[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Pages 24034-24036]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




      PRESERVING STRONG RELATIONS WITH OUR INTERNATIONAL NEIGHBORS

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, among the important issues I wish to 
discuss this morning is an important issue, an international border 
issue with our friends and neighbors in Canada and Mexico, that could 
have severe implications for the social and economic ways of life for 
border communities in my own State of Vermont but all across the 
country.
  In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a number of new 
border security measures have been put in place, all with the express 
goal of preventing another terrorist incident. I worked hard to provide 
balance and needed resources and to ensure that in the intervening 
years we did not focus solely on our southern border. I also have tried 
to convey to the administration and to this body something of the 
special relationship we have with our northern neighbor, Canada.
  It is convenient to forget that most of the 9/11 hijackers entered 
the United States with legal visas. They would not have been stopped at 
any border. Some were on secret watch lists by this Government, but 
they were not being watched. And even later on, the Bush administration 
sent them official letters after they had killed themselves and 
thousands of innocent people in their attacks. The Bush administration 
had them on a watch list but did not watch them. In reaction, after 
these mistakes, the administration has demanded billions of dollars for 
constructing border fences, seeking to develop and to deploy 
surveillance technologies, and adding troops along our borders. Now in 
doing this, we have snared some illicit drug shipments, we have snared 
a few criminals. We have not picked up many terrorists.
  Nobody questions that any country has a right to protect its borders, 
as we do to protect ours, but we should do it sensibly and 
intelligently. Instead, the administration's policy threatens to fray 
the social fabric of countless communities that straddle the border. 
They have needlessly offended our neighbors, they have sacrificed much 
of the traditional good will we have enjoyed, and they have undermined 
our own economy in border States. Local chambers of commerce along the 
border estimate that the costs of the administration's plans will 
amount to hundreds of billions of dollars and, I might say, the loss of 
thousands upon thousands of American jobs.
  I have heard from many Vermonters about problems they have 
encountered at U.S. border crossings, from long traffic backups to 
invasive searches and questions, to inadequate communications from 
Federal authorities about new facilities and procedures. Such a top-
down approach does not work well in interwoven communities along the 
border where people cross daily from one side to the other for jobs, 
shopping, and cultural events.
  I live an hour's drive from the Canadian border. Traditionally in my 
State, as in most border States, people go back and forth all the time. 
Many of us have family members in Canada. We have enjoyed an over 
5,000-mile-long unguarded frontier. Canada has been an important 
trading partner. It has been a friendly neighbor not only to Vermont 
but to the rest of the United States for more than 200 years. It is in 
the best interest of both of our countries to keep those relationships 
as positive and productive as possible. Post 9/11, everyone on both 
sides of the border recognized the potential threat and security needs. 
We have hardened

[[Page 24035]]

security around the U.S. Capitol, hardened it around the White House, 
and built fences near San Diego. But those procedures do not work on 
Canusa Avenue in Beebe Plain, a two-lane road where one side of the 
road is Vermont and the other side is Quebec. That is actually true. 
This is a street, an avenue. On one side, you are in Vermont; on the 
other side, you are in Quebec. What are we going to do, put an enormous 
barrier down the middle of the street? People are used to going back 
and forth to their neighbors to borrow a cup of flour or something such 
as that. Are they going to take two hours to go through some kind of an 
unnecessary, baseless search?
  And we have the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Derby Line, 
VT, and Stanstead, Quebec. The library and opera house is half in Derby 
Line, VT, half in Stanstead, Quebec. It straddles the international 
border. Mr. President, I invite you to come see that some time. It is a 
beautiful piece of architecture.
  That is why I am so troubled by the so-called Western Hemisphere 
Travel Initiatives, which would require individuals from the United 
States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean to present passports or other 
documents proving citizenship before entering the United States. This 
is a dramatic change in the way border crossings have been processed in 
the western hemisphere since the Treaty of Paris set up the 
international boundary to Canada in 1783. That is already costing us 
greatly.
  The Departments of State and Homeland Security have been charged with 
implementing this law. They should be coordinating their efforts with 
our neighbors in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean to ensure a smooth 
transition at our borders. Unfortunately, as I detailed to Secretary 
Rice and Secretary Chertoff on several occasions, there are serious 
problems in the ways in which their agencies have pushed forward with 
implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, before any 
of the necessary technology installation, infrastructure upgrades, or 
training takes place in our border stations. If these critical features 
of deployment are not in place, we are going to see severe delays at 
our border, and law-abiding citizens from the United States, Canada, 
Mexico, and the Caribbean will have great difficulties moving between 
our countries. Most importantly, a hasty implementation without 
assurances that the technology to be used is truly effective can 
actually result in a less secure border.
  Month after month, and despite hearing after hearing, the Department 
of Homeland Security, one of the least functional Departments in our 
Government, and the Department of State has highhandedly rushed to 
impose this new border crossing plan on the America people before they 
are ready with the necessary technology, infrastructure, and training, 
and at every step their rosy assurances to the Congress and the 
American people have been wrong. The administration's record on 
implementing the new passport program is clear, and it has been 
abysmal. Hundreds of Vermonters have been calling my office for 
assistance in salvaging their travel plans. I know that Americans from 
other States have experienced high levels of concern and problems as 
well. We have been doing what we can, passport by passport, but a large 
backlog persists.
  The huge passport backlogs prompted by the launch of DHS's 
requirement for air travel passports earlier this year are just a taste 
of the chaos that is likely next summer when they want to start 
enforcing passport checks at our land and sea borders. DHS, which has 
difficulty implementing most of their programs, said it will be very 
easy; look how well it is working for those who are flying to have the 
passports. They had press conferences, they had announcements, they got 
their talking points in the press on how well it is working. And then, 
within weeks, they had to pull it back. Why? Because it was not 
working. They did not have anything in place to make it work. And that 
is only about 5 to 10 percent of the actual traffic that will go across 
these borders. Well, think what is going to happen next summer when 
they start enforcing passport checks at our land and sea borders. If 
they cannot handle the small percentage, what is it going to be like 
when they have to do it for 100 percent?
  I have been urging the State Department and the Department of 
Homeland Security not to rush into establishing rules and procedures 
that shut our borders to legitimate travel and trade and, instead, work 
with our neighbors, coordinate with our neighbors on security plans 
that might actually work. We can be smarter and more effective, rather 
than arrogantly insulting our traditional friends in Canada and Mexico. 
We have worked with them on joint intelligence operations to identify 
and target terrorists. I would much rather see, instead of wasting tens 
of billions of dollars on a program that is not going to work, lose 
hundreds of billions of dollars in jobs in America, that we spend a 
tiny fraction of that talking about our northern border now, working 
with our friends in Canada, and do a better job of intelligence and 
identifying possible terrorists.
  Unfortunately, my calls and the pleas from border communities from 
Maine to Alaska--for that matter, from California to Texas--have been 
largely ignored. This administration is setting the American people up 
yet again for a fiasco of failure and frustration.
  Since DHS and State keep saying WHTI is a congressionally mandated 
program, they should stop opposing the bicameral and bipartisan flow 
moving through Congress to shift the new requirement to June of 2009. 
They have been warned repeatedly that they are not ready. Even the 
fresh embarrassment of this passport debacle does not humble these 
arrogant purveyors of a failed program. In the memorable words of 
President Bush: They are doing a ``heck of a job.'' The incompetence 
that led to the human and economic tragedy of Katrina and its 
aftermath, a tragedy that has not been rectified for more than 2 years, 
is striking again. By maintaining the fiction that they will be ready 
to implement the largest phase of this program next January, they are 
recklessly risking the travel plans of millions of Americans, but they 
are also risking the economies of scores of States and communities.
  Today is September 10. Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the 
attacks. I remember that day so well, being right here in Washington. 
The administration's failure to prevent those attacks, to connect the 
dots, to take seriously the warnings of Richard Clarke, to listen to 
FBI field agents in Minnesota and Arizona, all because of the 
preeminence of its ideological agenda, is no longer subject to denial. 
Those failures before 9/11 are no excuse to indulge in authoritarian 
excesses now and in the future.
  When we sacrifice our freedoms, Americans lose and the terrorists 
have taken from us what they cannot by force of arms. As we commemorate 
the sacrifices of so many that took place 6 years ago tomorrow, we need 
to rededicate ourselves to American principles and values.
  In the days ahead, the Judiciary Committee will be holding a series 
of hearings into important security matters. Today I am writing to the 
Director of National Intelligence inviting him to join us on September 
25 for a hearing into warrantless surveillance of Americans.
  I am not convinced that the sweeping scope and lack of checks and 
balances in the recently enacted temporary amendment to the Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Act are necessary to address the national 
security concerns the administration had identified. As elected 
representatives of the American people, we need to consider whether 
there are more effective mechanisms to ensure appropriate oversight of 
surveillance involving U.S. persons. We need to restore the proper 
balance in order to maintain our security while preserving the 
constitutional rights of Americans and providing appropriate oversight 
of executive action involving private communications of Americans.
  Just this past weekend, we saw reports indicating that the 
President's surveillance program of Americans was

[[Page 24036]]

much more extensive than he had led us to believe. The New York Times 
reported that the FBI was not just concerned about known or even 
suspected al-Qaida operatives, as the President spokespeople repeated 
over and over since the programs became known in December 2005, but 
with casting a much wider net for information about what they termed a 
``community of interest.'' We need to examine how far this so-called 
link analysis has gone, how far down the daisy chain it has gone, what 
use was made of the private call information, and whether private 
information of innocent Americans has been collected and retained in 
Government databases without any authorization. How many innocent 
Americans who called someone else, who may have had some innocent 
contact with someone else, are now in a Government database and 
suddenly wonder why they didn't get a job promotion or why their child 
wasn't able to get a student loan? It is telling that as this story 
became public--this always happens only when it becomes public--the FBI 
responded by saying that this data is ``no longer being used'' and, of 
course, ``was used infrequently.'' Is the administration nonetheless 
going to prevent Congress from obtaining the information it needs to 
provide appropriate oversight? Will our patriotism be threatened anew 
if Congress seeks to examine the administration's overreaching and 
ineffectiveness? I hope not, but we will have to see. The very first 
hearing we held before the Senate Judiciary Committee this year was on 
data mining. With the leadership shown by Senator Feingold, we have 
passed a reporting requirement on Government data mining. Now we need 
to follow up and get the information we need and exercise oversight 
authority.
  The first week in October, we are looking forward to hearing from 
Professor Jack Goldsmith, who served at a critical juncture in 2004 as 
the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel to the 
Department of Justice. In that capacity, he considered the 
constitutional underpinnings of the President's program of warrantless 
wiretapping and helped lead the way to changes in that clandestine 
surveillance affecting the rights of every single person in this 
Chamber and all other Americans.
  This past week, we were reminded yet again of the need to improve the 
operations of the Terrorist Screening Center, which failed to make 
watch list records of suspected known terrorists available to front-
line screening agents but continues to list the names of innocent 
Americans in its watch list database. I won't go through all of the 
stories that come out of some of these things: a year-old child having 
to get a passport to fly and prove they are not a 45-year-old terror 
suspect or one of the most senior Members of the Senate being blocked 
10 times from taking a flight he has been taking for 30 or 40 years 
because he is on a terrorist watch list. Somehow, they got the names 
mixed up. We saw a recent Government Accountability Office report on 
the Department of Homeland Security with its failing grades, having 
failed to achieve half its performance expectations since 2003. If you 
or I in college were to get a 50 or less on all our exams, we would be 
out on our ear in a moment. This is what we have seen from the 
Department of Homeland Security. We heard from an independent 
commission and former military leaders who indicated the Iraqi police 
force is so riddled with corruption and sectarianism that they should 
be disbanded, and after 4 years and hundreds of millions of American 
taxpayer dollars, we should start over from scratch. We can't even find 
half the weapons we have given them until they turn up in terrorist 
hands. But we send these hundreds of millions of dollars to the Iraqi 
police force and we tell the police in America: We have to cut out the 
COPS Program. We don't have money for our American police. We can't 
afford to improve our American police because we have to send hundreds 
of millions of dollars to the Iraqi police. If I have to call a police 
officer, I am going to call an American police officer. I would like to 
know that some of that money was spent on them.
  This past week also provided a reminder of the need to refocus our 
efforts on bin Laden. Six years after 9/11, he has not been brought to 
justice but continues to taunt us. He should never have been allowed to 
escape when our forces had him cornered in Tora Bora. One of the 
greatest mistakes of this administration--not counting the great 
mistakes made before 9/11--was withdrawing our special forces and not 
providing the support needed. That was another mistake driven by 
ideology. Think how much better it would be today had they actually 
succeeded in the one thing the whole Congress agreed on--to go and get 
bin Laden. They failed. The bipartisan leaders of the 9/11 Commission 
are right that the occupation of Iraq has provided a recruiting bonanza 
for al-Qaida and a costly distraction. Iraq, a country that didn't have 
al-Qaida, is now a recruiting bonanza for them. We need to be smarter 
and more focused in countering terrorism.
  How many costly mistakes are the American people going to be asked to 
bear? I hope all Senators, Republicans and Democrats, will join 
together in the days ahead as we did 6 years ago, when so many of us 
stood on this floor and joined hands to do the things that needed to be 
done. The American people deserve a government that works and that 
works for them. American freedom and values need to be defended and 
reinforced, not mortgaged to fleeting and ill-considered promises of 
security.

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