[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 15]
[House]
[Page 19764]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       AMERICA IS NOT SAFER TODAY

  (Mr. PALLONE asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, America is not safer today than it was 
before 9/11. The President can continue to deny this fact in speeches 
around the country, but his own intelligence agencies concluded that 
the world is not safer today, and the main reason is the ongoing war in 
Iraq.
  This is not the only proof that we are less safe today than 5 years 
ago. A recent independent Council on Global Terrorism report assigned a 
grade of D-plus to our Nation's efforts in combating Islamic extremism. 
The council concluded that ``there is every sign that radicalization in 
the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.''
  Another report, this one by Foreign Policy Magazine, surveyed our 
Nation's top security experts from across the political spectrum and 
their conclusions that 84 percent said we are losing the war on 
terrorism and 87 percent said the war in Iraq had a negative impact on 
the war on terror.
  Mr. Speaker, it is time that we get back to fighting the real war on 
terror. We need to begin redeploying our troops out of Iraq and 
refocusing our efforts in Afghanistan. How can we defeat the terrorists 
if we have seven times as many troops in Iraq as we do in Afghanistan?

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