Increasing The Statutory Limit On The Public Debt - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, as the Senate reconvenes in a new calendar year, it is hard not to notice that many of the toughest challenges we face in 2010 have been with us for a long time. Among the toughest and most persistent of these is the ongoing global war on terror. More than 8 years have now passed since September 11, 2001. Yet we are reminded every day of the need to remain as vigilant now as we were in the weeks and months after that terrible day.

This fact was recently brought home to us in a vivid way when a Nigerian-born terrorist attempted to kill nearly 300 innocent people in the skies over Detroit on Christmas Day. What could have been a terrible tragedy became instead an urgent reminder to remain focused--a wake-up call, if you will.

But even before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane, many Americans had already begun to wonder whether we had become too slack over the past year in the fight against terrorism.

And who could blame them? Time and again, the administration has made decisions that suggest a pre-9/11 mindset of prosecution over prevention--decisions which have left most Americans scratching their heads and concluding that some of the administration's priorities are dangerously out of whack. Most Americans did not understand why the administration was in such a rush to close Guantanamo, for example, before it had a plan for dealing with the dangerous detainees who were held there. Most did not see why classified memos detailing interrogation techniques that had saved American lives were made public and thus available to the very people we are trying to keep from harming us. And most recently, most people were shocked again when we treated the Christmas Day bomber not as a potentially rich source of intelligence for stopping future attacks but as a common criminal who needed a lawyer.

We should have gotten every bit of information we could have about this man's plans, his connections, and his cronies in al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula. Instead, the administration placed a higher priority on reading him his Miranda rights and on getting him a lawyer.

Even more outrageous is the administration's plan for getting information out of the Christmas Day bomber, offering him a plea bargain and a hope he will talk. These are just some of the signs that when it comes to prosecuting the war on terror, the administration has caused the pendulum to swing too far in the wrong direction.

No one denies a balance must be struck between preserving civil liberties and protecting the homeland. No one wants to sacrifice one for the other. But in many cases, all that is involved is a simple question of judgment. When a judgment call has to be made, our priorities should be clear: Keeping Americans safe should always--always--win out.

Over the past year, the administration has grappled with these questions. It sought to find the right balance. In some cases, it has gotten it wrong. In others, it has been quite sensible. The President was clear and convincing, for example, when he explained our goals in Afghanistan last December--to deny al-Qaida a safe haven, to reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to control population centers, and to strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take the lead
and take responsibility for Afghanistan's future. The President had it exactly right. But Americans know that in this fight, in the global war on terror, getting the strategy partly right will only lead to partial success. As the attempted Christmas Day bombing showed all too plainly, partial success isn't good enough.

So today I would like to discuss some of my own impressions of how our mission is going in the place where the attacks of September 11, 2001, were launched, and to describe the mission within the broader context of the global war that extends to places such as Yemen and to our own borders because success in one place overseas could easily be undermined by neglect in another, and success in both could still be undermined by neglect at home. We simply cannot prevail in this fight if we treat the various elements of it as separate events or if we fail to restore the proper balance between safety and civil liberties.

As the years wear on, it is easy for some to forget why we are still committing young men and women to fight in far off places such as Afghanistan or why our national security interests demand that we prevail. That is why it is important for us to recall that al-Qaida and other extremists were at war with the United States long before the attacks of 9/11.

The World Trade Center had been attacked 8 full years before the 19 hijackers destroyed it on September 11, 2001. The Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 killed 19 U.S. military personnel and injured hundreds more. Thousands were injured and hundreds were killed, including a dozen Americans, in the East Africa Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. That same year, Osama bin Laden declared that ``the judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country.'' A year before Ð9/11, al-Qaida attacked the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors and injuring dozens more.

So 9/11 may have been the day we realized the consequences of inaction, but the pattern of attacks leading up to that day is undeniably clear. From the first days after 9/11, our strategy has been the same: to deny al-Qaida and its affiliates sanctuary and to deny them a staging ground from which they could plan or launch another attack on U.S. soil. This is why we resolved shortly after 9/11 to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban which had harbored al-Qaida and its leader Osama bin Laden.

We had early successes in that effort. By November 2001, the Taliban had been driven from Kabul. Soon after that, an international body met to name an interim government in Afghanistan to be led by its current president, Hamid Karzai.

But despite that early success, al-Qaida's senior leadership was able to find a safe haven in Pakistan's tribal areas, and a few years later it had regained enough strength to once again pose a serious threat to the United States. Meanwhile, the Taliban had reestablished its headquarters in Pakistan and gained enough strength as a result of inadequate Afghan security forces and poor governance to return to Afghanistan and to risk success to our mission there.

By last year, the situation had grown so perilous that our then recently appointed top general in Afghanistan, GEN Stanley McChrystal, issued a report stating that our failure to gain the initiative and reverse the momentum of the Taliban within 12 months could make defeating the insurgency impossible. It was largely as a result of that assessment that the President agreed last year to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Earlier this month, I and some of my colleagues had the opportunity to visit Afghanistan and Pakistan to assess the situation on the ground firsthand. Among other things, we saw progress in the crucial southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Although still in the early phases, General McChrystal's plan to clear these areas of Taliban, hold terrain, control the population, build Afghan security forces, and establish a viable government for future and long-term stability shows early signs of success, not unlike the kind of success during the surge in Iraq.

The Taliban continues to put up a fight. As recently as last week, Taliban leaders accused NATO forces of defiling the Koran, a charge that led to major protests in Garmsir. This Monday, the Taliban demonstrated its lethality when it launched an attack against the heart of the government in Kabul. But the bottom line is this: Our commitment and that of our partners has given Afghanistan and its government a chance to succeed. While ultimate success is far from certain, every member of our delegation was impressed with the quality of the people we have sent to Afghanistan and with the strategy that General McChrystal has put in place.

Pakistan must do its part. The ultimate success of our mission in Afghanistan depends upon the continued efforts of the Government of Pakistan to fight extremist networks in the tribal areas. Over the last year, Pakistan has waged aggressive campaigns in the Swat Valley and in South Waziristan. After meeting with the Pakistani Army's chief of staff and with Prime Minister Gilani, we concluded they genuinely believe their national interests will be served in defeating the Pakistani Taliban. Still, action against the Quetta Shura, the leadership of the Afghan Taliban harbored just across the border in neighboring Pakistan, isn't likely to occur until the Pakistanis are convinced--convinced--that the United States has the endurance to remain committed in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan as well. In this regard, the leaders we spoke to in both countries were clearly troubled by the Obama administration's announced deadline of July 2011 for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

We saw firsthand on our trip that the fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan is difficult, and the situation is fragile. But complicating matters even further is the resilience and determination of al-Qaida and its affiliates, and we must not fail to appreciate all the implications of this. In this regard, the administration showed a shocking lack of common sense when it failed to treat the Christmas Day bomber as an enemy combatant, instead reading him his Miranda rights and giving him a lawyer.

As I said earlier, in my view, the administration has on a number of instances struck the wrong balance over the past year between safety and civil liberties. Its preference for prosecuting a terrorist like the Christmas Day bomber in civilian courts shows a dangerous preoccupation with prosecution over prevention, just as its hasty decision to close Guantanamo showed a preoccupation with symbolism over security.

But whether it is Guantanamo, interrogation memos, or prosecuting terrorists in civilian courts, many of the administration's priorities in this fight appear to be dangerously misplaced. Take the case of Khalid Shaikh

Mohammed. Here is the man who admits to planning the most catastrophic terrorist attack in U.S. history--nearly 3,000 people dead on our own soil in a single day. Yet once in court, he will enjoy all the rights and privileges of an American citizen. Classified information may be compromised, as it has been many times before in such cases. The consequences are easy to imagine.

Trying KSM in a civilian court makes even less sense in light of the fact the administration has decided to prosecute other foreign terrorists in a military commission, creating a baffling scenario in which those who target innocent people in the homeland are treated better than those who attack a military target overseas.

The administration also needs to ensure that our intelligence professionals and men and women in uniform are free to gather intelligence from detainees wherever they are captured. A U.S. marine assigned to a NATO-led security and development mission in Afghanistan shouldn't have to release or turn over a captured terrorist within 96 hours, as is now the case, nor should the Christmas Day bomber be treated as a common criminal at home when the nation where he met his al-Qaida handlers, Yemen, is actively pursuing al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

The intelligence community must be able to gather information from detainees in a way that is lawful and which protects American lives. Equilibrium between safety and civil liberties must be restored, and currently
it is not, in my view. A plea bargain for a terrorist who tried to blow a plane out of the sky on Christmas Day? It is wrong to think that al-Qaida would not use a civilian courtroom in New York or a long-term detention facility inside the United States for the same recruiting and propaganda purposes for which they have used other courts and Guantanamo in the past. This fact alone eliminates the administration's only justification for closing Guantanamo--that it was some kind of recruitment tool.

We need a place to send terrorists like the Christmas Day bomber--and that place is not a civilian courtroom or a prison in the Midwest. Once here, these terrorists will enjoy new legal rights, including, quite possibly, the right to be released into our country, as one Federal judge previously ordered with respect to a group of detainees from GTMO.

The war on al-Qaida will continue for years to come. In order to prevail, we must not only remain focused on the threat but also reliant on the reasonable tools that have served us well in the past. For example, now is not the time to experiment with the PATRIOT Act. We should clearly reauthorize its expiring provisions rather than eliminate one of them, sunset another, and tinker with those that remain, as the administration or some of its congressional allies propose.

As we continue to pursue this global network, we will rely more heavily on intelligence personnel, a point that was recently underscored by the December 30 suicide attack that killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan. We mourn the loss of these brave Americans. Their sacrifice, along with the attempted Christmas Day bombing and the recent plot to attack the New York subway system, reminds us that the threat from al-Qaida and other extremists to our homeland has not--I repeat, not--diminished.

But in its eagerness to distinguish its own policies from those of the past, the administration has gone way too far. The reaction to the attempted Christmas Day bombing offered conclusive proof. Hoping that terrorists are incompetent is not enough to defeat them; and showing more concern about their Miranda rights than the right of Americans to be safe suggests a fundamental and dangerous shift in the priorities since 9/11.

The good news is this: The administration is doing the right thing in Afghanistan. If it recognizes some of its errors in the broader fight, there is good reason to hope historians will look back on 2010 as the turning point not only in our fight with the Taliban but also as the year in which America achieved a balance in the war against al-Qaida.

Soon we will have an opportunity to make a good first step in the direction of bipartisan balance. Once the Congress receives the war funding request from the Defense Department and the administration, the Senate can demonstrate a new unity of purpose by quickly considering this legislation. This would signal our resolve not only to Americans but to our allies and to our forces in the field. This is not too much to hope for, and it is not too much to expect. Bipartisanship is not always easy to come by in Washington, but in the war on terror it is necessary, and in my view it is achievable.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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