Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4879) to increase the military housing private investment cap.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on the bill under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

(Mr. HUNTER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 4879, the Military Housing Improvement Act of 2004. We have spent the last several hours debating points of order and budgetary implications of a provision in the Military Construction Appropriations Act to address the housing privatization program. H.R. 4879, I am pleased to say, goes straight to the heart of the matter by raising the cap on the housing privatization program by $500 million, enough to permit DOD to continue the program through fiscal year 2005.

As Member after Member has pointed out today, the Military Housing Privatization Program has been an unqualified success. By leveraging the interest of private sector developers and property managers, housing privatization improves and manages military family housing better, more quickly, and at lower cost than our traditional military construction model.

To date, the housing privatization program has leveraged a government cash contribution of only $500 million to build approximately $5.6 billion in housing construction. Furthermore, privatized housing is a tremendous improvement over existing DOD housing facilities.

Privatized homes are often equipped with new appliances, built to modern standards, well-maintained, and are parts of communities. This is in stark contrast to the patchwork of poorly maintained housing for which DOD is known.

Despite the success of the housing privatization program, a legislative cap will soon bring a halt to the program by preventing DOD from entering into new privatization contracts after November 2004. The FY 2005 National Defense Authorization Act contains a partial fix to this problem. It eliminates the cap in fiscal year 2006. However, it leaves a gap between November 2004 and October 2005 during which DOD would be unable to sign any privatization contracts that would count against the cap. As a result, most projects DOD plans to begin in fiscal year 2005 would be delayed until October 2005. This would affect approximately 24,000 family housing units at at least 16 installations nationwide.

H.R. 4879 addresses this problem by increasing the cap on the program by $500 million, enough to allow DOD to proceed with its privatization program through FY 2005. The program is a success. I urge my colleagues to join with me in ensuring that it continues by supporting this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young).

Mr. Speaker, on that optimistic note, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Let me just address my friend who just spoke and all Members. This bill does have meaning because every time the full House manifests its will and gives a good majority vote, a good solid vote, that is a very important boost to the process. I would just tell the gentleman that we are going to make sure that by the time the smoke clears and the dust clears in this process, we are going to have these 24,000 units released for construction. It is important to everyone. I might say, also, and I appreciate my friend from Florida and all the great work he has done on this, and all the members of the Committee on Armed Services, that we do have this problem fixed from 2006 on. It is this gap, this bridge this year that we need to fix.

I might mention to my colleagues that the gentleman from Iowa is the author of this provision. I think that bespeaks of his good intentions to get this problem taken care of.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), chairman of the Committee on the Budget.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, let me just say that we have obviously a difference of opinion as to how we get this particular measure forward, how we move it forward. We have got people of goodwill on both sides.

I have recommended today, even though we are the authorizing committee, that we give up some of our turf today and let this thing pass on the appropriations bill. There is obviously a problem with that occurring.

We have got this measure up, which is authored, in fact, by the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), chairman of the Committee on the Budget, as evidence of the fact that he wants to get this thing to move forward; and I think if we pass this with an overwhelming vote, manifesting that will of the House is going to help this process.

We have got a long way to go before the dust settles on the spending bills this year. We are going to make sure that this problem is solved this year. The exact parliamentary road for that obviously has not been determined, as is, I think, evidenced by the debate that has taken place.

But I would just ask Members from all positions, from all points, who have one piece of common ground, and that is to get this very important housing measure passed, to work together on this thing and move forward.

I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time from my very good colleague, and I just remind him that no objection has been heard yet on the MILCON bill, and I would just would ask the gentleman, the chairman of the Budget Committee, to look at this as a very extraordinary situation, because it is an extraordinary situation in that we have a very unusual scoring application by CBO that is not endorsed by OMB and not, obviously, endorsed by us and does not make good sense. That is that the entire economic implication of this 24,000 units is being scored at one time, and that is a very unusual thing; and secondly, that we have a very unusual circumstance with this being the centerpiece of quality of life for our military folks.

So let me just suggest to my friend that we all have a job in this House and that the Committee on the Budget has undertaken to follow their duty, their obligation, in the manner they best see fit; and I would suggest to the gentleman that talking with them and working with them on this may be the way to get this thing done, and I would hope that the gentleman would talk with the Committee on the Budget.

Mr. Speaker, let me remind the gentleman that neither of us belongs to organized political parties. We are Republicans and Democrats. But I just want to remind the gentleman, too, that we are stretched between two cross-strains which are very familiar to this House. One is the strain and the discipline that is required for fiscal discipline. And we all know that, and I think we have to give some credence to the Committee on the Budget chairman's statement, because the chairman of the Committee on the Budget does stand here and he does take fusillades from both sides about spending money and about not having rules. On the other hand, we then have these extraordinary circumstances in which we beat up on the Committee on the Budget chairman for sticking with those rules.

And I told the gentleman that my position is, even though we own the turf on this as the authorizing committee, we think it is so extraordinary and so compelling we are willing to give up that turf and pass it in this particular bill.

But I would recommend to the gentleman that he talk with the members of the Committee on the Budget and remember that they have an obligation, too, and try to work through that obligation.

I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, let me respond to the gentleman because I think all of us were disappointed when we saw what I think is a very unusual ruling, that this is all to be costed up front, and that was a highly unusual ruling which I think is erroneous.

On the other hand, it has put us where we are. And what we have got to do is work through it, and I think we are going to work through it.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute to remind my friend that the same Republican leadership that he has criticized so heavily is the Republican leadership that passed concurrent receipt, where retirees can receive their checks and disability checks; has urged and has passed the survivor benefit program, which laid in state for years; has increased the equipment supply from an average of about $45 billion a year under the Clinton administration to an average of about $70 billion a year for new equipment for our troops in the field; and supplied the ammunition, force protection and, surveillance they have been so sorely lacking the last 15 years.

I would remind my friend, this should not be a blame day; this should be a day in which we all work and move forward. I think that every vote that one takes on an issue, one can call this a fig leaf vote if one wants, but I would remind my friend that every vote that we take on an issue is an important vote.

I would just tell my friend from Texas, at the end of this year when the dust clears on this process, which is obviously affected by the political season, we are going to have legislative vehicles come down the track and get across the finish line. This problem is going to be fixed.

If my friend wants to ask me to take the floor with him at the end of this session and we will prove up, I will be happy to tell him now, I will give him my word, this problem is going to be fixed.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young).

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I want to follow my good colleagues who just talked about what they consider to be the free trade debacle of the 1990s with a gentle reminder that that debacle commenced with the 1994 NAFTA vote under the Clinton administration, strongly supported by President Clinton, and I think, strongly supported by then Senator Kerry. At the time when we started that, I think we had a $3 billion trade surplus with Mexico. Shortly thereafter, we had a $15 billion annual trade loss.

I am reminded with respect to China that one of Mr. Clinton's strongest contributors, who happened to be the chief executive officer of the Loral Corporation, found that he had, after he had seriously violated the rules of transferring technology, had transferred technology to the Chinese with respect to their launch capability, because in their satellite launches they use these Long March rockets to do their satellite launches, and they use that same

rocketry to aim nuclear warheads at their adversary cities, several of which are in the United States of America.

And when Loral violated the restrictions on transferring this weapons technology, which puts all Americans at risk, he was allowed to continue to make those sales; and Loral was allowed to continue to make those sales, prematurely, in my judgment, and there was, I think, a very strong link to the Clinton administration manifested in a $300,000-plus contribution to President Clinton.

So I remember the free trade, the threshold free trade vote well, which a lot of my Republican colleagues do not agree with me on, and a number of Democrats do not agree with me on; but I do remember that it was done by President Clinton, and I wanted to add that little historic footnote.

I wanted to engage in a little dialogue with my good friend, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), who has been to Iraq a number of times, four times, I believe, and is one of the Members who has really focused on Iraq. I would just start off by saying, Mr. Speaker, that it is a long, hard road in Iraq. We understand that. It has been tough for our soldiers. It is a difficult environment. It is full of sweat and dust and high temperatures, and sometimes blood. But we are undertaking and are now well on our way to making this hand-off, both politically and militarily, to the Iraqi people in Iraq, and giving them the best running start at freedom that country has ever had. And, in doing so, we are on our way to neutralizing Iraq as a potential springboard for terrorism in the years to come, which will accrue to the benefit of many, many generations of Americans.

So the cause is right. It is a just cause. We are standing up that military right now. We have General David Petraeus, one of our best military leaders, former commander of the 101st Airborne in Iraq, as a leader of that stand-up and training of the Iraqi forces. He has put together the schools for officers, for noncoms, for enlisted personnel; and those forces are starting to pick up that weight a little bit now and carry it in various battles and clashes that they have had around Iraq with the insurgents.

So, Mr. Speaker, I would simply want to report that while this is not an easy task, it is a very difficult task, the United States is carrying the ball and the folks who wear the uniform of the United States are doing a wonderful job for us.

Having said that, I would like to yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) for his observations on this very important issue.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I will tell him that I am just one of many, many great folks on that committee, I am just part of the group there, because we have really wonderful people on both sides of the aisle on the Committee on Armed Services. The committee has been working hard. Our members have been working very hard. This has been a challenge. The IEDs, these Improvised Explosive Devices that are detonated remotely now, are an enormous challenge; and the deadliness of those is manifested and can be illustrated as you walk the halls of the hospital there in Ramstein, Germany, or over here in Bethesda at Walter Reed when they come back.

So we moved out smartly and the services moved out very quickly to armor up some 8,000-plus Humvee vehicles, basically our follow-on utility vehicle, and we are also working hard on other means of trying to stop these very deadly systems.

But in the end, if we look at the combat that took place in Iraq, it is interesting, with this high-tech world, a lot of it is just great, great people. So we have done a few good things; but we have had some really, really wonderful people wearing the uniform of the United States.

The last citation I picked up before I went over there was for a Marco Martinez, who was a sergeant in the Marine Corps who won the Navy cross for taking an enemy position, taking on and taking out four insurgents with grenades and rifle fire. That is one of hundreds of high awards for valor and literally thousands of lesser awards. We have issued some 16,000 Bronze Stars in that theater and over 127 Silver Stars. Mr. Speaker, those people, the television this year and the movie screens were filled with the invasion of Normandy, but the kids that wear the uniform of the United States, and they are kids, because a lot of them are teenagers, a few of them just in their early 20s, are every bit as courageous and dedicated as that great generation that hit the beaches in Normandy and hit the beaches in the South Pacific.

So I want to thank the gentleman for all the great work that he has done, all the intelligence work that he has done along with his colleagues.

Saddam Hussein really rattled on when he was there in the court, and I do not know if that is an equivalent to a preliminary hearing or a time in which one enters their plea; but he said as he rattled on, he said one thing that was true. He said, in essence, if it was not for George Bush and those Americans, this would not be taking place, and that was true. He would not be there if it was not for George Bush and about 300,000 great Marines and soldiers and sailors and airmen.

And I think of all of those great units, the First Marine Division, 101st Airborne, the Third Army, the Fourth Infantry Division, now taken over by the Big Red One, the first infantry division up there in Tikrit, and the First Cav and the First Armored Division, which has been centered there in Baghdad for so long, right in the heart of the tough operations, and now the First Striker Brigade up in the north, if it was not for the Americans, the people of Iraq would have no chance at freedom and we, the Free World, would have no chance at neutralizing Iraq as a potential springboard for terrorism.

So I want to thank the gentleman. I also want to thank the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bradley) and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller) for coming on down here. We have spent a lot of time working this issue and going over to theater, and all of the great work that they have done.

Well, I would just say to my friend that, at worst, we do not put documents in our socks; and I have not seen the definitive statement on this, but one, at least according to the news reports, and I think that is why we need to get more information on this, one of the staff members at the Archives said he put some of them into his socks.

Now, I think that they keep the temperature fairly temperate in that room, and you do not need to warm your feet. And just the idea of a national security adviser putting documents into his socks, I think raises a few questions.

There are more questions here than there are answers, and I think we all want to believe the best of our fellow man, our fellow government servant, who, as you said, was national security adviser. But another thing that I think the American people have to ponder on is that he did not, according to the news reports, say, Yes, I have got them until he was called by the archivists, who said, ``You have got secure documents.'' And at that point he said, ``Yes, I believe I do.''

So you are right. These are not documents that are mixed up.

It is a standard procedure to divest yourself of any notes that you have written, but also divest yourself of the documents, as it is to turn your car off when you pull your car into the parking garage. You turn it off. And the idea that you left the car running, and then you did not go down and turn the car off until somebody called you and told you the car was still running and that that was all done unintentionally is, I think, something that Mr. Berger needs to continue to explain.

Because one thing about the 9/11 Commission, the reports are out, one they were afraid of, and I need to yield to my friend from Florida, is that bits and pieces, little bitty statements out of that report, two and three words, will be used for news triggers, little statements that people made. And they will be plucked out and they will be used politically on one side or the other and they will be used by the news media, and so just a couple of words, one sentence, can have enormous effect, enormous effect.

I know the more liberal members of the media have pointed to one sentence that somebody used in one of the weapons of mass destruction analyses, where said it does not matter what we find, because this war is going to happen. Now, that was not a statement of policy. That was a statement by some guy who did not control policy, but it was plucked out and used and probably put in front of 50 million people. So little bitty words and little bitty sentences and little bitty phrases can be pulled out. And so the idea that we now have an incomplete reservoir of facts is, I think, disturbing to the American people.

If you lined up all the people in the United States and said, who would take those documents out, the President's former national security adviser would be the last gentleman that you would suspect. And on the other hand, apparently truth is stranger than fiction. It has happened. I think there is some explaining to do.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, and I think he has raised probably the most important question for the next several weeks.

One other question we might ask is when Mr. Berger took these documents home, he obviously took them home for a purpose, and presumably he reviewed them at home, he looked at them. That would be another opportunity to say, I have got classified documents; they should go back. And it would certainly be a time when you would not scrunch one of them up and destroy it, because you realize you have got something that the Archives needs.

And so it is a very, very strange situation, and I think the gentleman has posited the most important questions. And maybe in the next 5 or 6 or 7 days we are going to have some answers.

I hope the gentleman would stay around and we will talk about Iraq, because the gentleman, along with the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller) and the gentleman from New Hampshire have a wealth of experience with respect to the Iraq theatre.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida, a great member of the committee.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding at this point, because I think that it does reflect on the judgment of Senator Kerry, but I think more reflective of his judgment with respect to intelligence is the fact that Senator Kerry voted to cut intelligence all during the 1990s.

Now what we have discovered is that we cut intelligence, we cut our operatives, our operating officers by more than 20 percent during the 1990s, during the Clinton administration; and that meant that we cut all of the people that gave us information because each of those operating officers has stables of people who talk to them, whether they are taxicab drivers or people in a bureaucracy in some foreign country or just people that have a certain insight into knowledge, people who are in the room when somebody bad makes a decision to hurt Americans. We lost 40 percent of our assets, of our intelligence assets.

So we had all this information coming in, and we cut out 40 percent of it. So we are like Ford Motor Company cutting out 40 percent of its dealerships and then wondering why the number of Fords sold has dropped dramatically.

Well, while we were doing that during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, Senator Kerry tried to cut it more, and in 1994 he offered a massive cut that received from fellow Democrats extreme criticism, one of them saying this was going to cut the eyes and ears out of our Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and another one saying that this was going to be a disservice to our troops.

And then in 1996, Senator Kerry offered a bill, and I understand that he did not get a single cosponsor. There was not anybody in the Senate, Democrat or Republican, who was liberal enough to sign up to this one, because this cut $1.5 billion out of the intelligence budget. This is in 1996 when we really needed it, when we needed to rebuild intelligence; and he cut what would have been $300 million per year for 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 and the year 2000. Luckily, not a single Senator was liberal enough to join him in that.

And it goes back to a statement that he made that was reported in one of the Harvard newspapers when he was first running for office, and he said that for practical purposes, he was going to for practical purposes defund the CIA, just take away the money.

I think that Senator Kerry always looked at the CIA in the same way as people look at it when they go into these movies and the movie is made through the prism of some left-winger in Hollywood; and in these Hollywood movies the CIA is always out there moving drugs and hurting people and being basically a bad influence. In reality, the people that serve in the CIA and our other intelligence agencies are wonderful people who serve this country, get no kudos, get no parades down Main Street, put themselves in dangerous positions for our country and often die in small, isolated places around the world for the United States of America.

But the problem in judgment is not Sandy Berger, the image of Sandy Berger stuffing stuff into his clothes and leaving the classified intel room, as John Kerry's adviser. The real crisis in judgment, I think, is when John Kerry got up and tried to cut an already debilitated CIA, one where the Clinton administration had sliced the top right off of it, cut out 40 percent of our assets, and he came in with further cuts. And he called our programs, the intelligence programs, silly programs.

Nobody calls them silly programs today. We wish we had had more. We wish we had had people sitting in those meetings when decisions were made to hurt Americans.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman.

I thank the gentleman. Another question I think is a commonsense question that the average American would ask is, well, if you took this stuff home that was highly classified, very sensitive, it is against the law to take it home, and you took it home. And you are reading it and you are a former security advisor, you know that it is highly classified, well, if you wad it up and throw it in the garbage, which is almost unthinkable, almost unthinkable, would you not, when you get called up by the people who have run the collection of that information, would you not then go try to retrieve it?

Would you not go out to your garbage and dig through it and say, why did I just lose it and throw it away?

I agree with that and I want to thank, also, the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bradley) for his great work on the committee and especially his focus on making sure our troops have everything that they need. I yield to the gentleman.

Let me thank the gentleman for his great initiative because I am just a cog in this wheel and both gentlemen, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller), has been a leader and put together, drafted the provisions that we all got behind that gave these great survivor benefits which heretofore had not been coming. And the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller) is to be congratulated on that.

The gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bradley) has been a real leader in making sure that we have this momentum to rebuild the military; and not only do we have the 30,000 increase in Army end strength in our bill, but we also have an increase of some 9,000 Marines. I think that is important also. The Marines are out there deployed a great deal of the time. They are kind of a 911 for us. It always has one MEU or one larger unit. A MEU is a Marine Expeditionary Unit, a little bit bigger than a battalion, out on patrol, so to speak, in the world's oceans, ready to move in quickly if there is a problem.

The interesting thing is this all reflects on the people. If you have a family sitting around the breakfast table trying to decide whether to re-up or not, the fact that the dad has not been home for two or three Christmases is going to have an effect on whether he stays in. This is a corporate decision that is made by the family. So having enough people is a very, very important thing.

It is also standing military that is not committed that is an insurance policy for our country. It makes sense to have an insurance policy.

I want to thank the gentleman for his great work and just ask the gentleman, he has been to Iraq, and I would like to ask both gentlemen what their take is now. We all know it is a tough, hard road; but our troops are walking down that road. We are starting to make this hand- off. We have handed off the government of Iraq to Iraqis, and we are starting to hand off the military. What do you think?

I thank the gentleman for his comments. I would like to ask the same question of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller), who has been a great member of the committee and who has really worked this issue.

The gentleman made a good point when he said that sometimes the news media follows the old adage, if it bleeds, it leads. Because that is what a TV station will use to get viewership for their news hour so they can sell Coca-Cola and whatever type of advertising they have got. And they know that violence does attract a certain core audience.

Now, the problem with running wall-to-wall car wrecks if you are a local TV station is that you give a misleading impression of the traffic situation in a given town. If you go in, if you are a new TV station in town and you say, because we do not have a lot of good substantial news, we will do wall-to-wall car wrecks, and your news guys may say, we only have two car wrecks a day; and you say, run them over and over again. If the average person watches that news station and sees wall-to-wall car wrecks on the news, he will be given the impression if he drives out on the freeway in that town, he has a 50 percent chance of being in an accident.

The car wrecks in isolation may be true. They are accurate pictures, but if you run them back-to-back, wall-to-wall, all the time, all car wrecks, you are going to give a misleading impression on the traffic situation on that town. Similarly, if you run wall-to-wall pictures of burning tankers. If there was one tanker blown up in a country that is as big as the State of California and has 25 million people, and you run one explosion over and over and over, you give the impression that the entire country is on fire. It is not.

That is not to say it is not dangerous, because it is dangerous; and that is not to say it is not tough.

I want to give a description of what I saw last time I was there. When we went into Balad, we were there in time for the daily mortaring, where a couple of mortar rounds are thrown in by the insurgents in this big former fighter base for Saddam Hussein, which is now one of our main logistics bases.

Well, we were out looking at the gun trucks at that time; and as these rounds came in about 1,000 yards away, all the GIs just walked, they did not panic or stampede. They just walked, did not even stop their conversations, to the shelters that were nearby.

Our general said, Quick, get into the nearest building. It happened to be a movie theater. We went in there, and he said, get away from the glass, go indoors. We went into the actual theater portion of this building. I opened up the door and went in. It was a big church service. It was on Sunday. There were 400 GIs there. They had a great preacher who was preaching. They had a 100 GI choir, a band, had a couple of steel guitars up there, and everybody had their combat gear sitting there.

Not only were the politicians forced to go into the church service because of mortaring, we were forced to stay there because of mortaring. We asked

when we could leave, and they said, You are going to have to wait till the service was over, and so we waited until the service was over and we left.

My point is, those folks are standing firm. Our people in uniform are standing firm. The American people should stand firm.

It was interesting to come back here and watch the talking heads on television whip themselves into a tizzy, and in my mind's eye I had those great folks in uniform who were doing their job very coolly, very professionally and with a sense of purpose; and with respect to a sense of purpose, that is an important thing.

Just saying, Well, I support the troops, but they are wasting their lives is not enough. If you tell people that what they are doing, whether they are a truck driver for a living or they are a soldier, is without value. Then you are really denigrating that person. You are really taking the value away from their occupation.

So those who say, Well, I would support the troops, but what they are doing is a waste, is not a support of the troops.

Now, you may say, Well, that is okay, I think my opinion outbalances whether or not I support the troops but I am not a supporter of the troops, and it does a disservice to the troops.

I want to let you know when we went over, and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Reyes), a great Member from El Paso, was over with us and the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert), we let the troops know that we valued their service and valued them.

I would be happy to continue to yield to the gentleman from New Hampshire.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell the gentleman about another operation that took place.

For those folks who now have given the distorted view to the world that somehow the Americans are worse than Saddam Hussein, that we have tortured people and we are the emblems of torture because they have run these pictures back to back, including the picture where a person is pretending to shock a person. In the briefings I received, they never turned on the electricity, but they have given that picture out to literally millions of viewers with the clear impression that that person is being shocked with electricity.

When I was in the hospital there at Ramstein, one of the surgeons had a disk, and on the disk was a video of Saddam Hussein's people amputating the hands of people in one of the villages because they had not done enough for the economy. They were businessmen, and the growth rate of the economy had not been high enough. So he thought he would give a little example and amputate their hands.

So for people that want to see real torture, real inhumane treatment, it is there to see, but of course, if we give that disk to the news media, I am sure that nobody will. In fact, I think those people were in the capital. I think the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) brought them over for a reception, and as I recall, there were almost no stories about those people.

There was a story or two about the young kids, the 14-year-old kids who wrote anti-Saddam graffiti on their blackboard in high school. They were promptly taken out and hanged.

And the Kurdish mothers who died there by poison gas, with their babies in their arms, those were representations of real inhumane treatment.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I thank the gentleman from New Hampshire also, and would ask if he has any closing words he would like to say.

We will all continue to work together, and I thank all Members, Republican and Democrat, on our committee. We have got a great membership.

Let me just say one thing, if I could, with the indulgence of my colleagues.

A great gentleman, Cato Cedillo, who served as my assistant district administrator for 23 years passed away early this morning, and he was a real hero. He was a guy from San Angelo, Texas, who helped everybody, who had a heart as big as all outdoors; and I swear he could do more with a telephone, getting the problem solved, than the rest of us with a bank of computers.

Cato was a wonderful, wonderful person, and I was with him and with his family last night as we said good-bye to Cato. It is sad. He will be greatly missed around his hometown of San Angelo, Texas, and San Diego, California.

I thank the gentlemen for letting me mention him in the closing moments of our special order.

I want to thank the gentlemen for participating tonight, and again, the message from our troops was that they are staying steady and we in America should stay steady. We are making this handoff. We need to follow through with it and follow through with our mission.

I thank the gentlemen.

Mr. Speaker, I and my colleague, Congressman Randy Cunningham, rise today to recognize and commend to the House a man who embodies the spirit of America and has worked tirelessly for his community. Mr. Samuel James (``Sandy'') Kahn, a third generation Californian, has had both a distinguished business career and an unselfish record of community and philanthropic service.

Sandy received his undergraduate, graduate and law school education at the University of San Diego. He is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of one of our country's largest privately owned real estate development companies that developed in excess of 25% of the developable land in the City of San Diego. Although a successful business owner and executive, Mr. Kahn has always been committed to public service. He became a member of the San Diego Sheriff's Department Reserve program. Sandy graduated first in his academy class and progressed through the ranks from Deputy to Sheriff's Captain retiring honorably in 1995 after 25 years. For his service he received the department's highest award for meritorious service.

He has given unselfishly of his time to his community, State and nation. He was selected by the Adjutant General of the State of California to serve on the Advisory Board for Homeland Security. The San Diego County Board of Supervisors appointed Sandy to its Board of Economic Advisors for two terms. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and in October of 2001 he was appointed by the CEO of the San Francisco Federal Reserve bank to the ``Beige Book'' survey committee of leading economic indicators. He is a trustee of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation which is committed to defending the interests of crime victims and law enforcement through both State and Federal appellate jurisdictions.

Mr. Speaker, Congressman Duke Cunningham and I ask that the House commend Mr. Kahn for his accomplishments and his service to our Nation.

Mr. Speaker, my San Diego Congressional District suffers from the same problem that exists throughout all of the West--a diminishing supply of usable water. As populations increase, and resources are evermore stretched between agriculture, municipal, and environmental uses, we must be smarter with our current water use. To address this problem, San Diego has had great success. In recent months, we completed a landmark deal with our Imperial County neighbors that will provide up to 200,000 acre feet of new water per year for our growing city. San Diego County has embarked on a remarkable regional seawater desalination program to tap the nearby Pacific Ocean. Water efficiency efforts spearheaded by the San Diego County Water Authority have resulted in our ability to rely on the same amount of water we used in the year 1990--even though our population has swelled by nearly 20 percent. This is great progress, but we have more to do.

For this reason, today I am proud to introduce the San Diego Water Storage and Efficiency Act of 2004. The legislation helps the Sweetwater Authority, which administers much of the water supply in my district, make maximum use of the water they manage by enabling them to more fully use their existing reservoirs.

In 1993, the Army Corps of Engineers determined that one of the top methods to ensure greater water reliability in San Diego County was to connect three isolated reservoirs--the San Vicente, which receives raw, imported water, and the Loveland and El Capitan Reservoirs, which receive only local runoff and are rarely full. By connecting the three, we can ensure that the ability to use available water storage is maximized. This legislation authorizes a $3 million federal feasibility study of the reservoir intertie project.

I look forward to working with House Resources Committee Chairman Pombo, as well as Water and Power Subcommittee Chairman Calvert, both stalwart advocates for our State's water needs, in advancing this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, this bill will promote conservation and increase the reliability of our regional water supply, and I urge my colleagues' thoughtful consideration of the San Diego Water Storage and Efficiency Act.

Mr. Chairman, let me say one does not have to go too far with this amendment before finding a very strong point for defeating the amendment and objecting to it. Quoting section 802, it states that none of the funds made available in this act may be used to defend in court. So the U.S. cannot even send in people to defend in court the detention for more than 30 days of a person apprehended on United States territory solely because that person is classified as an enemy combatant.

Very simply, we have people who have been in Guantanamo, in fact who have been released from Guantanamo, who have been proven to have gone back to the battlefield and taken up arms against the United States.

If the Sherman amendment passed, if we caught Osama bin Laden in the U.S. tomorrow, the Department of Justice would not be able to legally defend his detention as an enemy combatant. That makes absolutely no sense.

It states further that none of the funds made available in this act may be used to classify any person as an enemy combatant if that person is apprehended on United States territory. We could have somebody driving a hijacked airplane and clearly in an act of aggression against the United States, and none of the funds available in this act, even if that person intended and was attempting to drive that airplane into a U.S. building, killing Americans, none of the funds in this act could be used to classify that person as an enemy combatant.

So interestingly, the Supreme Court cases that have held on this subject have said at least the combatant is entitled to some type of a hearing to determine whether, in fact, he is a combatant and whether he is being held legally. Well, a hearing requires that there are attorneys present and that there are advocates for and against the position. If we take section 208 of the Sherman amendment, we cannot spend any of this money to have the lawyer representing the United States of America to make his point that that person is a combatant and that we cannot hold him for longer than 30 days.

I would simply ask Members to vote against this amendment on this basis: It makes absolutely no sense. It in no way represents or reflects determinations made in the relevant court cases with respect to enemy combatants, detainees at Guantanamo or any other place.

Mr. Speaker, I thought we would talk tonight about several things, about our recent several CODELs to Iraq, to the theater, and also about the defense bill, and lastly, about the resources, the great American asset that ties all of our defense issues together, and that is the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States.

I thought, Mr. Speaker, maybe I would just start off with my great colleagues, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes) and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson), in just talking about a couple of those great men and women in uniform.

I wanted to read a citation, Mr. Speaker, because we have had a lot of talk, lots of discussion and enormous publicity about the prison mess over the last several months. And one way we have countered that image that I think has wrongfully been splashed against lots of folks in uniform is by talking about the great heroism of a number of those people. And I remind my colleagues that we had some 16,000 Bronze Stars awarded in Iraq, some 127 Silver Stars, and I thought that tonight just to start off I would talk about a couple of the commendations that have been given to heroes in that very difficult theater in Iraq.

This is a Silver Star that was presented by order of the Secretary of the Navy to Staff Sergeant Adam R. Sikes, United States Marine Corps. I wanted to read this, Mr. Speaker.

``For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against the enemy while serving as Platoon Sergeant, 1st Platoon, Company G, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, Regimental Combat Team 5, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force on 12 April 2003. During the Battle of At Tarmiyah, Staff Sergeant Sikes' platoon was pinned down by heavy small arms and rocket propelled grenade fire in the opening moments of the fight. Without orders, Staff Sergeant Sikes quickly rallied two of his squads and set them into position to suppress the enemy and prepare them to counter attack. With the squads in position, Staff Sergeant Sikes charged alone across the 70 meters of fire swept ground to close on the first enemy strongpoint, which he cleared with a grenade and rifle fire. Moving to the roof of a three-story building that was exposed to enemy fire, Staff Sergeant Sikes skillfully adjusted 60- millimeter mortar rounds onto nearby enemy positions. The rounds isolated the town from enemy reinforcement and decimated an enemy position in the nearby tree line. Upon learning that the other squad had taken causalities, Staff Sergeant Sikes moved to their position. With wounded Marines in a small compound, cut off by the enemy, Staff Sergeant Sikes signaled an amphibian vehicle and directed their evacuation while under a hail of small arms and rocket propelled grenade fire. By his bold leadership, wise judgment, and complete dedication to duty, Staff Sergeant Sikes reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.''

That is one of many, many commendations, Mr. Speaker, that have come out of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Here is another citation that I thought I would read tonight. This is a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal to Staff Sergeant Brian Porter, United States Marine Corps for heroic achievement while serving as tank commander, 3D Platoon, Company B, 1st Tank Battalion, Regimental Combat Team 7, 1st Marine Division in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. ``Staff Sergeant Porter's actions against the enemy were quick and deadly. Upon initial contact with the enemy near Imam Anas with two of four tanks in the platoon temporarily unable to fire, he guided his tank to the right of the platoon and destroyed an Iraqi T-55 tank with main gun fire. He personally engaged and destroyed numerous armored personnel carriers and tanks to ensure the safety of the company. During a reconnaissance operation in Ad Diwaniyah, he secured the southern flank of the company. During the ensuing firefight involving mortar fire, machine gun fire, and rocket- propelled grenade fire, he destroyed a technical vehicle that was firing upon the platoon at close range. Staff sergeant Porter's initiative, perseverance, and total dedication to duty reflected credit upon him and were in keeping with the highest tradition of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.''

Mr. Speaker, these are obviously just a few out of thousands of citations that have been given to our soldiers and airmen and Naval personnel and United States Marines in theater in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and in Operation Enduring Freedom.

Mr. Speaker, if we have time at the end of our special order, I would like to

read a few more of those. But right now I would just like to introduce two of my great colleagues who also have been really working the issues that arise from this operation in Iraq and the operation in Afghanistan. I would like to yield first to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes).

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to say before the gentleman yields, I know he has been to Iraq and we really appreciate that great tour, and also the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson) has spent a lot of time in Iraq. And I want to thank also the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert), a great member of the committee, and the gentleman from El Paso, Texas (Mr. Reyes) who was there with me over the last couple of weeks. So we have had great members of the Committee on Armed Services going over. I think that gives us some insight of what the troops need when we are putting together our bill to get the tools so they can get the job done.

I thank the gentleman for his remarks, and I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson).

I want to thank the gentleman. I just want to remind the gentleman that my job here is lots of inside work and no heavy lifting.

It is interesting, we do a lot of things here that have some import and affect the ways our troops operate. But seeing those guys and ladies in 120 degree heat in Iraq and cheerful is an extraordinary experience.

Mr. Speaker, I know both the gentlemen mentioned going through the air base in Germany, Ramstein Air Base, and going to the medical facility in Germany where our wounded troops are taken before they are brought back to Walter Reed or Bethesda; and in doing that this time, just this last week, I was reminded very strongly about what we displaced in Iraq when we got rid of Saddam Hussein, because one of the lead surgeons there had a videotape that was done by Saddam Hussein's agents as they amputated the hands of businessmen who they brought to the prison and decided, because Saddam Hussein had figured that they had not done enough for business lately and they had not brought the economy up sufficiently in Iraq in a certain period of time, he had their hands surgically amputated to give a little motivation to the other members of the business community. I imagine

it did motivate them. It probably motivated them to get out of there as quickly as they could.

When I see the discussion about Iraq peel off into some type of a debating society over whether or not we have found weapons of mass destruction lately, I pull that picture out of my top drawer that has all those Kurdish mothers spread out across the hillside dead, where they were killed in mid-stride holding their children, holding their little babies, where that chemical hit them and appeared to kill them just where they stood, and those pictures were as poignant and dramatic as any photos I saw of any of the death camps in Germany.

I was reminded once again of what we displaced when we displaced Saddam Hussein; and certainly, we are going to have, as the years go by and more mass graves are discovered and more people come forth with their stories, it is going to become very evident that the United States of America acted when others were afraid to act, when they were intimidated or when they were incentivized not to act because of economic situations, like the French who thought they were going to get all the contracts for the big oil fields, and perhaps others who thought that they somehow would have a good political or economic relationship with Iraq.

The United States acted, and we acted on behalf of humanity because it is humanity which rejects cutting people's hands off because they have not raised the economic standard; or shooting thousands of Shiites in the back of the head and bulldozing them into open trenches because they would resist Saddam Hussein's regime; or gassing Kurdish citizens in their little villages in northern Iraq. That is resisted by humanity, and the only nation which really took action along with our great British allies and Australia allies and several others brought something to the battle but not a lot, was the United States of America, and I think we can all be proud of that leadership.

It is going to be a rocky, tough road. They live in a tough neighborhood, and there is lots of danger for that new government to face. In fact, I think the biggest challenge for their armed forces is, number one, just keep their government alive, because there are lots of predators out there that want to take them down. I think we are going to make it and we are going to have an Iraq which is benign with respect to its relationship with respect to the United States, and that is going to accrue to the benefit of lots of Americans in generations to come.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes).

No. In fact, you know what I saw, The Washington Post had a front page article about the prison mess, and what they devoted the front and center to their front page on one day was that some prisoners in Guantanamo had asked for sugar in their tea, and they were told it was going to be a while before they got sugar for their tea. So they thought that was quite an abuse, and so instead of putting in an article about people who had their hands amputated by Saddam Hussein, they wanted to devote that very important space to prisoners who did not get sugar in their tea.

He may make that point to you when you try to get a part of the royalty.

The gentleman is absolutely right. And this Cold War was won by American service personnel. I look at Korea and Vietnam as two of the important battles in that war and battles which helped to bring that war to a successful conclusion.

The gentleman makes a great point about people who used to be behind the Iron Curtain now serving side-by-side with Americans. And I am reminded also that troops from Nicaragua and El Salvador, which were the centers of the so-called Contra wars during the 1980s, when America's liberals said Ronald Reagan should stay out of Central America; that if the Soviets want to have an influence in Central America, which they were having with the Communist Sandinista and the FMLN in Salvador, let them have it, said the liberals, and let us stay out of Central America; we cannot possibly win that war. And of course they brought back the old Vietnam thing, they said you are going to get bogged down in another Vietnam. Today, we have fragile democracies in each of those countries, and they have sent troops to stand side-by- side with Americans in Iraq to try to bring freedom to yet another country.

I was told, incidentally, that the Salvadorans in particular have fought fiercely in the Iraq theater; that they are excellent fighters and they very much support the coalition, and that they have brought a measure of strong support to our operation there. So I thank the gentleman for bringing that up because I think that is an important one.

When Ronald Reagan was bringing down the Wall, and when he met that first move of force by the Russians during his administration, when the Soviet Union started to ring Western Europe with SS-20 missiles and Ronald Reagan started to push in ground launch cruise missiles and Pershing missiles into Europe, the liberal commentators across the world said, essentially, now you have gone and done it; we will never have peace with the Soviet Union, and we have to get this Ronald Reagan out of there.

Yet, by meeting the strength of the Soviet Union with American strength, the President produced a situation where at one point the Russians picked up the phone and said, can we talk? And when they started talking, they talked not about a negotiated settlement but they talked really about the disassembly of the Soviet empire brought about by American strength.

I think this operation in Iraq, while it is tough and hard and very dangerous, is going to produce a good result in that very difficult part of the world.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.

Well, I thank the gentleman for pointing that out, and I think that the American service personnel who are serving in Iraq, because of what the gentleman has mentioned, are undergoing enormous hardship because they always have to be on guard for the possibilities that other shells, for example, that have nerve agents like the one that was picked up as an IED in Baghdad and was partly exploded to the point where the people who were the team that were neutralizing the shell got sick, there is always a possibility that more shells are going to be taken out of that particular load or cache of weapons. And that will be a danger to American troops. So I thank the gentleman for bringing that point up.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman.

I would be happy to. I would say to my friend that I would be happy to.

Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to do that with my friend. I cannot guarantee the American public is going to make a sell-out crowd for us, but I would be happy to do that. Sure.

I look forward to it.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman.

You better leave on that one. That is a good one.

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), also a great member of the Committee on Armed Services

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr.

Gingrey) for the point he has made. It is a very important point. That is the message that I think has gone out to people around the world. They really understand the goodness of this country. Interestingly, they might not understand by watching our own television, but they have enough experiences with their own families and with their own view of the world to know that the United States is a good country.

I am reminded of a couple of years ago when my parents were in Manila in the Philippines, and the Philippines were undertaking demonstrations against the United States. The demonstration leadership would walk over to the line of Filipinos waiting to get visas to come into the United States, and they would hire people to take hold of signs that said ``Down with the United States,'' or ``The United States out of the Philippines.'' They would hire them to demonstrate against the United States and after they demonstrated awhile, the demonstrators would then give back their signs to the organizers, and they would retake their position in line waiting for their visa to the United States that they just demonstrated against.

I think it is clear to the Iraqi people that we are the good guys. I think they are reflecting on this now as we have turned this government over. They have been ruled by a government for so long that was very self-serving. Its own survival and its own enrichment were the major goals that it undertook. Here is the United States, which has expended an enormous amount of human capital and our economic capital in this part of the world, and yet what we are asking them to do is be free; be free, grow your economy, become prosperous, become a member of the world community, which does not oppress its people; and it is our hope if you have a free government, you are not going to oppress other people.

The Iraqis are going to have to be tough to maintain this government. There are going to be bombs and explosions going off in Iraq for a long time to come. If the pouring in of resources could stop explosions from going off, we would not have explosions in Israel right now, but that is a fact of life in that part of the world. It is going to have to be a tough government with some grit. They are going to have to develop a military that has the capability of protecting that government and protecting this running chance at freedom that we have given the Iraqi people.

Maybe it will not work; but from the beginning of time to the end of time, the only time when the Iraqi people will have had a real chance at freedom is when the Americans were there, and that is something we can all be proud of.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson).

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman has described something very important to our country and that is all of us pulling together. That means we are pulling together whether you are part of the family and you know your husband or loved one is going to have to take off and spend some time overseas and you are going to try to pull through those difficult times, or if your neighbors are going to help out or relatives are going to help out. Or as the gentleman has said, employers are going to help out. This country has got to pull together. We have done a lot of that.

One thing that the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes) has worked on so much is American businesses pulling together. That means if you are a business, you are a prime contractor in this country and you can buy a piece of material or a machine tool from another country but you have the opportunity to buy one from Americans, and employ Americans by your purchases, create jobs in America by your purchases, take a look at that and that is something that the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes) has been encouraging our American businesses to do. That is part of pulling together.

We are going to have to all do that with the same spirit that we used to win the Cold War and World War II.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes).

Mr. Speaker, mentioning the President reminded me of something Saddam Hussein said, because the other day when he got to have his say in court, which is something he never gave the people that he oppressed, he said words to the effect that he would not be there if it were not for George Bush. I will not repeat the adjectives that he used to describe President Bush, but when he said he would not be there if it were not for President Bush, or words to that effect, he was right, George Bush and about 300,000 great Americans in uniform. The point is we have to be the leaders of the free world. If the free world were not led by the United States, I do not think there would be a leader in the free world.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes). It must have taken a lot of grit for Mikhail Gorbachev to have all of the previous speakers or the speakers at that ceremony talk about how Ronald Reagan equipped him; but, you know, he put up with that and then paid his respects to President Reagan. And I think there is a message there, and that is that the goodness of America comes through, and ultimately it persuades others to follow

the path of freedom. I thank the gentleman for his comments.

And I think, Mr. Speaker, we are out of time. We would like to yield back the balance of our time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the contributions of Dr. J. Robert Beyster, the founder of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Thirty-five years ago, Bob Beyster and a small group of scientists founded SAIC in my home town of San Diego. During this 35th anniversary, I would like to recognize Bob for his accomplishments in creating and leading a company dedicated to helping the United States government protect and serve its people.

Today, SAIC is one of the nation's top federal prime contractors. One unique aspect of this corporation is the fact that it is truly ``employee-owned.'' Dr. Beyster believed strongly that ``those who helped him build the company should own the company.'' Most of the 40,000 plus employees currently own SAIC stock.

SAIC has always worked with the U.S. Government, and has played a key role in our national security by providing systems engineering and integration support for our Armed Forces and allied powers. In addition, SAIC serves 12 of 13 Cabinet-level U.S. civilian agencies and has supported all 22 agencies of the newly created Department of Homeland Security.

In the aftermath of September 11, it provided wide-ranging support in New York City and Washington, D.C., and for military and government agencies. Today, SAIC support helps safeguard the nation's critical infrastructure and the information assets of government agencies. Its systems and networks are used to thwart crime and terrorism, and its technologies are used to examine vehicles and containers at ports and borders without impeding the flow of commerce.

SAIC designed and developed the Composite Health Care System for U.S. military hospitals, worldwide. Now, the company's Frederick subsidiary manages the National Cancer Institute's leading center for cancer and AIDS research.

Telcordia Technologies, an SAIC subsidiary, is the leading provider of telecommunications network software and new wireless solutions for military and criminal justice initiatives.

Decades of service to energy, the environment and our space programs have improved cost efficiencies, reduced risk and produced measurable results. Agencies have selected SAIC to help them modernize and manage huge volumes of data and to develop internet-based systems praised for setting new standards for e-government.

Dr. Beyster's contributions to the nation as a leader in applying science, technology and innovation to meet national needs stand as a tribute to the American entrepreneur and truly

demonstrate American business at its very best. I am truly honored to call Bob Beyster my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) for their wonderful bipartisan effort in putting this together and also my great colleague from the Committee on Armed Services, my partner, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton), for his work and contribution.

I will be very brief, but there are two messages in this resolution. I think it is appropriate that this resolution follows the funding of our Defense bills and our Intelligence bills because those are the bills that give our forces the tools to get the job done.

I think we have done an excellent job in putting together bills that give the force protection, the surveillance capability, the extra troops that are going to be needed over the next several years, and the funding for those troops, and particularly that $25 billion bolt-on that we did on the Defense authorization bill and the Defense appropriations bill.

So it is appropriate that this resolution, this message to the people of Iraq and the people of the United States, follow those funding bills because this is a very important message that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) and the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) and many others are sending.

The message to the American people can be found in this resolution that the command of American forces will remain with American commanders. That is very important to moms and dads and people who care about our uniformed people, that that chain of command will remain firmly in place, that we will continue to pursue our mission against terrorists, and that operation will be overseen and supervised by U.S. leaders. That is a very important message.

But to the Iraqi people there is also a message, and the message is that we are giving them a running start. We are handing over a country divested now of the leadership of Saddam Hussein. We are handing over to them a chance to maintain freedom in a very, very difficult part of the world. We are going to provide for them this military shield just as we have in other countries around the world as they stand up this free government.

But I think it is important for the Iraqi people to understand that too, and I think they do understand it, that this enduring, the endurance of this government in a very difficult neighborhood is going to require some real grit on the part of the Iraqi people and that no country, not our country, not any country, is guaranteed perpetual freedom.

We are giving them a running start. We have given them the sacrifice of many brave Americans and the continued sacrifice right through this day in terms of Americans KIA, killed in action, and wounded in action, as well as coalition partners, as well as many Iraqis. But they are going to have to take hold, and they are going to have to be able to lift that weight.

I hope that under the good leadership that is now forming, that is taking over on the 30th of this month, they are going to be able to make that transition. This is only when the Americans were in Iraq, one thing that can be said from the dawn of time until the end of time, only when the American came to Iraq did they have a chance to have a free and fair government. We are giving them this chance.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

And let me just say that when we put the defense bill together, put together with bipartisan support, passed the committee unanimously, we bolted on $25 billion in supplemental for this next year. 2.2 billion of that, after consultation with the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Goss), we put into the intel side which went into his intel budget. That is only for a couple of months. It was understood that was just for a couple of months.

And I would say to the gentlewoman who said we have underfunded counterterrorism to hold on to her horses because we have got a supplemental coming up for 2005, which will have a large intel piece to it and she will be tired of voting for intel increases.

So there is no cut to the intel budget. This was always intended to be a bridge. And everybody, everybody, on both sides of the aisle, we passed this thing 60 to zero in the committee, an overwhelmingly vote in the full House. It was only be supposed to be for a couple of months at the end of this year so our intel people and the people that wear the uniform would have that bridge in the winter months of this year.

So I want to applaud the gentleman for everything he has done. We did this with total synchronization, total coordination, and we have got a great budget for the folks who carry out the intel duties for this Nation.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to say to the gentlewoman the reason we bolted on $25 billion, not $50 billion, not $75 billion, with a piece of that being carried for her committee was because we have a war in two theatres which is ebbing and flowing. We cannot see into the future. We may need more money in January and February than projected $50 billion or even $75 billion. So I would just say to the gentlewoman, there is plenty of money for current operations. Nobody is being short-changed in this year.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Chairman, let me just say to the gentlewoman that I too have looked at requirements. And intel requirements in those two war-fighting theatres, Afghanistan and Iraq, are as difficult for the intel experts to project as it is for our defense experts, our people who are leading uniformed troops, and there is plenty of money to carry this bridge. This is a bridge fund, and I might say 60 out of 60 people, Republicans and Democrats, agreed this was a good number, and this had the $2.2 billion intel piece embedded in it when we passed it. So I can just tell the gentlewoman there is not going to be a gap.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, if one drives out beyond the population centers in California, they will come to the great California desert that lies between the coastal range and the Colorado River and vast areas of sand dunes, and that is a place where literally hundreds of thousands of Californians go to get away from the boss, to take the family for a weekend, to have a good time and to be able to off-road with their four-wheel-drive vehicles and their sand rails and dune buggies; and we have got places out there where families have gone for generations, where under one Palos Verde tree a family may have camped for 30 or 40 or 50 years, and it is a great getaway spot for Americans.

This land is BLM land, and recently the BLM has tripled user fees for the folks that use this territory, for the families that go out there and recreate. And that amounts, Mr. Chairman, to about 30 bucks a weekend. They go out and before they can buy groceries or charcoal or anything to use for their camping, they are going to have to fork out over $30 to Uncle Sam ostensibly for improvements in this BLM recreational facility. In fact, the BLM advertises it in one of their national publications, ``The Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area''; and they talk about these windblown sands of an ancient lakecrest which is one of the premier off-road vehicle playgrounds in the United States.

What this advertisement does not tell us is that the BLM has decided to use, having tripled the user fees for these off-roaders, a lot of folks having trouble coming up with that extra money to pay for a weekend, they have tripled the user fees, and they are using now almost a billion bucks of these user fees for monitoring studies which are used in an attempt by a number of groups to try to close down the dunes.

When we passed this pilot program for user fees, we never envisioned that this money would be used for monitoring studies for endangered species that would be used to try to inhibit the use of this great public land that is so valued by many Americans. It is within driving distance of about 10 percent of America's population.

So my amendment says very simply that we cannot use these user fees. We have to use them for what they were designed for and stated to be designed for, which is improving this recreational resource and not for doing biological studies which in the end are used by a number of groups in an attempt to close down the usage of this public area.

So my amendment would restrict that type of usage, and right now it is proposed by BLM that they take $1 million out of this fund, which is only about $3.8 million, and pull it way from using it to improve the resource and instead use it for monitoring; and my amendment would limit that.

I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman very much for his comments.

I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. Chairman, no. For the Endangered Species Act they have the money to enforce. They are using it for monitoring studies which are used to discover the existence of endangered species which in turn has been used in public lands throughout the West.

Yes, Mr. Chairman. I am arguing that they should be using other money other than this demo money. The demo money is supposed to be used for the benefit of the off-road community and put into recreational areas, campgrounds, et cetera.

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Exactly.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I think if he thinks I am one of the greatest Americans he may be in trouble. But I want to commend the gentleman for his great service on the Committee on Armed Services and all the work he has done on behalf of people in uniform everywhere.

It is interesting. This is an interesting time in that we have had several weeks of remembering a great President, Ronald Reagan, and at the same time the criticism of our present President, George Bush, has mounted severely.

I was looking over some anti-President quotes, anti-Republican President quotes, and I thought I was reading some things about President Bush, because, of course, you have these various groups that have been put together, knit together, to come forth in the nature of Henny Penny announce to us that the ski is falling in, particularly with respect to foreign policy, and that we have got to get this guy out of here; and we look at the credentials of the people who have said it, and a few of them have marginally worked in Republican administrations, but most of them came right out of the team on the other side.

It was interesting, I was looking at some statements about a President, and I had a couple of statements I thought bore repeating, because they looked to me like they had been applied to President Bush by his critics.

Here is a quote by a gentleman who is running for President. He said, ``The biggest defense buildup since World War II has not given us a better defense. Americans feel more threatened by the prospect of war, not less so, and our national priorities have become more and more distorted as the share of our country's resources devoted to human needs diminishes.''

I thought that was John Kerry talking about George Bush, but it is not. It is John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan. In fact, it looks to me like they simply xeroxed this statement and put this out on the latest ``sky is falling in'' report about the present President.

Here is another quote: ``The administration has no rational plan for our military.'' You heard that one before? There is no plan. ``Instead, it acts on misinformed assumptions about the strength of the enemy and a presumed window of vulnerability, which we now know not to exist.''

I thought, well, doggone it, that is Senator Kerry and he is talking again about George Bush. No, that is Senator Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. Of course, the same Senator Kerry now thinks that Ronald Reagan was actually quite a guy, and he said over the last several weeks that he brought us together and was a great President.

Now, here is another one. This one is a little bit personal. ``You roll out the President one time a day, one exposure to all you media, no big in-depth inquiries, put him in his brown jacket and his blue jeans, put him on a ranch, let him cock his head, give you a smile, it looks like America is okay.''

I thought, there is John Kerry talking about George Bush down on the ranch in Texas. No, it is John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan down on the ranch in California 20 years ago.

``The President certainly was never in combat. He may have believed he was,'' this is another quote, ``but he never was. The fact is he sent Americans off to die.''

I thought maybe that was John Kerry talking about George Bush. We have heard a lot about that issue over the last 3 or 4 months. No, that was John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan.

Here is another quote: ``I am proud that I stood against the President, not with him, when his intelligence agencies were abusing the Constitution of the United States and when he was running an illegal war.''

Once gene, I thought this was John Kerry talking about President Bush. It is not. Twenty years ago, this was John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan.

After his first major political battle in the Senate over the President's foreign policy, John Kerry said, ``I think it was a silly and rather immature approach.''

I thought, well, doggone it, that has to be John Kerry talking about George Bush's approach to Iraq. No, that is not. That is John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan's approach to our Central American countries during the contra wars, 20 years ago.

Incidentally, it is interesting, that ``silly and immature approach'' that Senator Kerry talked about 20 years ago ended up and resulted in Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador and Nicaragua all today being fragile democracies; and, interestingly, Salvadorans are standing side-by-side with Americans fighting for freedom in Iraq today. They are some of our best soldiers. In fact, their people have shown absolute bravery on the battlefield. And one time they were on the verge of being assimilated or taken over by a communist-backed insurgency, a Russian backed insurgency back in the 1980s.

It is interesting, what John Kerry called ``a silly and immature approach'' resulted in fragile democracies coming around or springing up in all those countries, which, before the Reagan administration had been military dictatorships.

Now, here is another one. Mr. Kerry spoke at great length about the President's abuse of the Constitution and totalitarian inclinations. This must be him talking about the PATRIOT Act. ``They are literally willing to put the Constitution at risk because they believe there is somehow a higher order of things,'' maybe that is about Abu Ghraib, ``and the ends do in fact justify the means. That is the most Marxist, totalitarian doctrine I have ever heard in my life.'' This is a quote from John Kerry. ``You have done the very thing that James Madison and others feared when they were struggling to put the Constitution together, which was to create an unaccountable system with runaway power running off against the will of the American people.''

Once again, I thought that must be Mr. Kerry talking about George Bush. No, that was Mr. Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan, whom he now reveres.

Interestingly, just a year or so ago, he likened his own criticism of Ronald Reagan to George Bush. He said this, and this is about the President. He says, ``They have managed him the same way they managed Ronald

Reagan. They send him out to the press for one event a day. They put him in a brown jacket and jeans and get him to move some hay and drive a truck, and all of a sudden he is the Marlboro Man.''

He goes on. ``We have seen governors come to Washington, and they don't have the experience in foreign policy and they get in trouble pretty quick. Look at Ronald Reagan, look at Jimmy Carter, and now, obviously, George Bush.''

So let me see. We had the former leaders of the free world talking about Ronald Reagan the other day, Brian Mulroney, Maggie Thatcher, talking about the hundreds of millions of people who were freed by the Reagan doctrine of peace through strength. Those days when Ronald Reagan strode out, took leadership of the free world, and when the Russians ringed Western Europe with SS-20 missiles in an attempt to intimidate our allies, the President started to move ground-launched Cruise missiles and Pershing missiles into place in Europe, and the Russians picked up the phone and said, can we talk?

But, of course, before they picked up the phone and said can we talk, there were massive demonstrations in Europe, and liberals like Mr. Kerry talked about the idea that somehow we had lost our leadership of the free world. They called Ronald Reagan a cowboy. They said we need to talk more. We need to get concessions from the Soviet Union.

And what happened? He met their strength with American strength, and in the end we had arms reductions, and in the end Ronald Reagan negotiated not just arms limitations, he negotiated the surrender and the disassembly of the Soviet empire.

Very interesting that we have got now this same collection of people coming together and saying, well, they may have gotten it wrong with Ronald Reagan 20 years ago; but by golly, this time they think they have got it right with George Bush. And you can Xerox these quotes from Mr. Kerry that he used 20 years ago against President Reagan and put them in his speeches today against George Bush, President Bush; and there is not a bit of difference.

Now let us go back to the facts. The facts are that when this country was attacked, this President did what we all needed him to do. He moved aggressively against terrorists; and in moving aggressively, we hunted these guys down in places where they never thought we could get to them. The Tenth Mountain Division soldiers killed them in rifle pits at 10,000 feet elevation in the mountains of Afghanistan, in those rugged areas on the Pakistani border.

We went into Iraq and took out a dictator, who I guess, except for Adolph Hitler, was the only dictator in the history of the world who used poison gas to kill his own people. And those thousands of Kurdish mothers laying on those hillsides holding their little babies killed in mid-stride by that poison gas, according to today's liberals, was not enough of a justification for the United States to change the leadership of Iraq.

What have we done in Iraq? Well, we have occupied Iraq, and it truly is an occupation and occupations are tough. They are tough on both the occupied country, and they are also tough on the occupying country. And if you do not think that is so, look at what happened after World War II when we were occupying Germany and other parts of Europe, and you had the presence of outsiders, Americans are great people, but outsiders wearing very thin on the German populace, just as we wore thin on dozens of countries simply because we were there, we were outsiders; they knew we were going to leave after a while.

We had lots of writings, lots of editorials talking about how the people who had come in and had their tanks strewn with flowers when they liberated those areas now becoming somewhat of a guest who had been there, who had overstayed their invitation and should move out.

Well, we all know that, and we all know that the stray artillery round that accidentally hit civilians, the truck that is going too fast that hurts livestock, the very presence of having outsiders in your country is always wearing thin. But what is the alternative? The alternative was Saddam Hussein and those thousands of Kurdish mothers laying on the hillside killed by poison gas in mid-stride. And I would just say to my friend, those pictures, and I keep them in my office and I look at them on a regular basis, those pictures are as compelling as anything that ever happened at Auschwitz. They are compelling, compelling pictures.

So maybe that question the school kids ask, they ask their daddies, ``Daddy, if Hitler hadn't threatened the rest of us, would we have stopped him from killing the Jewish community?'' Well, that is a pretty profound question. That is a pretty tough question, because generally speaking, the desire or the will to go to war manifested in a declaration of war by an assembled Congress and the President is usually justified based on the threat that a particular adversary has toward you, toward your country.

But I can tell you this, that at least partially the reason that we went into Iraq was because of those dead Kurdish mothers strewn out across that hillside killed in mid-stride by poison gas. It was those thousands of people who were taken in buses to the killing fields where the backhoes worked all night digging the trenches, where the firing squads that kept, according to the farmers, bankers' hours. They showed up at nine o'clock. Would wait patiently for the buses full of civilians, women, old men, children; and they would disembark from the buses and line up dutifully along their trenches, and then Saddam Hussein's gunners would walk down the line and in a very workmanlike way would put bullets in the backs of their skulls, and they would be bulldozed into the trenches and filled up.

One day the farmer said that the ammo people, the executioners, ran out of ammo, and so they just bulldozed them in anyway. They found out that kills them just as dead.

So what is that we replaced, and every American who has served in Iraq, and there are 300,000 of them, incidentally, who have served in Iraq, 16,000 bronze stars have been won. I would ask the gentleman to pull that over. We might ask that that be noticed. That is one of 127 silver stars that have been awarded in combat operations to Gunnery Sergeant Jeff Bohr, who happened to place his body between his wounded people and the adversary until he himself was killed.

And, you know, as I was looking at the stuff about the Abu Ghraib prison and the prison mess, which has dominated the media, I started to look through some of these citations of bravery, and there are tons of them. There are tons of brave, brave people who have sacrificed everything, including giving that last full measure of devotion to this cause.

And I want to say to them, what you have done, the purpose of what you have done is of value. And the real meanness of the left, of these operations, where they say, Well, we like the troops, we support the troops, we do not support what they are doing, is to devalue and take away meaning from the people that serve the cause of the American military. What they did does have value. Every single person whose boot has touched that sand of the Middle East who has served his country in an honorable way has value to this country, and Gunny Sergeant Jeff Bohr is just one of those people.

If my colleagues look through, there are literally dozens and dozens of people, hundreds of people who have done heroic acts; some 16,000 Bronze Stars have been earned in that country. Yet, I saw all this publicity about Abu Ghraib, because there is a couple of newspapers driving that story. They want that story to stay alive, to the point where The Washington Post had an article the other day and on the front page I thought, boy, they are going to try to come out with something really bad.

One of the bad things they cited was that the prisoners at Guantanamo asked for sugar in their tea. These were suspected al Qaeda, some of them, the people that ran those airplanes into our Twin Towers. These people asked for sugar in their tea, and they were told by the cruel American captors that it would be a long time before they got sugar in their tea. The Washington Post, by golly, obviously thinks

that ought to be fixed real quick. The other thing they did not get was DVDs for their religious ceremonies. So on the one hand, we have people who drive planes into buildings and kill thousands of Americans; and on the other hand, we have people who commit those acts who are treated in general so well that one of their biggest complaints is that they do not get sugar in their tea and they have only The Washington Post to fight for their rights.

Now, I looked at the number of articles that The Washington Post did, because I made the statement the other day where some people said, well, that puts you out on a limb. I said that the biggest event, military event in our history, the event upon which the freedom of our world hung in the balance, and that was D-Day, the invasion of Normandy when we were fighting the forces of Hitler, that day, that event, that operation received in The Washington Post, in those days when The Washington Post wrote a lot about our military operations, that received some 57 articles in The Washington Post. We counted them up. Now, if I have missed a couple, I want The Washington Post to set me straight and send in the other articles, and we will sure put them in our count. Fifty-seven articles The Washington Post printed about the invasion of Normandy.

Now, on the other hand, The Washington Post likes the prison story like the one they just printed about the prisoners not getting enough sugar in their tea. They have printed twice as many articles about the prison mess, about Abu Ghraib, 127 articles, and they are still going, so it is not over yet. They have printed 127 articles about the prison mess, twice as many articles as they printed about the most important day, arguably, in the history of this country during the 20th century, and that was D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, when thousands of ships and thousands of airplanes and hundreds of thousands of fighting Americans, including thousands who lost their lives, did everything they could to win back freedom for the world.

So the invasion of Normandy, D-Day, had roughly half as much importance to The Washington Post as the Abu Ghraib prison mess. I think that is imbalanced. And I think it is time for us to refocus on winning this war and, maybe more importantly, now that we have come to the first phase of this hand-off, handing off this country to a new government, a government that is led by people who are responsive to their constituents, that means to the Iraqi people, with a military that will respond to a civilian leadership; and maybe it will not be a Jeffersonian democracy, and it will not have all of the complex attributes that a country that has been free for hundreds of years has.

But, hopefully, it will be a country where the average guy has a modicum of freedom and protection, like freedom of speech, freedom to come and go, freedom to buy or sell, freedom to know that somebody is not going to knock on your door in the middle of the night and take you on a bus to the killing fields and dig a trench and execute you and push you into it.

So, hopefully, we are going to turn this country over to a government and a military, a new military that we are standing up, which will be strong enough to back that government and be responsible to that civilian government. And the United States, which is much chastened by the rest of the world, just as Ronald Reagan was chastened by the rest of the world when he took on the Soviet Union for them, and when he freed literally hundreds of millions of people, all we are asking of the people of Iraq is this: be free. Be nice to each other. Be representative if you are in government. Be responsive to what your people want. Be good to each other. Have a rule of law. Have a court system that works. Have an education system that works. Have economic opportunities so a guy with a good idea and a machine shop can make some money. Very basic, simple things.

Arguing against that, of course, are our so-called allies who really have not been our allies in many cases. The French, for example, are not our allies. The French have, on occasion, been very strong, stood strongly with the United States. Certainly they did when our people were shedding our blood at Normandy. The French liked us then. We have Mr. Lafayette gazing at us from his framed picture here on the House floor. We sure remember him.

We remember those allies in those early days, and also in World War II and, of course, the French have contingents fighting terrorism in other areas. But the idea that the French would not agree with us to get rid of a man who left all of those Kurdish mothers killed with poison gas with their babies laying across that hillside, or gunning down people in wholesale quantities and pushing them with bulldozers into open graves, or taking people who he suspected of having done things against the State and having their arms removed from them, that prison, and having schoolchildren who wrote graffiti on the blackboard ``Saddam Hussein is a bad guy'' taken out, schoolchildren, and hanged from the neck until they are dead, certainly the French would agree with us that that is the kind of a government you want to change. And certainly the Russians should agree with us that that is the kind of government that you want to change.

Now, maybe they will not agree with us; maybe they do not agree with us. I am just reminded that when we hit Mr. Qadhafi in the days when Ronald Reagan was then called a cowboy by the left, hit Mr. Qadhafi in those days when Qadhafi's agents have bombed Americans in Germany, a terrorist act, and we flew a responsive aircraft, we flew our bomber aircraft out of Heathrow in England, I remember Maggie Thatcher stood with us. And when she stood with us, even a majority of the British people were right on the bubble as to whether or not they should support us because they thought this might bring trouble on them, but Maggie Thatcher stood with us.

But when we flew over France with our bombing runs, we had to go around France, because France, even then, did not like our actions, and this particular action against a terrorist who I think they felt they could deal with, Mr. Qadhafi, so they told our planes not to cross their soil. That was not under George Bush; that was under Ronald Reagan. Do my colleagues know what Ronald Reagan did? He flew those planes right through the Gulf of Sidra and he flew a couple of cruise missiles right down to meet Mr. Qadhafi and he changed his attitude. Maybe that change of attitude is going to result in new openings in Libya.

Other actions that Mr. Qadhafi has taken lately would indicate maybe it is not. But the point is that that President stood strong against lots of criticism back here from the left and lots of criticism from allies like the French, but he did the right thing.

This President is doing the right thing, and we are on the verge now of making this hand-off. We are going to have elections in December. It is going to be a rough, tough, difficult road. We drove that steel column up through Baghdad very quickly and did it in what I think was a historically effective manner.

This occupation is a tough occupation. It is always tough when you have to provide a shield behind which a new government can knit itself together and that is what we are having to do. We have to provide that shield. That shield has vulnerability. When you are out there shielding people, you have vulnerability just when we have seen when they bombed U.S. headquarters; they have bombed hospitals; they have bombed lots of places where people are doing good things but we will continue to provide that shields until we make this hand-off.

I will just say one thing to the gentleman that we have learned in these United States that freedom is not free. It is also not guaranteed and freedom is not going to be guaranteed for the Iraqi people either. We are going to give them their freedom and a running start. They will have to have some grit to maintain that freedom. They have lots of enemies in the neighborhood. I hope they make it because we put an enormous investment, an investment like the gunnery sergeant who is in that particular citation.

In fact, if the gentleman will look at that, is that for the Navy Cross or the Silver Star?

There are lots of folks who have given a great deal, not just

for our country, but for Iraq; and it is a very, very important thing that the Iraqi people take hold and have discipline and have tenacity and have toughness and grab hold of this idea of freedom and evolve that idea, that policy, that desire into a Nation that can endure, that will have a good relationship with the United States.

I thank the gentleman for taking out this time and I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo), who is just a great contributor to these discussions for letting me talk about Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, I just thank the gentleman for his very astute analysis that there are no guarantees in this war against terrorism and this is a central part of the war against terrorism.

It is interesting that we had America hit with these aircraft taken over by terrorists, shocking Americans beyond their wildest nightmares and in a way that no one could imagine just a few years ago. I think that is going to be for this country, even Iraq aside, that is going to be the pattern for the next many, many years.

We live in a new age. The age is terrorists with high technology. And we had a Soviet Union which was big and strong and fielded literally in the Warsaw Pact hundreds of divisions. It had a lot of might. It had 309 SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each of which had 10 warheads, each of which was about 30 times as powerful as the bomb that hit Hiroshima. And they had those bombs and those missiles aimed at American cities, and they had at times over the last 20, 30 years very aggressive foreign policies. But they were fairly predictable, the Soviet Union.

We certainly should not lapse into nostalgia for the Soviet Union because

they were very much an evil empire. From where the sun now stands we will have people excavating graves, many of them mass graves that were caused by the Soviet Union, but this is a new era. This is an era of terrorists with high technology, and it is an era that will see bad people doing everything they can to leverage technology and to hurt Americans and our allies in ways that go far beyond the scope of what was possible just a few years ago. And just a usage of those American aircraft that were taken over by the terrorists and the thousands of people who were killed and hurt by those actions are representative of what we can expect for the next 20 or 30 years.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when the Soviet Union went down. We look forward to an era of peace. Unfortunately, we will only have an era of peace if we have strength, and one thing that we will have to have if that we dissembled in the days when liberals in this country thought that it was not Marquis of Queensbury rules for us to have good intelligence. We are going to have to have really good intelligence.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my very good friend, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo), as he is leaving, because he is a gentleman who is very astute and has spent a lot of time looking in depth at these issues and knows a lot about security. He is not a member of our Committee on Armed Services, but we wish he was. And I want to thank the gentleman from Colorado.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to ask my friend, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks), who has done a great job on this Committee on Armed Services, we put together this bill. We hope to get the other body to get to work and get their bill done and get the thing finished and get it to the President's desk. But I wanted to ask him what his impressions are of where we stand in this war against terror. Because I know he looks at it every day and I just say to the gentleman, you have done a great job on the Committee on Armed Services.

That is one thing this President has done in moving so aggressively because lots of people cautioned him to hold back and wait and delay; and by moving aggressively, he kept the terrorists off balance. Many people have said, well, how come we have not had more strikes and have not had more actions against Americans. Very simply, when you have a meeting and a bomb-guided precision munition comes through the window and blows up your meeting, it is pretty tough to conspire to kill Americans, and the literally hundreds and hundreds of bad guys have discovered that the Americans were able to find them in places where they thought they were totally inviolate.

That is because of the aggressive posture against terrorism that this President assumed. He did the right thing by doing that.

Mr. Speaker, I say one other thing to my good colleague. I think I got the name wrong on Gunny Sergeant Jeffrey Bohr. I called him Jeffrey Shore. That shows how good my eyes are after being here for 20 years or so. I just ask the gentleman, since we have got Gunny Sergeant Bohr's citation up there and since the doggone media has literally, with the 127 articles coming out of one newspaper alone about the prison mess involving criminal acts by what so far have been focused, been identified as seven people who have been recommended to be bound over under article 32 of UCMJ for courts-martial, with all that mess occurring and being so focused on by the media, that brave people like those people who are out there fighting in the field for our freedom are not being recognized. This gentleman did not get on the front pages of any newspaper. It was more important to talk about a detainee not getting sugar in his tea; but if the gentleman could read that citation, I think as long as we put him up there, we better get it right. I would ask the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) to help me out on this one. If you could read that citation, I think that would be appreciated, hopefully, by the gentleman's family.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for reading that citation and so we have laid out for Gunny Sergeant Bohr's family at least publication of his service to our country and to our flag that will never make the front page of The Washington Post because unless he denies sugar for the tea of detainees at Guantanamo, he will not merit that kind of attention; but we have literally, again, 16,000 Bronze Stars were earned, and all those are not earned for valor. All Silver Stars are earned for valor.

We have got a picture, and I would ask the gentleman if he could hold that picture up. That is the picture of a GI giving some stuff to some kids. That is the story of the American GI. The Marines right now, they went up and got in battle at Fallujah, but you know what they brought to Fallujah? They brought soccer balls to Fallujah because they wanted to help people and to be good and American GIs are good to people.

I am reminded in the days when the liberals were talking about how Vietnam hated us and just wanted us out and if we would just get out of there, by golly, the Viet Cong and the MVA could create a people's paradise. When the GIs left Vietnam, about half that country tried to swim after us; and for years after that, they would get out and push off in a leaky shrimp boat into the South China Sea, some of them to be capsized and drowned, a few of them to make refugee camps like the one in Hong Kong.

I am kind of reminded of Senator Kerry, meeting in Paris with the North Vietnamese leaders must have felt strongly they were on the right side of this thing. I am reminded that when those people pushed off in those leaky shrimp boats and got to Hong Kong and later were forcibly repatriated to what was described as the People's Paradise of Communist Vietnam, if you look at the photographs of those refugees being taken back to so-called people's paradise, you will notice that many of them were shrieking and crying and holding on to the chain link of the detaining facility. They had to be sedated and forcibly removed from that squalid refugee camp because that squalid refugee camp in Hong Kong meant one thing to them that they would never see in Vietnam. It meant freedom, and that is the real story of the American presence in Vietnam.

It is also the story of the American presence in Tokyo. After World War II, we had the capability of doing anything we wanted to the Japanese people, and the warlords of Japan told their people to expect us to be as bad to them as they had been to the rest of the world, when they raped and killed over 100,000 people in Manking, China; when they beheaded many of our American captives; killed a third of our POWs. Yet American GIs walked down the streets of Tokyo and handed out Hershey bars to the kids, and there were almost no incidents of mistreatment of civilians by Americans.

Once again, if you take that drop in the bucket, that one group of people that did wrong at Abu Ghraib and match them against the 300,000 GIs who did right, it should not dominate 127 articles out of one paper alone. So I thank my friend for letting me ramble on here. I think we have had a good discussion. I would like to hear his closing thoughts.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4322) to provide for the establishment of the headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security in the District of Columbia, to require the transfer of administrative jurisdiction over the Nebraska Avenue Naval Complex in the District of Columbia to serve as the location for the headquarters, to facilitate the acquisition by the Department of the Navy of suitable replacement facilities, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 4322, the bill under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, this March the Department of Homeland Security celebrated its first anniversary in its short existence. DHS has been a leader in the effort to secure America, prevent and deter terrorist attacks, and protect against and respond to threats against the Nation.

While DHS has successfully integrated 22 government agencies into the homeland security mission, it still does not have a centralized headquarters location. The longer that DHS operates without such a centralized location, the longer it will be handicapped by the challenges of running an organization whose parts are scattered throughout the region.

H.R. 4322 addresses this shortcoming by authorizing the Department of the Navy to transfer jurisdiction, custody, and control over more than 30 acres in northwest Washington, known as the Nebraska Avenue Complex, to the General Services Administration. This property will be used as the Department of Homeland Security headquarters.

This bill was crafted at the request of the administration and is cosponsored by the gentleman from California (Mr. Cox), the chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security. The House Committee on Armed Services reported the base text of this bill without objection on a voice vote.

The amended version before the House today contains a number of technical changes to the bill reported by the committee, most notably the addition of ``custody and control'' to the transfer language, but the substance of the bill remains the same. In sum, it provides a home for the headquarters of DHS for the foreseeable future.

In just 1 year, DHS has proven its value to homeland security. I urge my colleagues to help make DHS an even more effective organization by supporting H.R. 4322 today.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I do not believe we have anymore speakers. I would thank my colleague, an esteemed member of the committee, for his comments; and I believe he has one more speaker on his side. If he could go ahead and recognize that speaker, then we will close out very quickly.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I thank the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) and also the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Larsen) for their comments. I think we do have 22 agencies coming together in this Homeland Security Department. Obviously it is a major, major challenge to put this team together. We are taking the first step, and that is getting an appropriate area in Washington, D.C. to headquarter this team.

I want to commend Mr. Ridge and Asa Hutchinson and the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Larsen), who is helping us on this legislation, and the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) for everything she has done.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4323) to amend title 10, United States Code, to provide rapid acquisition authority to the Secretary of Defense to respond to combat emergencies.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on the bill under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, on April 21, 2004, the Committee on Armed Services held an open hearing on the performance of the DOD acquisition process in support of force protection for combat forces, an area which is of extreme importance to all Americans, and especially to our 138,000-plus troops serving in Iraq and the troops who are serving in Afghanistan, and obviously other places around the world where our forces are exposed to terrorist operations and the dangers thereof.

Mr. Speaker, as a result of the testimony that we received in this hearing, it became very clear that under the special circumstances, a change in the acquisition process is required. When a combat commander submits an urgent requirement for equipment that directly relates to preventing combat fatalities, it should not take 6 months to process the commander's request. Because of the oversight role that Congress plays and of course the interest that any administration, the executive branch, has in the acquisition process and the many billions of dollars which flow through the military acquisition process, it is understandable that our acquisition process is rather slow moving.

There are combatant requirements that are set up by the field commanders. Those are scrubbed by a number of requirements, bodies, including the joint chiefs, and the service that attends that particular area. There is a competitive bidding process which carries with it its own appeals process. And as a result of that, when we have a requirement that emanates from field conditions, from a threat that is posed by the enemy on the battlefield, it can take months and months and months before America can respond to that particular challenge.

Right now we are seeing some of that, and we are seeing rapid tactical changes by our adversaries in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places. Very simply, Mr. Speaker, we have to be able to react quickly. We need to be able to come up with not necessarily the 100 percent solution, but maybe the 80 percent solution while we are researching and developing and putting out contracts in this very measured pace that the present acquisition system takes.

So the trust that is given to the people of the United States Congress by the soldiers and families is that we provide them with the necessary systems and equipment to accomplish their mission at any time, anywhere in the world. In keeping this trust, we must be honest in our assessment of whether we are doing everything in our power to not only give them everything that they need to accomplish their mission but we give it to them when they need it, in other words, to be able to act quickly to tactical changes by our adversaries.

H.R. 4323 does that. It says that a combatant commander makes a request from the field and that request emanates from combat fatalities, that the contract award should not take more than 15 days from the time that urgent request is made from the field. This is not intended to knock out the normal acquisition process. It is intended as a quick-start bridge to the normal acquisition process that gets something in the field quickly, whether it is armor for our troops, new types of munitions, new types of surveillance, but gets something in the field quickly that will have an immediate salutary effect on the casualty rate.

As I said before, we do not need to have the 100 percent solution. In many cases, the 80 percent solution would draw down that casualty rate very substantially. This is a very narrow, but important, piece of legislation. It is the right thing to do for our troops.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Once again I want to thank the distinguished gentleman from Washington for his leadership on this bill, also, and all the Members, Republican and Democrat, who worked on this. This is truly a bipartisan product.

Mr. Speaker, I include for printing in the Congressional Record two letters: One is a letter from the Committee on Government Reform waiving jurisdiction over H.R. 4323 and the second letter is my response dated today.

House of Representatives,

Committee on Government Reform,

Washington, DC, May 23, 2004.

Hon. Duncan Hunter,

Chairman, Committee on Armed Services, 2120 Rayburn House

Office Building, Washington, DC.

Dear Chairman: On May 11, 2004, we introduced H.R. 4323, a

bill to provide rapid acquisition authority to the Secretary

of Defense to respond to combat emergencies. The Committee on

Armed Services ordered this bill reported on May 12. As you

know, H.R. 4323 contains provisions within the jurisdiction

of the Committee on Government Reform under Rule X of the

Rules of the House of Representatives--specifically, the

subsection entitled ``Waiver of Certain Statutes.''

Because of our desire to move this legislation

expeditiously, I will waive consideration of the bill by the

Committee on Government Reform. By agreeing to waive this

consideration of the bill, the Committee does not waive its

jurisdiction over H.R. 4323. In addition, the Committee

reserves its authority to seek conferees on any provisions of

the bill that are within its jurisdiction during any House-

Senate conference that may be convened on this legislation. I

ask your commitment to support any request for conferees by

the Committee on H.R. 4323 or similar legislation.

I request that you include this letter in the Congressional

Record during consideration of the legislation on the House

floor. Thank you for your attention to these matters.

Sincerely,

Tom Davis,

Chairman.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 439) honoring the members of the Army Motor Transport Service that served during World War II and participated in the trucking operation known as the Red Ball Express for their service and contribution to the Allied advance following the D-Day invasion, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on the resolution under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, when called to prosecute a war, Americans have always brought a number of important qualities to the war fight. Leadership, courage, teamwork and commitment are but a few examples of the inherent characteristics of American warriors that make us a feared adversary. One only has to look at the record of our forces fighting in Iraq today to understand that our society is still producing men and women who have the ``right stuff.''

I would suggest that another vital warfighting skill that is a great American strength is the ability to organize. While the present day military can cite many examples of superb achievements in organization, House Concurrent Resolution 439 reminds us of one of the great examples of military organization from World War II, the Red Ball Express, and the great Americans who made it work to defeat Nazi tyranny.

The Red Ball Express was the massive effort to resupply Allied armies as they advanced through Europe after D-Day. Following the breakout from Normandy and the French hedgerow country at the end of July 1944, the First Army under General Bradley and the Third Army under General Patton began to race north and east from St. Lo, France. I might add, Mr. Speaker, that Helen Tracy, who was General Patton's secretary in World War II and was with him when he died in Germany shortly after the war, is a member of my staff and we are very proud of Helen. I hope that she is watching this order with respect to the Red Ball Express.

In this first 100 percent internal combustion engine war, gasoline was the key to continued success on the battlefield. As U.S. and French troops entered Paris at the end of August 1944, the two armies were consuming 800,000 gallons of gasoline each day and had exhausted their reserve supplies.

On August 21, 1944, the Army Motor Transport Service responded to the challenge with a trucking operation called the Red Ball Express. Within days, over 900 trucks were trekking the 700 miles round trip from St. Lo to Paris and the front lines to the northeast carrying the gasoline, ammunition and other supplies needed to keep the armies on the move. At a speed of 25 miles per hour and distance of 60 yards apart, the trucks moved 24 hours a day along the dedicated route marked with red balls, an old railroad symbol for priority freight. By mid-November, when the operation ended, the Red Ball Express truckers had delivered over 410,000 tons of gas, oil, lubricants, ammunition, food and other essentials using nearly 6,000 vehicles at the peak of operations. This amazing example of organization only became a reality because those 6,000 trucks were driven by men who possessed all those other qualities I mentioned earlier, leadership, courage, teamwork and commitment. Fatigue, weather and enemy ground and air attacks all took their toll, but these men were determined not to let General Patton or General Bradley down. They knew what was at stake and they were in the fight as much as any combat soldier.

Three-quarters of those soldiers driving that hazardous route were African Americans serving in segregated truck companies and quartermaster units. Most of these dedicated men would have preferred to be assigned combat duties, but they were denied that opportunity. Notwithstanding having been dealt a hand not of their own choosing, they accepted the role they had been given and did it with a warrior's spirit, a spirit that we would now recognize as authentically American.

The men that refused to allow the Red Ball Express to fail, and particularly those who were African American, deserve more than a footnote in our military history. The outstanding performance of the African Americans who endured the dangers and hardships of the Red Ball Express was a source of great pride and reflected credit on their race during a time when few chose to acknowledge their immense contribution to the war effort.

Mr. Speaker, I commend the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson) for introducing this resolution. The Red Ball Express was a great moment in our country's military history. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the issue.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to thank the gentleman from Washington and the gentlewoman from Texas for such an articulate description of what these great public servants did for our country.

I am reminded also, Mr. Speaker, I checked with our contractors the other day. In Iraq right now, we have private contractors like the gentleman who just escaped from the terrorists driving those trucks through Ambush Alley as they come up through Iraq facing those deadly IEDs, and RPG and AK-47 attacks. I am reminded that some 37 of those contractors from one company, from Halliburton, who were bringing supplies and food to our people up in northern Iraq have been killed in action so far. That is a dangerous, deadly run.

By the same token, it was a dangerous and deadly run in World War II. Keeping that gasoline in those tanks so that that spearhead of steel could continue to drive the Nazis back was everything. Being able to continue the momentum from the landing at Normandy and the hedgerow fighting was an absolute key to our victory. Once again, I want to thank the gentlewoman for her very articulate support of this resolution and the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) for yielding me this time, and I want to thank my great friend also for not only helping to preside over this special tribute, but for everything that he did in helping to lead the California delegation to be a source of strength for President Reagan when he put forth those monumental changes in the direction of our government.

I have listened to his statements and just now to the statement of the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes), and many others, in talking about this wonderful American, Ronald Reagan; and I thought I might just

touch on a couple of the things he did in the way of national security.

We have short memories, Mr. Speaker; and President Reagan was not always popular, especially with the media and often with our European allies. I can remember in the 1980s, when he responded to the Soviet Union's ringing Western Europe with the SS-20 missiles and he started to move those Persian missiles and ground launch cruise missiles into Europe to offset the Soviet strength of their strategic programs and their intermediate range ballistic missiles that they were moving in. And there were massive demonstrations against Ronald Reagan and against those who supported him in Europe and lots of sniping by the press in this country.

And yet because of that strength and because he rebuilt national security, the Russians at one point, especially after the Reykjavik summit when he refused to give up the Strategic Defense Initiative, that is missile defense, the right of Americans to defend themselves against incoming ballistic missiles, after he did that, there was lots of hand-wringing among the elite media and lots of our European allies who said, there it goes, the last chance for peace, and lo and behold, the Russians picked up the phone and said, can we talk?

Ronald Reagan at that point started to negotiate with the Soviet Union, and not just to negotiate a peace, but to negotiate the disassembly of the Soviet empire, the tear-down of the Soviet empire, which is manifest today in numerous free states where once there was one state ruled by tyranny.

Mr. Speaker, I remember the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) was present as one of our senior members, and the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger) had not been elected yet, along with the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier), and Bob Lagomarsino, and John Rousselot, and Chip Pashayan, and my colleague Bill Lowery, and Bobby Fever, new Republicans who had come in in the Reagan win of 1980, and the President invited us to Blair House. The President invited us to Blair House even while President Carter was still in the White House. We were standing in the foyer, celebrated this victory of our Commander-in-Chief-to-be because he had not been sworn in yet, and the President-elect came down the stairs, and he talked to us about being up on his ranch in Santa Barbara and killing an especially big rattlesnake the day before while he was cutting brush. We had a great time talking with the President-elect. After a while he said, I am tired, I am going to go upstairs and hit the hay. He said, you guys turn off the lights when you leave. He went right upstairs; we continued to have a good time. That represented that western hospitality, that great charm that Ronald Reagan had that brought so many people, attracted so many people, even people of very different political persuasion.

My son Sam was not even born in those days when we first came in. I remember the picture of the cowboy that the President drew for my other son Duncan, who is now a United States marine and deployed overseas.

I think the one thing that this President sold in boatloads was inspiration. He was great at inspiration. He realized a little secret, and that is this country runs on inspiration. Whether it is the markets or the economy or people deciding whether or not they are going to join the uniformed services, inspiration is the fuel that this country runs on, and that is something that Ronald Reagan had an endless supply of.

He was tough during the tough times. You have to have good endurance to be a good President, and he had great endurance. He was able to handle the difficult times, the times when he was not real popular, and outlast his critics. It has been kind of fun in the last couple of days to watch people who criticized him very severely to seem now to remember that he was not such a bad guy after all. Not only was he not such a bad guy, but he brought this country together as a family. He was, of course, the head of the family.

It is a time for us to mourn this President, but also to celebrate his great life and the big piece of this life that he gave to our Nation. I will never forget when I was first running for Congress, I was practicing law on behalf of a barbershop on the waterfront in San Diego. My dad came in and said, you can be a Member of Congress. He said, Ronald Reagan is running. He is going to run on a platform of national defense and jobs, and in San Diego that is the same thing. I said, what do I need to start running? He said, we need one thing; you need a picture with Ronald Reagan, and we are going to go up and get it, and we went up and got it in L.A. That launched my foray into politics. So many of us won that year who had no chance of winning because we were riding along with a guy named Ronald Reagan.

Let us take a message and a lesson from this great American and proceed ahead with optimism and with dedication to the idea that you get peace through strength. That was a trademark of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. I think we are following it with this President. I think we need to stay the course and stay steady.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) for letting me say a few things.