Real Security

REAL SECURITY -- (House of Representatives - April 06, 2006)

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I thank my colleague from California, Mr. Schiff. And again, like my colleagues, I thank you for your leadership on issues of national security in this Congress for our country.

I think we all understand that in order to successfully conduct the important work of our Nation, we must have management systems in place. We must have systems of checks and balances to make sure that those people who are making critical decisions for our country are held accountable, and nowhere is that more important than in the area of national security. We have to have competence and we have to have accountability, and unfortunately we have seen a lack of both those qualities in the decisions on national security made by this administration.

It is Basic Management 101 that if you reward failure you are going to get more failure, and if you want success you should reward success. But if you look at the way this administration has approached national security, they have kind of got that principle backwards.

In fact, they have essentially rewarded and acknowledged those in the administration who got it wrong and criticized those who got their facts right.

Let us just go back to General Shinseki, who proposed early on that we would need, he said, a couple hundred thousand troops on the ground in post-war Iraq in order to maintain stability. He was dismissed by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz of being ``way off the mark.''

We have had up to 160,000 troops on the ground, and as you, Mr. Schiff, noted early on, it is the consensus of most military experts that one of the reasons we failed in the immediate post-war period to maintain stability was the lack of enough troops on the ground. General Shinseki was right. He was dismissed by the administration. Mr. Wolfowitz received the plum job as president of the World Bank. I do not know what kind of message that sends.

How about the costs of the war? Well, Secretary Wolfowitz said: ``We are dealing with a country that can finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.'' Well, we know today that Iraq has still not come back up to its prewar oil production, and the predictions that were made by the chief economic policy adviser to the President, Lawrence Lindsey, who at the time said he thought the cost of the war would run about $100 billion to $200 billion, look good from today's vantage point.

At the time we need to remind people that others in the administration, like the head of the Budget Office, Mitch Daniels, dismissed those projections as being too high, and said very, very high.

We have seen a recent study by the Columbia University economist and former Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joe Stiglitz, who projects that this war could be up to $2.5 trillion in costs.

But perhaps most dangerous from the vantage point of national security have been the failures with respect to the intelligence and the abuse of intelligence. And we need an intelligence system where the facts inform the policy, rather than a system where politics shape and distort the facts. But we have seen the administration ignore many of the professionals in the government who actually called it right in many instances.

If you look back now over the national intelligence estimates and you look at what the people in INR, Intelligence Research at the State Department, were saying; if you look at what the folks at the Department of Energy were saying, a lot of them questioned these conclusions that were being jumped to with respect to the presence of weapons of mass destruction. They questioned both those agencies, the fact that these aluminum tubes were somehow evidence of an Iranian nuclear program. They said they did not believe that. And yet in its selective use of intelligence, the administration ignored those. They relegated those opinions to mere footnotes and essentially put forward the other information.

And you mentioned today a very disturbing revelation has come to light with respect to the selective use of intelligence. And I just want to quote from the Los Angeles Times. This is in many other papers. It turns out, according to the information put forward by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, ``President Bush personally authorized leaking long classified information to a reporter in the summer of 2003 to buttress administration claims, now discredited, that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction for Iraq.''

Before the war, they selectively leaked information in a way that misinformed the American public; and then when they were essentially caught doing that, they further selectively leaked information to try to hide that fact when revelations were brought to light.

This has very serious consequences for our security because our credibility around the world depends on people whom we go to believing that the information that we have is true and that it is solid. When Adlai Stevenson was at the United Nations in the Cuban Missile Crisis and he said the Soviets were putting missiles into Cuba and had the information to support it, our credibility as a Nation was enhanced. As a result of the failures and abuse of intelligence, our credibility around the world has been degraded. It makes it much harder to persuade others about the seriousness of the threats in Iran and North Korea.

Now, the 9/11 Commission made a number of recommendations as to how we could deal with this particular issue; and one of the recommendations they made was to bolster intelligence oversight reform. Let us hold people accountable for their decisions. Let us not reward failure because we will get more failure. Let us not reward and ignore mistakes; we will get more mistakes. But when it comes to intelligence oversight reform, what grade did they give to the Republican Congress and the administration? A ``D.'' A ``D.''

We have said, we Democrats, as part of our proposal, we are going to strengthen the oversight process. We are going to hold people accountable, and we are going to implement all of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, including the recommendation to improve the oversight of intelligence so we can end the abusive intelligence, restore our credibility around the world, because that credibility is essential to the national security of this country.

I thank the gentleman from California for his leadership on this issue, and I hope we will continue to have this conversation that I think is so important to our country

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