[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 8942]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   THE TRUTH IS WHAT CAN SAVE AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
North Carolina (Mr. Jones) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I am on the House floor today to express my 
thanks to Senator Rand Paul for his 11-hour filibuster of the PATRIOT 
Act reauthorization on May 31.
  I voted against the USA FREEDOM Act, which would have reauthorized 
the PATRIOT Act, because the NSA spying program allows for the Federal 
Government to gather bulk private data on law-abiding American 
citizens, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.
  I also commend Senator Paul for his courageous statement a couple of 
weeks ago. He said: ``ISIS exists and grew stronger because the hawks 
in our party gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were 
snatched by ISIS. They''--the hawks in our party--``created these 
people.''
  Unfortunately, Louisiana's Governor, Bobby Jindal, criticized my 
friend Senator Paul by saying he is ``unsuited to be Commander in 
Chief.'' It is obvious Governor Jindal does not know about the 
manipulation of intelligence that led us into the Iraq war.
  In a 2006 article for Time magazine, Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, 
whom I met with shortly after he wrote the article, stated: ``From 2000 
until 2002, I was a Marine Corps Lieutenant General and Director of 
Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness 
and, therefore, a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of 
Iraq, an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret 
of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense.''
  Later in the article, Lieutenant General Newbold states: ``The 
distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war led us to the 
unnecessary war in Iraq.''
  The distortion of intelligence, Mr. Speaker, is what led us to that 
war in Iraq.
  Last month, when Governor Jeb Bush justified his brother's war in 
Iraq, my friend Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to 
former Secretary of State Colin Powell, appeared on MSNBC's ``The Ed 
Show,'' where Wilkerson said: ``The intelligence was fixed, and 
everyone should know that by now. It was a failure of the intelligence 
agencies, but it was also a failure of the political people who 
manipulated the intelligence failure to their own benefit. It destroyed 
the balance of power in the Gulf and produced what we have today: the 
chaos we have today; al Qaeda in Iraq--never there until we invaded; 
ISIS--never there until we invaded; the mess we have in Yemen. 
Everything that's happening in the Middle East today can be attributed 
to our having destroyed the balance of power that we had carefully 
maintained for half a century with the invasion in 2003. It was a 
disaster.''
  Thank you, Lawrence Wilkerson, for telling the truth.
  Like Colonel Wilkerson said, everyone knows the intelligence was 
manipulated to trick the American people and the Congress into thinking 
the Iraq war was necessary. In fact, it was not, and it created the 
vacuum of power that exists today and that ISIS takes advantage of.
  Also, I would like to say, Mr. Speaker, as I have a poster here of 
the Air Force removing an American hero from the plane in a flag-draped 
coffin: because of that unnecessary war in Iraq, we lost over 4,000 
Americans; because of that unnecessary war in Iraq, we had over 30,000 
wounded.
  So in closing, Mr. Speaker, I would first like to thank our men and 
women in uniform, their families, and the families who gave a child 
dying for freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  I also would like to say: Thank you, Senator Paul, for standing up 
for the truth. The truth is what can save America. Thank you, Senator 
Paul.

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