[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 17 (Wednesday, January 29, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H1506-H1509]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized 
for 40 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it has been an honor and a privilege and a 
pleasure to work with Trudi Terry here in the House. I really hate to 
see her retire. She has put up with me more times than most people have 
had to, and kept a wonderful spirit and cooperative atmosphere in this 
body, in this Chamber, and I will be forever grateful. Thank you. I 
really hate to see you retire. So I guess to add to the bad news of 
Trudi Terry retiring, there are other things going on.
  One story that hits home for me as someone with other friends like 
Dana Rohrabacher and Steve King, who have met with Baloch leaders from 
the Balochistan area of Pakistan--it is the area where most of 
Pakistan's minerals are located. It is an area where Pakistan has, for 
many years, terrorized the Baloch people, persecuted them mercilessly. 
They want the Baloch area's minerals and assets to keep Pakistan going 
and basically radicalized, but they don't want to let the Baloch people 
live in peace.
  I proposed in a previous op-ed a couple of years ago that perhaps it 
is time to look at encouraging a new Baloch state, a new country of 
Balochistan as independent of Pakistan so that the people can live in 
peace, so they don't have to be worried about Pakistan officials and 
military coming through and committing, really, crimes against these 
people. After I wrote that op-ed and included a statement that perhaps 
it is time to join in the encouragement for a new Balochistan state, 
there was an article in a Pakistani daily paper that said in essence 
maybe it is time to quit persecuting the Baloch, reach out to them and 
figure out a way to let them live in peace because to Pakistan that 
area was important. The op-ed from the Pakistan paper also indicated 
that perhaps they needed to quit funding and helping the Taliban defeat 
the Americans in Afghanistan and just concentrate on their own country. 
That would have been wonderful, and would still be.
  This story is out from the Toronto Sun, and it regards the 
Balochistan province in Pakistan. By the way, I have heard from 
numerous members of our American military and from others in 
Afghanistan that most of the supplies to the Taliban are coming from 
Pakistan through the southern Baloch area of Pakistan, and that is why 
the thought was triggered, maybe if Balochistan was independent of 
Pakistan, that would cut off the supply to the terrorist Taliban in 
Afghanistan and would save a lot of American lives. Since that has been 
said, we have lost hundreds more American soldiers. More American blood 
has been shed because we have failed to neutralize the Taliban, and 
they have continued apparently to grow in their efforts to take over 
Afghanistan shortly after we leave.
  This article, though, says:

       It would have been inconceivable that any U.S. official, 
     let alone a Secretary of State, would host a delegation from 
     Serbia the day after mass graves were discovered in 
     Srebrenica in 1995. Yet on Sunday, a day after bullet-ridden 
     bodies were discovered in suspected mass graves in Pakistan's 
     military-controlled province of Balochistan, Secretary of 
     State John Kerry was toasting a delegation of Pakistan 
     security officials at the State Department. Balochistan and 
     human rights officials say 169 bodies have been uncovered so 
     far. Pakistani officials put the number at 15. Victims and 
     families of Baloch youth who have disappeared and who are 
     feared to be among the decomposed bodies being unearthed from 
     the mass graves had hoped that Kerry would raise the issue 
     with his Pakistani counterpart.
       Instead, they heard Kerry say to the Pakistanis, ``We are 
     really delighted to have you back, and I look forward to our 
     continued conversation.'' America looked the other way in 
     1971 when the Pakistan Army slaughtered a million of its own 
     citizens in what is now Bangladesh.
       What emerged was a country that hosted the mastermind of 
     the 9/11 attacks, allowed Osama bin Laden to operate on its 
     soil for more than a decade, and whose terrorists have been 
     involved in numerous jihadi attacks around the world ever 
     since the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 
     attack on USS Cole off Yemeni waters.
       Yet America continues to give Pakistan billions of dollars 
     in aid, which is then turned around to generate more hatred 
     toward the West and produce more jihadi terrorists.

  Inserting parenthetically into this article is my oft-quoted 
statement that you don't have to pay people to hate you; they will do 
it for free. We continue to send billions of dollars to nations that 
hate us and want us gone from the map. They want to see us suffer, and 
we keep sending them money to hate us. We can use that money here. We 
could save raising some taxes. We could get some roads and some of the 
infrastructure that the President promised if we gave him $900 billion, 
basically, in a stimulus package right after he took office, and that 
was going to fix all of the infrastructure, but maybe 6 percent of $900 
billion went for infrastructure, and so the President is back out 
saying we have got to build these roads.
  I mean, we have been talking about this for 5 years. He has. So you 
didn't do it with the stimulus money--why don't we just save some of 
the billions that we are giving to people who hate us, and then we 
don't help them kill Americans. We don't continue, as this 
administration is doing, to assist Syrian rebels who are killing 
Christians.
  For anyone who happens to believe that there is a God as reflected in 
the Bible, the question will have to be asked: If there is such a God 
as reflected in the Bible, which I believe, is it going to bode well 
for a Nation which is funding and helping nations that are killing, 
torturing, kidnapping Christians around the world?

                              {time}  1200

  This article goes on:

       Now the U.S. is giving the same Pakistan army another pass 
     as it carries out the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous 
     Baloch people from their homeland.
       In response, the Baloch have taken up arms and are fighting 
     their fifth war of independence since 1948, when the Pakistan 
     army invaded and captured the independent and sovereign state 
     of Kalat.

  The article goes on.
  But the fact is we have people in this administration demanding that 
what they say are indigenous people--despite the fact that the children 
of Israel occupied the promised land 1,600 years or so, 1,700 years at 
least, before a man named Muhammad was born. There are people who say: 
Oh, but these Palestinians--a name that arose as Newt Gingrich pointed 
out in the last 40 or so years--these Palestinians are indigenous, so 
you have got to give them their land.
  Yet they are not saying it about Balochistan. They are not saying it 
about the Baloch people that are being killed and persecuted by 
Pakistan. Oh, no. We are helping kill and persecute the Baloch people 
by giving aid and assistance to a government that is killing and 
persecuting them.
  If there is a just God in the universe, would there not be a price 
for a country as powerful as the United States that continues to 
support those who kill, maim, torture, horrify innocent

[[Page H1507]]

people, Christians, Jews, secularists, and oftentimes they are even 
more brutal to moderate Muslims that are not as radical as they think 
they should be?
  That is why in Egypt, for those who really have eyes and really have 
ears to hear, we had an incredible event last summer. This was the real 
Arab Spring, but it came in summer. This is when moderate Muslims, 
Christians, Jews, secularists rose up, some reports of 30 to 33 million 
people, larger than any demonstration in the history of the world. They 
rose up and said: We don't want radical Islamists running Egypt. The 
radical Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood that were controlling Egypt--
as we knew they would if they had election too quickly--the Muslim 
Brotherhood became desperate because they knew, to have a new Ottoman 
Empire running around the Mediterranean that would become a worldwide 
caliphate, they could not afford to lose Egypt from under their iron 
fist.
  So what do they do? They immediately start burning down churches, 
killing Christians particularly, and so many others. That is why I was 
so encouraged. Over 90 percent of the people voting--which was a higher 
percentage than we have voting here in the United States--came out and 
voted for the new constitution that has been drafted under the 
chairmanship of Amr Moussa.
  I was very pleased that Chairman Moussa was willing to come on the 
Sean Hannity radio show a few weeks ago when I was guest hosting for 
Sean Hannity. It is really encouraging what is going on in Egypt by 
those who want a democratic form of government and who do not want 
terrorists running Egypt, who don't want a worldwide caliphate, who 
don't like the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are not as blind to 
the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood as the leaders of this 
administration are.
  If one will just go look at one of the symbols used by the Muslim 
Brotherhood these days, you find the crossed swords, the signs and 
wording in their language denoting the Muslim Brotherhood, and that is 
fixed over a globe of the world. It is not just Egypt, Iraq, Iran, not 
just in the former Ottoman Empire. Oh, no. This is fixed over a globe 
that is revolving, and the United States of America passes under those 
swords of the Muslim Brotherhood.
  It is true that the Muslim Brotherhood here in the United States does 
not want to utilize violence right now because they have made so much 
progress in this administration that they are afraid violence right now 
might do damage. Violence in Egypt, the same Muslim Brotherhood feels 
it was necessary because they had just been caught. They had been 
rejected by moderate Muslims--the majority of Egyptians--and they 
became desperate. So their violence had to occur. Christians, according 
to these radical Islamist Muslim brothers, had to die.
  Once America starts figuring out that the goal is global caliphate--
including the United States--then they will be participating in 
horrendous violence here, as they have in other places in the world.
  Some of our moderate Muslim friends in the Middle East asked some of 
us last September: What is wrong with you in America? Don't you 
understand? You call it al Qaeda, but that is really just an offshoot 
of the Muslim Brotherhood. They are the ones that attacked you on 9/11/
2001. These are moderate Muslims asking these questions.
  Why do you not understand: Yes, it was the Taliban, but it is really 
the Muslim brothers behind it that you were at war with in Afghanistan? 
They are the ones that did more killing of Americans in Iraq, and yet 
you are helping the Muslim Brotherhood, you are running to their aid 
and assistance; and in Egypt you are demanding that either they put the 
radical Islamists back in charge of Egypt or we are not going to 
provide them the Apache helicopters, the tanks, and the jets that we 
were going to provide to the Muslim Brother leaders of Egypt.
  They asked: What is wrong with you people? What are you not getting? 
You are helping the people that want to destroy you. People can see 
that around the world, but here in Washington, D.C., it is apparently 
one of the hardest things to find and see.
  We hear people saying: Well, we really need all the people's most 
private information about phone calls, every phone call they make; we 
need to have that as part of the government because one time we believe 
it may have stopped a bombing.
  Well, if this administration would do their homework, they wouldn't 
need the logs of every phone call of every American. We could go back 
to what the Constitution does require and the Court should require, and 
that is probable cause, before you start giving out personal 
information, before you let the government start monitoring every email 
of every person in America.
  We were promised my freshman term that if the PATRIOT Act were 
extended, specifically section 206 and 215, that that would only apply 
if someone were in contact with a foreign terrorist, but Americans 
would never have to worry unless they were in touch with foreign 
terrorists. Then after Edward Snowden, we find out that actually what 
they promised was not true. And yes, that was during the Bush 
administration. I don't care. I don't care if it was a Republican or 
Democrat. I don't care where it started. When we find out it is still 
going on, it has got to stop. We are supposed to have some privacy in 
this country.
  Those Democrats that were suspicious of the Bush administration 
wanting that much power were right. Where have my friends gone now that 
it is a Democrat administration? I certainly don't have a problem 
calling out a Republican administration when they are not doing the 
right thing. I wish my friends across the aisle would do the same thing 
and join me.
  What about the Boston bombing? The Russians took a huge risk in 
giving this administration information and saying: Look, Tsarnaev, this 
guy has been radicalized and you are letting him back in America. You 
are headed for trouble. This is a bad guy. They took a risk in giving 
us that information because, when any country gives intelligence to 
another country, then sometimes it allows that country that gets the 
information to figure out how that other country is getting 
intelligence just by the information they get.

  So now we have people here in this administration saying: Oh, the 
Russians, shame on them. They didn't give us enough information.
  Are you kidding me? They told you a person had been radicalized.
  When I asked the Director of the FBI in our hearing about not even 
going to the mosque to investigate, he says, ultimately: Yeah, we did 
go to those mosques--and I didn't hear it at the hearing. I didn't hear 
it until the replay. And he said: Under our outreach program.
  Under the outreach program? Well, that is the FBI's ridiculous former 
program where they have special outreach to Muslim communities to try 
to be friends with them. It is not the FBI's job to be friends with 
people. It is the FBI's job to enforce the law and, in so doing, 
protect us.
  When Tsarnaev, the older brother, came back into this country from a 
place on the globe where we know radicalization is occurring--and as I 
understand it, he didn't even have his passport; he had his legal 
permanent resident card--he wasn't even pulled aside for extra 
questions when there should have been bells and whistles going off 
everywhere. The best I can find out, all they did, basically, was talk 
to him and his mother, and he said: No, I am not radicalized.
  No, my son is not radicalized.
  They didn't go to the mosque and start asking questions that would 
tell them has he been reading Qutb, which is the author, the Muslim 
brother from the sixties that was involved in trying to commit 
assassinations and other terrorist activities, and he wrote a booklet 
called ``Milestones'' that Osama bin Laden credits with helping turn 
him radical.
  If you know about the people that hate you and want to destroy you, 
then you can ask intelligent questions to find out if someone is your 
enemy. But because of the purge of training materials at the FBI, the 
intelligence departments, at the State Department--as one intelligence 
officer told me, we are blinded to our ability to see our enemy, 
because there was a young man named Tsarnaev who wanted to kill 
innocent Americans at a Boston Marathon and they got a heads-up from 
the Russians. They got all the information

[[Page H1508]]

right before them that they could possibly need, and we don't even stop 
him coming into this country after he has been radicalized. What more 
did you need? We shouldn't have needed a heads-up from the Russians. 
All the signs were there for those who have eyes to see and ears to 
hear.
  But we were so busy in our outreach program to a mosque that was 
founded by the Islamic Society of Boston, the founder of which is a man 
named al-Amoudi, who is in prison today for 24 years, I believe, for 
supporting terrorism, despite all the assistance he allegedly gave to 
the Clinton administration helping them find good Muslims to help in 
that administration. After 9/11, a couple of years or so after 9/11, it 
has been determined that he has been supporting terrorism, and now he 
is in Federal prison.
  A man named al-Awlaki, who this President ordered a drone strike on 
in Yemen, though he was an American citizen, because his parents came 
over on a visa to study, had him, he is an American citizen. They take 
him back to Yemen. He learns to hate America, comes back and works on 
radicalizing Americans, except, of course, when he led prayers of 
Muslim staff members here on Capitol Hill.

                              {time}  1215

  Otherwise, this President determined that he needed to be killed 
without a trial because he radicalized Americans, and he was a threat 
to this country. al-Awlaki had attended the Boston mosque where the 
Tsarnaevs attended.
  I mean, how many heads-up notices do you need to figure out there is 
a problem, and innocent Americans are going to be killed and maimed as 
they were in Boston? It is time to wake up. Yet we get this story from 
Matt Apuzzo. The picture was from the Associated Press, January 15: 
``U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents.''
  The Attorney General, who came here last night, sat here for the 
State of the Union address while he is in contempt of Congress, while 
he is being lawless in not following the law and providing information. 
They wouldn't even give me all of the documents that they provided to 
convicted terrorists in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. I 
asked repeatedly. We finally got a letter many months after the 
request, basically saying, We will give you the 500-or-so documents 
that were entered into evidence in the trial, and we have got some 
others you can come look at.
  I still don't understand, Mr. Speaker. If they will give boxes and 
boxes of information to the terrorists who are convicted ultimately as 
terrorists, why can't you give that to Members of Congress? Is it 
because the convictions occurred in 2008 under the Bush administration?
  Then this Justice Department came in and stopped any further 
prosecutions from going forward even though there were a couple-
hundred-or-so named coconspirators in that case who were unindicted. My 
understanding from former Justice Department folks is that the plan 
was, if they could get the first convictions, then they would move 
forward with more and continue to follow up until they got this network 
that was allegedly supporting terrorism. We know five of them were 
supporting terrorism.
  Could it be that this Justice Department doesn't want us to see all 
of the documents that they provided to the terrorists that actually 
show they are terrorists? Could that be the reason they don't want 
Members of Congress to see?
  It is because then we might realize, wow, they convicted those five 
in 2008 under President Bush. They could surely have gotten a lot more 
convictions if they had just used this same evidence. Oh, sure. 
Congressman Gohmert, come over here, and we will show you some of the 
documents. We will let you see some of the electronic versions.
  You gave them to terrorists for heaven's sakes. You can't give them 
to me so I can look at them in my office? It is unbelievable what is 
going on here.
  Then there is a story from Kerry Picket from Breitbart. The story 
starts:

       Senator Dianne Feinstein--a Democrat from California, 
     chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee--told 
     Breitbart News on Monday that she did not know a CIA annex 
     existed in Benghazi, Libya, before the deadly September 2012 
     attack--which took the lives of four Americans--on the U.S. 
     compound happened. Feinstein could also not confirm if other 
     Members of Congress knew about the CIA annex prior to the 
     attack.

  Senator Feinstein and I disagree on many things, but I know she wants 
what is best for America even though we have staunch political 
disagreements on how we do that and what that is. My understanding is 
that, with anything of that nature, it would have been required that 
the Super 8, as they are sometimes referred to, would be briefed--the 
top Republican and Democrat on the Intelligence Committee in the House 
and in the Senate and the Republican leader in the House and the 
Democratic leader in the House and the Democratic leader in the Senate 
and the Republican leader in the Senate. Yet Senator Feinstein said, I 
didn't know there was a CIA annex at the Benghazi consulate.
  What else is this administration doing to help rebels, who include al 
Qaeda--as it did in Libya? What else is it doing that it is not 
following the law and briefing the people who are required to be 
briefed in Congress?
  I heard the President, who was standing right here last night, get 
applause when he, in essence, says, If Congress doesn't change the law, 
then I will do it--and he got applause. To thinking people, when you 
hear somebody say, ``if Congress doesn't do what is necessary,'' which 
is required by the Constitution, ``I will do it,'' it sounds like I am 
going to chuck the Constitution and do what I think is best.
  Now, I have read about those situations, of countries that had a fair 
and representative form of government. Ancient Greece and ancient Rome 
had senates that were somewhat representative. There have been types of 
representative governments, and you would always find that, eventually, 
people had that desire for one rock solid leader. They would get tired 
of the disagreements because, as one of the English leaders had said--
and it may have been Churchill--democracy is the worst form of 
government except for all of the others. It isn't a pretty thing to 
watch, as has been said. It is like watching sausage being made. Yet 
when you strip away the checks and balances that the Founders put in 
place to keep one executive officer from just doing whatever he wanted, 
then you don't have a democratic Republic as we are supposed to have; 
you have one man making the rules or one woman making the rules. It is 
time America woke up and realized their constitutional rights are at 
severe risk, and we are at risk as a result.
  I wanted to mention something else that happened here at the State of 
the Union. A wonderful young man got the longest, best applause of the 
evening here as the President recognized Cory sitting up there.
  In addition to Cory--the hero that that dear man is--I could see 
other uniformed people. In fact, there were some uniformed people up in 
that section up there, one of whom was not Cory but was Alonzo. The 
President didn't recognize Alonzo because Alonzo was a staff sergeant 
at Fort Hood. With Nidal Hasan, people kept looking the other way. They 
kept giving him good officer evaluation reports because they didn't 
want to be deemed to be profiling or doing something that was 
considered racist when the man made clear over and over that he was 
going to have to take action--violent action--against his country if 
they tried to ship him over and order him to fight Muslims overseas.
  I did not get to meet Alonzo last night. I looked up and waved a few 
times, but I have great respect for that man, and he deserves so much 
better than he has been treated. He was shot six times; and apparently, 
while he is lying with six bullets in him, he realizes, as the shooting 
continues by Major Hasan, that he is not going to be able to pass off 
as dead because he is sweating profusely. As he says, dead people don't 
sweat, so he figured he had better get out of there, as I understand, 
and he took off. That is when he got shot and lost one of his eyes.
  This administration has prevented Alonzo from getting the benefits he 
deserves because of an act of war, an act of terrorism. He is not even 
considered at the level of the 9/11 victims. He heard, Allah akbar, and 
he knew it was not going to go well. Everybody who heard that radical 
Islamist yell before

[[Page H1509]]

the murders began knew this was not workplace violence, that this 
wasn't a postal employee going postal. This was a radical Islamist who 
was carrying out a war against what they consider to be infidels in 
America. They deserve to be treated as victims of an act of war--an act 
against them as uniformed military--and to get the benefits coming to 
them. That is what should have happened.

  We heard the references last night to health care, and it kind of 
sounded like applause started when he was talking about how they were 
helping to reform health care, and then it died so quickly they must 
have realized, ooh, I don't want to be on camera clapping for the 
reform of health care when people are hurting across America who have 
lost their insurance--people like me, who liked my insurance, but 
ObamaCare said your insurance policy is not good enough. So I lost it. 
Thank you very much. There are people in really tough shape around 
America who deserve better health care than what ObamaCare is doing to 
them.
  There were so many things in the State of the Union address. He was 
talking about raising the minimum wage with Federal contractors with a 
stroke of the pen. I mean, how many other laws does the President want 
to pass with a stroke of the pen? It is not constitutional to make laws 
with one man's pen. That is not the democratic Republic we are supposed 
to be. There was even, it sounded like, some snickering when he said 
that. He didn't talk about the millions who have lost their insurance 
as a result of ObamaCare. If it were only about trying to ensure the 30 
million people who reportedly didn't have health insurance--they had 
health care; they didn't have insurance--then let's direct it at those. 
Let's don't take millions and millions of Americans' insurance away in 
the process.
  As far as illegal immigration, one of the newspapers in my district--
Longview--had an article, an op-ed, in which they were saying I was 
opposed to immigration reform. Obviously, they read left-wing blogs and 
don't read and talk to me and understand what I have said repeatedly.
  We desperately need immigration reform in America, but every time 
anybody here starts talking about legal status--amnesty--the ICE agents 
and the ICE union representatives tell us repeatedly that more people 
try to rush into the United States, that more people die trying to come 
across the desert, that more people fall into human trafficking and a 
horrible life. My position has been clear for anyone who cares to see 
or hear, and it is supported by so many other Republicans.
  Mr. President has the money; he has got the wherewithal; he has got 
the manpower to secure our border. As soon as it is secured, as 
verified by the border States, we will come to an immigration reform 
bill so fast that people won't be able to believe it; but until the 
President enforces existing law, there is no sense in talking about it 
and luring more people to their deaths, more people in here. Control 
the border. Secure it. Don't close it. We need that water continuing to 
flow into this pond, but secure it so we know who is coming in, and 
when people are here without valid visas, we need to pick them up.

                              {time}  1230

  Nearly 40 to 50 percent of the people that are here illegally came 
legally and overstayed their visas. Enforce the visas.
  And so when a guy has been radicalized, do your homework. Don't let 
Tsarnaev back in when he doesn't have a passport and there are all 
kinds of indications he is now a terrorist. Don't let him in. We could 
have done without that one.
  Secure the border. We will get an immigration bill done immediately 
after that. But before that, there is no reason to expect the President 
will ever secure the border.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________