[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 8772-8774]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       AMERICAN HOMELAND SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) is 
recognized for half the time until midnight as the designee of the 
minority leader.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, for much of our history the United States 
has not feared a direct attack. The vast expanses of the Atlantic and 
Pacific Oceans allowed our young Nation to survive and thrive safe from 
the predation of the great powers of the 19th Century, and the growth 
of our military power in the 20th Century reinforced the belief that no 
hostile power could strike us here at home.
  Only the British, nearly two centuries ago during the War of 1812 
have mounted a sustained military campaign on American soil. Japan 
attacked both Hawaii and Alaska during World War II, but was unable to 
carry out a major ground offensive against the United States.
  Our relative physical isolation fostered a sense of the 
invulnerability of the American people. Our borders with Canada and 
Mexico were relatively open, and we traditionally welcomed foreigners 
to our shores both as visitors and immigrants.
  Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, American policymakers viewed 
terrorism as primarily a Middle Eastern and European problem. Even when 
the targets were Americans the acts themselves took place abroad. The 
hijacking of TWA 847, the Rome and Vienna airport massacres, the La 
Belle discotheque bombing, the seizure of the Achille Lauro and the 
bombing of Pan Am 103 resulted in hundreds of American casualties, but 
they all took place overseas.
  This reinforced the deeply held belief that terrorists would not 
strike in this country. As a result, our Government at all levels was 
not configured to deal with terrorism, nor was the phrase ``homeland 
security'' part of our national lexicon.
  During the 1990s terrorism came to America. The 1993 truck bombing of 
the World Trade Center began to rouse us from our complacency, and the 
Oklahoma City bombing 2 years later shocked Americans into the 
realization that mass casualty terrorism could happen here.
  The fact that the Oklahoma City bombing was an act of home-grown 
terrorists, however, mitigated the sense of urgency that should have 
spurred Congress and the executive branch to take serious action to 
prepare for an act of international terrorism on our shores.
  So, Mr. Speaker, our Nation did not see the gathering clouds for what 
they were, and America remained complacent. The September 11, 2001 
attacks shattered that sense of security. Through the tears and their 
anger the American people demanded action. And the President and 
Congress promised swift and comprehensive measures to safeguard our 
Nation.
  In the 4\1/2\ years since 9/11, the Federal Government has undergone 
a massive reorganization centered on the creation of the Department of 
Homeland Security, and a reorganization of the American intelligence 
community.
  Government buildings and other high-value targets are now ringed by 
concrete barriers. Aviation security has been Federalized, foreign 
visitors are routinely fingerprinted and photographed upon entry into 
the United States. Law enforcement has been granted greater authority 
to monitor the activities of people it considers potential terrorists.
  But to what end? Are these measures and hundreds of others making us 
safer? The answer, Mr. Speaker, is that in some ways we are safer now 
than we were on September 11. In other ways we are not safer. And we 
are not nearly as safe as we should be and as we could be.
  Numerous commissions and investigations at the Federal, State and 
local level, as well as a multitude of private studies have pointed to 
broad systemic and other flaws in our homeland security program.
  Tonight I have a message for the American people. The Democrats have 
a plan to better secure our homeland. Our plan is tough and smart and 
it is comprehensive.
  This plan is part of an overall effort to reconfigure America's 
security for the 21st Century, a plan that we call Real Security. 
Several weeks ago Members of our party from both the House and the 
Senate, Minority Leader Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Reid, and others 
unveiled a comprehensive blueprint to better protect America and to 
restore our Nation's position of international leadership.
  Our plan, Real Security, was devised with the assistance of a broad 
range of experts, former military officers, retired diplomats, law 
enforcement personnel, homeland security experts and others, who helped 
identify key areas where current policies have failed and where new 
ones were needed.

                              {time}  2315

  In a series of six Special Orders, my colleagues and I have been 
sharing with the American people our vision for a more secure America. 
The plan has five pillars, and each of our Special Order hours has been 
addressing them in turn.
  The first, building a military for the 21st century. The second, the 
steps to winning the war on terror. Third, protecting our homeland. 
Fourth, a way forward in Iraq. And, fifth, energy independence for 
America.
  Three weeks ago, we discussed the first pillar of our plan, building 
a military for the 21st century. We discussed the need to rebuild our 
state-of-the-art military, to provide the best equipment and training 
to our troops, to assure accurate intelligence and a strategy for 
success, to build a GI bill of rights for the 21st century, and to 
strengthen the National Guard.
  Last week, we discussed a comprehensive plan to win the war on terror 
which focused on a wide range of strategies to destroy the threat posed 
by Islamic radicalism. We outlined steps to destroy al Qaeda and finish 
the job in Afghanistan, to double our special forces and improve 
intelligence. We talked about how we will eliminate terrorist breeding 
grounds, the preventative diplomacy and new international leadership 
that must be brought to the cause in the war on terror; our goal of 
securing loose nuclear materials by 2010, probably the most urgent 
national security threat we face and stopping the nuclear weapons 
development in Iran and North Korea.
  In the coming weeks we will be discussing a new course in Iraq to 
make sure that 2006 is a year of significant transition to full Iraqi 
sovereignty, with the Iraqis assuming primary responsibility for 
securing and governing their country with the responsible deployment of 
U.S. forces. Democrats will insist that Iraqis make the political 
compromises necessary to unite their country, defeat the insurgency, 
promote regional diplomacy, and strongly encourage our allies and other 
nations to play a constructive role. Our security will remain 
threatened as long as we remain dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
  The fifth pillar and the one with the far-reaching ramifications for 
our country and the world is to achieve energy independence for America 
by 2020.

[[Page 8773]]

  The real pillar of security that I will be addressing tonight with my 
colleague David Scott, the gentleman from Georgia, is the one that most 
directly touches on the lives of ordinary Americans. Since 9/11, the 
lives of Americans have been changed by the new reality of the need to 
secure the United States and the American people here at home. As I 
have just said, most experts have concluded that there are huge gaps in 
our preparations and that we need a new strategy to secure America. 
Tonight, we will introduce you to our plan.
  When Democrats are in charge, we will immediately implement the 
recommendations of the independent bipartisan 9/11 Commission, 
including securing national borders, ports, airports, and mass transit 
systems. We will screen 100 percent of our cargo bound for the U.S. in 
ships and airplanes at the point of origin, and secure and safeguard 
America's nuclear and chemical plants, its food, and water supplies. We 
will prevent the outsourcing of critical components of our national 
security infrastructure such as our ports, our airports, and our mass 
transit. We will provide our firefighters, emergency medical workers, 
police officers, and other workers on the front lines with the 
training, the staffing, the equipment and the cutting-edge technology 
that they need. And we will protect America from the biological 
terrorism and pandemics including the avian flu by investing in public 
health infrastructure and training public health workers.
  Providing real homeland security requires taking a pragmatic and 
comprehensive approach that uses resources to effectively maximize 
security and balances our offensive and defensive efforts. At any given 
time, we have to make hard choices about how to spend our national 
security dollars. The Democratic plan directs resources to those areas 
that minimize the risk of a terrorist attack. We rejected the reactive 
mentality that too often plagues the Federal bureaucracy of planning 
against the last attack. Under real security, we will integrate our 
foreign and domestic security efforts, balancing the projection of 
power abroad with securing the country at home. Central to this will be 
the implementations of the recommendations of the
9/11 Commission.
  This commission was one of the most effective bipartisan commissions 
in our Nation's history. It had access to some of the most experienced 
professionals and influential experts on homeland security. The 
commissioners weighed a wide range of issues, including emergency 
preparedness, transportation, critical infrastructure, and first 
responders and made sensible and sweeping recommendations to the 
administration and to Congress.
  Unfortunately, the administration's performance on implementing these 
recommendations has been unimpressive. In fact, in December of last 
year the 9/11 Commission Public Discourse Project, made up of the 
members of the commission, issued a report card on its progress. The 
report card was filled with Cs, Ds, and Fs for the administration's 
implementation of the 9/11 recommendations.
  In a statement accompanying the report card, Chairman Thomas Kean, a 
Republican, and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, said, ``Many 
obvious steps that the American people assume have been completed have 
not been. Some of these failures are shocking.''
  What we have seen over the last 4 years, Mr. Speaker, has been a 
failure of leadership and a failure of initiative.
  I would now like to yield time to my colleague, a leader on national 
security issues, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).
  Mr. SCOTT of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. As always, 
it is indeed a pleasure to join you on the floor of our very 
distinguished Congress of the United States to address what is without 
a doubt the most pressing issue facing the American people, and that is 
security of our Nation, national security, homeland security.
  I think it is very important for us to make the first step, to show 
that we as Democrats are indeed not only strong on security, but we are 
the stronger party on security.
  Our legacy, our history is rich. We have built this military all the 
way through Democratic Presidents, from World War II with Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt, through the Korean War with Harry Truman, through all 
of the crises that we have had with Lyndon Johnson, with John 
Fitzgerald Kennedy; and with Bill Clinton leaving this Nation with a 
tremendous surplus and built a military that was capable of moving and 
being able to handle any threat in the world.
  But then 9/11 came and then President Bush's response. And I am here 
to say tonight that the American people deserve much better than what 
we have gotten in that response from President Bush and this 
Republican-led Congress. Let us review for a moment 5 years.
  Five years ago, 9/11 took place. And what has happened since that 
time? Can we say we are safer? Are our ports safer today? Obviously 
they are not, for not only do you and I and the rest of America know 
that only 5 percent of our cargo is being checked, the whole world 
does. The President's response to checking our ports was to turn the 
security over to a company that was owned by a country, the United Arab 
Emirates. That was one of only three countries in the world that 
recognize the Taliban as the ruling authority in Afghanistan.
  At a time when our young men and women were dying and are dying and 
putting their lives on the line fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, 
our President, this administration, so cavalierly says let these people 
guard our ports, a nation that we had from our intelligence that proved 
to be the central banking process that handled the financing of al 
Qaeda and other terrorists coming through that country; yet this was 
the country that owned the company Dubai Ports to handle security at 
our ports, a country that we know from our intelligence that was the 
cross-trading ground for shipping nuclear material, building fusion 
material into Iran, who has subsequently said they want to knock Israel 
off the face of the Earth and then turn and do the same to the great 
Satan, the United States of America. That has been that response on the 
port security.
  And as Democrats have tried to do time and time again since then, to 
rein that in, joined by Republicans, we were successful in defeating 
that move, that very foolish and unwise move made by the President and 
this administration. And then, as we turn then to one of the worst 
disasters, perhaps the worst natural disaster in the history of this 
country, the very first opportunity for this Nation to be responsive to 
the major threat to homeland security, when Hurricane Katrina rolled 
in, another disturbing, disappointing, mismanagement, incompetence, and 
failure of the worst kind that resulted in the loss of over 2,000 
American lives, billions and billions of dollars of loss and damage, 
farms and crops out of place, energy costs zooming, all because of slow 
mismanagement that we have not been able to recapture our place to this 
day.
  FEMA, the lead organization in homeland security, a total F in 
response. And right to this day, exactly 14 days before the next 
hurricane season begins, we do not even have not just an executive 
director of FEMA, we don't even have a regional director of FEMA in the 
Atlanta region, my home base, in the region which will be most 
devastated by a natural disaster and the hurricanes.
  And in that region, while I am at it, the response has been, even to 
reorganizing our military, even to realignment of our military bases, 
to take the primary base that trains, that deploys all of the National 
Guard and first responders in the event of a terrorist attack or a 
hurricane threat, a hurricane hitting this country at Fort Gillam. 
Instead of responding and building that base up, this administration 
comes in and recommends that that base be closed. And yet when Katrina 
hit, where did they have to turn? The only bright spot we had in the 
whole response to Katrina was to come and take our first responder 
commander, General Honore, and dispatch him down to the scene. Total 
mismanagement in every single aspect of response to our homeland 
security.

[[Page 8774]]

  Now here we are with a great threat to our borders, which, quite 
honestly, is perhaps the single most aspect of our own threat to not 
just homeland security but our national security, untold numbers, 
thousands of undocumented illegal immigrants sneaking into this country 
putting extraordinary downward pressure on our wage system, and 
providing in a way a very serious threat to the basic social services 
infrastructure of this country.
  But it just didn't happen overnight. Where has this administration 
been? Why are the American people so upset? Why are the polls so low in 
the face of these Republicans and this administration? It is obvious: 
slow response, mismanagement. And nowhere is it more exacting and 
exemplary than with the response to Katrina, a threat to our homeland, 
and a response to our border security. And that is what is happening.
  What is the response? Now it is because in this budget that they get 
on the floor and they are clapping about that they passed, a budget 
that cut homeland security by over $6 billion, a budget that would not 
fund the 1,000 border agents that the 9/11 Commission and a bipartisan 
group of us Democrats and Republicans in this Congress have 
recommended. And then to take and overtax the overextended National 
Guard that has been overextended in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in responding 
to our hurricanes, and to say now we are going to put them on the 
border. Too little, too late of the wrong type. And how hypocritical.

                              {time}  2330

  How hypocritical to take 6,000 of our National Guard and put them on 
the border, but to cut the funding for an additional 1,000 to 2,000 
border agents that actually need to be there? The American people want 
some answers to that. That is not an adequate response. America 
deserves better, and I assure you that Democrats are going to give them 
better.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia for his 
comments and for all of his work in this area.
  The gentleman highlighted the lapses that we saw in homeland security 
with Katrina, which I think were all the more graphic with the fact 
that we could literally see Katrina coming. Now, with infinite ways to 
perpetrate a terrorist attack, we may not see it coming in exactly the 
form it takes, and if we were not better prepared as a Nation for the 
hurricanes we could see coming, it gives me great concern about those 
attacks we do not foresee with that degree of precision.
  These failures in the preparation and response to Katrina were also, 
I think, the result of a failure of initiative. The report of the 
bipartisan congressional committee that investigated the response to 
Katrina, in fact, was entitled ``A Failure of Initiative.'' The report 
cataloged a series of errors in judgment and in planning, including a 
failure to prepare for a catastrophic event, a failure to execute the 
National Response Plan, a failure to evacuate New Orleans and other 
vulnerable areas, and a lack of information sharing and coordination. 
We were not prepared for a natural disaster that gave us several days 
of advance notice. We are even less likely to be prepared for a 
disaster, natural or man-made, that strikes us suddenly.
  Under our Real Security plan, the Department of Homeland Security 
would develop a comprehensive national emergency preparedness and 
response plan that spells out the responsibility for government and 
private agencies at every level. While the Department of Homeland 
Security had a response plan before Katrina, it lacked the details 
about coordinating various agencies and jurisdictions, and it was not 
treated seriously even within the bureaucracy.
  For example, a review by the Joint Chiefs of Staff found that the 
National Response Plan did not even specify the role of the Pentagon 
and other Federal agencies in assisting local leaders during disasters.
  In addition, a GAO report found that the National Guard units that 
responded to Katrina had only 34 percent of their authorized equipment, 
which also slowed their response.
  These, I think, are some of the failures my colleague from Georgia 
alluded to, and these are also I think incumbent on the party in power 
in Congress to do its oversight, to make sure that we are prepared, to 
hold the executive accountable.
  We have not done that oversight. We did not do it before Katrina. We 
have not done it adequately since, and under Real Security, it not only 
requires organizational changes within the executive, but also requires 
Congress to step up to its responsibilities, would you say?
  Mr. SCOTT of Georgia. Absolutely, and I will tell you another example 
of the lack of response as well.
  When we look at our military and the overextension of our military, 
all of our generals are saying that, and we have got to listen to them. 
They are the ones that we have in place to be able to run the military 
and be able to execute our programs, to maintain and keep us safe.
  Now, we in this Congress, for example, have just allocated the money 
and the space for 17,000 additional National Guardsmen, and what did 
this administration do? Cut it, at a time when we have our National 
Guard so overextended.
  As you have been, I have been to Iraq and as I have been to 
Afghanistan, and I might say at the outset here that our soldiers are 
doing an extraordinary job. My hat's off to them, and it is just a 
pleasure to just get on a plane and fly over there into Kuwait and into 
Baghdad as we have done and into Afghanistan and Kabul and to see them 
do their job under most extraordinary circumstances and the sacrifices 
that their families are making.
  But this administration and this Republican-led Congress, to not fund 
them at the levels that the military leadership is asking us to and to 
have them go on two and three tours of duty and then come back here and 
to shortchange them in their training operations, that they took 2 
weeks periods of times in rotation, to go and provide and do paperwork 
on the border security, quite honestly sometimes feels insulting to me, 
and our military deserves better. We have got to strengthen our 
military.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlemen, and these issues and 
the others we will continue to explore in the coming weeks as we 
further amplify Real Security.
  Let me just end on this note. I had lunch with one of the Guardsmen 
from my district who served in the war in Iraq. He described to me how 
they had to put sheets of plywood and sandbags in to fill the doorways 
in their humvees because they did not have up-armored vehicles for 
their runs. The fact that our Guard have to go to those lengths, part 
of the Real Security plan that I outlined earlier was making sure our 
troops have the best equipment possible. We have not lived up to that 
standard. That is going to change under Real Security.
  Mr. SCOTT of Georgia. Or you go into junk yards, they are scrapping 
metal just to give them some body armor. That is despicable. That is 
never going to happen again. We are going to make sure of that.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

                          ____________________