[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 18182]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           SPLIT PERSONALITY

  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of 
order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Without objection, the gentleman from 
Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  There was no objection.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Ohio has shown one of 
the hallmarks of this administration, its ability to spin a tale. Say 
it often enough and the American people may actually begin to believe 
it. In fact, they are so good at it they may have begun to believe 
their own press releases.
  The other day, Secretary of War Rumsfeld delivered a major speech at 
the National Press Club. Along the way, terror got a new name, Osama 
Hussein. Or was it Saddam bin Laden? In English, the rule is I before E 
except after C but in this administration I equals A. Iraq equals al 
Qaeda because they say so, not because there is a shred of evidence. 
There is not.
  Mr. Rumsfeld appeared to link Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in 
the same breath. He has got them all confused in his head now. He has 
said the story so many different times and they still are trying to 
connect the al Qaeda with what happened on 9/11. Or maybe it was just a 
stumble compounded later in his appearance by another gaffe. Or was it 
reading too many spin memos that your head begins to turn and spin and 
spin and you do not know where you are. At the very least, this shows 
the effect of a PR campaign that began well before the invasion of 
Iraq. The separation between the rhetoric and the reality has blurred 
into one and the same. Over and over again, the administration has 
exaggerated the tie between Iraq and al Qaeda. When questions from the 
Congress and the American people outstripped the rhetoric, the 
administration's rhetoric got louder, a lot louder. Today it is so loud 
that it is hard to hear the quiet truth. But it is there.
  It has been over a year and a half since the President ordered the 
beginning of hostile action against Iraq. It has been over a year since 
the President declared ``mission accomplished.'' Absolutely no one on 
the planet believes that the mission has either been accomplished or 
will be anytime soon. Even some Republicans are now talking about a 
presence in Iraq over the next two decades. Is that the plan for 
winning the peace? Is that the plan or the consequence of going to war 
in Iraq?
  Today, U.S. military commanders are using more air strikes in Iraq. 
If that helps save American lives or keep soldiers safe, out of harm's 
way, I am all for it. If this is a new military strategy, then it 
raises the question, why can we not get a lot of American soldiers out 
of Iraq and get them out of harm's way? It has been almost 3 months 
since the so-called handover. In those 90 days, 150 soldiers have died 
and 900 have been wounded. We cannot ask what we are going to do to win 
the peace because U.S. soldiers are still fighting and dying in a war. 
This is not the time to ask how the administration plans to win the 
peace, because there is no peace in Iraq today.
  Colin Powell came out yesterday and said we have a secret plan that 
sometime soon we will roll out so we can get stability at the time of 
the election. What is he waiting for? The election? Or the fact that he 
does not know what he is doing? U.S. forces managed a weekend without a 
military death but the death count of innocent Iraqi citizens is up 
dramatically over the last 48 hours. In another day of war, there can 
be no peace.
  Today, the American people have a fog of war, reality obscured by an 
administration which would prefer that we merely accept their version 
of reality or versions when the story needs to change. While it may 
have been a slip of the tongue the other day at the National Press 
Club, one wonders whether Secretary Rumsfeld inadvertently expressed 
publicly what he thinks privately. Are bin Laden and Hussein two 
different faces of evil, or are they some kind of split personality? 
Spin the rhetoric around enough and it gets hard to separate it from 
the reality on the ground, here or there.
  The administration has wrapped itself in the mantle of fighting the 
war on terror. Just today this administration could have struck a major 
blow against terrorism simply by extending the ban on assault weapons. 
These are bona fide weapons of mass destruction. We know where they are 
and we know how to keep them out of the hands of the bad guys. The 
President said he favored the ban, but then he did absolutely nothing 
to make it happen. You think he could not get the leadership in the 
House of Representatives to act on this if he meant business? He never 
meant anything close to that.
  The administration did not need weapons inspectors from the U.N. or 
air strikes from the military to find and isolate weapons of mass 
destruction that will threaten police officers and our security 
officers and our homeland security. All the President needed to do was 
tell his surrogates in this body and the other body to extend the ban. 
That did not happen, despite overwhelming support from the American 
people, despite overwhelming support from law enforcement officers. 
Instead, the administration used empty rhetoric to disarm a true weapon 
in the war on terror.
  The regime is coming to an end, Mr. Speaker, in 49 days.

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