[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17341-17343]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         9/11 COMMISSION REPORT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce) is 
recognized for half the time remaining until midnight as the designee 
of the majority leader.
  Mr. PEARCE. Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to kind of catch 
up on some of the comments that were made earlier this evening by my 
friends on the other side of the aisle.
  One of our friends suggested that we should involve the international 
community here in the Iraq situation. I would remind her that the 
international community, the U.N., the United Nations is involved in 
the largest scandal, the oil-for-food scandal that this world has seen, 
almost $10 billion, and it looks like our friends in France and Russia 
were involved in taking payoffs and taking oil vouchers at the very 
time they were taking U.N. Security votes, and even in the press 
accusing the United States of involving themselves in Iraq for the oil.
  That is the international community that we would like to involve. I 
would remind my friends also that the United Nations cannot even have a 
definition, they do not have an established definition for terrorism 
because Syria sits on the Security Council, and Syria will not let our 
neighbors be characterized in any way as terrorists, and yet our 
friends call for the involvement of the international community, 
meaning the United Nations.
  I would note that we pointed out last week in a similar venue that 
the media somehow has seemed to overlook this scandal. They go smelling 
around and looking for scandals any time the Bush administration makes 
a decision, but when the facts come to light in the United Nations' 
largest scandal ever, they simply ignore it.
  They also have overlooked the 400,000 mass graves that have been 
found in Iraq and seem to be fixated on other problems overlooking the 
damages that were done during 35 years of Saddam Hussein.

                              {time}  2310

  I would like to associate myself with the comments by my other 
colleague from the other side of the aisle who said put Sandy Berger in 
jail. If it would help, I would second that and call for a vote 
immediately on the floor of the House.
  It looks like Mr. Berger rolled up documents, stuck them in his 
underwear and stuck them in his socks and carried them out. These were 
documents that related to his service during the Clinton years and as 
it dealt with terrorism.
  I suspect then that we begin to put some of the facts in place as we 
consider Richard Clarke's testimony where he began to tell the American 
people that there is absolutely no evidence that Iraq was ever 
supporting al Qaeda ever. This is Richard Clark who was the head 
terrorism expert under President Clinton.
  If one looks back to his initial memos, immediately after 9/11, while 
the Nation is still sorting through the grief, Mr. Clarke is beginning 
to e-mail and memo his colleagues that we should begin to cover our 
trails. It looks like Mr. Berger may have been doing the same thing 
there in taking documents from the archives, continuing to cover trails 
that they felt like were damaging.
  But the 9/11 Commission came out today with their final report today, 
Mr. Speaker, and we found several significant findings.
  First of all, they declared that there was no smoking gun. The 9/11 
Commission's report is very clear in its finding that the terrible 
events of September 11 could not reasonably have been prevented. The 
findings produce no smoking gun and place blame at the feet of no 
single individual or institution.
  Furthermore, they go on to quote that since we believe that both 
President Clinton and President Bush were genuinely concerned about the 
danger posed by al Qaeda, approaches involving more direct intervention 
against the sanctuary in Afghanistan apparently must have seen, if they 
were considered at all, to be disproportionate to the threat. That is 
on page 349 of the document.
  Furthermore, they commented that we do not believe, this is the 9/11 
Commission quoting, that we do not believe it is possible to defeat all 
terrorist attacks against Americans every time and everywhere. A 
President should tell the American people no President can promise that 
a catastrophic attack like that of 9/11 will not happen. Again, history 
has shown us that even the most vigilant and expert agencies cannot 
always prevent determined, suicidal attackers from reaching a target. 
That is quoted on page 365.
  The report goes on, Mr. Speaker, to establish a very clear link to al 
Qaeda, and I would remind this body about former Vice President Al 
Gore's quote. You will recall that in the height of his emotion about 
60-days ago, former Vice President Al Gore quoted, the President 
convinced the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be 
forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al 
Qaeda. I suspect that we should see Mr. Gore coming out now to say that 
the 9/11 Commission was subjected to those same forged and blatantly 
false documents because the 9/11 Commission says that there is a clear 
link between Iraq and al Qaeda. The Commission's report provides ample 
evidence that there was a strong and real link between al Qaeda and 
Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
  Quoting from the report, page 66, it describes similar meetings 
between Iraqi officials and bin Laden or his aids may have occurred in 
1999 during a period of some reported strings with the Taliban. 
According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered bin Laden a safe 
haven in Iraq. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some 
common themes in both sides hatred of the United States.
  Again, on page 61, the 9/11 Commission finds that bin Laden himself 
met with senior Iraqi intelligence officers in Khartoum in late 1994 or 
1995.
  On page 66, again, the 9/11 Commission report quotes, in March 1998, 
after bin Laden's public plot against the United States, two al Qaeda 
members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In 
July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with 
the Taliban and then with bin Laden.
  Mr. Speaker, I suspect that Mr. Gore should apologize to the American 
people for blatant, false comments or he should provide the 
documentation for his rhetoric.
  The 9/11 Commission, Mr. Speaker, also comments on the fixation on 
Iraq.

[[Page 17342]]

Over the past year, there have been numerous reports from people in the 
media and from our friends on the other side of the aisle that the Bush 
administration was fixated on attacking Iraq in the wake of 9/11. 
However, the Commission's finding strongly refutes such a claim.
  On page 335, the Commission quotes, Secretary Powell recalled that 
Wolfowitz, not Rumsfeld, argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of 
terrorist problems and should, therefore, be attacked. Powell said the 
President did not give Wolfowitz's argument much weight. Though 
continuing to worry about Iraq in the following week, Powell said 
President Bush saw Afghanistan as the priority.
  It goes on on page 336 to quote that, on September 20, President Bush 
met with British prime minister Tony Blair and the two leaders 
discussed the global conflict ahead. When Blair asked about Iraq, the 
President replied that Iraq was not the immediate problem. Some members 
of his administration, he commented, had expressed a different view, 
but he was the one responsible for making the decision. Again, the 
September 11 Commission finds no fixation on Iraq.
  Page 336, they continue speaking about General Franks, in quotes, 
Franks told that he was pushing independently to do more robust 
planning on military responses in Iraq during the summer before 9/11, a 
request President Bush denied, arguing that the time was not right. The 
CENTCOM commander told us he renewed his appeal for further military 
planning to respond to Iraqi moves shortly after 9/11. Franks said that 
President Bush again turned down the request.
  So our friends on the other side of the aisle would like to 
characterize the attacks on 9/11 as being easy to contemplate, easy to 
forecast, and yet, the 9/11 Commission says it is not possible at all.
  There is also great testimony on the other side that there was 
absolutely no link between Iraq and al Qaeda, and the 9/11 Commission 
report says blatantly that there was connection between the two. They 
also comment that President Bush did not have a fixation on Iraq, that 
actually he felt like the problems were elsewhere, Afghanistan or other 
places.
  Finally, the 9/11 report, Mr. Speaker, comments about our urgent need 
in this country. It comments that perhaps the most powerful finding of 
the 9/11 Commission is that fighting the global war on terror is a 
total call to arms.
  The Commission goes on to say that one of the key structural failures 
that the Commission identifies, referred to as a lack of imagination, 
that was the lack of the imagination of anyone in America to conceive 
that any persons could hate America so much as to do the attacks on 9/
11. In failing to connect the isolated pieces of intelligence in the 
past, leaders did not understand the urgency because they 
underestimated the terrorists' singular goal of destroying every 
American.
  Therefore, the September 11 report continues, one of the larger 
points that the Commission makes is that the war on terror is about 
killing terrorists before they kill us.
  The report said that bin Laden and Islamic terrorists mean exactly 
what they say. To them, that is, to bin Laden and the terrorists, 
America is the font of all evil, the head of the snake, and it must be 
converted or destroyed. It is not in a position with which Americans 
can bargain or negotiate.
  With it, there is no common ground, not even respect for life on 
which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly 
isolated.
  The report goes on to say that bin Laden said we do not differentiate 
between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They are all 
targets in the spotlight. That is, bin Laden is saying that if you are 
dressed in a uniform, you are no more of a military target than people 
walking on the streets in any town in Iowa, Michigan or New Mexico.
  Furthermore, the report goes on to clarify that the 1993 World Trade 
Center bombing signaled a new terrorist challenge, one whose rage and 
malice had no limit. Again, this is the 1993 attack on the World Trade 
Center, following on 10 years later with the more brutal attack.

                              {time}  2320

  But considering the 1993 attack Ramzi Yousef, the Sunni extremist who 
planted the bomb, said later that he had hoped to kill 250,000 people, 
all of those being Americans.
  The recommendation on page 367 of this 9/11 report, this bipartisan 
report that just came out today, this month's long study of the 9/11 
catastrophe, the recommendation is that the U.S. Government must 
identify and prioritize actual or potential terrorist sanctuaries. For 
each it should have a realistic strategy to keep possible terrorists 
insecure and on the run using all elements of national power.
  Mr. Speaker, after 9/11, the President came on TV and said we must do 
three things. We must first of all uproot the Taliban to where they 
cannot continue to train and turn out terrorists onto the streets. We 
must uproot the Taliban from Afghanistan and its training camps. 
Secondly, we need to choke off the funding for the Taliban for the 
terrorists. Thirdly, we need to take the fight to them.
  Mr. Speaker, in Afghanistan we did uproot the Taliban and put them on 
the run. They are not able to sit and take shots at us because they are 
in a defensive mode moving constantly. So the President followed 
through on the first of his objectives.
  On the second objective, that is squeezing off funding to the 
terrorist groups worldwide, the President and members of the 
international community have done a very good job. Just recently, 
Secretary Powell reported that even in Saudi Arabia that the leaders 
there acknowledged within the last 30 days that they have a tremendous 
problem with terrorism and they committed to seek to end the funding 
that Saudi nationals have given to terrorists.
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, in response to the third mantra that he laid 
out, the President did take the fight to the terrorists. Liberating 
Iraq is the right thing to do. He has taken the fight to them. He has 
uprooted them, and we have begun squeezing off their funding sources. 
Mr. Speaker, the only thing that could cause us to lose this war on 
terror is for us to lose our resolve.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) at 
this time for observations that he has in dealing and talking with 
Iraqis here in this city this week.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. 
Pearce). As a member of the Committee on International Relations, 
Subcommittee on the Middle East, I would like to thank the gentlewoman 
from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen) for bringing into the committee some 
victims who had survived Saddam Hussein's brutality so we could 
personally hear from them. They also had with them a documentary 
filmmaker, Mr. Janos, who showed excerpts of his film interviewing 
survivors, the grieving mothers and widows of Saddam Hussein's 
executioners.
  It is not often that we truly get a chance to plumb the unfathomable 
depths of human pain, but I believe we experienced that in committee 
yesterday. We had a chance to see a grieving mother whose husband was 
killed, whose children were killed, saying she would never laugh again 
in her lifetime, and praying to God for a short life and a merciful 
death so she could forget.
  We saw a mother break down because she remembered the cries of her 
child in a cell, a 6 year old, crying out that he had no milk, he was 
hungry. Well, he is gone and she remains to grief. We had a Mr. Ibraham 
and a Mr. Taimor. They were both testaments to the evil of the Iraqi 
dictator. Mr. Ibraham, a Shiite, had been chased through that country, 
arrested several times, housed in Abu Ghraib prison, and was so shocked 
by what he experienced there he could not speak about it, especially 
about what happened to the women.
  We also saw Mr. Taimor who had been shot by Iraqi executioners in 
front of a mass grave and while bleeding had to crawl out.

[[Page 17343]]

  We in this country hear much from many that Iraq was a mistake. I ask 
one thing of those people, I ask them to say it to those victim's 
faces. We hear the hippocrits in this country say that Saddam was a bad 
man, but the United States should not have taken him from power. I ask 
them to say that to the Iraqi victims' faces. For those people who 
believe America is the greatest threat to peace in the world, I ask 
them never to show their faces in public again.
  Whether we like it or not, what we are seeing internationally is a 
clash of revolutions. It is a clash of revolutions that is fought not 
upon maps but upon minds. It is the American revolution of freedom for 
the individual and republican forms of democracy and private enterprise 
that chased every king from Europe or put them on the dole, that has 
chased imperial Japanese forces and put a democracy in place, and the 
world is better. We have seen the Philippines that we once annexed and 
helped bring into a stable democracy, and throughout the globe we see 
people trying to emulate the freedom and opportunity we have here.
  Yet the second revolution, which is lot upon many, is the Iranian 
revolution, a revolution of extremism and totalitarianism perverting 
the peaceful tenets of Islam to accomplish political objectives. Right 
now our revolutions meet in Iraq. That is why those in this country who 
do not think deeply about this believe we can retreat from Iraq and 
that the only consequence will be the United States will have to act 
multilaterally. The reality is we cannot retreat because unless freedom 
and democracy are established on the borders of the Iranian revolution, 
the Iranian revolution will continue to be exported through means both 
traditional and terrorist. The stakes have never been greater.
  I know it is very difficult for many to remember that we are and 
remain the seminal revolutionary country, and that in many ways it is 
hard to admit we are a moral force for good in this world, and that 
absent the United States, what would the world be like.
  Well, we might have trouble remembering that, but when I had the 
chance to ask the victims of Saddam if they thought any other country 
on the face of the earth could or would save them from his butchery, 
their answer was no, only the United States could do that. Only the 
United States would do that. I asked them if they thought it was a 
mistake, and they said no, that they believe we were a great and a good 
country for helping to save them.
  So as we engage in the debate through now and the election and 
perhaps throughout the remainder of our lives, let us remember what is 
at stake, the clash of revolutions. Either we will prevail or we will 
be defeated, and if we are defeated, as President Lincoln said, we will 
lose the last best hope of earth.
  Mr. PEARCE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.
  Mr. Speaker, in the last year I have had the opportunity to meet a 
man in New Mexico and I have become friends with him. In looking at 
things he has in his story, I told him you have been in China for a 
very long time.
  He said yes, since the late sixties.
  I commented to him you had to be one of the only Americans there 
during that period of time. I said how did you go there?
  He very truthfully and straight-
forwardly responded, and his comment was, ``To my internal shame, I was 
invited to mainland China in the late sixties because of my campus 
radicalism. I went there with the greatest hope to help fight the war 
for communism and to spread it.'' He said, ``I was not in China more 
than 30 minutes before I realized it was one of the deepest and biggest 
scams I had ever seen.''

                              {time}  2330

  He continued to live in China, eventually marrying a Chinese woman. 
They watched as her father was carried to the edge of town and 
summarily shot.
  Mr. Speaker, we defeated communism for the most part in this world 
because of the efforts of Ronald Reagan. But I feel like there is as 
much lack of truth in this argument about al Qaeda and Iraq and the 
dangers that terrorism presents to the United States and to the world 
today as there was back in the 1960s and 1970s about the Communist 
regimes throughout the world.
  There is much work to be done if we are to find freedom and liberty 
for more people. Freedom and liberty cannot live together in the same 
world as terrorism. We are finding that out. What the world is going 
through right now is a decision process: Are we going to accept 
terrorism, or are we going to root terrorism out? Are we going to have 
liberty, or are we going to have tyranny? This is one of the most 
important discussions in our history because at this point terrorism 
has the potential to be spread worldwide.
  Terrorism has as its main focus instability. The terrorists 
understand they could not militarily defeat the United States. Their 
attempt was to destabilize us financially. On 9/11, the high estimates 
are that over $2 trillion worth of losses occurred in the U.S. economy. 
$2 trillion represents almost 20 percent, Mr. Speaker, of our total 
economy. How many countries could have suffered that kind of loss and 
still bounced back with an economy where we could be concerned about 
the production of jobs? $2 trillion and over 3,000 lives in one split 
second. That is what happened on 9/11.
  If the terrorists are not defeated at every turn, they have stated 
their intent to get vials of disease, to unleash chemical weapons, to 
unleash nuclear weapons. Whatever it takes to defeat freedom, they are 
willing to do. Those attacks on freedom are going to continue to be 
targeted at the United States first because they realize that this 
country is the heart and soul of freedom worldwide, that this country 
is a shining light of liberty to those countries that would aspire to 
it.
  Mr. Speaker, we can make no mistake. We must choose sides in this. We 
cannot appease terrorists. We cannot act like it will get better. We 
have read into the Record earlier tonight an entire list, two pages, 
double-spaced, of attacks into the United States or to United States 
troops by terrorists. Mostly those went unresponded to, but President 
Bush made a bold decision that we will take the fight to the 
terrorists. He should be commended for his activities, Mr. Speaker, 
because it is that boldness that has forestalled any future attacks.
  The investments in homeland security, the investments in our defense 
have been somewhat successful. I agree with the 9/11 report, though, 
that says that any President should promise the American people that we 
cannot fight a defensive battle all of the time. That is the reason I 
favor taking the fight to the terrorists. We must take the heart out of 
the fight for them. We must take the will to damage this country away 
from the heart of terrorism.
  Mr. Speaker, the 9/11 Commission report gives us valuable information 
about this Nation's lack of preparedness, the lack of preparedness that 
extended across more than one administration. I would recommend that 
Members of this body on both sides of the aisle begin to discuss the 
findings of the 9/11 Commission, that commission which stated that 
there is a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, that there was no 
preoccupation with Iraq as far as President Bush is concerned, and, 
finally, that we must either kill the terrorists or accept that they 
are going to kill us.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hensarling). The gentleman from New 
Mexico will suspend.

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