[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6390-6393]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1910
                     THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tipton). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  This is a momentous occasion. The headlines all across the country 
say the same thing: Osama bin Laden has been killed and justice has 
been done. I think everybody ought to celebrate the tenacity of the 
American military and this administration as well as the Bush 
administration for being dedicated to bringing this man to justice for 
the things that he has done not only to the United States but to the 
entire world.
  I would like to start off this Special Order by giving a little bit 
of history of Osama bin Laden and what he has done. In 1990, he started 
criticizing the Saudi regime for allowing the Americans to establish a 
base of operations there. In 1991, he was expelled from Saudi Arabia 
and disenfranchised or disowned by his family. He immediately went out 
and started working to establish al Qaeda, to establish a terrorist 
network that would kill people who didn't agree with his views and to 
terrorize the world until they started acceding to his wishes.
  Let me just read a few of these things, and these are widely 
attributed to al Qaeda, or al Qaeda-inspired groups, which was headed 
by Osama bin Laden.
  In December of 1992, there was a bomb attack that killed two people 
at Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden, Yemen. One hundred U.S. military personnel 
were stationed in the hotel awaiting deployment into Somalia for 
Operation Restore Hope.
  In February of 1993, a 500-kilogram bomb was detonated beneath the 
World Trade Center--we all remember that--in New York City. Six were 
killed and 1,000 were injured.
  In March of 1993, 250 people were killed and 700 injured in a series 
of 13 bomb explosions that took place in Bombay, India.
  In October of 1993, 18 U.S. servicemen were killed in the Black Hawk 
Down incident in Somalia. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for arming 
the Somali factions who battled and killed those U.S. forces.
  In November of 1995, five Americans were killed in the bombing of the 
U.S. military advisory facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
  In June of 1996, 19 U.S. airmen were killed in the bombing of Khobar 
Towers near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
  In November of 1997, 62 people were killed by gunmen in the massacre 
at Luxor in Egypt.
  In August of 1998, 223 people were killed when the U.S. Embassies in 
Kenya and Tanzania were attacked.
  In October of 2000, 17 U.S. sailors aboard the USS Cole were killed 
in a ship-borne suicide bombing while the Cole was docked in Aden, 
Yemen.
  On September 11, 2001, 2,974 Americans and others were killed when 
hijacked planes are flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 
I don't think America will ever forget that day.
  In December of 2001, attempted bombing of an American Airlines flight 
from Paris to Boston by al Qaeda operative Richard Reid, a/k/a the 
Shoe-Bomber.
  In October of 2002, 200 people killed and 240 injured in a series of 
bombings in the tourist district of Kuta, Bali, Indonesia.
  In November of 2003, 57 people killed and 700 injured by four truck 
bombs in Istanbul, Turkey.
  In February 2004, 116 people killed in the bombing and subsequent 
sinking of the ferry SuperFerry 14 in the Philippines.
  In March 2004, 191 people were killed and 2,000 wounded in a bombing 
of the Madrid commuter train system.
  In May of 2004, 22 people killed and 25 injured in attacks on two oil 
industry installations, the Arab Petroleum Investments Corporation 
building and the Petroleum Centre near Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia.
  In July 2005, 56 killed and 700 injured in an attack on the London 
transportation sector. Three bombs were detonated on the London 
Underground and one on a double decker bus.
  In July 2005, 88 killed and 200 injured in a series of bomb blasts in 
the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, located on the southern 
tip of the Sinai Peninsula.
  In November 2005, 60 were killed and hundreds wounded in a suicide 
bomber attack on three hotels in Amman, Jordan.
  In July 2006, 209 killed and 700 injured in a series of seven bomb 
blasts on the Suburban Railway in Mumbai (Bombay) India.
  In April 2007, 33 people killed in twin bombings in Algiers, Algeria.
  In June of 2008, six people killed and several injured in a car bomb 
attack against the Danish Embassy in Pakistan. Al Qaeda issued a 
statement after the bombings claiming that the attack was a response to 
the 2005 publication of the Mohammed cartoons.
  In December 2009, an attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 
253 to Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
  In May 2010, an attempted car bomb in Times Square, New York. Faisal 
Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistan-born resident of Bridgeport, 
Connecticut, admitted attempting the car bombing and said he had 
trained at a Pakistani terrorist training camp.
  In October 2010, an attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound cargo plane. 
Two packages, each containing a bomb consisting of 300 to 400 grams of 
plastic explosives and a detonating mechanism, were found on separate 
cargo planes. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula took responsibility for 
that plot.
  April 28, 2011, 16 killed in a bomb attack on a market in Marrakesh, 
Morocco.
  April 29, 2011, an attempted attack in Germany. Police arrested three 
alleged

[[Page 6391]]

members of al Qaeda who had been planning attacks in the country.
  This is the legacy that Osama bin Laden leaves behind: blood, murder, 
maiming, all across the world because he had radical views that he did 
not believe the rest of the world should not encompass and enjoy. This 
is a terrible tragedy, a terrible thing that occurred in this world by 
one human being. He has been brought to justice now, and we should 
compliment President Bush and President Obama for being tenacious in 
going after this man.
  One of the things--and I will talk about this later after I yield to 
my colleague--that I think should be sent around the world is this 
message: No matter where you go, no matter where you hide, if you're a 
terrorist who attacks the free world, we will come and get you. The 
allied countries who fight terrorism, including the United States, will 
not rest until you're brought to justice. It took us 10 years to get 
Osama bin Laden, but we got him. I want to thank once again President 
Bush for taking the initiative originally and President Obama for 
signing the attack message just a couple of days ago to make sure we 
brought him to justice.
  With that, I would like to yield to my colleague from Indiana's Third 
District for whatever time he may consume.
  Mr. STUTZMAN. I thank my colleague, Congressman Burton, for his 
comments.
  What a momentous day, as he said, that we can all take courage and to 
look to the future, but as well as celebrate the ending of a chapter 
that has caused so much pain and so much fear in the lives of many 
Americans.
  Three weeks after my wife and I had our first born child, our 
American homeland was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001. As 
I held my baby boy, I knew that I had to do something, and ensuring the 
future security of my two sons is the reason I ran for the U.S. 
Congress.
  The terrorist attacks on 9/11 tested our security, our defense, and 
our fortitude in protecting our country, but we have not stood idly by. 
For nearly 10 years now, our American soldiers have given their lives 
every day in Operation New Dawn, Operation Enduring Freedom, and now 
Operation Odyssey Dawn to protect our Nation and to secure justice. 
Their service demands respect and admiration.

                              {time}  1920

  Last night, justice was served. bin Laden has been the leader and the 
symbol of al Qaeda for more than 20 years, continually plotting attacks 
against the United States and its allies.
  The word ``Qaeda'' means foundation or base. Osama bin Laden was the 
head of this foundation, the face of terrorism around the world, a 
foundation upon which its members expected to erect a vigorous, 
widespread network spreading terror around the world.
  Well, folks, we have beheaded their foundation. We have beheaded al 
Qaeda. And should they continue, we will be glad to bring justice and 
help them join their leader once again if they so choose.
  We must continue to fight. Our third President, Thomas Jefferson, 
said this: ``Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.''
  We must use our strength and cultivate our relationships with the 
people around the world to ensure we take a stand against cruel 
dictatorships, tyranny and radical Islam.
  As I work with Congress and military commanders, I will fight to 
honor those who have died to secure our freedom because they deserve 
our utmost respect, and we should only be so grateful.
  I congratulate the men and the women of our military and intelligence 
communities who have devoted their lives to this mission. For this, our 
soldiers have America's boundless gratitude.
  I also want to commend and congratulate President Obama and President 
Bush for their determination and their willingness to continue the 
fight, to pursue Osama bin Laden, who has been the eluding terrorist, 
the face of terrorism around this world. And today, freedom has been 
victorious.
  I am honored to represent the people of Indiana's Third District and 
am proud of Indiana's 14,700 members of the Indiana Army and Air 
National Guard. It is the dedication of these men and women and their 
families who have brought the leader of al Qaeda to justice and will 
continue to bring justice to those who seek to destroy freedom and 
destroy America.
  As Winston Churchill once said: We sleep safe in our beds because 
rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would 
do us harm.
  So, Mr. Speaker, today is one of those days that I didn't know that I 
would ever see, but stand here knowing that we have been victorious, 
but also know that the fight in front of us is not over with; that we 
will continue to be vigilant; that we will support our troops, our men 
and our women, our Commander-in-Chief in this fight on terrorism.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. I thank my good friend, Congressman Stutzman, 
for his remarks, and I really appreciate you taking your time to come 
down here tonight.
  Congressman Stutzman talked a little bit about the military, and I 
really appreciate that because we have thousands, hundreds of thousands 
of men and women in the military defending our freedoms all around the 
world, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and we have them in Germany and we 
have them in Korea. We have them in bases all around the world making 
sure that the freedoms we enjoy today and tonight will be there 
tomorrow for us and our kids and our grandkids.
  But tonight I'd like to read a little bit of an article that was 
written just yesterday by a fellow named Marc Ambinder with the 
National Journal. And I think it's really well done, and it points out 
all the hard work that went into going after Osama bin Laden.
  The team that killed Osama bin Laden were members of the 
counterterrorism unit for the Navy, known as the Navy SEAL Team 6. It's 
a highly elusive group that was developed in the 1980s to rescue 
American hostages in Iran. They exist outside the military protocol and 
engage in operations that are at the highest level of classification. 
The fact that Team 6 is front page news today is a measure of how 
important the publicity about bin Laden's killing is to the U.S., 
because normally you don't hear about these guys.
  The President gave the order on Friday morning for the operation to 
pursue bin Laden. The strike began early Sunday morning, at the Ghazi 
Air Base in Pakistan, the MH-60 helicopters made their way to Osama bin 
Laden's tightly guarded compound, which is 70 miles from the center of 
Islamabad.
  The helicopter carrying the team of SEALs malfunctioned. Can you 
imagine that? They're over their target and the helicopter stops 
working. As it hovered outside the high walls, the pilot gently landed 
inside the walls of the 3-story condo, but he couldn't get the 
helicopter going again.
  And yet the assault team disembarked to raid the massive, walled 
compound, prepared to take bin Laden dead or alive, even though they 
knew there was a chance they wouldn't have a ride back. Their lives 
were at risk, and yet they went ahead and carried out their mission.
  Bin Laden was discovered using women as human shields as American 
forces fired at him. One of the women was his wife. Bin Laden was shot 
in the face by the SEALs during a firefight after resisting capture. 
Three other males were killed along with bin Laden. One of them was his 
adult son.
  With the team still in the compound, the commander on the ground told 
a remote commander that they had found bin Laden. The Special Forces 
blew up the malfunctioned chopper, helicopter, then escaped in a 
reinforcement close to 4:15 p.m., just 40 minutes after they landed.
  The West Wing staff worked most of the day on the operation. 
President Obama joined senior national security officials in the 
Situation Room that afternoon as the firefight was monitored.
  Leon Panetta, one of our old colleagues here, was in his conference

[[Page 6392]]

room at the CIA headquarters, which he had turned into a conference 
center to give him constant contact with the tactical leaders of the 
strike team. And I want to compliment Leon as well. I hope he's paying 
attention to this.
  Less than 12 hours after the raid, bin Laden's body was taken to the 
aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson, and he was buried in the North 
Arabian Sea overnight. A DNA match from the remains confirmed that bin 
Laden was dead at age 54.
  And of course President Obama made the official announcement of his 
death from the East Room of the White House at 11:35 p.m., and he said 
what all of us really agree with: ``Justice has been done.''
  But we still have a lot of those guys out there that we have to watch 
out for; and the message needs to be sent again and again today and in 
the days to come that anybody that takes up the mantle of leadership 
like Osama bin Laden, we're going to go after them. And we have the 
elite military people, the Special Forces, the people in the Air Force, 
the Marines, and the Navy SEALs, that will get the job done. They know 
how to do it, and they are willing to risk their lives to get it done.
  Mr. Speaker, I would now like to go through a minute-by-minute 
description of what happened. And once again, it's an article that was 
written on national security by the secret team that killed bin Laden. 
It was an article written for the National Journal by Marc Ambinder, 
and it's very well done. I'd like to go through this with my colleagues 
because it tells almost everything that took place during this 
operation.
  ``The two sides of the Joint Special Operations Command Challenge 
Coin, which was given out by the JSOC Commander, Vice Admiral William 
McRaven.
  ``From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters 
made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 70 miles 
from the center of Islamabad.''

                              {time}  1930

  ``Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, 
along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators 
using highly classified hyperspectral imagers.
  ``After bursts of fire of over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or 
captured. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double 
tap--boom, boom--to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the 
choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical 
failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House 
officials tell National Journal.
  ``Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a 
routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL 
Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development 
Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in 
Virginia as just DevGru.
  ``This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they 
replicated the 1-acre compound. Trial runs were held in early April.
  ``DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an 
extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces 
and special missions units. They report to the President and operate 
worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified 
Presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the 
special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions 
never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British 
aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens 
(a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the 
military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several 
dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several 
years.''
  These are heroic people that go in and risk their lives on a daily 
basis on special operations to kill and destroy the enemy before they 
get to us.
  ``Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual 
manner, but with a cover story--generally, they were killed in training 
accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That's the code.''
  So they don't get the glory that is due them because they know that 
they have gone into a secret mission that cannot be exposed, and they 
risk their lives defending this country. And many of them will never be 
known, but they fought and died to save us all.
  ``How did the helicopters elude the Pakistani air defense network? 
Did they spoof transponder codes? Were they painted and tricked out 
with Pakistan Air Force equipment? If so--and we may never know--two 
other JSOC units, the Technical Application Programs Office and the 
Aviation Technology Evaluation Group, were responsible. These truly are 
the silent squirrels, never getting public credit and not caring one 
whit. Since 9/11, the JSOC units and their task forces have become the 
U.S. government's most effective and lethal weapon against terrorists 
and their networks, drawing plenty of unwanted, and occasionally 
unflattering, attention to themselves in the process.''
  When things don't go exactly right, they get criticized, even though 
they are going in and risking their lives without being glorified or 
being well-known. And yet, when something goes wrong, they are 
criticized, but they rarely get the credit that's due them.
  ``JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command 
has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny 
and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its 
interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition''--
and I don't believe that's the case. I would take issue with this part 
of the article, because I never did think waterboarding was torture. I 
think it was a system that was used to get information that would save 
us from terrorists, and that waterboarding may very well have led to 
the information that got Osama bin Laden a couple of days ago--``and 
the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's 
has been blurred.
  ``But Sunday's operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and 
JSOC work well together. Sometimes intelligence needs to be developed 
rapidly, to get inside the enemy's operational loop. And sometimes it 
needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were a delicate bacteria in a 
petri dish.
  ``In an interview at CIA headquarters 2 weeks ago, a senior 
intelligence official said the two proud groups of American secret 
warriors had been `deconflicted and basically integrated'--finally--10 
years after 9/11. Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by 
five senior administration officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the 
intelligence that led to bin Laden's location. A memo from CIA Director 
Leon Panetta sent Sunday night provides some hints of how the 
information was collected and analyzed. In it, he thanked the National 
Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for 
their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or 
Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan's 
knowledge is a secret. The NGIA makes the military's maps but also 
develops their pattern recognition software--no doubt used to help 
establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say `with high 
probability' that bin Laden and his family were living there.
  ``Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in 
Rosslyn, Virginia. Where the National Counterterrorism Center tends to 
focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first 
disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active 
`kinetic'--or lethal--counterterrorism missions abroad.
  ``That the Center could be stood up under the nose of some of the 
Nation's most senior intelligence officials without their full 
knowledge testifies to the power and reach of JSOC, whose size has 
tripled since 9/11. The command now includes more than 4,000 soldiers 
and civilians. It has its own intelligence division, which may or may 
not have been involved in last night's effort, and has gobbled up a 
number of free-floating Defense Department entities that allowed it to 
rapidly acquire, test, and field new technologies.

[[Page 6393]]

  ``Under a variety of standing orders, JSOC is involved in more than 
50 current operations spanning a dozen countries, and its units, 
supported by so-called `white' or acknowledged, special operations 
entities like Rangers, Special Forces battalions, SEAL teams, and Air 
Force special ops units from the larger Special Operations Command, are 
responsible for most of the `kinetic' actions in Afghanistan.
  ``Pentagon officials are conscious of the enormous stress that 10 
years of war have placed on the command. JSOC resources are heavily 
taxed by the operational tempo in Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials 
have said. The current commander, Vice Admiral William McRaven, and 
Major General Joseph Votel, McRaven's nominated replacement, have been 
pushing to add people and intelligence, surveillance, and 
reconnaissance technology to areas outside the war theater where al 
Qaeda and its affiliates continue to thrive.
  ``Earlier this year, it seemed that the elite units would face the 
same budget pressures that the entire military was experiencing. Not 
anymore. The military found a way, largely by reducing contracting 
staff and borrowing others from Special Operations Command, to add 50 
positions to the JSOC. And Votel wants to add several squadrons to the 
`Tier One' units--Delta and the SEALs.'' And, boy, he will have my vote 
for that.
  ``When General Stanley McChrystal became JSOC's commanding general in 
2004, he and his intelligence chief, Major General Michael Flynn, set 
about transforming the way the subordinate units analyze and act on 
intelligence. Insurgents in Iraq were exploiting the slow decision loop 
that coalition commanders used, and enhanced interrogation techniques 
were frowned upon after the Abu Ghraib scandal. But the hunger for 
actionable tactical intelligence on insurgents was palpable.''
  I want to add one more time, and this was not in the article, but I 
really believe when we are talking about dealing with terrorists and 
getting information that will stop terrorists from attacking us in the 
United States or elsewhere in the world, we ought to use whatever 
techniques that we possibly can to get that information. And I'm not 
talking about torture. Some of the newspaper people and news people 
that we see on television have actually experienced waterboarding on 
television to show how it works, and it was not torture and it is not 
torture, and we ought to use those techniques to make sure we protect 
our homeland and our people here and abroad.
  ``The way JSOC solved this problem remains a carefully guarded 
secret, but people familiar with the unit suggest that McChrystal and 
Flynn introduced hardened commandos to basic criminal forensic 
techniques and then used highly advanced and still-classified 
technology to transform bits of information into actionable 
intelligence.''

                              {time}  1940

  ``One way they did this was to create forward-deployed fusion cells, 
where JSOC units were paired with intelligence analysts from the NSA 
and the NGA. Such analysis helped the CIA to establish with a high 
degree of probability that Osama bin Laden and his family were hiding 
in that compound where he was hit.
  ``These technicians could `exploit and analyze' data obtained from 
the battlefield instantly, using their access to the government's 
various biometric, facial-recognition, and voice-print databases. These 
cells also used highly advanced surveillance technology and computer-
based pattern analysis to layer predictive models of insurgent behavior 
into real-time observations.
  ``The military has begun to incorporate these techniques across the 
services. And Flynn will soon be promoted to a job within the Office of 
the Director of National Intelligence, where he will be tasked with 
transforming the way intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and 
utilized.''
  That article tells just about everything about how this all came 
about and how it was carried out. But the one thing that isn't really 
hit hard enough, in my opinion, is the men and women in the military 
who do the job for us every single day. Sometimes we fight about 
spending in this body. We fight about who gets the money. But the one 
thing we should never fight about is the money that goes to our Armed 
Forces, our men and women who do risk their lives every single day.
  My hat goes off to those who were in the command that got Osama bin 
Laden, and the people, the Navy SEALs that got the job done, even 
though their helicopter failed to work. They went in, 40 of them, and 
risked their lives, knowing that they might not come out. They got 
Osama bin Laden, they got 22 others, they got his body out of there, 
and they got back to freedom without any casualties.
  So my hat goes off to you, Navy SEALs, and to all of those in the 
military who risk their lives every single day protecting and 
preserving our freedoms. And for those Special Ops guys in all the 
branches of the service, well done.

                          ____________________