[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 4621-4622]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           AUTHORITIES ARE CLOSE TO CAPTURING OSAMA BIN LADEN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Kirk) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KIRK. Mr. Speaker, today we have received tantalizing reports 
that Pakistani authorities may be close to arresting Osama bin Laden's 
deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri.
  We do not know if this is true, but we do know that hundreds of 
American men and women in uniform are currently risking their lives as 
part of Operation Mountain Storm to arrest high-level terrorists in the 
critical border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
  This border region was the safe haven for the world's most wanted 
man. Osama bin Laden lived there for many years since his first visit 
to the region during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
  This January, I conducted a mission to this region to review the 
operations of the State Department's terrorist rewards program. This 
program was highly successful in helping the arrest of key 
international criminals important to the United States. The program led 
to the arrest, capture, or death of two-thirds of U.N. war criminals in 
Bosnia. It led to the arrest, prosecution, and execution of Mir Aimal 
Kasi who killed many Americans outside the CIA gate in Virginia. By the 
way, Mr. Kasi was arrested in the very region of Pakistan receiving so 
much attention today. The program also led to the arrest and death of 
Uday and Qusay Hussein, the two Hussein brothers, sons of Saddam 
Hussein.
  As a congressional staffer, I drafted the bill that lifted the 
rewards program from 5 to $25 million and allowed its

[[Page 4622]]

use against U.N. war criminals. Based on my January mission to 
Afghanistan and Pakistan, we found the need for more reforms. We asked 
to raise the award for Osama bin Laden's arrest to $50 million and to 
make the payment of cash rewards more flexible so that in rural 
communities we could provide trucks or farm implements that could be a 
much more motivating factor with rural families.
  In the frontier autonomous tribal region that we are focusing so 
heavily on today, we face a population largely illiterate, very poor 
and speaking the Wasari tribal language. In making these reforms, we 
need the State Department to do media surveys and use more radio and 
TV, which is much more appropriate to communicating with large, 
illiterate communities.
  These ideas would all combine with one other idea: Osama bin Laden 
has slowly been changing his source of financing. He used to depend on 
Wahabi donations, his personal fortune and donations from Europe, but 
those sources of funding have largely dried up under a series of United 
Nations legal orders.
  Today, Osama bin Laden stands as one of the world's number one 
sellers of heroin. Haji Bashir Noorzai of Canada provides him with 
2,000 kilograms of heroin every 8 weeks, giving bin Laden from that 
source alone $28 million a year. In mid-December, the United States 
Navy arrested three dhows in the Arabian Gulf that contained 
methamphetamine, hashish, and heroin worth $10 million, an attempt by 
bin Laden to move from the Pakistani market where he gets $2,000 per 
kilogram of heroin to the United Arab Emirates where he would get 
$10,000 per kilogram.
  Osama bin Laden has more money access to his fortune than ever 
before, and these ideas need to be incorporated into our new bill, H.R. 
3782, the Counter-Terrorist and Narco-Terrorist Rewards Program Act. 
That act just passed the House of Representatives an hour ago by a vote 
of 414 to 0, a monument to bipartisan cooperation on a critical 
national security issue of the United States. The passage of this bill 
was needed, and it is needed more than ever because of the news coming 
from Operation Mountain Storm.
  We need to thank the uniformed men and women of Combined Task Force 
180 and the men and women of U.S. embassies in Islamabad and Kabul and 
other government agencies that are today risking their lives this very 
hour for the arrest of some of the world's most dangerous terrorists.
  I also want to recognize our allies in this battle, the governments 
of Pakistan and Afghanistan. President Musharraf of Pakistan is riding 
a tiger tonight, but he has made the bold step to move against al 
Qaeda, regardless of the political risk. He and his Special Forces team 
are key, key parts of this allied victory against terrorism.
  Mr. Speaker, we may or may not have good news tonight, but we can 
already thank the hundreds of Americans in uniform and out of uniform 
who are so far from home today, but are doing our government's most 
dangerous and important work.

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