Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008

Floor Speech

INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008 -- (House of Representatives - May 10, 2007)

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Mr. ISSA. Madam Chairman, I thank the ranking member, and I thank the chairman for what we were able to accomplish during the markup. But I come to the House floor knowing that in fact in a few short minutes, an hour or so, our Members will vote not knowing what is in this bill. Oh, they will hear us talking in unclassified terms about the fact that HUMINT, contrary to the last speaker, is being cut in absolute dollars. The eyes and ears of human beings is being cut in this bill.

Certainly, with inflation, other things are going up. But as everyone knows that has read the Iraq Study Report or the 9/11 report, it is the absence of the human resources that we have been investing in that led to our vulnerability on 9/11. And I will say that if the people on the other side of the aisle want to say we are losing this war, then they have to be willing to make a much greater commitment in the diplomatic and especially in the human resources and the above-sky resources that allow us to know what our enemy is thinking and planning before he attacks.

This bill doesn't do it. This bill does, as many of the speakers have said, deal with ``bugs and bunnies.'' Now, I happen to be an advocate for global warming research. I happen to believe that the Earth is warming, and I happen to believe that CO

2 is something we have to address. I serve on a committee that has overseen it, that has looked at it, that has costed it; and I will continue to do so.

But I am beyond words, furious, that with no new funding we are diverting resources from finding out what bad people want to do to us, to a vague, beyond vague, an open-ended statement of over the next 30 years what is global warming maybe going to do.

It is a worst case, all-possible-negatives study. It will cost ten or hundreds of millions of dollars to begin with. It will cause us to divert satellites to do the research. To be honest, the CIA doesn't just throw together a report, especially when it is this vague.

We urged in committee that in fact they put reasonable amendments to
this. We asked something simple: task them with the U.N.'s finding on global warming. Any committee, any group's finding. It is an open-ended go-study report. It is going to cost a lot of money, and it is going to cost American lives.

But last but not least, there are unconscionable earmarks in this bill which I three times participated and voted for going to closed session so the Members would understand that pork and ``unfounded'' earmarks are in this bill; that American lives will be lost because we divert needed moneys from the human resources we need to invest in to pork projects and special interests of Members of the majority.

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