horror of the explosion and 
fire down in West, down in Bill Flores' district, we will continue to 
pray for those who are enduring such suffering, for those who have lost 
loved ones. There is no easy way to lose a loved one. Everyone in 
America has either lost a loved one or will; and when it happens, it 
allows you to empathize and sympathize so much more easily with those 
who have lost loved ones. So we grieve; we mourn.
  An important after-tragedy aspect for those who are in government is 
to make sure that we figure out exactly what went wrong so that 
Americans are spared this tragedy in the future. A former Secretary of 
State once asked in the aftermath of a tragedy, which she was 
overseeing in the department, what difference does it make? Having had 
Embassies attacked before--and yet this consulate in Benghazi was not 
adequately protected--it raises very serious issues, and the answer 
should be very clear when the question is: What difference does it 
make?
  It makes a difference in not having to console those who have lost 
and mourned with those who have lost and consoled and help those who 
are trying to heal. It means all of that suffering doesn't happen if we 
find the mistakes and make sure they are not replicated in the future.
  It was difficult--and it continues to be difficult--to get 
information out of the State Department, out of Homeland Security in 
having questioned the Secretary of Homeland Security myself and finding 
that she couldn't even answer how many members of the Muslim 
Brotherhood were part of her closest advisory council, the Homeland 
Security Advisory Council, or what backgrounds people had that would 
indicate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood within her Countering Violent 
Extremism Working Group. It's called the Countering Violent Extremism 
Working Group because, heaven forbid, we should offend anyone who is 
trying to kill us and wants to destroy our way of life.
  It's also interesting as we dig into the situation--I mean, I've been 
hammered in the last week and accused of being an intolerant racist 
simply because people did not know the facts when they leveled such 
allegations, but I don't expect any apologies as they find out the 
truth that, yes, there have been radical Islamists who have been known 
to have changed their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and 
to have falsified their identification documents so they would appear 
to be Hispanic and then make their way across our southern border.

                              {time}  2110

  There is nothing racist in that. In fact, it actually can be 
construed as a compliment because these people knew that radical 
Islamists were not wanted in this country and that in this country most 
of us are greatly appreciative of the heritage that Hispanics bring.
  As I've said many times, I think something that has been a 
foundational part of making America great has been, generally 
speaking--with a hat tipped to atheists and all the other religions in 
America--traditionally there was a faith in God, there was a devotion 
to family and there was a hard work ethic. And generally speaking, 
that's what I see more than any other things in the Hispanic culture. 
I'm hoping that culture will help revive those aspects in our American 
culture. So it's certainly not intended as a snub, and, in fact, it is 
just stating a fact. This is something that's occurred. But it's always 
apparently a fun game for liberals to preach about tolerance and then 
be the most intolerant people in the country when it comes to 
conservatives or conservative Christians.
  Jesus told us 2,000 years ago, You'll suffer for my sake. I didn't 
suffer as a Christian growing up, but some are all too willing to 
oblige nowadays to make sure that Christians do suffer, that they are 
persecuted, that they are condemned for their religious beliefs; and 
they go after Christians in a way that they would never seek to condemn 
even radical Islamists.
  But I hope that out of the disaster and the heartbreak and the harm 
and damage that came not just to Boston, Massachusetts, but to a 
central heartbeat of America and Boston, which is such an important and 
integral part of America--we all got hit on 9/11. We got hit as 
Americans when our consulate was hit and four Americans were killed in 
Libya. We got hit when rebels took the weapons that this administration 
helped provide and killed Americans in Algeria.
  We all take a hit when there are mistakes in judgment, mistakes in 
judgment like helping bomb Qadhafi, even though this administration had 
agreements with him. He was providing intel on radical Islamic 
terrorists. Well, that source is gone now. And this administration, 
despite being warned by many of us that, Look, we know there are al 
Qaeda that are actually embedded in the revolutionaries; don't help 
until we know who we're helping, but this administration made clear it 
didn't need congressional approval and it did not

[[Page H2243]]

need congressional authority. It had been asked to help by the 
Organization of Islamic Council and by NATO. So forget what all the 
elected Representatives of Texas and all 49 other States and all of the 
territories think, I'll just do what I want.
  I am proud to count Michael Mukasey as a friend. I had tremendous 
respect for him as a judge back when he presided over many trials, but 
particularly the trial of the Blind Sheik after the attempted bombing 
of the World Trade Center in 1993. He did a great job, and the 
prosecutors did great jobs. Andrew McCarthy should ever have the thanks 
and the acclaim he deserves instead of the condemnation he often gets. 
When you're around Andrew McCarthy and Michael Mukasey, no matter what 
your IQ is, the average is quite high.
  As a former attorney general, former Federal judge, Michael Mukasey 
said in his article that was printed April 21 by The Wall Street 
Journal--there are so many fantastic points that need to be brought 
out. These are Michael Mukasey's words. He said:

       If your concern about the threat posed by the Tsarnaev 
     brothers is limited to assuring that they will never be in a 
     position to repeat their grisly acts, rest easy.
       The elder, Tamerlan--apparently named for the 14th-century 
     Muslim conqueror famous for building pyramids of his victims' 
     skulls to commemorate his triumphs over infidels--is dead. 
     The younger, Dzhokhar, will stand trial when his wounds heal, 
     in a proceeding where the most likely uncertainty will be the 
     penalty. No doubt there will be some legal swordplay over his 
     interrogation by the FBI's High-Value Interrogation Group 
     without receiving Miranda warnings. But the only downside for 
     the government in that duel is that his statements may not be 
     used against him at trial. This is not much of a risk when 
     you consider the other available evidence, including photo 
     images of him at the scene of the bombings and his own 
     reported confession to the victim whose car he helped hijack 
     during last week's terror in Boston.
       But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres 
     in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and 
     what they represent, then worry--a lot.
       For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value 
     Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was 
     finally put in place by the FBI after so-called ``underwear 
     bomber'' named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the 
     airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on 
     Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. 
     The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the 
     interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.
       At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups 
     as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic 
     Society of North America and other self-proclaimed spokesmen 
     for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training 
     materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does 
     this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?
       Will we see another performance like the Army's after-
     action report following Major Nidal Hasan's rampage at Fort 
     Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout ``allahu 
     akhbar''--a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but 
     referred to the incident as ``workplace violence''? If tone 
     is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the 
     time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it 
     interfered with the Army's diversity program.
       Presumably, the investigation into the Boston terror attack 
     will include inquiry into not only the immediate 
     circumstances of the crimes but also who funded Tamerlan 
     Tsarnaev's months-long sojourn abroad in 2012 and his 
     comfortable lifestyle. Did he have a support network? What 
     training did he, and perhaps his younger brother, receive in 
     the use of weapons? Where did the elder of the two learn to 
     make the suicide vest he reportedly wore? The investigation 
     should include, as well, a deep dive into Tamerlan's 
     radicalization, the Islamist references in the brothers' 
     social media communications, and the jihadist Web sites they 
     visited.
       Will the investigation probe as well the FBI's own 
     questioning of Tamerlan 2 years ago at the behest of an 
     unspecified foreign government, presumably Russia, over his 
     involvement with jihadist Web sites and other activities? 
     Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has 
     participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. 
     He was preceded by Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al-
     Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad--born Carlos Leon 
     Bledsoe--who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 
     2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to 
     the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn't 
     count Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the 
     CIA that he was a potential terrorist.

                              {time}  2120

       If the intelligence yielded by the FBI's investigation is 
     of value, will that value be compromised when this trial is 
     held, as it most certainly will be, in a civilian court? 
     Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers, as they have every right to do, 
     will seek to discover the intelligence and use it to fashion 
     a case in mitigation if nothing else, to show that his late 
     brother was the dominant conspirator who had access to 
     resources and people.
       There is also cause for concern that this was obviously a 
     suicide operation--not in the direct way of a bomber who 
     kills all of his victims and himself at the same time by 
     blowing himself up, but in the way of someone who conducts a 
     spree, holding the stage for as long as possible, before he 
     is cut down in a blaze of what he believes is glory. Here, 
     think Mumbai.
       Until now, it has been widely accepted in law enforcement 
     circles that such an attack in the U.S. was less likely 
     because of the difficulty organizers would have in marshaling 
     the spiritual support to keep the would-be suicide focused on 
     the task. That analysis went out the window when the 
     Tsarnaevs followed up the bombing of the marathon by 
     murdering a police officer in his car, an act certain to 
     precipitate the violent confrontation that followed.
       It has been apparent that with al Qaeda unable to mount 
     elaborate attacks like the one it carried out on 9/11, other 
     Islamists have stepped in with smaller and less intricate 
     crimes, but crimes that are nonetheless meant to send a 
     terrorist message. These include Faisal Shahzad, who failed 
     to detonate a device in Times Square in 2010, and would-be 
     subway bomber Najibullah Zazi and his confederates.
       Is this, as former CIA Director Michael Hayden put it, the 
     new normal?
       There is also cause for concern in the President's 
     reluctance, soon after the Boston bombing, even to use the 
     ``t'' word--terrorism--in his vague musing on Friday about 
     some unspecified agenda of the perpetrators, when by then 
     there was no mystery: the agenda was jihad.
       For 5 years we have heard, principally from those who wield 
     executive power, of a claimed need to make fundamental 
     changes in this country, to change the world's--particularly 
     the Muslim world's--perception of us, to press the ``reset'' 
     button. We have heard not a word from those sources 
     suggesting any need to understand and confront a totalitarian 
     ideology that has existed since at least the founding of the 
     Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.
       The ideology has regarded the United States as its 
     principal adversary since the late 1940s, when a Brotherhood 
     principal, Sayid Qutb, visited this country and was aghast at 
     what he saw as its decadence. The first World Trade Center 
     bombing in 1993, al Qaeda attacks on American embassies in 
     Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and on the USS Cole in 2000, the 
     9/11 attacks, and those in the dozen years since were all 
     fueled by Islamist hatred for the U.S. and its values.
       There are Muslim organizations in this country, such as the 
     American Islamic Forum for Democracy, headed by Dr. Zuhdi 
     Jasser, that speak out bravely against the totalitarian 
     ideology. They receive no shout-out at Presidential speeches; 
     no outreach is extended to them.
       One of the Tsarnaev brothers is dead; the other might as 
     well be. But if that is the limit of our concern, there will 
     be others.

  Michael MuKasey is a great, patriotic American, a brilliant American.
  And now, we have those who have told us that we must pass gun control 
legislation that they, most of them, even acknowledge would not have 
affected the horror at Sandy Hook at all. But they say you must pass 
gun control legislation for the benefit, in the memory of Sandy Hook, 
utilizing that horrible murder spree to try to justify their political 
agenda.
  My first question is: Will the legislation you're proposing, would it 
have changed the outcome at Sandy Hook or Colorado or any of the mass 
murders? When the proponents say no, it wouldn't have changed Sandy 
Hook at all, then the next question is: All right, what other 
legislation do you have, something that might make a difference? Don't 
bring things that won't make a difference other than to further your 
political agenda. Let's do something to change what has happened in the 
past so it won't happen in the future.
  So now we're told: Oh, gee, you should not use the Boston bombing as 
a wake-up call to make sure that we look more closely at people coming 
in who might want to harm us. The FBI got a heads-up from Russia, for 
heaven's sake, and I understand that they would have viewed the 
Russians' complaint and their information with a jaundiced eye because 
they'd say: Well, they don't care for the Chechens anyway. But they got 
a heads-up. And we've already seen, and I can't go into what was 
classified--it shouldn't have been; it shouldn't be classified--but all 
of the documents that have been purged from the FBI training materials 
because we had heard and read and found out from people involved in the 
FBI that they're eliminating words.
  I had a chart up here that explained, under the 9/11 report, the 
words

[[Page H2244]]

``Islam'' and ``jihad'' and ``radical.'' These were words used commonly 
in the 9/11 report. But since then, since we had a new President and 
new regime and new Justice Department under Attorney General Eric 
Holder, and since the FBI had partnered with CAIR, one of the two 
known, as the Federal Court in Dallas and in the Fifth Circuit Court of 
Appeals had said, the two largest Muslim Brotherhood front 
organizations, CAIR, the Council of American-Islamic Relations, and 
ISNA, the Islamic Society in North America, those are the two largest 
front organizations for Muslim Brotherhood, and this administration had 
embraced them and responds to them regularly and has the president of 
ISNA to the White House and even to the State Department and gets his 
input on things of importance.
  So we have Muslim Brotherhood front organization members leading, 
guiding, directing this administration. They kept telling the President 
apparently, from what we've seen, because certainly that's what the 
President and Secretary of State Clinton said, hey, they don't dislike 
the administration, don't watch them burn the President in effigy, no, 
they love him, but it's just they're mad about a video. Or they're mad 
about perceptions of the U.S. They love our President.
  Well, read the polls overseas and you'll find out that's not the 
case.
  But for those who say: Look, the lesson from Boston ought to be that 
we need to rush through at least 11 million--some think it may be as 
high as 20 million--people who are in this country legally--or 
illegally and make them legal as quickly as possible because that will 
allow us a complete and thorough report on these people, but I would 
only submit, if the FBI is still using the purged lexicon where they 
can't talk about jihad or can't talk about all of the things that were 
removed from their training manuals and FBI agents were told they can't 
use anymore, how do you go question a proponent of killing Americans, a 
proponent of radical murderist jihad without talking about jihad, 
without talking about the words that radical Islamists use?
  That must have been quite an interrogation of the now-deceased 
Tamerlan since they couldn't use the words that would have told him 
what he really believed in. And now, FBI agents who are so overworked 
they couldn't even do a proper investigation of a guy after Russia 
gives them a heads-up and gives them information, and now the solution, 
we're told, is to bring in 11 million more, rush them by the FBI, and 
then we'll know whether they're terrorists? You think?

                              {time}  2130

  Or are we going to come down here and repeatedly have to express 
truthfully and honestly how our heart breaks for Americans that were 
killed because we never learned our lesson, because we had people that 
thought, what difference does it make?
  America deserves better. We have a pledge that we take to protect 
this country, this blessed country, from all enemies, foreign and 
domestic; and I hope and pray we'll begin to better live up to that 
oath.
  At the same time as I pray and mourn for those who've lost, who are 
suffering, it is my prayer that God Almighty will wrap His protective 
hands around this country, and that this country will give the Good 
Lord reason to do so.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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