Our Nation's Security
OUR NATION'S SECURITY -- (House of Representatives - May 11, 2006)
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Well, let me thank my colleague from California (Mr. Schiff) on his leadership on national security issues and helping to lay out the Democratic national security plan, and thank him for taking us back to 9/11/2001 and the new security challenges that posed for our country, indeed for many others around the world, and reminding all of us that at that time the American people rallied behind the President and the Congress and said we need to take action against al Qaeda, we need to take action against the Taliban.
This body, the United States Congress, was united, Republicans and Democrats alike, in taking that action, toppling the Taliban government, and working to try and root out al Qaeda and find Osama bin Laden. Indeed, as Mr. Schiff mentioned, the international community rallied behind us as well.
So let us go back to that point in time and see what has been done. If you look at the recent trip that President Bush took to Afghanistan and India, Pakistan last March, it was a reminder to all of us that was probably, number one, the closest he will ever get to the man who masterminded those attacks on September 11th, on the United States, Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan along the very rugged Afghan-Pakistan border. It was a reminder that we have not accomplished our mission of destroying Bin Laden and al Qaeda.
We all recall back in May of 2003 aboard the aircraft carrier, the USS Lincoln, when the President unveiled a big banner that said, ``Mission accomplished.''
Well, before that time, before the unveiling of that banner, there had been 138 American troops who died in Iraq, 542 wounded. Since declaring ``Mission accomplished'' aboard the aircraft carrier, there have been 2,405 American troops dead and over 17,000 wounded. As we all know, the situation in Iraq continues to be a very difficult one.
But certainly that ``Mission accomplished'' banner could not have applied to the main objective we had after September 11, 2001, to destroy the al Qaeda network and capture, destroy the person at the top of that network, Osama bin Laden, and fulfilling that mission. Preventing a resurgence of the Taliban will depend on the actions that we take today and in the months ahead in Afghanistan. This is no time for us to be reducing our commitment in Afghanistan.
At the very time the President was in Afghanistan last March, the Director of U.S. Defense Intelligence, General Michael Maples, was testifying before the Congress, and he testified that the Taliban insurgency is growing and will increase this spring, presenting a greater threat to the Afghan central government's expansion of authority than at any point since late 2001.
Under these circumstances, the plan, the current plan in place to replace 2,500 U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan later this summer with contingents of Canadian, Dutch, British, Romanian and Australian troops should be considered. We welcome having those additional troops there, but given the intensifying Taliban insurgency, we should consider whether or not those new forces should augment and supplement the forces we have there and not replace them. Replacing them could send exactly the wrong signal to the people of Afghanistan and to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Now, it is hard to ignore the fact that the Taliban has stepped up its operations recently.
Last year, attacks by the Taliban and other anti-government troops jumped by 20 percent, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Suicide bombings increased almost fourfold, and strikes with improvised explosive devices, which is a tactic imported from Iraq, doubled last year.
The main battlegrounds in this insurgency are in the provinces of Qandahar, Oruzgan, Helmand and Zabol, the Pashtun areas that form the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. And as recently as January 10 of this year, Mullah Mohammad Omar, who was the Taliban leader, who was born in southern Afghanistan and forged a very close tie with Bin Laden, rejected a call to reconcile with the new government of President Hamid
Karzai and publicly exhorted his followers to fight.
It appears from all indications that his followers have been listening. The Assistant Administrator of USAID told Congress earlier this year about the deaths that have been taking place in many of the provinces and the attacks, school teachers killed. As a result, 200 schools in Qandahar and 165 support schools in the province of Helmand closed for security reasons, and on and on. February was a deadly month, and March and April.
In May, earlier this month, The New York Times wrote an article, headline, Taliban Threat Is Said to Grow in Afghan South. I am just going to read a few excerpts. The Taliban and al Qaeda are everywhere, a shopkeeper told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan. He said it is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice.
The article goes on to note that the fact that American troops are pulling out of southern Afghanistan in the coming months and handing matters over to NATO peacekeepers, who have repeatedly stated they are not going to fight terrorists, has given a lift to the insurgents and increased the fears of Afghans.
I think it is very important that we not send a signal that we are reducing our commitment to the people of Afghanistan and to the fight against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. But stopping that action is going to require forceful action, stopping that violence and stopping the Taliban attacks.
Until now, the NATO forces have been stationed in relatively quiet areas. Their role has been primarily limited to peacekeeping rather than combat operations, and there are real questions about whether they will be able to engage the Taliban as aggressively as U.S. forces there.
It is also likely that the withdrawal of these 2,500 U.S. forces from Afghanistan will weaken our ability to put pressure on the Pakistan government to cooperate with us in trying to track down al Qaeda elements in Pakistan. We know that Pakistan Interservices Intelligence Agency has historically had a very cosy relationship with the Taliban. Many in the Afghan government, if you talk to them, doubt Pakistan's commitment to denying the sanctuary to Taliban fighters along the Afghan-Pakistan border. So we should be careful about the signals that we send.
Afghanistan's stability depends on strengthening the central government, developing the economy and limiting the booming opium trade there. Progress on these fronts requires that the Taliban be neutralized and security improved.
It has been said now from a number of Afghan leaders that the anticipated withdrawal of some of the U.S. forces has already caused some local leaders to hedge their bets with respect to the Taliban and figure if we are not going to be protected by U.S. forces, maybe we ought to bet on the Taliban being the future here. That is a very, very dangerous thing indeed.
It is important for us to remember that the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in the chaos that followed the Soviet Union's withdrawal from that country, and the subsequent U.S. disengagement and lack of interest in the region.
With the Bush administration and much of political Washington focused on Iraq, many Afghan leaders worry whether the reduction in our forces there signals a lack of commitment and a signal that we will again lose sight of Afghanistan. We do so at our peril because we need to remember, as my colleague reminded us, that the September 11 attacks, September 11, 2001, did not come from Iraq. They were from Afghanistan. That raises a very serious question about how we came to be in Iraq and raises the question of failure of intelligence.
I think it is important to note that whether or not you were for taking military action in Iraq or against military action in Iraq, we all should be in favor of getting the intelligence information right. It is especially important in this time when we are trying to disrupt terrorist networks.
The fact of the matter is the President told the American people we were taking action in Iraq for two reasons. He said, there are weapons of mass destruction there, and he said that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Well, we know now that both of those statements proved false. It is important, going forward, that we get the intelligence right.
One of the essential components of the Constitution of our country is a system of checks and balances, making it clear that every branch of government has an obligation to take the responsible actions within its own sphere. Unfortunately, this Congress, especially this United States House of Representatives, has failed to exercise that responsibility. Instead of being a check on the executive branch, we have been a blank check for this administration. Instead of being a balance, we have been a rubber stamp.
The result of that failure of oversight has been to allow the mistakes and failures of this administration in the area of intelligence gathering to continue, because if you don't pay attention to failure, if you look aside from failure, if you ignore failure, you are going to get more failure.
One of the greatest failures, of course, has been the failure of this Congress to hold the administration accountable for its failures to gather intelligence information and for its abuse of the use of intelligence.
Now, every administration, Republican or Democrat, is entitled to have its own policies. But they are not entitled to their own facts. Facts are stubborn things.
In the war on terror it is critical that we gather good intelligence information. We need to base our policy on the facts, not decide to make up the facts based on our policy.
Now, we should all agree that we don't want to put our troops in harm's way because we don't have adequate intelligence. We shouldn't sort of make up the facts in a way that leads to those consequences.
But in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, many in the administration ignored those professional voices within the executive branch, the civil servants, who had been there for years, have years of experience, who got it right.
For example, the professionals in the Bureau of Intelligence Research at the State Department and the professionals at the Department of Energy said these aluminum tubes were not evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq; they were evidence of a rockets program. Yet their information, their input, was relegated to a footnote, because people did not want to see beyond the world as they wanted to see it to justify their own policy decisions.
Those intelligence failures have consequences. Not just immediate consequences for our military and our Armed Forces; they also undermine our credibility around the world and are coming back to haunt us.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, we all remember when he went before the United Nations. He had his charts; he had his displays. He said to the world, Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction, in fact, has weapons of mass destruction. They did not. Secretary Powell has acknowledged that was one of the low points of his career.
Contrast that to the Cuban missile crisis, when our ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, showed the world satellite photos that the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba. The Soviets had been denying it, but they couldn't deny it in the face of those facts and that evidence. It was a high point for credibility at the U.N. Our display there was a low point.
The problem is not just that we look bad. The problem is it is hard to make back lost credibility. As we go to the U.N., as we go to international partners around the world now and talk about the situation in Iran, we talk about the situation in North Korea, we talk about the situation and threats elsewhere in the world, people remember what we said before, and even the President, President Bush, has acknowledged that we face increased skepticism as a result of our failures of intelligence. Those have serious, serious consequences.
There is a lot more that can be done in the intelligence area, and I think tonight we should talk about some of the missteps that were made and how we intend to correct those missteps going forward. But I think we should all agree, Republicans and Democrats alike, that getting the intelligence information right is essential to our national security. We need to allow the professionals with the experience to call the facts as they see them, not how any administration would like to see them to justify a certain policy.
I yield back to my colleague from California as we continue this discussion about how we think that this Congress can do a much better job of enhancing the national security of this country.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from California in his leadership on these issues. We both serve on the Judiciary Committee. And we know the revelations about the domestic wiretapping program came out back in December. And as of today, we have not had a single nearing in the House Judiciary Committee devoted specifically to that issue.
And whether people are for it or against it or undecided, we have an obligation as a separate branch of government to do our oversight, to get the facts, to ask the hard questions. And that committee has been AWOL on this issue, just as it has been, this Congress has been on so many other issues.
And I am very pleased that my colleague pointed out in the 9/11 Commission's sort of final report card they issued last November with respect to the issue of nuclear nonproliferation. They did give this Congress and the Bush administration a big fat D, D on that effort.
My colleague from California has been active in proposing different ideas for how we can strengthen those, but this Congress has not moved ahead. I just want to cite from that report card where it says, ``Countering the greatest threat to America's security is still not the top national security priority of the President and the Congress.''
What is that top priority, they say? A maximum effort by the U.S. Government to secure WMD. The fact of the matter is, we know after 9/11 that the most toxic combination of all would be some terrorist group getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction and the consequences to the people of our country.
We are getting a D on that. We can do a lot better. That same report card gives this Congress a D in another area, an area we have been talking about. Under the category of congressional and administrative reform, there is a subcategory, intelligence oversight reform.
Grade D. We would be embarrassed if our children brought back Ds from school, and yet Congress gets a D for this. And it is important to point out in this area, this is an area entirely under the control of the leadership in Congress. The Republican leadership could decide today to fix this.
This one has nothing to do with the administration. This has to do with decisions that can be made tomorrow by this Republican leadership. They have decided not to do it. Apparently a D is acceptable to them. And I think it is important to go back to the consequences of that failure of oversight.
Now, we know in the lead-up to the Iraq war the failures of intelligence. The former Director of CIA, George Tenet, very decent guy, said it is a ``slam dunk case'' that there are weapons of mass destruction.
Well, what happened? Well, first the President awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The guys in intelligence and research in the State Department who got it right, they have never gotten any recognition. And then what happened?
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, that is exactly right. Very serious consequences for the American people. And that is why it was surprising, I must say, that after George Tenet left the CIA as Director, that the administration decided to replace him with Mr. Porter Goss. Now Mr. Goss is a very decent, well-meaning person. But the fact of the matter is he was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at a time when this House failed to ask the hard questions and failed to do its oversight job. It accepted what the administration told them at face value, and it was a rubber stamp when it came to taking the administration's word on intelligence.
And yet he was the one they decided to make the head of Central Intelligence. And he brought with him some of the members of his committee staff. He brought his staff director and some of the other people who were very politically close to him, including his staff director, Patrick Murry.
And what was the result of that? Well, I think it is important to take us back to, this is what happened right after that appointment at the CIA. And I am reading from a Post story back from November 2004.
The deputy director of the CIA resigned yesterday after a series of confrontations over the past week between senior operations officials and CIA Director Porter Goss's new chief of staff that have left the agency in turmoil, according to several current and former CIA officials.
John McLaughlin, a 32-year CIA veteran who was Acting Director for 2 months this summer until Goss took over, resigned after warning Goss that Goss's top aide, former Capitol Hill staffer Patrick Murry, was treating senior officials disrespectfully and risked widespread resignations.
The day after this, the story says, the agency official who oversees foreign operations, Deputy Director of Operations Stephen Kappes, tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Murry.
It goes on to say, it is the worst roiling I have ever heard of, said one former senior official with knowledge of the events. There is confusion throughout the ranks and an extraordinary loss of morale and incentive.
That was the result of the Goss appointment at the CIA. Now, we see that Goss is being pushed out. And they are trying to bring back the guy, Kappes, in fact it looks like he will be coming back, that Goss's chief of staff essentially pushed out. He got in a confrontation and Kappes said, the person with great experience said, I am out of here.
But a recent Post article of today, looking back on this period, said, former and current intelligence officers say Goss never had a strategic plan for improving spying on terrorist networks.
I think it is also important to note another recent development with respect to people who were brought in at the top of the CIA, because another one of those people was a gentleman by the name of Kyle ``Dusty'' Foggo. It says, and I am quoting from a very recent Washington Post story, other Goss lieutenants at the agency also appear to be on the way out following Goss, who resigned Friday.
Kyle ``Dusty'' Foggo, brought in by Goss as the CIA's Executive Director, number 3 official, announced to agency staff in an e-mail yesterday he plans to resign as well.
The FBI said it is investigating whether Foggo steered contracts to a friend, Brent R. Wilkes. People may recognize that name, Wilkes. He is the defense contractor who got caught up in the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal that we all know about and is an example of what is wrong in this House.
So these people who are at the CIA were appointed by this administration. I do not think it gives people confidence to know that the same people who appointed Michael Brown as the head of FEMA were the people who made these appointments to the CIA, an agency the American people depend on to gather good intelligence for our security.
And yet we have been a rubber stamp in that area. And the 9/11 Commission report continues to give us a D. And this Congress deserves a D because the Republican leadership has not done anything. Until we get our act together with respect to conducting serious oversight in the intelligence area, we are going to continue to get policies that are not based on fact, but instead policies that are based on the world as people would like to see them, not the world as it really is.
In this day and age, we need people who are clear-eyed and can see the world as it is, because that is necessary for our national security.
I yield.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, that is right. If I can just say to my colleague, you know this Congress was relatively quick when the 9/11 Commission recommended changes to the executive branch, in redesigning our national security review apparatus. We have the Director of National Intelligence now, Mr. Negroponte, and trying to change around the oversight within the administration, even though it is important to remember that the Bush administration originally resisted that reform and fought the reform.
They realized that when the 9/11 Commission on a bipartisan basis came out in favor of that recommendation that change would have to be made.
But here in the Republican-led Congress they have not done anything to address the 9/11 Commission's recommendations with respect to oversight. And I think everybody understands that at a time when we are trying to identify terrorists who are trying to do harm to our country and respond against them, it is absolutely essential that we get it right. It is important that we get it right for our military men and women. It is important that we get it right for the American people. It is important that we get it right for our own credibility.
In order for us to do that, we know we have to expand our abilities in human intelligence gathering overseas. You need to have people who know more foreign languages. It is a shift in paradigm somewhat. And what is absolutely clear is that this administration has not had that paradigm shift when it comes to intelligence. Certainly the leadership in this House of Representatives has not had a paradigm shift, because they have not supported the bipartisan recommendations of the 9/11 Commission with respect to the issue of oversight. And so unless we do something, we are going to be caught with our lenses looking one way when the danger to this country sneaks up from another direction.
We need to get it right. We need this oversight. It is like a board of directors that decides to go on vacation for four years and not pay any attention to the company. That board of directors would be sued for malpractice by the stockholders if something went wrong. We know some things are not going right and you have got to hold people accountable. And when you reward people who fail to punish or ignore people who get it right, you have got a recipe for failure. We need a recipe for success.
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