[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16390-16397]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     NEUTRALIZING THE IRAQI THREAT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hensarling). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Hunter) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to follow my good colleagues who just 
talked about what they consider to be the free trade debacle of the 
1990s with a gentle reminder that that debacle commenced with the 1994 
NAFTA vote under the Clinton administration, strongly supported by 
President Clinton, and I think, strongly supported by then Senator 
Kerry. At the time when we started that, I think we had a $3 billion 
trade surplus with Mexico. Shortly thereafter, we had a $15 billion 
annual trade loss.
  I am reminded with respect to China that one of Mr. Clinton's 
strongest contributors, who happened to be the chief executive officer 
of the Loral Corporation, found that he had, after he had seriously 
violated the rules of transferring technology, had transferred 
technology to the Chinese with respect to their launch capability, 
because in their satellite launches they use these Long March rockets 
to do their satellite launches, and they use that same rocketry to aim 
nuclear warheads at their adversary cities, several of which are in the 
United States of America.

                              {time}  2100

  And when Loral violated the restrictions on transferring this weapons 
technology, which puts all Americans at risk, he was allowed to 
continue to make those sales; and Loral was allowed to continue to make 
those sales, prematurely, in my judgment, and there was, I think, a 
very strong link to the Clinton administration manifested in a 
$300,000-plus contribution to President Clinton.
  So I remember the free trade, the threshold free trade vote well, 
which a lot of my Republican colleagues do not agree with me on, and a 
number of Democrats do not agree with me on; but I do remember that it 
was done by President Clinton, and I wanted to add that little historic 
footnote.
  I wanted to engage in a little dialogue with my good friend, the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), who has been to Iraq a number 
of times, four times, I believe, and is one of the Members who has 
really focused on Iraq. I would just start off by saying, Mr. Speaker, 
that it is a long, hard road in Iraq. We understand that. It has been 
tough for our soldiers. It is a difficult environment. It is full of 
sweat and dust and high temperatures, and sometimes blood. But we are 
undertaking and are now well on our way to making this hand-off, both 
politically and militarily, to the Iraqi people in Iraq, and giving 
them the best running start at freedom that country has ever had. And, 
in doing so, we are on our way to neutralizing Iraq as a potential 
springboard for terrorism in the years to come, which will accrue to 
the benefit of many, many generations of Americans.
  So the cause is right. It is a just cause. We are standing up that 
military right now. We have General David Petraeus, one of our best 
military leaders, former commander of the 101st Airborne in Iraq, as a 
leader of that stand-up and training of the Iraqi forces. He has put 
together the schools for officers, for noncoms, for enlisted personnel; 
and those forces are starting to pick up that weight a little bit now 
and carry it in various battles and clashes that they have had around 
Iraq with the insurgents.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I would simply want to report that while this is not 
an easy task, it is a very difficult task, the United States is 
carrying the ball and

[[Page 16391]]

the folks who wear the uniform of the United States are doing a 
wonderful job for us.
  Having said that, I would like to yield to the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) for his observations on this very important 
issue.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding. He, 
like myself, has been to Iraq a number of different times. And as 
chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, I just want to 
congratulate the gentleman on the tremendous work that the gentleman 
and his committee have done to demonstrate to our armed services, our 
men and women in uniform, that we stand with them, that we are 
providing them with all of the resources necessary to conduct this war 
effectively, and that our presence in Iraq is a testament to the 
courage that we witness from them each and every day.
  I was over there on Father's Day, really, just to go over there and 
to say thank you. We have 130,000 men and women over there who are 
giving up their time with their families, who are over there on 
Father's Day, they are over there on Christmas, they are over there on 
Easter, all of the important holidays for our families. It was really 
meaningful to be there and to have lunch and dinner with some of our 
troops.
  As we talked with them, we found out the effectiveness of the 
Committee on Armed Services. We found out that this is a little 
different type of a war than what we expected, a little bit different 
than an occupation. The gentleman and his committee have done just a 
tremendous job in altering the procurement process and the types of 
things that we are buying to get them what they need in Iraq to be 
successful and to be safe. I know that they appreciate all of the work 
that the gentleman and his committee have done. I know there are lots 
of other things.
  The gentleman may want to respond to some of the things that the 
gentleman's committee has done in terms of getting armored Humvees and 
these types of things to our troops, to enable them to be successful to 
go after these insurgents.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I will tell him that 
I am just one of many, many great folks on that committee, I am just 
part of the group there, because we have really wonderful people on 
both sides of the aisle on the Committee on Armed Services. The 
committee has been working hard. Our members have been working very 
hard. This has been a challenge. The IEDs, these Improvised Explosive 
Devices that are detonated remotely now, are an enormous challenge; and 
the deadliness of those is manifested and can be illustrated as you 
walk the halls of the hospital there in Ramstein, Germany, or over here 
in Bethesda at Walter Reed when they come back.
  So we moved out smartly and the services moved out very quickly to 
armor up some 8,000-plus Humvee vehicles, basically our follow-on 
utility vehicle, and we are also working hard on other means of trying 
to stop these very deadly systems.
  But in the end, if we look at the combat that took place in Iraq, it 
is interesting, with this high-tech world, a lot of it is just great, 
great people. So we have done a few good things; but we have had some 
really, really wonderful people wearing the uniform of the United 
States.
  The last citation I picked up before I went over there was for a 
Marco Martinez, who was a sergeant in the Marine Corps who won the Navy 
cross for taking an enemy position, taking on and taking out four 
insurgents with grenades and rifle fire. That is one of hundreds of 
high awards for valor and literally thousands of lesser awards. We have 
issued some 16,000 Bronze Stars in that theater and over 127 Silver 
Stars. Mr. Speaker, those people, the television this year and the 
movie screens were filled with the invasion of Normandy, but the kids 
that wear the uniform of the United States, and they are kids, because 
a lot of them are teenagers, a few of them just in their early 20s, are 
every bit as courageous and dedicated as that great generation that hit 
the beaches in Normandy and hit the beaches in the South Pacific.
  So I want to thank the gentleman for all the great work that he has 
done, all the intelligence work that he has done along with his 
colleagues.
  Saddam Hussein really rattled on when he was there in the court, and 
I do not know if that is an equivalent to a preliminary hearing or a 
time in which one enters their plea; but he said as he rattled on, he 
said one thing that was true. He said, in essence, if it was not for 
George Bush and those Americans, this would not be taking place, and 
that was true. He would not be there if it was not for George Bush and 
about 300,000 great Marines and soldiers and sailors and airmen.
  And I think of all of those great units, the First Marine Division, 
101st Airborne, the Third Army, the Fourth Infantry Division, now taken 
over by the Big Red One, the first infantry division up there in 
Tikrit, and the First Cav and the First Armored Division, which has 
been centered there in Baghdad for so long, right in the heart of the 
tough operations, and now the First Striker Brigade up in the north, if 
it was not for the Americans, the people of Iraq would have no chance 
at freedom and we, the Free World, would have no chance at neutralizing 
Iraq as a potential springboard for terrorism.
  So I want to thank the gentleman. I also want to thank the gentleman 
from New Hampshire (Mr. Bradley) and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. 
Miller) for coming on down here. We have spent a lot of time working 
this issue and going over to theater, and all of the great work that 
they have done.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I just want 
to put some of that in context of what our men and women are doing in 
Iraq as to the shameful event that was outlined yesterday here in the 
United States, last night. This war on terrorism has evolved through 
the 1990s. It was not brand-new on September 11, 2001. It started when 
the World Trade Centers were bombed the first time in the early 1990s, 
when the Khobar Towers in Saudi were attacked, when our embassies in 
Africa were attacked, when the USS Cole was attacked. We know that 
during much of the 1990s, the Clinton administration did not appear to 
take this war on terror very seriously. Mr. Speaker, it was not 
identified.
  What we found out last night was we may never know the decision-
making process that the Clinton administration went through as it 
developed its policies. Because after 9/11, we have had a joint inquiry 
between the House and the Senate as to what happened, what went wrong, 
and what went right; and there has been talk about the failure in 
decision-making, both in the executive branch and in Congress, and in 
other areas. And we now have a 9/11 Commission report coming out.
  What we found out last night, what America learned last night, is 
that John Kerry's foreign policy adviser, Sandy Berger, who was the 
National Security Adviser to President Clinton, removed highly 
classified documents from a secure area; and these documents, we are 
not quite sure what they are anymore, because they are gone. But we do 
know that he went into a secure area, and the gentleman and I have gone 
into these rooms ourselves. you go in with maybe a couple of pieces of 
paper, a pen, they bring in the documents, you have the opportunity to 
review the documents, to read them, to study them, to take notes on 
them, to organize your thoughts. But when you leave that room, you 
leave all of the paper and you leave all of your notes in the room. 
Nothing comes out with you, because these are secret documents.
  Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser, last night revealed, and 
he has been under investigation by the FBI I guess now for over a year, 
last night publicly admitted that he inadvertently took documents from 
the National Archives that outlined Clinton administration decision-
making policies, practices, whatever, in relationship at least to the 
millennium threat; he removed those documents inadvertently. We do not 
know exactly how many. We do not know what was in them. But he 
inadvertently removed them; and then, some time later, when he was home 
or in his office, he inadvertently destroyed these documents.
  I think some of the news media said, Berger said he deeply regretted 
the

[[Page 16392]]

sloppiness involved. Well, to American citizens, to the folks that are 
involved in the 9/11 Commission, and to our troops who are fighting in 
Iraq, and for the troops that may be fighting sometime in the future, I 
am sorry, America deserves better than that. Our troops deserve better 
than that, and taking highly classified, secret documents out of a 
secure room inadvertently and then destroying them inadvertently means 
that the 9/11 Commission, this Congress, and others will probably never 
really know what we knew in the 1990s, what we could and maybe should 
have acted on in the 1990s, and how we could have improved this process 
so that it would not happen again.
  Critical documents were taken out and they were destroyed, and we 
have a National Security Adviser who was involved in this for years. He 
knows, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) and I know the rules 
going into that room. How is it characterized? I think the sloppiness 
is characterized as somebody stuffing papers into their coat and into 
their pants. Excuse me. This is a National Security Adviser with top 
secret documents who takes them out of there, and the only question 
that one can really ask is, because I believe that he probably knew 
that somewhere along the line someone would discover that these 
documents were missing; why was he willing to risk taking these 
documents out of this security facility and taking them home and 
destroying them? What was in those documents that he probably did not 
want the American people to see?
  I yield back to the chairman, because it is an unbelievable assertion 
from Sandy Berger that he inadvertently took documents. I mean, when 
the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) and I go into these rooms, 
do we walk in with a binder of our own notes and our own documents and 
then put the classified stuff next to it and kind of put it through 
each other and then walk out with a binder and say, oh, man, I just 
happened to take a few extra documents? Is that the process that we go 
through? I yield back to the chairman.

                              {time}  2115

  Mr. HUNTER. Well, I would just say to my friend that, at worst, we do 
not put documents in our socks; and I have not seen the definitive 
statement on this, but one, at least according to the news reports, and 
I think that is why we need to get more information on this, one of the 
staff members at the Archives said he put some of them into his socks.
  Now, I think that they keep the temperature fairly temperate in that 
room, and you do not need to warm your feet. And just the idea of a 
national security adviser putting documents into his socks, I think 
raises a few questions.
  There are more questions here than there are answers, and I think we 
all want to believe the best of our fellow man, our fellow government 
servant, who, as you said, was national security adviser. But another 
thing that I think the American people have to ponder on is that he did 
not, according to the news reports, say, Yes, I have got them until he 
was called by the archivists, who said, ``You have got secure 
documents.'' And at that point he said, ``Yes, I believe I do.''
  So you are right. These are not documents that are mixed up.
  It is a standard procedure to divest yourself of any notes that you 
have written, but also divest yourself of the documents, as it is to 
turn your car off when you pull your car into the parking garage. You 
turn it off. And the idea that you left the car running, and then you 
did not go down and turn the car off until somebody called you and told 
you the car was still running and that that was all done 
unintentionally is, I think, something that Mr. Berger needs to 
continue to explain.
  Because one thing about the 9/11 Commission, the reports are out, one 
they were afraid of, and I need to yield to my friend from Florida, is 
that bits and pieces, little bitty statements out of that report, two 
and three words, will be used for news triggers, little statements that 
people made. And they will be plucked out and they will be used 
politically on one side or the other and they will be used by the news 
media, and so just a couple of words, one sentence, can have enormous 
effect, enormous effect.
  I know the more liberal members of the media have pointed to one 
sentence that somebody used in one of the weapons of mass destruction 
analyses, where said it does not matter what we find, because this war 
is going to happen. Now, that was not a statement of policy. That was a 
statement by some guy who did not control policy, but it was plucked 
out and used and probably put in front of 50 million people. So little 
bitty words and little bitty sentences and little bitty phrases can be 
pulled out. And so the idea that we now have an incomplete reservoir of 
facts is, I think, disturbing to the American people.
  If you lined up all the people in the United States and said, who 
would take those documents out, the President's former national 
security adviser would be the last gentleman that you would suspect. 
And on the other hand, apparently truth is stranger than fiction. It 
has happened. I think there is some explaining to do.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield for a second, 
I think we need to put this in context to the American people.
  He removed those documents as he was preparing his testimony for the 
9/11 commission. It just does not feel right. The context of going into 
a secure room, reviewing documents, knowing that these documents are 
going to be scrutinized by the 9/11 Commission, and as the chairman 
said, word for word for word, and then perhaps stuffing them into his 
coat, into his pants and perhaps even into his socks as he is preparing 
that testimony, and the disappointing thing is, now the American people 
will probably never know what was in those documents.
  Those were original documents. They were not copies of documents, at 
least the evidence that we have or the information we have today said 
that those were original documents, they were not copies. There are not 
multiple versions of this available. He had the originals.
  And the other thing we have to know about Sandy Berger, very 
different than the current President in the way that he operates, Sandy 
Berger was the gatekeeper to the President, meaning that George Tenet, 
John Deutsch and the CIA and other folks who wanted to get to the 
President and brief the President had to go through Sandy Berger, and 
Sandy Berger was the gatekeeper.
  It is not like this President, who gets briefed by a wide variety of 
people on a pretty regular basis. Sandy Berger was the gatekeeper. He 
had all of the information. These were documents that he prepared. Most 
likely, these are documents that are now missing. We will never know 
what is in them.
  As those of us here on Capitol Hill are involved in the process of 
trying to improve the Intelligence Community, improve the intelligence 
capability and the analysis, we will never have the benefit of 
reviewing how these documents influence decision-making, and that will 
impair our ability to come up with the right recommendations to try to 
make sure or to minimize the possibility that a 9/11 will ever happen 
again.
  I thank the chairman for yielding.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, and I think he has 
raised probably the most important question for the next several weeks.
  One other question we might ask is when Mr. Berger took these 
documents home, he obviously took them home for a purpose, and 
presumably he reviewed them at home, he looked at them. That would be 
another opportunity to say, I have got classified documents; they 
should go back. And it would certainly be a time when you would not 
scrunch one of them up and destroy it, because you realize you have got 
something that the Archives needs.
  And so it is a very, very strange situation, and I think the 
gentleman has posited the most important questions. And maybe in the 
next 5 or 6 or 7 days we are going to have some answers.
  I hope the gentleman would stay around and we will talk about Iraq, 
because the gentleman, along with the

[[Page 16393]]

gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller) and the gentleman from New 
Hampshire have a wealth of experience with respect to the Iraq theatre.
  I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida, a great 
member of the committee.
  Mr. MILLER of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman very much.
  We all intended to come down to the floor tonight and speak about 
Iraq and the successes that are taking place in that region, having 
been there myself, planning to go back there in August again on behalf 
of the committee.
  But I do think attention needs to be drawn, as my good friend, the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) and the chairman have already 
alluded to, the fact that the information that was provided to most of 
us today and some last night that Sandy Berger has in fact admitted 
that he did take information out of a secure area.
  It has already been alluded to that we can take notes while we are in 
an area looking at specific Top Secret information, but we by no means 
are allowed to take any of that information out, much less the notes 
that we make to take out, and the facts that are coming to light now 
that he apparently used his jackets, his pants and possibly his socks. 
And I would tell my good friend that I understand today that while they 
all were original documents, there may, in fact, have been three 
different drafts of a single document that were there. And apparently, 
Mr. Berger went back and got all three drafts of that particular 
document. For what reason, I do not know.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman yield?
  Mr. MILLER of Florida. I would certainly yield to my good friend.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think this is another critical point. Again, the 
information that we have to date is that this was not a single 
occurrence, but this was a pattern on a series of visits that he on 
multiple occasions inadvertently took documents. Again, that is what 
some of the press reports are indicating, which makes it even more 
suspect that by accident you took documents on a number of occasions.
  I thank my colleague for yielding.
  Mr. MILLER of Florida. Exactly, and I think that the additional 
question that needs to be asked, and apparently now the presumed 
Democratic nominee, Mr. Kerry has accepted Mr. Berger's resignation as 
his national security adviser in regards to his political campaign.
  Interestingly enough, I think it should have been the reverse. I 
think that the good Senator probably should have immediately, once he 
found out what was going on, should in fact asked Mr. Berger to step 
aside instead of waiting for Mr. Berger to make that decision. Again, I 
think it shows a lack of leadership on the Senator's side in regards to 
how he would handle an issue in regards to Top Secret information.
  I would be glad to yield to our chairman.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding at this 
point, because I think that it does reflect on the judgment of Senator 
Kerry, but I think more reflective of his judgment with respect to 
intelligence is the fact that Senator Kerry voted to cut intelligence 
all during the 1990s.
  Now what we have discovered is that we cut intelligence, we cut our 
operatives, our operating officers by more than 20 percent during the 
1990s, during the Clinton administration; and that meant that we cut 
all of the people that gave us information because each of those 
operating officers has stables of people who talk to them, whether they 
are taxicab drivers or people in a bureaucracy in some foreign country 
or just people that have a certain insight into knowledge, people who 
are in the room when somebody bad makes a decision to hurt Americans. 
We lost 40 percent of our assets, of our intelligence assets.
  So we had all this information coming in, and we cut out 40 percent 
of it. So we are like Ford Motor Company cutting out 40 percent of its 
dealerships and then wondering why the number of Fords sold has dropped 
dramatically.
  Well, while we were doing that during the Clinton administration in 
the 1990s, Senator Kerry tried to cut it more, and in 1994 he offered a 
massive cut that received from fellow Democrats extreme criticism, one 
of them saying this was going to cut the eyes and ears out of our 
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and another one saying that 
this was going to be a disservice to our troops.
  And then in 1996, Senator Kerry offered a bill, and I understand that 
he did not get a single cosponsor. There was not anybody in the Senate, 
Democrat or Republican, who was liberal enough to sign up to this one, 
because this cut $1.5 billion out of the intelligence budget. This is 
in 1996 when we really needed it, when we needed to rebuild 
intelligence; and he cut what would have been $300 million per year for 
1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 and the year 2000. Luckily, not a single Senator 
was liberal enough to join him in that.
  And it goes back to a statement that he made that was reported in one 
of the Harvard newspapers when he was first running for office, and he 
said that for practical purposes, he was going to for practical 
purposes defund the CIA, just take away the money.
  I think that Senator Kerry always looked at the CIA in the same way 
as people look at it when they go into these movies and the movie is 
made through the prism of some left-winger in Hollywood; and in these 
Hollywood movies the CIA is always out there moving drugs and hurting 
people and being basically a bad influence. In reality, the people that 
serve in the CIA and our other intelligence agencies are wonderful 
people who serve this country, get no kudos, get no parades down Main 
Street, put themselves in dangerous positions for our country and often 
die in small, isolated places around the world for the United States of 
America.
  But the problem in judgment is not Sandy Berger, the image of Sandy 
Berger stuffing stuff into his clothes and leaving the classified intel 
room, as John Kerry's adviser. The real crisis in judgment, I think, is 
when John Kerry got up and tried to cut an already debilitated CIA, one 
where the Clinton administration had sliced the top right off of it, 
cut out 40 percent of our assets, and he came in with further cuts. And 
he called our programs, the intelligence programs, silly programs.
  Nobody calls them silly programs today. We wish we had had more. We 
wish we had had people sitting in those meetings when decisions were 
made to hurt Americans.
  I would be happy to yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. MILLER of Florida. And I appreciate the chairman's remarks, and 
in fact, President Bush has been working diligently, as the chairman 
knows, for months and months trying to rebuild that Intelligence 
Community that has been decimated so terribly.
  Looking for that great peace dividend that was out there and slashing 
the intelligence budget was a foolish thing to do, and we now see, and 
in fact people are telling us, that it will take 1, 2, 3, maybe 5 
years, in order to rebuild that human intelligence. You do not just 
rely on all of the whiz-bang things that we have now and the great ways 
that we have to gather intelligence, but you certainly have to take the 
opportunity to get the human intelligence.
  But what bothers me even more is the fact that it appears that the 
information that Mr. Berger took out of that Top Secret room in that 
area where he should not have taken anything out of that room possibly 
dealt with very credible information in regards to our vulnerability at 
airports and seaports and what was going on in those general areas; and 
I think it is very coincidental, at best, that Mr. Kerry, Senator 
Kerry's advertisements, as he has been running for the Democratic 
nomination and has in fact been beating on our President time and time 
again, have in fact been homed in on our vulnerability at our airports 
and our seaports. And I am just concerned as to what Mr. Berger did 
with the information once he removed it from that Top Secret classified 
room and took it supposedly to his home, who may have seen it, who 
gained from

[[Page 16394]]

the information that was there; and in fact, is there any type of tie 
that can be made to the campaign of Mr. Kerry, because it is beginning 
to appear we have a very convoluted web at this point in regards to 
some of the issues that the Senator has been raising.

                              {time}  2130

  Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman. Another question I think is a 
commonsense question that the average American would ask is, well, if 
you took this stuff home that was highly classified, very sensitive, it 
is against the law to take it home, and you took it home. And you are 
reading it and you are a former security advisor, you know that it is 
highly classified, well, if you wad it up and throw it in the garbage, 
which is almost unthinkable, almost unthinkable, would you not, when 
you get called up by the people who have run the collection of that 
information, would you not then go try to retrieve it?
  Would you not go out to your garbage and dig through it and say, why 
did I just lose it and throw it away?
  Mr. MILLER of Florida. I understand that it was not just papers that 
were taken, but there possibly were bound books or folders of some type 
that you, in fact, could not just crunch up as a bunch of papers. You 
would know, in fact, that you were disposing of them; and you had to do 
it deliberately, if, in fact, you did dispose of it.
  So to say that it was sloppy and inadvertent kind of stretches the 
imagination. But, of course, a lot of this has been done in this House 
over recent months, unfortunately; and it is being done out on the 
campaign trail, so it is certainly to be expected.
  Mr. HUNTER. I agree with that and I want to thank, also, the 
gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bradley) for his great work on the 
committee and especially his focus on making sure our troops have 
everything that they need. I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. I thank the chairman.
  I first want to take this opportunity to salute his leadership, the 
way that he works on the Committee on Armed Services in a bipartisan 
fashion to strengthen our Nation's military and to make sure our troops 
have what they need. Certainly your leadership is commendable.
  The one point that your comments brought to mind from some in the 
Defense authorization bill that we recently just passed out of the 
Committee on Armed Services, when we were talking about intelligence, 
one of the other cut backs that was made in the 1990s was the overall 
troop level. And we are seeing the unfortunate consequences of that 
when we have gone from 18 Army divisions down to 10 today. And we have 
our troops, our brave, loyal troops that are being asked by all of us 
as Americans to win the war on terrorism and fighting in over 100 
different countries. It is not just Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Bosnia, 
it is Kosovo, it is many different places. And we are by virtue of 
having made these cut backs, stressing our troops rather to a high 
degree.
  The point that I am trying to make, and perhaps the gentleman would 
want to elaborate on this, is that in the Defense authorization bill 
which we passed as I recall unanimously out of the committee in the 
final vote, we upped the number of troops over the next 3 years by 
30,000, 10,000 for each of the next 3 years, active members of the Army 
and 9,000 additional Marines over the next 3 years. And this is 
certainly a first step in addressing the fact that we have gone from 18 
Army divisions to 10 divisions.
  And certainly something that all of us have to look at to make sure 
that not only, like intelligence, but in terms of personnel that we 
have the troop strength that is necessary to win the war on terror, it 
is not just the numbers. It is ample pay. It is the appropriate level 
of benefits for veterans, housing allowances, all of those things that 
the gentleman has shown such remarkable leadership on in his tenure as 
a chairman to make those improvements for our troops.
  Mr. HUNTER. Let me thank the gentleman for his great initiative 
because I am just a cog in this wheel and both gentlemen, the gentleman 
from Florida (Mr. Miller), has been a leader and put together, drafted 
the provisions that we all got behind that gave these great survivor 
benefits which heretofore had not been coming. And the gentleman from 
Florida (Mr. Miller) is to be congratulated on that.
  The gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bradley) has been a real leader 
in making sure that we have this momentum to rebuild the military; and 
not only do we have the 30,000 increase in Army end strength in our 
bill, but we also have an increase of some 9,000 Marines. I think that 
is important also. The Marines are out there deployed a great deal of 
the time. They are kind of a 911 for us. It always has one MEU or one 
larger unit. A MEU is a Marine Expeditionary Unit, a little bit bigger 
than a battalion, out on patrol, so to speak, in the world's oceans, 
ready to move in quickly if there is a problem.
  The interesting thing is this all reflects on the people. If you have 
a family sitting around the breakfast table trying to decide whether to 
re-up or not, the fact that the dad has not been home for two or three 
Christmases is going to have an effect on whether he stays in. This is 
a corporate decision that is made by the family. So having enough 
people is a very, very important thing.
  It is also standing military that is not committed that is an 
insurance policy for our country. It makes sense to have an insurance 
policy.
  I want to thank the gentleman for his great work and just ask the 
gentleman, he has been to Iraq, and I would like to ask both gentlemen 
what their take is now. We all know it is a tough, hard road; but our 
troops are walking down that road. We are starting to make this hand-
off. We have handed off the government of Iraq to Iraqis, and we are 
starting to hand off the military. What do you think?
  Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. As the chairman knows, I had the 
opportunity to visit Iraq several months ago. While there is no 
question what we saw there, there were six of us Members of Congress 
with other military personnel attached to us. We saw a war zone. There 
was no question about that. But we also saw the rebuilding of the 
country; and that is something that, unfortunately, people only see the 
pictures from the war zone, but they do not see the fact that the 
electricity is coming on, that the water is being restored, that there 
is adequate supplies of petroleum products in the country.
  We saw a lot of traffic on the street. For instance, in northern 
Iraq, in Kirkuk where we were, we even saw some new construction. We 
were told there was plenty of food available in the country. As we flew 
around the country, not only in the C-130 transport planes at 18,000 
feet but in Black Hawk helicopters at 150 feet, we flew over a lot of 
agricultural areas of the country that were starting the winter 
planting.
  We did not have, when we were there, the opportunity to visit a 
school or a hospital; but certainly we have been told, as you know, 
about the progress in refurbishing those critical institutions for 
Iraqi education and health care. So these are things that show where 
progress is being made to this day and certainly it was when I was 
there in November.
  The other thing I think is really important to stress, and I think 
you may want to add to this, Mr. Chairman, is the morale of our troops. 
I had the opportunity to talk to a number of New Hampshire troops at 
every stop that we made, as did all of the other Members of the 
delegation. You are right, we are asking them to do a dangerous and 
dirty job. It is difficult. It is life threatening. And these kids are 
so dedicated to their mission and that is probably the most compelling 
story that I came away with. And when I say ``kids'' that is really not 
right. They were young Americans. They are wonderful patriots. They are 
fine Americans. And they are so dedicated to restoring a sense of 
normalcy, a representative government in Iraq; and they felt, despite 
the difficulty of the job that we are asking them to do, they felt that 
they were making significant progress and the morale was high.

[[Page 16395]]

  All I can say is God bless them, and I pray for their safe return. 
They are doing a fantastic job in very difficult circumstances.
  Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for his comments. I would like to 
ask the same question of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller), who 
has been a great member of the committee and who has really worked this 
issue.
  Mr. MILLER of Florida. I thank the Chairman. I would say that all 
indications, I think for most Members, they would say that Baghdad is 
returning to normal. Yes, there still are some problems. We see them on 
a daily basis, but the fact of the matter is children are attending new 
schools, new universities, playgrounds are up. Children are actually 
going there. Their parents feel comfortable to allow them to go. Where 
the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down some 15 months ago in 
Firdos Square, adults are sitting around playing games of bingo.
  Now, that sounds pretty silly, but the fact of the matter is if you 
are comfortable enough to sit on the ground or under the shade of a 
tree and play bingo, things are getting back to normal.
  At the northern end of Iraq in Mosul, security forces are in almost 
total control up there. It has been divided into sectors. They have 
been going house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood; and they have 
got a lot of insurgents out and a lot of weapons caches there in that 
area to make sure our troops and coalition forces remain safe. We have 
thwarted hundreds of different types of IED attacks on our troops. On 
the banks of the Tigress River I would say that nightlife is returning 
to normal as well.
  You look in the background of all of these TV scenes that you see of 
some of the car bombs that are exploded and burning. If you look in the 
very back, you will see that traffic is moving and progress is still 
going on. Commerce is taking place. People are walking in the streets.
  Certainly the target is coalition forces. And recently we have seen 
where they have begun to target those members of the coalition that 
have the smallest numbers of troops because it makes them easy for them 
to pull out by going in and taking some of their people captive and 
holding them hostage and threatening to cut their heads off. Of course, 
the press might show that for maybe 1 or 2 days on television, but they 
are going to over and over and over again show the fact of our troops 
and the coalition forces that are being killed.
  It goes back, I think, to the old adage, and I hate to be overly 
descriptive of this but I am a journalism major. And I can tell you 
that one of the things we learned, if it bleeds, it leads. That is 
exactly what the press want to do right now is to continue to try to 
turn the American situation or the American feelings and opinions 
against what is going on. Our opponents know that. They have been 
working it.
  Saddam Hussein is not a dumb man. He had his people well prepared, 
and he thought that the American citizens and the coalition forces 
would be so afraid when these things started that we would pull out, 
and leave or we would be willing to give in to whatever demands that he 
may actually put out there. And that, in fact, is not what is 
happening.
  President Bush has been very strong in his resolve. I will never 
forget, totally different subject, but I had an opportunity to travel 
to North Korea over a year ago. When we were in North Korea, the North 
Koreans absolutely could not understand why this American Commander in 
Chief would not negotiate with them. They were used to dealing with the 
Clinton administration who would give them whatever they asked for in 
order to keep the peace.
  Now, the things that have been welling up inside and swelling up for 
so long have come to pass. We have had 9/11. We have had attacks on our 
soil. President Bush is doing whatever he can to make sure that does 
not happen in the United States again on our own soil, making sure that 
we take the war to the terrorists where they live and root them out, 
and it is not going to happen over night. I mean, Saddam Hussein ruled 
for over 25 years. Longer than Tojo was in Japan. Longer than Hitler 
was in power in his time in Germany.
  So the fact of the matter is for years Saddam Hussein ruled. He 
killed the Kurds in the north and those in the south, and we are 
continuing to try to root out those people in whatever hole they may 
have climbed into.
  Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman made a good point when he said that 
sometimes the news media follows the old adage, if it bleeds, it leads. 
Because that is what a TV station will use to get viewership for their 
news hour so they can sell Coca-Cola and whatever type of advertising 
they have got. And they know that violence does attract a certain core 
audience.
  Now, the problem with running wall-to-wall car wrecks if you are a 
local TV station is that you give a misleading impression of the 
traffic situation in a given town. If you go in, if you are a new TV 
station in town and you say, because we do not have a lot of good 
substantial news, we will do wall-to-wall car wrecks, and your news 
guys may say, we only have two car wrecks a day; and you say, run them 
over and over again. If the average person watches that news station 
and sees wall-to-wall car wrecks on the news, he will be given the 
impression if he drives out on the freeway in that town, he has a 50 
percent chance of being in an accident.
  The car wrecks in isolation may be true. They are accurate pictures, 
but if you run them back-to-back, wall-to-wall, all the time, all car 
wrecks, you are going to give a misleading impression on the traffic 
situation on that town. Similarly, if you run wall-to-wall pictures of 
burning tankers. If there was one tanker blown up in a country that is 
as big as the State of California and has 25 million people, and you 
run one explosion over and over and over, you give the impression that 
the entire country is on fire. It is not.
  That is not to say it is not dangerous, because it is dangerous; and 
that is not to say it is not tough.
  I want to give a description of what I saw last time I was there. 
When we went into Balad, we were there in time for the daily mortaring, 
where a couple of mortar rounds are thrown in by the insurgents in this 
big former fighter base for Saddam Hussein, which is now one of our 
main logistics bases.
  Well, we were out looking at the gun trucks at that time; and as 
these rounds came in about 1,000 yards away, all the GIs just walked, 
they did not panic or stampede. They just walked, did not even stop 
their conversations, to the shelters that were nearby.

                              {time}  2145

  Our general said, Quick, get into the nearest building. It happened 
to be a movie theater. We went in there, and he said, get away from the 
glass, go indoors. We went into the actual theater portion of this 
building. I opened up the door and went in. It was a big church 
service. It was on Sunday. There were 400 GIs there. They had a great 
preacher who was preaching. They had a 100 GI choir, a band, had a 
couple of steel guitars up there, and everybody had their combat gear 
sitting there.
  Not only were the politicians forced to go into the church service 
because of mortaring, we were forced to stay there because of 
mortaring. We asked when we could leave, and they said, You are going 
to have to wait till the service was over, and so we waited until the 
service was over and we left.
  My point is, those folks are standing firm. Our people in uniform are 
standing firm. The American people should stand firm.
  It was interesting to come back here and watch the talking heads on 
television whip themselves into a tizzy, and in my mind's eye I had 
those great folks in uniform who were doing their job very coolly, very 
professionally and with a sense of purpose; and with respect to a sense 
of purpose, that is an important thing.
  Just saying, Well, I support the troops, but they are wasting their 
lives is not enough. If you tell people that what they are doing, 
whether they are

[[Page 16396]]

a truck driver for a living or they are a soldier, is without value. 
Then you are really denigrating that person. You are really taking the 
value away from their occupation.
  So those who say, Well, I would support the troops, but what they are 
doing is a waste, is not a support of the troops.
  Now, you may say, Well, that is okay, I think my opinion outbalances 
whether or not I support the troops but I am not a supporter of the 
troops, and it does a disservice to the troops.
  I want to let you know when we went over, and the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Reyes), a great Member from El Paso, was over with us and 
the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert), we let the troops know 
that we valued their service and valued them.
  I would be happy to continue to yield to the gentleman from New 
Hampshire.
  Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. Mr. Speaker, one of the most telling 
periods of time when I was there was our visit to the Abu Ghraib 
prison, and while that prison has gotten a certain amount of notoriety 
because of the abuse by our troops, a very small number of people, of 
Iraqi detainees, the larger story that I took away from it is what I 
saw in that prison.
  When you walk through the execution chamber, when you go through the 
torture chambers, and when you see the barbaric nature of those 
facilities, and the fact that in this one prison, 80,000 Iraqis were 
first tortured and then executed, it was a life-altering experience for 
me and, I think, the other Members of Congress who were there to have 
been in that room where so many souls were so cruelly murdered.
  I left, from that experience, I think, a very changed person, having 
seen that kind of depraved behavior and the aftermath of it; and 
certainly when I have come home and had the opportunity throughout New 
Hampshire to talk to people about that, it has been a pretty telling 
experience.
  I had a video camera with me and took an actual picture of the 
execution chamber and how it worked. We were shown the grizzly details. 
It is a very frightening experience, and people need to know of the 
mass graves and the fact that Saddam Hussein started two wars; that he 
actually used chemical weapons against his own people, against the 
Iranians; that he was funding suicide bombers; that he did have a very 
significant weapons of mass destruction program that the United Nations 
was never able to account for at the end what happened to.
  While there certainly have been intelligence questions, and we need 
to improve our intelligence as we talked about at the beginning of this 
hour, these are facts about what happened. Having been in that prison 
and having seen that execution chamber, it certainly changed the way I 
look at this entire situation.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I will tell the gentleman about another 
operation that took place.
  For those folks who now have given the distorted view to the world 
that somehow the Americans are worse than Saddam Hussein, that we have 
tortured people and we are the emblems of torture because they have run 
these pictures back to back, including the picture where a person is 
pretending to shock a person. In the briefings I received, they never 
turned on the electricity, but they have given that picture out to 
literally millions of viewers with the clear impression that that 
person is being shocked with electricity.
  When I was in the hospital there at Ramstein, one of the surgeons had 
a disk, and on the disk was a video of Saddam Hussein's people 
amputating the hands of people in one of the villages because they had 
not done enough for the economy. They were businessmen, and the growth 
rate of the economy had not been high enough. So he thought he would 
give a little example and amputate their hands.
  So for people that want to see real torture, real inhumane treatment, 
it is there to see, but of course, if we give that disk to the news 
media, I am sure that nobody will. In fact, I think those people were 
in the capital. I think the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) 
brought them over for a reception, and as I recall, there were almost 
no stories about those people.
  There was a story or two about the young kids, the 14-year-old kids 
who wrote anti-Saddam graffiti on their blackboard in high school. They 
were promptly taken out and hanged.
  Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. In that prison.
  Mr. HUNTER. And the Kurdish mothers who died there by poison gas, 
with their babies in their arms, those were representations of real 
inhumane treatment.
  I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida.
  Mr. MILLER of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I want to say I think a little 
perspective probably needs to be added to some of the discussions 
tonight, and I would imagine there is not a person that looks at that 
hollow Manhattan skyline that does not think of the Twin Towers and 
where they stood. There are some that remember before the towers were 
ever built. Certainly, there are those that now know the towers were 
there and one day something will be built in its place, but I say this 
just to say that it is far easier to destroy something than it is to 
rebuild it. And rebuild is, in fact, what America and the coalition 
forces have been doing in Iraq and in Afghanistan as well, but tonight, 
we are mostly focused on Iraq.
  Our military forces have been engaged in a very complex not only war 
on terror, but also the process of going through and rebuilding. They 
have been looking for weapons of mass destruction. We keep hearing 
people saying that it is a failure because the weapons of mass 
destruction have not been found.
  I am more concerned because of the fact that they have not been 
found. Where are they? We know that they existed at one point. We know 
that Saddam Hussein used them on his own people. We have not found them 
yet. David Kay said, all we are looking for from a biological 
standpoint is a vial that is about this big and a two-car garage-size 
building that could hold 500 chemical warheads in a country, as you 
have already related, the size of California.
  We are working on restoring basic public services: electricity, 
water, sewer. We hear some on the other side say, we went in and we 
broke it. We did not break it. It was already broken, but what is 
happening out of all of this is something that I think is truly 
revolutionary, and that is, the verge of democracy breaking out in an 
Arab region.
  The fact of the matter is, Iraq now has a new government. They are 
preparing for election, but of course, the press does not want to tell 
the positive story that is there to be told. They want to continue to 
focus, as you have already said, on those car crashes in a loop over 
and over again, those burning cars. They want to focus on those lives 
that have been lost, and we are all focused on the lives that have been 
lost.
  Not a single Member of this Congress does not mourn the loss of an 
American military man or woman, nor a Coalition force person; but the 
fact of the matter is, they are doing again, as the chairman has 
adequately stated tonight, very, very difficult work in a difficult 
region and in an area where people want to kill us. We are the enemy to 
them, and we understand that, and the soldiers that are there and the 
Marines that are there know they are there to do a job.
  A great number of individuals have chosen to travel to Iraq. Some 
have not been yet, but they want to go to Iraq, and they are working on 
scheduling trips over there. And when they sit down and they talk with 
the soldiers, bar none, every one of them will tell them they are there 
for the right reason. They have, in fact, been welcomed as liberators. 
They have had the arms of young Iraqi children, men and women around 
their neck thanking them, hugging them for what they have done 
relieving them of the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein; and now we are 
helping, along with the Coalition forces, to rebuild their country.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I thank the gentleman 
from New Hampshire also, and would ask if he has any closing words he 
would like to say.
  Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. Once again, it has been a pleasure to

[[Page 16397]]

serve under the gentleman from California's (Mr. Hunter) leadership, to 
have watched the Committee on Armed Services start the process of 
rebuilding our Nation's military, in particular, making sure that we 
have given a pay increase to members of the military for the last 
couple of years; that we have done a better job of providing the 
bulletproof vests and the retrofit kits for the Humvees and that type 
of thing. It is a process that needs to continue.
  I thank you once again for your leadership and certainly look forward 
to continuing to work with you.
  Mr. HUNTER. We will all continue to work together, and I thank all 
Members, Republican and Democrat, on our committee. We have got a great 
membership.
  Let me just say one thing, if I could, with the indulgence of my 
colleagues.
  A great gentleman, Cato Cedillo, who served as my assistant district 
administrator for 23 years passed away early this morning, and he was a 
real hero. He was a guy from San Angelo, Texas, who helped everybody, 
who had a heart as big as all outdoors; and I swear he could do more 
with a telephone, getting the problem solved, than the rest of us with 
a bank of computers.
  Cato was a wonderful, wonderful person, and I was with him and with 
his family last night as we said good-bye to Cato. It is sad. He will 
be greatly missed around his hometown of San Angelo, Texas, and San 
Diego, California.
  I thank the gentlemen for letting me mention him in the closing 
moments of our special order.
  I want to thank the gentlemen for participating tonight, and again, 
the message from our troops was that they are staying steady and we in 
America should stay steady. We are making this handoff. We need to 
follow through with it and follow through with our mission.
  I thank the gentlemen.

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