[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6683-6685]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 SECURITY THREATS TO THE UNITED STATES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I don't know if my dear friend from 
California has seen this, but following up on his comments, this is 
part of the front page of the Army Times, April 28, and it says here:

       Thousands more will be forced out; staff sergeants now on 
     hit list.

  It talks about the career killers, but because of the cuts to our 
military, we are forcing out thousands and thousands of patriots who 
wanted to make a career of the United States military. I, along with my 
friend from California, don't necessarily think it is a good idea to be 
saying: look, if you are illegally in the country, all you have to do 
is go displace yet another American patriot and take their job in the 
military, force them out into the civilian sector, where our United 
States military veterans have a much higher unemployment rate than the 
general population.
  That is not a good idea. It is not fair to our patriots, and it 
should not be something that this Congress passes, to once again not 
only run out patriots who wanted to make the United States military a 
career, but force them out with illegal immigrants using their job, 
taking their jobs, forcing them into an unemployment sector, where 
their unemployment rates are so very high. They shouldn't be high.
  People should be willing to hire veterans. They have phenomenal work 
ethics, or they wouldn't have been in the military, unless they got 
bumped out early for not working; but otherwise, from my 4 years in the 
Army, right after we turned to being a volunteer Army, it was a very 
difficult time. Our military was not appreciated.
  I went through officer basic at Fort Riley, Kansas, and it was a 
standing order not to wear your uniform off post because of hatred for 
the military, and if you got caught by yourself in uniform, there might 
be a gang that would beat you up. It happened, so it was a standing 
order. You couldn't wear your uniform off post because of potential 
violence upon our military by American citizens.
  It has blessed my heart to see America begin again to appreciate 
those who answer the call of their country, serve their country, and do 
so honorably and well in the United States military, which should 
result in our promises to our military and promises that, to some, 
helped induce them into the military of good health care, good 
veterans' care.
  Now, I was only in 4 years and don't have a disability. I have never 
been provided any VA assistance or health care, but for those who need 
it, deserve it, were promised it, we can't be having a socialized 
medicine system that ends up being like most socialized medicine 
systems become; and the way ObamaCare will eventually lead this country 
into being, with regard to health care, you get put on lists.
  Socialized medicine doesn't go broke because you get put on lists, 
and you die waiting for your procedure in sufficient numbers, at least 
we have people die who won't get the procedure, or perhaps they need a 
hip or a knee, pacemaker, or whatever it is, they don't get them 
because they are having to wait in line.
  We shouldn't do that to our Nation. We should repeal ObamaCare 
outright before it takes us there, but for the sake of this country, we 
can't continue betraying our veterans and not ensuring that they have 
the best health care that is available.
  If VA clinics or hospitals aren't doing the trick, let's give them a 
card that lets them walk into any health care facility in the Nation 
and get the best care we have got, and let's keep our promise to them 
that we will take care of that.
  My dear friend, Andrew C. McCarthy, has an article out in National 
Review Online today. He posted it at 4 a.m. I know Andy is up that time 
in the morning because, sometimes, we exchange emails at that time in 
the morning.
  He is a brilliant lawyer, constitutional scholar, historian, and a 
patriot himself, who was the lead prosecutor in ensuring that the 
planner, the one most responsible for the first World Trade Center 
bombing in 1993, when President Bill Clinton was in office, he made 
sure he was convicted.
  If one actually looks at comments by the brother of that al Qaeda 
leader, you find references to his brother saying: hey, you know, there 
is violence, there is going to be a lot more violence against the U.S., 
but I will be glad to help negotiate this thing if we can get release 
of The Blind Sheikh.
  Morsi, who became president of Egypt, a Muslim brother, he made 
clear, before he was even elected, that he wanted to secure the release 
of The Blind Sheikh who plotted, planned, carried out the first bombing 
of the World Trade Center, which we can be thankful that it didn't 
result in more death and more damage.
  We should have learned a lesson from that. We didn't learn it. We 
continued, under the Clinton administration, to treat that like it was 
some civilian crime, instead of what it actually was, an act of war. As 
an act of war, it should have stirred more of a response.
  So perhaps there was someone in the White House after the World Trade 
Center was bombed in 1993, who wondered out loud within the White 
House: well, what difference at this point does it make why they bombed 
the World Trade Center or what we might have done to provide more 
security? What difference at this point does it make?
  Because perhaps, if that kind of thinking were not in the White House 
during the 1990s, perhaps we could have looked more closely at the 
causes of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and looked more closely 
at the forces behind it and determined, wow, this is really a group 
that is at war with the United States, radical Islamists have been at 
war with the United States since 1979.
  We just didn't know it. There was a war going on, but it was one-
sided because the other side, the United States,

[[Page 6684]]

didn't know there was a war, so they weren't fighting a war. They just 
kept retreating.
  In 1979, an act of war occurred in an attack against our embassy. The 
man, the Ayatollah Khomeini, radical Islamist who became the head of 
Iran, that President Jimmy Carter welcomed as a man of peace, that one 
of the top advisers right now in our Homeland Security Department spoke 
up for as a featured speaker at the Ayatollah Khomeini man of vision 
ceremony that was held some years back in this country.
  Now, this featured speaker on behalf of the man of vision, the 
Ayatollah Khomeini, he is advising the Homeland Security Department; 
not only that, the FBI in 2011 gave him their highest civilian award. 
Some people do not understand there is still a war going on. Some in 
this administration and some in the Senate and some in the House may 
refuse to recognize it, but there is still a war going on.
  Mr. McCarthy writes:

       Here is the main point: The rioting at the American embassy 
     in Cairo was not about the anti-Muslim video. As argued here 
     repeatedly, the Obama administration's ``Blame the Video'' 
     story was a fraudulent explanation for the September 11, 
     2012, rioting in Cairo every bit as much as it was a 
     fraudulent explanation for the massacre in Benghazi several 
     hours later.
       Once you grasp this well-hidden fact, the Obama 
     administration's dereliction of duty in connection with 
     Benghazi become much easier to see, but let's begin with Jay 
     Carney's performance in Wednesday's exchange with the White 
     House press corps, a new low in insulting the intelligence of 
     the American people.
       Mr. Carney was grilled about just-released emails which 
     corroborate what many of us have been arguing all along: 
     ``Blame the Video'' was an Obama administration crafted lie, 
     through and through. It was intended, in the stretch run of 
     the 2012 campaign, to obscure the facts that (a) the 
     President's foreign policy of empowering Islamic supremacists 
     contributed directly and materially to the Benghazi massacre; 
     (b) the President's reckless stationing of American 
     government personnel in Benghazi and his shocking failure to 
     provide sufficient protection for them were driven by a 
     political-campaign imperative to portray the Obama Libya 
     policy as a success--and, again, they invited the jihadist 
     violence that killed our ambassador and three other 
     Americans; and (c) far from being ``decimated,'' as the 
     President repeatedly claimed during the campaign (and 
     continued to claim even after the September 11 violence in 
     Egypt and Libya), al Qaeda and its allied jihadists remained 
     a driving force of anti-American violence in Muslim 
     countries--indeed, they had been strengthened by the 
     President's pro-Islamist policies.
       The explosive emails that have surfaced thanks to the 
     perseverance of Judicial Watch make explicit what has long 
     been obvious: Susan Rice, the President's confidant and 
     ambassador to the U.N., was strategically chosen to peddle 
     the administration's ``Blame the Video'' fairy tale to the 
     American people in appearances on five different national 
     television broadcasts the Sunday after the massacre. She was 
     coached about what to say by other members of the President's 
     inner circle. One of the emails refers expressly to a ``prep 
     call'' that Ambassador Rice had with several administration 
     officials on late Saturday afternoon right before her Sunday 
     show appearances.

                              {time}  1430

       The tangled web of deception spun by the administration has 
     previously included an effort to distance the White House 
     (i.e., the President) from Rice's mendacious TV performances. 
     Thus, Carney was in the unenviable position Wednesday of 
     trying to explain the ``prep call'' email, as well as other 
     messages that illuminate the Obama White House's deep 
     involvement in coaching Rice. The emails manifest that Rice's 
     performances were campaign appearances, not the good-faith 
     effort of a public official to inform the American people 
     about an act of war against our country. Her instructions 
     were ``to underscore that these protests are rooted in an 
     Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy,'' and 
     ``to reinforce the President and administration's strength 
     and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.''
       Carney risibly claimed that the ``prep call'' was ``not 
     about Benghazi.'' Instead, according to him, it was ``about 
     the protests around the Muslim world.''

  Two points must be made about this.
  The first involves the administration's blatant lying. Benghazi was 
the only reason Rice was on the Sunday shows. If the massacre had not 
happened, there would not have been an extraordinary administration 
offering of one top Obama official to five different television 
networks to address a calamity that had happened a few days before.
  Moreover, as is well known to anyone who has ever been involved in 
government presentations to the media, to Congress, to courts, and 
other fact-finding bodies, the official who will be doing the 
presentation is put through a ``murder board'' process. This is a 
freewheeling session in which the questions likely to be asked at the 
presentation are posed, and potential answers--especially to tough 
questions--are proposed, discussed, and massaged. The suggestion that 
Rice, less than 24 hours before being grilled by high-profile media 
figures, was being prepped on something totally separate and apart from 
the incident that was the sole reason for her appearance is so 
farfetched it is amazing that Carney thought he could make it fly.
  The second point brings us full circle to Egypt.
  Why would Carney claim, with a straight face, that Rice was being 
prepped ``about protests around the Muslim world?'' Because other than 
Benghazi, the ``protest around the Muslim world'' that Americans know 
about is the rioting, not protest, the rioting at the U.S. Embassy in 
Cairo a few hours before the Benghazi siege. When Benghazi comes up, 
the administration--President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Jay 
Carney, et al.--love to talk about the Cairo protests. Why? Because the 
media--and, thus, the public--have bought, hook, line, and sinker, the 
fraudulent claim that those ``protests'' were over the anti-Muslim 
video. Obama & Co. shrewdly calculate that if you buy ``Blame the 
Video'' as the explanation for Cairo, it becomes much more plausible 
that you will accept the ``Blame the Video'' as the explanation for 
Benghazi; or, at the very least, you will give Obama officials the 
benefit of the doubt that they could truly have believed the video 
triggered Benghazi, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
  You see, the Benghazi fraud hinges on the success of the Cairo fraud. 
If you are hoodwinked by the latter, they have a much better chance of 
getting away with the former.
  But the ``Blame the Video'' is every bit as much a deception when it 
comes to Cairo.
  Thanks to President Obama's policy of supporting the Muslim 
Brotherhood and other Islamic supremacists in Egypt, post-Mubarak Cairo 
became a very hospitable place for jihadists. That included al Qaeda 
leaders, such as Mohammed Zawahiri, brother of al Qaeda emir Ayman 
Zawahiri; and leaders of Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic group, the 
terrorist organization that was led by The Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-
Rahman, the terrorist I convicted in 1995 for running the jihadist cell 
that bombed the World Trade Center and plotted to bomb other New York 
City landmarks.
  In the weeks before September 11, 2012, these jihadists plotted to 
attack the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. In fact, The Blind Sheikh's son 
threatened a 1979 Iran-style raid on the embassy. Americans would be 
taken hostage to ransom for The Blind Sheikh's release from American 
prison, where he is serving a life sentence thanks to Andy McCarthy. 
Other jihadists threatened to burn the embassy to the ground, a threat 
that was reported in the Egyptian press the day before the September 11 
``protests.''
  The State Department knew there was going to be trouble at the 
embassy on September 11, the 11th anniversary of al Qaeda's mass murder 
of nearly 3,000 Americans. It was well known that things could get very 
ugly. When they did, it would become very obvious to Americans that 
President Obama had not decimated al Qaeda as he was claiming on the 
campaign trail. Even worse, it would be painfully evident that his pro-
Muslim Brotherhood policies had actually enhanced al Qaeda's capacity 
to attack the United States in Egypt.
  The State Department also knew about the obscure anti-Muslim video. 
Few Egyptians, if any, had seen or heard about it, but it had been 
denounced by the Grand Mufti in Cairo on September 9. Still, the stir 
it caused was minor, at best. As Tom Joscelyn has elaborated, the Cairo 
rioting was driven by the jihadists who were agitating for The Blind 
Sheikh's release

[[Page 6685]]

and who had been threatening for weeks to raid and torch our embassy. 
And indeed, they did storm it, replace the American flag with the 
jihadist black flag, and set fires around the embassy complex.
  It is important here, Mr. Speaker, to note that the al Qaeda leader's 
brother, Zawahiri's brother, he was out there even after the attack on 
Benghazi's consulate, basically saying: Hey, there could be more 
rioting, more trouble, unless you work with me, and let's get The Blind 
Sheikh released and then we can avoid future violence. Amidst all that 
is what Andrew McCarthy is pointing out, claiming it was all about a 
video.
  In his article, McCarthy says:

       Nevertheless, before the rioting began but when they knew 
     there was going to be trouble, State Department officials at 
     the embassy began tweeting out condemnations of the video 
     while ignoring the real sources of the threat: the resurgence 
     of jihadists in Muslim Brotherhood-governed Egypt, the 
     continuing demand for The Blind Sheikh's release (which 
     underscored the jihadists' influence), and the very real 
     danger that jihadists would attack the embassy (which 
     demonstrated that al Qaeda was anything but ``decimated'').

  The transparent purpose of the State Department's shrieking over the 
video was to create the illusion that any security problems at the 
embassy--violent rioting minimized as mere ``protests''--were actually 
attributable to the anti-Muslim video, not to President Obama's 
policies and patent failure to quell al Qaeda.
  Because there was a kernel of truth to the video story, and because 
the American media had abdicated their responsibility to promote the 
predominant causes of anti-Americanism in Egypt, journalists and the 
public have uncritically accepted the notion--a false notion--that the 
video caused the Cairo rioting. That acceptance is key to the 
administration's ``Blame the Video'' farce in connection with the 
lethal attack in Benghazi.
  At about 10 p.m. Washington time on the night of September 11--after 
they knew our Ambassador to Libya had been murdered and while the siege 
of Benghazi still raged--Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama 
spoke on the telephone. Shortly afterwards, the State Department issued 
a statement from Secretary Hillary Clinton blaming the video for the 
atrocity in Benghazi. That was the beginning of the fraud's Benghazi 
phase--the phase Susan Rice was prepped to peddle on nationwide 
television. But it wasn't the beginning of the fraud.
  Secretary Clinton's minions at the State Department had started 
spinning the video fraud hours earlier in Egypt. The sooner Americans 
grasp that, the sooner they will comprehend the breathtaking depth of 
the President's Benghazi coverup.
  Today, our Oversight Committee was having a hearing to see a retired 
general on the verge of tears finally coming forward, who was with 
AFRICOM. He knew what was going on, he knew the truth, and he could not 
remain silent; and so he came forward and said: Yes, there was really 
much more we could have done.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope and pray that all of those who were part of the 
AFRICOM intelligence community will find courage from the general 
coming forward--some I know that have left our intelligence service and 
gone on to good civilian jobs. He has broken the ice. They can come 
forward now. I hope, Mr. Speaker, they get the message. He has come 
forward, the ice is broken, you won't be the first should be the 
message.
  All of the hostility--I mean, when I have an intelligence officer, 
former intelligence officer, tell me--when I ask, ``Where have you 
been?''--``I have been scared.'' I said, ``You have never been scared 
of anything.''
  ``I have been scared since 9/12.''
  All of those who have been forced to remain silent, I hope they will 
come forward.
  A mom with a son in our country's service had told me after 9/12 
about where her son was and what he was doing. So I called him, and it 
took a long time to get hold of him. He wasn't forthcoming. His mom 
told me yesterday, or this week, that he'll be out of the U.S. service 
before long and he wants to talk and come clean. I hope more will start 
coming clean on the strength of this retired general's courage.
  But in the remaining minutes, it should not be lost that today is the 
National Day of Prayer. For some that still are not convinced at what 
is at war here, we simply need to look at a statement from Khalid 
Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind who is at Guantanamo. I am grateful to 
President Obama that he has kept him there. He is a threat to the 
world, and particularly the United States. He was the mastermind behind 
9/11.
  In the pleading he prepared himself on page 4--this has been 
declassified so anybody can find it on the Internet--he says:

       We do not possess your military might, not your nuclear 
     weapons. Nevertheless, we fight you with the almighty God. 
     So, if our act of jihad and our fighting with you caused fear 
     and terror, then many thanks to God, because it is him that 
     has thrown fear into your hearts, which resulted in your 
     infidelity, paganism, and your statement that God had a son 
     and your trinity beliefs.

  In other parts of the pleading he makes clear that Jews should be 
destroyed.
  Here he makes clear, also, anyone who has a trinity belief believes 
that God had a son. Then he quotes from the Koran saying:

       Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the 
     unbelievers, for that they joined companies with Allah, for 
     which he has sent no authority; their place will be the fire; 
     and evil is the home of the wrongdoers.

  So he bases his belief that anyone who believes in a holy trinity 
should go to the fire and burn forever on that part of the Koran. 
Others have different interpretations, but radical Islamists believe 
that.
  That is why I think it is immensely helpful to go back to after the 
Declaration of Independence but before the Constitution.
  In 1783, the Treaty of Paris was entered in Paris, France, between 
American diplomats and British diplomats. Britain was the strongest 
country in the world, and our American diplomats knew they had to come 
up with something that was so important that the strongest nation in 
the world would not quickly come back after the new United States.

                              {time}  1445

  When I first saw this document, I was shocked at the first words, and 
then it made sense. The beginning of the treaty that forced Great 
Britain to acknowledge United States' independence starts with these 
words: ``in the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity.''
  They believed in the Holy Trinity. They knew that Great Britain 
believed in the Holy Trinity. They wanted something under which the 
Brits would swear that would be so important that they would not dare 
break that oath. That is why it started, ``in the name of the most holy 
and undivided Trinity.'' That is where we got our start. That is why 
radical Islam is at war with us.
  I hope and pray on this National Day of Prayer that we will humble 
ourselves, admit our wrongdoing, turn back to the God who has protected 
us--and He will bless our land.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________