National Security
NATIONAL SECURITY
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Florida for his persistence to get to the truth, and my colleague from Delaware, who succinctly described our problem brilliantly in terms of the ideology of the neocons running into reality. I could not agree more.
Ever since I was in college in the late 1960s, I would say to my colleagues, ideologues have bothered me. Anyone who thinks they have a monopoly on truth, and there is only one way to see the world, always gets us into trouble. They can be ideologues of the far left, they can be ideologues of the far right, they can be ideologues just on one issue. America is a place where we all come together. It is a place of consensus.
I tend to believe in a strong and muscular foreign policy. I think the war on terror is real. But by being so blind to the realities of the world, those who are hawks should be more angry at some of the things that have been done, as my colleague from Delaware outlined, than those who are doves because we are going to need strength and fortitude to continue this war for decades.
I thank both my colleagues. I was privileged to listen to their erudite and illuminating explanation.
Over the last few days, we have been discussing the question: Are we better off than 4 years ago? We have been discussing mainly domestic issues the last few days. Today we are discussing it on national security; are we better off than we were 4 years ago. I guess this means our safety. And there are pluses and minuses.
Certainly in the wake of September 11 and the horrible attacks-and now that the September 11 Commission was in my city yesterday, I am living them all over again and it shakes my insides to remember what happened, to remember going the day after with my colleague, Senator Clinton and Mayor Guiliani and the Governor, and seeing what happened-certainly we have responded. It is good we have responded. Some do not want to respond or find every response wrong, and you get caught in a quagmire of no response, which would be the worst response, in my opinion.
Having said that, I focus on two areas where we should be a lot better off than we were 4 years ago, where there is a large deficiency. One I will touch on is Iraq. Again, as somebody who supported the President going into Iraq and supported the $87 billion, I am troubled, deeply troubled, by the lack of planning, not just in the prisons but in the whole way the peace has been managed.
No one knows what is going to happen on June 30. We set a June 30 deadline and then we have to fill in the blanks. What do we want to do? How long does it take? The lack of planning has been troubling. It is taking the great military victory we had in Iraq, a justified victory, and turning it into certainly less than a complete success in terms of what happened afterward.
So this inadequate planning, the "go it alone" attitude which my colleagues discussed, means we should be a lot better off than we were.
The place I want to focus on in my remaining few minutes is homeland security. It is a truism that has been stated before, but it is not irrelevant still. To win a war, to win a game, you need a good offense and a good defense. My colleagues talked about some of the problems on our team's offense. Let me talk about our problems on our team's defense. We are better off than we were 4 years ago in terms of homeland security. No question. Our guard was down, we know that. But we are not close to where we should be.
What has happened is basically this: While this administration is willing to fully fund the war on terror overseas-and we will get repeated requests for more dollars, which we will support, provided they are planned out and we see what they are doing with the money-we are totally short on homeland security. There are so many areas where we are weak: Port security, rail security, computer technology, the borders, who is coming in and who is not.
What is frustrating is, we can solve all these problems. They are not technologically beyond our reach. We can have foreigners cross our borders free and clear and yet keep bad people out if we have the right computer systems and the right cards that we can give to foreigners before they come in.
We can make our rail and our ports far more secure. We can develop devices that can detect explosives and biological and chemical weapons. We can detect nuclear devices so, God forbid, if one is sent over here, we will get it at the borders.
And why is the pace so slow? I will tell you why. Somehow the priorities in the White House are not to spend money on homeland security. It is to talk about it. It is to do some photo opportunities. Let me share with the American people somebody who has been deeply concerned and ahead of our task force on this side on homeland security. Every time we ask for the dollars that are needed to tighten one area-we say $10 is needed, and they say, We will give you $1.50.
An example, shoulder-held missiles. We know the terrorists have them. God forbid, they smuggle 10 of them into this country, and on a given moment take down a plane in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, Denver, Boston, Miami. The mayhem. Of course, all the progress we are trying to make on the economy would go right down the drain. No one would fly for 6 months or a year.
We can arm every one of our commercial planes so they can avoid these shoulder-held missiles. Our military planes have them. Air Force One has them. People on their own private jets, wealthy people, have them. We are not doing it on our commercial planes. It is a slow walk.
We said take $8 billion to do the whole thing in 2 years out of the $80 billion we are spending on the missile defense system-which was designed to fight Russia and now Russia, thank God, or the Communist Soviet Union, is no longer our enemy. And they said no. They do not say let's not do it, but they say let's spend $50 million and study it.
We know what is going on. I have spoken to people in the White House who will talk to me privately and say they will not spend a nickel on homeland security. Between the military and the idea of cutting taxes, cutting taxes, cutting taxes, you cannot do it all. And it seems to me homeland security should be just as high a priority as helping our troops overseas fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet there is nothing.
It hurts our localities. It is not just New York City, my city, where, obviously, we have a real problem. In Buffalo, Rochester, and smaller places, Watertown, Jamestown, talk to the police and fire departments, and they are trying to do their job. They do not have the dollars to do it. So they stretch and do their best. But it is not being done right.
In place after place after place, we are only inspecting 2 percent of the containers that come in on our ships. Two percent? Do you want there to be a 2-percent chance that we stop someone from smuggling in something terrible? We have the technology to do it. It costs dollars. We cannot do homeland security without the necessary resources to make it happen.
And every single time, the one place where we have done a good job is on air security, to prevent people from smuggling weapons on the planes. Even there we are not doing enough, but we have done better.
I give credit in one other place: In the biological area, we are doing a B. It is not an A-it should be an A-but we are doing B. In almost every one of the other areas we are at C's, D's, and F's.
Who in America would not spend dollars to make us safe so that, God forbid, another September 11 does not happen? No one. But, once again, it is the ideologues in the White House who say they hate spending money on domestic things. It is not just education or health care, it is homeland security.
So we are not as well off, we are not close to as well off as we should be. We can do a lot better.
The bottom line is this: In area after area we should be far more secure than we are. We have taken some steps in every area, but who wants to wake up one morning and say: What if? God forbid, there was a terrorist incident the day before, and we say: What if we had put the detectors on the cranes and ports to avoid nuclear? What if we had made our ports secure?
Mr. President, I hope the administration will change its view on homeland security and spend the dollars that are necessary.