Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3257) to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a study to determine the suitability and feasibility of establishing the Western Reserve Heritage Area, as amended.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 3257 sponsored by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) and amended by the Committee on Resources would authorize the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a study to determine the suitability and feasibility of establishing the Western Reserve Heritage Area. The proposed study area under this bill would encompass 14 modern-day counties in Ohio which throughout history have made a unique contribution to the cultural, political and industrial development of the United States.

The Western Reserve is every bit as distinctive as the land settled by the people of Connecticut after the Revolutionary War and holds a unique mark as the original wilderness in the West that many settlers migrated to in order to begin life outside the original 13 colonies.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 3257, as amended, is supported by the majority and minority of the committee and by the administration. I urge adoption of this bill.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio for his comments, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and concur in the Senate amendment to the bill (H.R. 1658) to amend the Railroad Right-of-Way Conveyance Validation Act to validate additional conveyances of certain lands in the State of California that form part of the right-of-way granted by the United States to facilitate the construction of the transcontinental railway, and for other purposes.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California (Chairman Pombo).

Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I addressed this House last evening about the policies in our Forest Service which are causing jobs to go overseas, which are killing industries, which are causing infrastructure to be abandoned. After I made that presentation, we received a call today.

Rio Grande Forest Products, operating in New Mexico and the northern district of New Mexico from a town called Espanola in New Mexico, had 100 employees. Rio Grande Forest Products shut down last year due to the Forest Service restricting the harvesting of large-diameter trees. Basically, the Forest Service is blocking them from pursuing harvest. The Forest Service would not facilitate the harvesting despite numerous submittals and requests for assistance.

The employees who lost their jobs have been unemployed, and it is because of restrictive policies that are pushed by extremists in our country who would block any effort to harvest the resources from this country. The sawmill was located on 60 acres, 180,000 feet of idle space.

Mr. Speaker, it is ourselves who are causing the loss of American jobs in this country, not the President.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to speak about tort reform, but before I do that I would like to use some of the comments of my colleague and friend who has just spoken about scientific integrity and maybe the creation of a climate that self-selects facts but disregards the scientific evidence, the active suppression of that evidence and questioning and removal of voices that are contrary to predetermined outcomes.

I was certain that he was going to bring in CBS news and Dan Rather into the thing, but he stopped one step short. So I would like to add CBS news and Dan Rather to the list of people who preselect their facts, who preselect and predetermine the outcomes, and then compliment CBS news and Dan Rather for their pursuit of truth in front of the American people.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we continue to talk about on this House floor is the way that businesses are driven off the shores of America into other countries. Very often we seem to simply omit the discussion of tort reform and the need for tort reform and the cost to not only businesses but to individuals in this country for lawsuits, for frivolous lawsuits, litigation.

Mr. Speaker, the U.S. Chamber ran an ad 2 years ago which described the cost of every car to include $500 for the cost of legal protection. That means that every consumer who buys a new car contributes $500 to the trial lawyers in this Nation. Is it any surprise then, Mr. Speaker, that this year the trial lawyers have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars into the 527s in order to buy influence and to influence the outcome of the elections?

It is no surprise to me, Mr. Speaker, because we find that the trial lawyers right now are pulling somewhere between 2.5 to 3 percent of the Nation's economy. Keep in mind that we are trying at this moment to get a 4 percent rate of growth year after year, and we are doing that; but at the same time, the trial lawyers are pulling 2.5 to 3 percent of the economy out the bottom.

Now, if that money were going to productivity and the hiring of people, that would be one thing; but what we find is that trial lawyers are escalating into the category of the world's richest people, not based on productivity, not based on what they add to the economy, but based on what they take out of the economy.

This affects every single one of us when they go to get a job. We find that the companies pay less because of the threat of lawsuits.

American Express told us in New York last year, a group of business leaders who were in the Congress, at that point that if we do not limit the frivolous lawsuits, if we do not limit class action lawsuits in this Nation, that we are going to drive out every single major corporation; that, in fact, within 20 years there would not be a single major corporation left in America.

We have to wonder then where are we going to get our pension plans funded. Where are we going to have the taxes that are paid to the Federal Government to support our retirees? It is a huge problem, and yet the trial lawyers continue to buy influence at an amazing rate, and they buy influence in this institution.

Here in the House, we have passed multiple forms of lawsuit abuse protection; but somehow, once they leave the doors of this institution, they simply are bottled up and kept dormant.

Mr. Speaker, it is time for the partisan politics that limit the debate and that limit the actions to stop the frivolous lawsuits. It is time for the partisan politics to stop and for us to protect the American consumer, for us to protect American businesses.

At one point last year, the insurance agents' representative for the Nation came into my office and gave me a list of maybe 30 or 40 new businesses, new

activities that will not be covered under insurance this coming year. That means that every company that does those activities will not function because you cannot function without liability insurance in this country.

So what we are doing is we are continuing to limit the number of activities that we can have, jobs produced for Americans, all at the benefit of the trial lawyers of America.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 44 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, September 15, 2004, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address this body tonight. My colleague, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne), has addressed the concept of the drought and what it means in the West, and again I would draw the attention of our audience to the areas that are affected by the drought.

Now, many of us do not necessarily make the connection of what the drought means to us in our everyday lives, what it means to the Nation, but let me just take one example of what the drought means and how it plays out.

We can see here that the drought is mostly concentrated in the West. In the last several years, we have seen a precedent, kind of a first- time precedent, of our forests, and national forests, burning to the ground. Many people wonder, well, why have I not seen that previously in my lifetime. I have not really seen it. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that there are several things that have converged at this particular time in history.

First of all, we decided about 100 years ago to manage our forests in such a way that we put out every single fire. Now, the tree rings give us a very good history, and the tree rings in the arid States of the West will show us that about every 8 years a very hot fire would burn through, and it would burn the low-lying brush and the small diameter trees that had not yet reached maturity. Fire by that mechanism then kept our forests clean.

In New Mexico, for instance, the general tree density was between 30 and 50 trees per acre. If one looks at photographs from 100 years ago, they will find that there was a savannah with widely-spaced trees through much of New Mexico, whereas today we have a tree load per acre not of 30 to 50 trees per acre but instead we find that there are anywhere from 1,500 trees per acre to about 2,500 trees per acre.

Now, this tree density, this tree load, this fuel loading has been occurring for the past 100 years without much substantial negative impact. The situation in the West in the 1950s was that we had an extremely dry period. But even in that period of the 1950s, we had not yet reached the median drought indicator. So as dry as it was, we were not yet to the historic drought median line.

Through much of the rest of the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and on in to the 2000-year period, most of the West had historic wet periods. If we look at a 2,000-year summary of moisture in the West, and especially in New Mexico, we will see that same thing verified; that in the past 2,000 years there have been droughts of up to 200 years, sometimes more. And yet in our lifetimes we have had an unprecedented history, an unprecedented time of very high moisture levels. So the tree loads, these 1,500 trees per acre, really did not cause many great difficulties because there was enough water to dampen down the effects.

Now, when you get too many trees per acre, more than nature would have allowed to grow, more than nature would allow if the fires had been allowed to clean out naturally our forests, then you would find that if the tree loads increase, then there are three risks: The first risk, of course, is fire; the second risk is insects; and the third risk is disease. Trees that do not have enough water or nutrients are going to be subject to all three of those problems.

We are finding in New Mexico and throughout the West that that exact situation is occurring. We find that the area around Santa Fe, New Mexico, the estimates are that we have lost 1 million trees in that area because of disease. The trees were weakened through a lack of moisture and through a lack of nutrients because they were overcrowded, sucking up too many nutrients and not allowing enough per tree. But we are also finding through the West that hundreds of thousands of acres of our prime forest land is simply burned up.

Now, these are not fires that burn the timber from the ground up. They are fires that began in the brush, maybe by lightning, maybe by some other means, maybe a campfire, but the fire begins and soon it uses the small diameter trees that are struggling to reach the sunlight. These small diameter trees are at the height of the mature trees, and the fire uses those small diameter trees as kindling to get a fire that is burning up in the cap of the trees, the cap of the forest, and that fire then begins to sweep across the forest much like many of us have seen our Christmas trees burn if we would throw them out after the Christmas season.

The trees are stressed by drought, they are stressed by a lack of nutrients, they are small in diameter, and they are easily consumed by fire, so the fire begins to build and rage across our forests. These trees are then killed because the top part, the green part, is burned, but the stand, the tree itself, is left standing and the timber in that tree is actually still good for a period of time for harvest.

What we are finding is that our forests are going to be damaged and destroyed by fire, by pests, or by disease. There are not many other options. But the Forest Service, in its policy of putting out all fires in the last several decades, has also had a policy of not cutting trees. There is a community of extreme environmentalists in this Nation who say that to cut one tree is bad, and so we have in the West the drought, accompanied by the overcrowding, the overpopulation, the overdensity, whatever terminology you would like to use, and we have conditions where not only are we not using our national natural resource of our forests and the timber in it, but we are also committing those same resources to be squandered due to pests, fire, and disease.

Mr. Speaker, I think that anyone who would look at it with a common- sense view would say that this is impractical and it is not good stewardship of our resources. Yet we find ourselves today where we have passed the Healthy Forest Initiative, which tells the Forest Service to begin to thin, to do a common-sense balance, a thinning program in our forests; to take some of the small trees, take some of the large trees out and get the tree density, the tree loading back to where nature would have sustained itself in many areas.

We have much natural forest in the Southern District of New Mexico, and in many areas we find that the people on the field understand the need to cut the trees, the need to begin to thin them out. But many times their supervisors upstream are discouraging or even not allowing those common-sense thinning processes to occur.

Now, there are a couple of results of that. Number one is, as long as the drought continues, and we see this 2004 chart of the drought, but as long as the drought continues, then we have no choice, we are going to continue to squander this tremendous resource that we have all because of an ideological position that says no tree will be cut, ever, out of our national forests. And we have many people in the Forest Service itself who, as managers, have adopted that simple philosophy.

We can see the destructive results of it, but one thing that is rarely seen by members of a State is that an entire industry infrastructure begins to decay and finally go away.

There were in excess of 20 lumber mills in New Mexico at one point, and today there are two left, and both of those are in my district near a town called Alamogordo. We as a congressional office have been asking the Forest Service a very commonsense question: will you please cut enough timber to keep these mills in business otherwise we have no one who will take logs at some point to process them.

The Forest Service has taken 3 years to give us an answer. Now the mills have told us they are getting quite a lot of timber from the Indian reservation, the Mescalero Indian Reservation, but they need an additional 12 million board feet per year. In the Lincoln National Forest, which is in close proximity to the lumber mills, we are growing 50 million board feet per year.

It took 3 years for the government agency to find out if they could make a decision about cutting that much timber. Now, I was in the district for

the August recess when we met with the Lincoln National Forest forester. We met there with the supervisor of that particular forest and a couple of his staff members. They indicated after 3 years of study the regional office in New Mexico had finally said we could cut 9 million board feet. We needed 12 to maximize the capabilities of the mill, and about 85 jobs are involved in my district.

We took 3 years to get an answer, to find out we are growing 50 million board feet. We needed to cut 12, and yet the answer was we could cut 9 million board feet. I asked the next question, which was approximately what value does that 9 million board feet bring to the Federal Government. The amazing answer from the gentleman who is the supervisor of the forest was he did not know the value of 9 million board feet. It has been so long since we have cut timber in many of our forests he simply did not know that.

I pulled out my calculator and we began to do calculations, and determined that the approximate value of 9 million board feet was $54,000. Now $54,000 worth of timber is a very modest amount. That same Lincoln National Forest has an annual budget of $13 million. They have not cut timber recently, so they have a timber department that is funded at about half a million dollars, for a timber-cutting department that does not cut timber and does not seem to know how much 9 million board feet represented. Again we calculated and came up with a response that was $54,000, but the thing that happened next stunned me.

I asked what would be required to cut this 9 million board feet. I was thinking in terms of what would be required in the manpower, what would be required in the time to get the permits and the time to get approval to cut this. But I was stunned at the response. The supervisor of the Lincoln National Forest said it would take $11 million to cut that 9 million board feet. That is $11 million to generate $54,000 worth of income. Any 9th grader would know that is not a very good return on investment, and yet this forester declared that was as good as it could get and we could not cut it cheaper.

At some point we must have a national discussion on the value that is added by a department that is so engrained in this bureaucracy they would require $11 million to cut $54,000 worth of timber.

My wife and I were in business for 14 years. We had to make a payroll every week for 14 years. We had to pay the bills. We had to pay the expenses; and yet our government bureaucracies, they simply do not understand that kind of thinking any more. They simply say we need more money to do those things that we have to do.

That same forest has half a million dollars in a department already that is appropriated for the tree-cutting department, and yet the stunning response was we need $11 million more to cut $54,000 worth of timber. Needless to say, I simply said I do not think we are going to get that. I am now worried that we are going to continue to send more jobs overseas.

Many times our friends on the other side of the aisle complain about sending jobs overseas; and yet if we follow the progression from our policies down to the field level down to a job level, we will see that possibly 85 more jobs are going to go overseas to where they do not have such restrictions on the cutting of timber.

If we were saving the timber for a future generation, we might argue that it is justified. But again because of the drought situation, I would remind the House that it is not that we are saving these trees for future generations. We have been burning millions of acres per year for the last several years. We are not saving them. Because of the weakened nature of our national forest based on the drought and the overcrowding of our trees, we are going to donate these trees to insects, disease, and fire.

So the offshoot is we find fewer jobs every year in America; we find the infrastructure completely gone in many areas. In New Mexico, we are down to two mills. We find the infrastructure is completely gone, and we look at each other and wonder why. And our friends on the other side of the aisle declare that it is evil corporations who are moving out of America, when the truth is many times our policies are starving companies out of America; and I am using this example of our forests and tree products.

We had a hearing several months ago where members of the union that cuts trees and makes pulp wood and paper came in, and they expressed dismay that jobs were going overseas because of policies that said we are not going to cut trees out of our national forests. These are professionals. These are people who understand the industry. They were union members were asking their friends on the other side of the aisle, Why?

The best answer that could be given was you get jobs in the hospitality industry. The answer was the same you or I would give. It was a measured anger that said we do not want jobs in the tourism and hospitality industry. We want our good, high-paying jobs in the timber industry where we are cutting trees that are going to burn or be destroyed by pests. We are doing a service to our country, and yet we are being told that our jobs are going to go overseas and you, in the grace of Washington, are going to give us jobs in the hospitality industry.

I was offended that we would consider sending those jobs overseas and that we would consider policies that would be so restrictive as to not allow an industry to operate in the United States; and yet we see that same mentality playing out in the oil and gas industry, in the farming industry, in mines. Every industry is under assault from these extremists on one side who say we are not going to do any of that kind of production in this country, but the mines, gas and oil, agriculture and timber are respectful positions.

Those are respected jobs that have a place in this Nation. When we begin to overregulate, when we begin to adopt policies that cause these industries to lose their infrastructure and to go away, then we need to understand that we ourselves are going to suffer in the long term. For instance, the shifting of our agriculture production overseas, many people say, what does it matter; but I will tell you that we restrict chemicals and insecticides in this Nation because we do not want our consumers to eat things that are put on our row crops, our vegetables, and yet we will allow imports to come in that do not have any of the restrictions for the application of those pesticides, none of the restrictions for the herbicides that we find in this Nation. So it is an unfair competitive playing field. But in the end, the American consumers pays because they are consuming products that we as a Nation have declared to be banned for use inside this country but that we tolerate if the products are imported into this country.

Mr. Speaker, as a previous business owner, my attempt is always to bring some common sense to the discussions about how we are going to treat the national forests, how we are going to treat the production of food, how we are going to treat the industries in this country that provide us with our energy, with our minerals, with our lumber, and with our food. Again, I remind our viewers and our listeners that we have extreme drought conditions that are affecting all of these.

The final bad outcome of the way we have managed our forests is that the water supplies are greatly diminished in the West. In New Mexico, we have approximately, the estimates by specialists are that because of management of our forests, about 1 billion trees too many in New Mexico. Estimates range as to how much water one tree uses. The lowest estimate is a gallon per day. Higher estimates are up to and including and exceeding 100 gallons per day.

But just for discussion purposes, if we accept the lower figure, one gallon per day, a billion too many trees, then every day 1 billion gallons of water are being used by trees, transpired into the atmosphere, and that water is being sucked out of the ground, water that should be percolating into our aquifers, recharging our streams and being water that is available for development, water that is available for drinking in our towns, for watering lawns, water for life as we know it and appreciate it in America.

But because of our mismanagement, we are finding that not only are our trees at risk but even the resource of

water itself. Water is life. Water is development. Water is our future. Without water, water being the most strategic of all resources, without water we cannot have industry, we cannot have growth and jobs and continue the life-style that continues as we know it.

Mr. Speaker, we find that a very simple policy transcends into very disastrous results, disastrous results for our forests, for our future, for our water and for job situations in the current time and in future times.

Mr. Speaker, I think this is an important issue that we as a Nation must continue to talk about.

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to be here tonight speaking on what is very close to the anniversary date of 9/11, and joining me tonight would be the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Granger) and the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Kelly). I would like to at this time recognize the gentlewoman from New York to discuss the events and the things that we should be mindful of on this anniversary date.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for those stirring comments, and I would now like to yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Granger) for any comments that she may have.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Texas for her comments. In just a brief reflection, the differences between the two parties, Mr. Speaker, I think become evident as we contemplate responses to such events as 9/11. I do not doubt that my colleagues who believe differently feel as sincerely as I do about the possible courses of action that they suggest. But, Mr. Speaker, we do come to different conclusions.

We heard just a moment ago from one of our friends on the other side of the aisle who wanted to choose a smarter way to fight terrorism, to choose a good way, a way that is right, and suggesting that stronger intelligence is going to be the key to that. Mr. Speaker, I would point out that in the very period of time when we were needing more intelligence, the previous administration chose to bring in all of the operatives out of our intelligence systems and only use electronic means. And it so blindfolded us, it blindfolded us to the heart and the passion of the people in these cells.

I have heard estimates that it could take as long as 20 years, Mr. Speaker, to return us to the level of information-gathering that we were prior to withdrawing all of our agents out of the field under the previous administration.

My friend also pointed out that we should treat war as a last resort. Mr. Speaker, war is a last resort. We have tolerated one attack after another after another, beginning with the Olympics in the 1970s, when the Israeli Olympic team was brutally murdered at those events. We have tolerated as a world continuing attacks from these people who would kill innocent civilians for no reason and with no explanation. With no notice they would come in and do the horrific crimes that they have committed.

War is a last resort, and this President has said we have gone far enough. When we lost the people, those innocent civilians on 9/11, almost 3,000 people in just moments, when we lost those, the President of the United States, George Bush, said it is time to respond, and he has responded with steadfastness, with intent, and with clear direction.

I remember perfectly when he said, just after 9/11, if you harbor a terrorist, you are a terrorist; if you are a terrorist, we are going to come see you very soon. And he has been good for that promise.

But President Bush also laid out three fundamental things in the fight on terror. We must first uproot the Taliban so they cannot continue the training of new terrorists. The Taliban was operating in Afghanistan with basic training camps of terrorism, bringing people in to train them in the techniques of terror, the techniques of explosions, the techniques of murder. President Bush said, we are going to uproot you and take you out of those training camps, and he did that.

The second thing President Bush said was that we were going to begin to choke off their funding worldwide, and we have steadfastly worked toward that target, even to the point that within the last 90 days, our friends in Saudi Arabia, for the first time, have admitted they have a problem with terror in their own country, and they have a problem with funding mechanisms in their own country funding terrorists. For the first time the Saudi Arabians began to help us dismantle those funding streams for terrorists that originate inside the borders of our friends, the Saudi Arabians.

So, first of all, we are going to uproot the Taliban. We are going to uproot al Qaeda out of the training camps from Afghanistan. We are going to choke off the funding, and we have to do that and continue to do that. And, thirdly, the President said we are going to take the fight to the terrorists.

Now, some may agree or disagree, but I will tell you that when I was in Iraq, the Iraqi police forces that were guarding the border said about 50 percent of the people coming across the border were al Qaeda members. These are people from Iraq, from that northern region in Kirkuk, who would know. They were compelling in saying that we must continue the fight on terror.

They had two requests: Do not leave before you catch Saddam Hussein, and please do not take your troops home before the job is done. President Bush is firmly committed to that course of action, and I would say that we are making great progress toward the goal of eliminating terrorism worldwide.

It is going to be a very, very long fight. It will not probably be accomplished in our lifetimes. But I will say that the United States, and my children and my colleagues' children, and my grandchildren and my colleagues' grandchildren, Mr. Speaker, are safer today with Saddam Hussein in jail than they were previous to the removal of his regime.

Mr. Speaker, a comment was made that we need to confront the root cause of terrorism: poverty. I am sorry, but I disagree with that fundamentally. The cause of terrorism is not poverty. To say that terrorism is created by poverty is to say that poor people have no standards. It is to say that poor people do not have discretion; that poor people cannot understand right from wrong.

Mr. Speaker, having grown up in a desperately poor family of six, with a father who worked in the very basic lowest level of the oil field economy of Hobbs, New Mexico, I can say that our family understood right from wrong, no matter our income status.

Mr. Speaker, I often wonder how the people who say that poverty causes crime and poverty causes terrorism justify that. If that is true, then the opposite would also be true. The corollary would be true, Mr. Speaker; that if poverty causes crime, then, as my colleague Dennis Prager says, affluence causes kindness.

I think that each one of us would recognize that that certainly is not the case. If poverty causes crimes, then those people who raise themselves up out of poverty by selling drugs into our high schools would certainly become more kind and more noble and more generous. But instead we find exactly the opposite is true. It is simply a false statement to continue to say that poverty causes crime, because affluence certainly does not cause kindness.

Mr. Speaker, the root cause of this terrible scourge of humanity, this terrorism that is being inflicted on the world right now, is not poverty, it is caused by a radical fundamentalist religious group who want to take power at any cost. At any cost. What else would explain a group who would go in and kill innocent children in a school in Chechnya?

I was in the district, Mr. Speaker, during this last August period, and I confronted questions that really were wrestling. There were people of noble intent wrestling with what is causing terror, and they had read the things on Web pages that were declaring it is the United States' policies.

My answer to them and my answer to them before the Chechnyan event is if it is the United States policy, then what on Earth is going on with the terrorists who are in Chechnya, a place that does not have troops in Afghanistan, a place that did not side with the United States in its current war? Russia was completely hands off, and yet they are being attacked the same as anybody else.

We know of the French resistance to our positions in the war; and yet the

fundamentalists, the radicals, have taken two French reporters as hostages. The cause of terrorism is not poverty, the cause of terrorism is a desire to gain power at any cost with no public vote. The desire of the terrorist is to destabilize world economies, individual countries' economies; and by destabilizing them economically, they have the potential to destabilize them politically.

Mr. Speaker, this question goes far beyond whether or not countries are democratic or non-democratic. It has to do with stability and stability on the world stage. We find that in many ways we might not agree with the Mainland Chinese; but make no doubt about it, when they stand side by side with us, and when they ask for North Korea to quiet down the rhetoric, North Korea knows that they ought to quiet down the rhetoric.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to find that we have allies of unusual sorts in this battle against terrorism. We are going to find that sometimes our friends are there and sometimes they are not, because we are going to find unusual circumstances in their nation which cause them to move in and out based on the resolve.

Prime Minister Tony Blair was in this body, in this Chamber, and spoke to a combined group of the House and Senate. He asked one of the most compelling questions rhetorically. He said you as Americans must be wondering why us, why us? Why should we be the ones to lead this international war on terror? He said history has placed you in the position to where you can lead it. You have the resources, the financial resources, the young men and women who will fight for freedom. You have the standing military. He said history has placed you in the position to where you can respond, and it is your duty to respond.

I remember that comment to this day, and I use that answer when my constituents ask me why, why is it us? I will tell Members that no deeper disappointment has been felt by this Nation than the response of some of our friends. It is understood now with the Oil-for-Food scandal where nations were taking payoffs underneath the table, where nations were taking that oil for food money and enriching themselves; and it is understood now that probably even the vote in the Security Council, especially by our friends, the French, was probably a vote that reflected the payoffs that they were getting, the fact that they were getting oil at below world prices, the fact that they were taking payoffs.

I have asked in this Chamber if Kofi Annan can continue in his position because his son is somewhat implicated in the scandal and can he objectively look at what the U.N.'s response is. When my constituents ask should the U.N. be more involved, I answer that I think we must have the best response to terrorism possible. We must ensure that our troops have the equipment that they need, that the money that we intend for rebuilding Iraq and Iraq's economy is used for those purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I personally do not want to trust friends who just recently have been taking payoffs under the table and pulling money, almost $10 billion, one-seventh. Almost $10 billion of the $70 billion in the Oil-for-Food program was scammed out of it by all estimates. Mr. Speaker, that is not the sort of results that I would like to trust the safety of our young men and young women to.

As we think about the war on terror, we must understand that our young men and young women are simply the last wedge between tyranny and freedom in the world, that if we are not willing to stand up, if our young men and women are not compelled to fight for this fight that benefits much of the world, and not so much their own homeland at this moment, if they stand up to fight, they are the last wedge between tyranny and freedom.

Mr. Speaker, we owe them a debt of gratitude. We owe them the thanks of a grateful Nation. We owe their families the thanks. And for those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice, we owe an undying respect for the sacrifice that they have made to make this battle, to make this war, to make this struggle to ensure that freedom survives and sustains itself in this world. To honor the memory of those who have given the ultimate sacrifice, we must give respect into the system and that war to ensure that that loss has not been in vain.

Mr. Speaker, as I contemplate the accomplishments that we can point to in this particular war on terror, I have to understand that under the leadership of President Bush and the 30 or so nations who are working with us, significant things have been accomplished in this war on terror. As far as al Qaeda, nearly two-thirds of the senior al Qaeda leaders have been taken into custody or killed. That includes Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the mastermind of 9/11; and Muhammad Atef, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command.

In Afghanistan 3 years ago, the nation of Afghanistan was the home of al Qaeda, a country ruled by the Taliban, one of the most backward and brutal regimes of modern history. Today in Afghanistan, a presidential election is scheduled for this fall. The terror camps are closed, and the Afghan government is helping us to hunt the Taliban terrorists in remote regions.

Mr. Speaker, this Chamber has hosted the current President of the Afghanistan Republic. Mr. Karzai came into this Chamber speaking to both House and Senate Members, and the strength of his comments reflected the change in that society. These are changes that are generations coming, not just a few years, but thousands of years. He was pointing out for the first time that women in Afghanistan are going to have the right to serve in public office; and if my memory is correct, the Constitution is reserving 25 percent of the elected offices for women. This is in a nation where women did not previously have the right to vote.

Today more than 15 million Afghan citizens have been freed from the brutal zealotry of the Taliban. Women are experiencing freedom for the first time and thousands of Afghan girls are going to school. Simply going to school was an act which was illegal under the Taliban regime.

Because we acted to liberate Afghanistan, a threat has been removed, and in this Nation we are safer because the threat has been removed in that country. It has become obvious that we are going to fight this war on terror. The only question is are we going to fight it here or are we going to fight it in Baghdad or Kabul.

My vote has always been to protect our children and grandchildren. My vote has always been to take the fight to the terrorists so our moms and dads can continue their lives in this country without threat of another 9/11. I know it has been just 3 short years since the 9/11 attacks, but that is 3 years without another significant attack inside this country, and I think we should pay respect to the thousands of homeland security officers and those first responders who daily look at what they can do to interdict the potential terrorists coming into this Nation.

Mr. Speaker, other accomplishments that we have in prosecuting the war on terror include many things in liberating Iraq. We have 25 million people in that country who were liberated from the brutal Saddam Hussein regime. The vast majority of Hussein's regime have been captured or killed, including the dictator himself. This sent a powerful message to the Iraqi people that the tyranny of that regime will not come back. Saddam Hussein currently sits in a jail cell awaiting trial by his own people. This gives more reassurance than any of us in this country will know.

The press has done a very, very skimpy job of reporting on the 400,000 mass graves that have been uncovered already, and we have members from the Iraqi civilian population who tell us that the numbers will be far greater than that.

Mr. Speaker, just before we went home for the August break, many in this Congress were treated and privileged to hear eight Iraqi women who came to speak to Members of Congress. When one particular Republican asked should we be in your country, and the obvious intention of the question was to find out if the Iraqi people felt like we had a right to be there, there were two comments that I was made aware of that seemed to sum it up. The first person that spoke said, let me tell you about my son. He simply spoke up and when he spoke up against Saddam Hussein, they arrested him and they cut out his tongue and then they put him on the phone trying to explain to me after they had cut out his tongue what

had happened, and then they cut off his hand. She said these were the sorts of things we were used to under Saddam Hussein.

Another woman raised her hand and said, one person of my family spoke up, and 52 members of my family were gathered up, some summarily executed, some were tortured horribly and then executed. The 52 members of my family are dead, she said, because one person spoke up, and she said, and your question is, Should you be here? She said that is the wrong question. She said the more compelling question is what took the world so long to come here.

Mr. Speaker, sometimes I think we have grown accustomed in this Nation to such debates that are so removed from actual fact that we think in some corners of this country that this war on terror is an intramural contest, one in which after all of the flags are pulled out and we take our positions on the sidelines, we will get to come back out and start a new game.

Mr. Speaker, these women who came here to talk to us understood that terrorism is a game for keeps. They understood that what we are fighting is for freedom and for life itself.

Mr. Speaker, we have also handed sovereignty over in the interim to the Interim Iraqi Government. The new government is leading reconstruction of the country. In early 2005, we are going to have an election there. When we look at the effects that the new regime is having, we find that they can take instances that we could not. Some of our Middle Eastern partners were very disillusioned and angry about some of our stances; and yet when the new interim regime took strong stances, the Middle Eastern partners in that region began to get quiet and support them.

Mr. Speaker, the changeover from the coalition forces who are governing the Iraqi region into the interim government have resulted in much more stability, much more ability to fight vigorously the terrorists that live inside the population there in Iraq. I think that we are going to see continued attacks that may even escalate up until the time of our election, but, Mr. Speaker, we are making progress in the war on terror as we capture or kill the terrorists. There are simply fewer of them who have been through the training camps.

The other advances that we have made in the Middle East, Mr. Speaker, cannot be overlooked. Libya was a country which had weapons of mass destruction. They had nuclear weapons components. They voluntarily offered to give those up, but it was not out of the gracious heart of Muammar Qaddafi that they gave them up. The President has told me personally that they received the first call in the White House the day after we put the first Tomahawk missile through the restaurant where Saddam Hussein had been sitting 3 hours before. Mr. Qaddafi knew that Saddam Hussein had moved for years, close to 30 years. He had had a regimen where he would physically move every 3 to 4 hours. So we missed him on that day, where we started the war a couple of days early, but Muammar Qaddafi understood that we had information that placed him in the building a couple of hours earlier. He knew that he did not have the same strong discipline, and so when we stuck the Tomahawk missile through that window in the restaurant where Mr. Hussein had been sitting, Mr. Qaddafi suddenly realized, I don't think I want to play the game. He called the White House within 24 hours, negotiations took 9 months, but he voluntarily gave up those weapons of mass destruction that he had, asking for someone to please come and take these things out of the backyard.

Mr. Speaker, he did that not because of a doctrine of appeasement on the part of the world community. He did that in the face of the strength of the response on the part of the world community. And so my friends across the aisle who say that there should be a kinder and gentler way simply do not understand the thought processes of terrorism. You cannot appease terrorists. You cannot negotiate with them. Their intent is to get political power with as few people as possible. Even in their own nations they cannot win elections, so they depend on terrorism.

I have heard and understood that there are approximately 31 conflicts going on in the world today, and that the great majority, approximately 29 of those, involve radical Islamic states. Mr. Speaker, these people who would like to end freedom in the world as we know it insist that their standards of behavior, their standards of treatment of women and their standards of treatment of other people is the standard that we should have. They fear the freedom that exists in this country. They fear the freedom that might begin to cause people to choose a different system than what they currently live in, and, Mr. Speaker, they are willing to kill, they are willing to maim, they are willing to torture, they are willing to destabilize the entire world to make sure that their value system holds.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that we are in very much a civil war in the world. I think that it is very similar to the United States prior to the Civil War. We as a Nation were beginning to wrestle with such different value sets that we as a Nation understood that we could not have both slave and free States in the same Nation, and we fought a civil war to eliminate the slave-holding properties of this Nation.

Worldwide at this point, Mr. Speaker, I think what is happening is that the world is realizing we cannot live with both tyranny and freedom; that the Internet, that satellite TV, that quick, fast communications are eliminating the potential for terrorists to keep their people completely isolated from the current world. And I think what we have going on is a struggle between the two value sets, and this war on terror in essence is simply a civil war fought among the world's countries to determine exactly what values we as a world will hold.

We sometimes think that we in America are removed, but 9/11 has changed everything. 9/11 brought to our understanding for the first time that we can no longer hide. Many nations around the world had experienced terrorist acts firsthand in their own nations prior to us experiencing them, but now then we also understand that we will fight the war on terror, that we will fight the war on terror here, or we will fight it there.

Mr. Speaker, there have been tremendous changes in many parts of the world. Pakistan for the first time is beginning to fight with us against these radical fundamentalists. Saudi Arabia has begun to work inside their own borders. Iran, although they are not exactly where we would have them, has begun to have discussions about the different programs they have that would create mass hysteria or create mass casualties.

Mr. Speaker, these are the ways that the war on terror is working right now in the world, changing literally thousands of years of history. No one of us could have expected 4 or 5 years ago that we would be where we are today in Afghanistan and Iraq, that we would be where we are today in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The worst thing we can do is lose our resolve, change our commitment, become less steadfast.

Many of the things that we find today in our discussions politically do not help the situation. They do not help ensure the safety and the security of our homeland. Many of the things in the discussion today would have been absolutely outlawed in World War II. I am not sure exactly why our friends on the other side of the aisle are making some of the comments that they do regarding our war on terror, because every time they make comments that indicate that they would pursue it differently, the terrorists simply say, We've got to wait out to the next election and maybe there will be a change, and we'll be emboldened more.

Mr. Speaker, we are doing our young men and women no favors by some of the comments that are being made in the Presidential debates on how this war should be handled. I know that there can be differences, and I do not think that the Republicans have every single answer, but in this particular regard I think that we do ourselves great harm and great danger by some of the ways that the debate is being handled.

Mr. Speaker, as we look at strengthening homeland security, we have spent billions of dollars that were unanticipated prior to September 11, 2001, but now we recognize the need to protect our skies, our borders, our ports and the critical infrastructure, as well

as support intelligence-gathering capabilities.

President Bush and Congress created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. We began to pull the agencies together and to insist that they communicate the problems that each one saw at the border, communicate them back and forth. Previously that was not accomplished. So far we have conducted more than 124,000 port security patrols and 13,000 air patrols, boarded more than 92,000 vessels, interdicted over 14,000 individuals attempting to enter the United States illegally, created and maintained more than 90 maritime security forces. We have hired, trained and deployed over 45,000 Federal security screeners to America's airports to inspect all people and baggage to keep our skies safe. We established the Terrorist Screening Center to consolidate terrorist watch lists and ensure that government investigators, screeners and agents use the same unified, comprehensive set of antiterrorist information.

The majority party, the Republicans, have also enhanced America's ability to prevent, prepare for and respond to acts of terrorism by providing nearly $27 billion for our first responders since 2001. Congress has also approved Project Bioshield, which will provide incentives for America's brightest scientists, physicians and researchers to develop lifesaving vaccines and medications to fight chemical and biological weapons in the event of an attack.

Under the present administration, under the Bush administration and under this Congress, the majority of which are Republicans, we have begun to reverse years of underinvestment in both our intelligence- gathering community and also in our military. We have increased the number of CIA operations officers. We have begun to reverse the crippling effects of the adverse attitude toward human intelligence- gathering, and currently in Iraq we are finding that the human intelligence-gathering has increased tremendously.

Mr. Speaker, as we look at ways to protect our troops, today I visited with a company from my district who are here, they have currently 11 prototypes in Iraq right now of an antenna that transmits a signal to make sure that the IEDs do not explode. They are in the process of making another 850 of these, these devices which will help protect our troops. Mr. Speaker, I know that everything is being done by this administration and this Congress which we can do to ensure the safety of our young men and women who are fighting the war on terror.

Mr. Speaker, it would be appropriate at this point to review some of the conclusions which were reached by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as listed in their report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq. Conclusion number 1 of this U.S. Senate select committee was that the intelligence reporting did show that Iraq was procuring dual-use equipment that had potential nuclear applications. Conclusion number 1 went on to say that the intelligence reporting did support the conclusion that chemical and biological weapons were within Iraq's technological capability, that Iraq was trying to procure dual-use materials that could have been used to produce these weapons, and that uncertainties existed about whether Iraq had fully destroyed its pre-Gulf War stock of weapons and precursors.

Conclusion number 91 told us that the Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that Iraq had maintained ties to several secular Palestinian terrorist groups and with the Mujahidin e-Khalq was supported by the intelligence. The CIA was also reasonable in judging that Iraq appeared to have been reaching out to more effective terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas and might have intended to employ such surrogates in the event of war.

Conclusion number 92 was that the Central Intelligence Agency's examination of contacts, training, safe haven and operational cooperation as indicators of a possible Iraq-al Qaeda relationship was a reasonable and objective approach to the question.

Conclusion number 93 was that the Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contact between Iraq and al Qaeda through the 1990s.

Conclusion 94 was that the Central Intelligence Agency reasonably and objectively assessed in ``Iraqi Support for Terrorism'' that the most problematic area of contact between Iraq and al Qaeda were the reports of training in the use of nonconventional weapons, specifically chemical and biological weapons.

Conclusion number 95 was that the Central Intelligence Agency's assessment on safe haven, that al Qaeda or their associated operatives were present in Baghdad and in northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control, was a reasonable conclusion.

Mr. Speaker, the 9/11 Commission also reiterated the substance of our prewar conclusions. First of all, the Chairman of the Commission, Thomas Kean, on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, June 16, 2004, said, ``Yes, there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there.''

Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton on that same date said, ``I don't think there's any doubt that there were contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's people.''

Lee Hamilton is a former Democratic Congressman from Indiana who served for 34 years in this U.S. House of Representatives.

The 9/11 Commission staff statement number 15 said that bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan.

The 9/11 Commission continues to discuss the reasonableness of the assessment that Iraq was involved in terrorist activities. ``The Butler Report on British Intelligence,'' chaired by Lord Butler of the British House of Commons, declares that ``we have reached the conclusion that prior to the war, of the Iraqi regime,'' number one, ``had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons programs, including, if possible, its nuclear weapons program, when the United Nations inspections regimes were relaxed and sanctions were eroded or lifted.''

Secondly, they concluded that in support of that goal, Iraq was carrying out illicit research and development and procurement activities to seek to sustain its indigenous capabilities. And, thirdly, they commented that Iraq was developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than that permitted under relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions.

They continue in the report: ``We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we also conclude that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January, 2003, that: `The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa was' in fact `well founded.' ''

They continued later, paragraph 449, conclusion 21: ``We have found no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence.'' In paragraph 450 they comment that ``we found no evidence that the Joint Intelligence Committee's assessments and the judgments inside them being pulled in any particular direction to meet policy concerns for senior officials on the JIC.''

So report after report indicates that we have good reason and we had good reason to expect that the Iraqis were involved deeply in terrorist activities and that our operations there have certainly made the world more safe.

Mr. Speaker, all of us wish that 9/11 had not occurred. All of us wish that we were not having to fight this war on terror. All of us wish that we were not

losing American troops in this effort. But I will tell the Members that the young men and women who I talked to in Iraq have declared that they feel like their efforts are worthwhile, that their efforts are resulting in definite changes in Iraq, and they feel like their efforts are noble.

Mr. Speaker, we should keep in our prayers the families who lost loved ones on 9/11 and the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Granger) and the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Kelly) made very compelling comments about that. I would reiterate their comments that we could keep those families in our prayers, the families of 9/11, but also the families who lost loved ones in this war on Iraq.

The men and women who had done nothing wrong on 9/11, the families who have suffered so much loss deserve our continued memory and our continued remembrance. We must rid this world of the radicals who would kill innocent men, women and children. The event in Chechnya, the event in that schoolhouse, was not an isolated incident. It reflects the heinous attitude that some in the world terror community have toward other human life, even the most innocent, our children. In order to keep my grandchildren and my children safe and your grandchildren and your children safe, I would hope that we would all maintain our resolve to make sure that we all fight this war on terror in another land and not fight it here.

I would like to associate my comments with the gentleman from North Carolina, who commented that here we are fighting for freedom and the rest of the world and ministers in this country do not even have freedom of speech.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, September 13, 2004, at 12:30 p.m., for morning hour debates.

Mr. Speaker, one of the constant comments and questions that I have had regarding our education policy on the Federal level is that local teachers have constantly said, we think that the No Child Left Behind provisions are underfunded; we think that it is an unfunded mandate. Our office has continually researched the problem, and we recognize that in the last 10 years, Federal funding has increased from $23 billion to $56 billion, a 132 percent increase. So, Mr. Speaker, the numbers never quite matched the explanations that were coming from our teachers in the district. Knowing that the teachers were, to their best knowledge, presenting the facts as they were told them, we began to dig even deeper.

In July, it began to come to our attention that many times the funds that we have allocated on the Federal level have not been made available from the States to their local school districts. I am not sure exactly why that has occurred, but it still is a fact that, for instance, in New Mexico, we have $78 million in unspent Federal funds. The situation is even so bad that $16.7 million has been allocated so long that now it is going to revert to the Federal Government on September 30.

So as I spent my time at home during the summer recess the last week of July and the 4 weeks of August, I began to talk to the teachers and the principals and explain to them that much of the money, much of the $78 million that is there and is available is actually in title I funding that is for the low-income programs. And then also, there is money for the Reading First programs. New Mexico needs both of those kinds of fundings in the extreme. The teachers and principals were somewhat shocked to find out that as they were telling me there was no funding for No Child Left Behind, that actually there were unspent funds, and then we began to understand that possibly the facts that were given to the teachers and to the principals were not the same as existed in reality.

In July, I had the opportunity to meet with three principals from my district who were here in Washington for a national conference. I began to bring my concerns to the attention of these three principals and gave them the facts about the unspent money in New Mexico. One of the principals took it on himself to share those facts with the leadership of this conference, with that national conference, and with the other principals in attendance in the meeting. Upon hearing the information, to their credit, the national leaders at the conference began to do their own research, and they found that almost every State has the same problem, that money has been allocated, but the State departments of education are not either making people aware of it, or maybe there are just no requirements for these monies; and no one is making application for the grants that could improve the education to our students in America. They have been funded already; and yet, sadly, the money is not being allocated.

The situation was so extreme that one State, on September 30, is losing $16.7 million because the time has elapsed in which it is possible for the State to make application. One State has the extreme circumstance of turning back on September 30 $90 million. And across the Nation, teachers are being told that No Child Left Behind is not funded, that it is an unfunded mandate. But, Mr. Speaker, the facts are exactly opposite, that the funds are there and they are available; it is just that the local schools and the principals are not made aware of it.

This national association felt so compelled that they stopped their intent. Their intent was to have a national education advertising program criticizing the unfunded mandate of No Child Left Behind; and this national organization decided, based on the facts that were provided by my staffer to them, that, in fact, they were not going to run this national ad, and they could no longer contend No Child Left Behind as an unfunded mandate.

Just some of the figures so that my colleagues would understand, Mr. Speaker, total dollars unspent on the Federal level, $13.4 billion. Under education for the disadvantaged, $5.2 billion is unspent. Special education, $3.9 billion is unspent. School improvement programs, $3.38 billion is unspent. English language acquisition, $231 million is unspent. Vocational adult education, $701 million is unspent, and yet the teachers unions nationwide are castigating anyone who supports No Child Left Behind for supporting an unfunded mandate, and I would respectfully make the observation that their facts appear to be in error.

Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to bring these facts to my colleagues' attention and possibly to the attention of other legislators.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to support this rule, because this debate must be removed from the courts who are filled with unelected, lifetime judges, and the debate should be moved from those courts back into the court of the people, back into the courthouse square instead of in the courthouse.

Mr. Speaker, Congress has the constitutional right to be involved in this process, and I can tell that the debate has already covered that, so I am going to limit my comments. But the Constitution declares that Congress will be involved in making these sorts of decisions in determining what the Federal courts will and will not hear. It was, in fact, that judicial review process that Judge Marshall made in Marbury v. Madison that began the process of judicial review that is not even called for in the Constitution, and judicial review which has extended the power of the courts beyond, beyond, and beyond where the original Framers of the Constitution intended for the courts to have power and, in doing so, have eroded the power of the legislative branch.

Mr. Speaker, we have encountered in our history a very clear, similar case, exactly paralleling what we are doing today. We had a time in our history when there were definitions that the courts began to give, such as the definition of slavery.

It was the Supreme Court that decided in the Dred Scott decision that the issue of slavery involved the will of the minority and said that the will of the minority could not be subjected to the will of the majority. Of course, the courts at that time did a small sleight of hand because the minority that they were talking about was really the minority slave holders, the owners of slaves, and they overlooked the rights of the minority of the slaves themselves. We fought a Civil War over the Supreme Court's definitions at that point.

Instead of really understanding that the will of the people had spoken and the ensuing constitutional amendments, the courts later, in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, established the Separate but Equal Doctrine that again was offensive to the multitudes of people in this country.

Right now we have a Supreme Court that is willing to declare its will on the people no matter what the people say, and I think that the rule is extremely important here, because it begins to take that right back from the Supreme Court and put the discussion in this body who represents and can be elected and unelected by the people. The Supreme Court cannot be unelected, ever, and it is a very critical element of this argument.

But to those people who say this is an emotional issue, they are exactly correct. Our office spent over 20 hours discussing the issue, and we have people inside our office who were on both sides of the issue. But at the end of the day, nature has described what a marriage is. Law only fundamentally defines what nature has already defined: that a man and a woman come together, they create life, and it is the only life-creating institution and the only life-creating relationship in the world, and then the bonding process of that keeps them together in order to nurture and to grow the children and the offspring.

Mr. Speaker, that is the relationship that people are asking about, and it is a good question. Should gays be allowed to marry? Well, yes, they can, and they should be allowed to marry. But marriage, by definition of nature, is between a man and a woman, and if they are going to marry, they have to marry a man or a woman. The discussion is absolutely centered around this question, and it is not a matter of right and it is not a matter of discrimination.

But what the other side of the aisle wants to do is to redefine marriage for all people. It is the redefinition that is wrong, because there is no civil rights abridgement here. Many black leaders are speaking in favor of this. This is the will of the people saying we must have a discussion among the people as to what is marriage and how it is defined.

For these reasons, I support the rule, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, again, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time and support the rule.

The comments about conservative-leaning courts just fly in the face of actual fact. This court in Lawrence v. Texas was not exactly right- leaning, and that is a fairly recent decision. In fact, the case of the Congress over being willing to declare what the courts can and cannot look at is a very recent occurrence, as our friends on the other side of the aisle seem to have forgotten that Mr. Daschle himself wrote into the legislation that the court cannot even oversee the removal of shrubbery and scrub brush from the national forest in South Dakota.

And certainly if the Supreme Court and the courts can be held back from considering anything in the management of those forests, it might just reach the threshold that the American people should have the right to say that the Federal courts would not be the last point of reference there.

I would go back again to my friend's comment that quoting the Dred Scott decision is like quoting from the Ku Klux Klan civil rights manual. I think that the mixing of conversations there was certainly not based on fact. The Dred Scott decision was a decision by not a Republican court to establish slavery as the legitimate form of activity in this country. The Dred Scott decision was the one that authorized and made slavery legal, and it was against the will of the people that that was done. And it is similar to the case now where the courts would operate against the will of the people.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me time.

I rise to support the rule and the underlying bill. We have got several comments from our friends on the other side of the aisle that definitely demand a closer look. First, the statement that this side of the aisle is bringing this highly charged issue up right now as an electionary issue. I am sorry, but it was not this side of the body that began to cause people to go down in acts of defiance of the law, began to get licenses and get marriages approved that were currently against the law. It was not this side of the aisle that brought those up. We are simply responding that now that the issue has come up, we need to deal with it.

Also, there was a comment that we are diminishing democracy, and absolutely the opposite thing is occurring. We are empowering the democracy and we are empowering the people. But the other side is working under the very knowledge and the very truth that if they can find one court and four judges they can create law in this country. That is not empowering democracy. This bill and this rule empower democracy.

Mr. Speaker, wrapping up my comments for this part of the debate, I again rise to support the rule and the underlying bill.

This bill does not favor or disfavor any particular result or any group of people. It is motivated by the desire to preserve for the States the authority to decide whether the shield Congress enacted to protect them from having to accept same-sex marriage licenses out of State will hold.

This bill does not eliminate any group from the Constitution, but instead, recognizes the 10th amendment of the Constitution which declares that all rights are reserved for the States except those which are specifically given to the Federal Government.

I would comment that the observations of the last gentleman are completely contrary to the 10th amendment of the Constitution.

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to kind of catch up on some of the comments that were made earlier this evening by my friends on the other side of the aisle.

One of our friends suggested that we should involve the international community here in the Iraq situation. I would remind her that the international community, the U.N., the United Nations is involved in the largest scandal, the oil-for-food scandal that this world has seen, almost $10 billion, and it looks like our friends in France and Russia were involved in taking payoffs and taking oil vouchers at the very time they were taking U.N. Security votes, and even in the press accusing the United States of involving themselves in Iraq for the oil.

That is the international community that we would like to involve. I would remind my friends also that the United Nations cannot even have a definition, they do not have an established definition for terrorism because Syria sits on the Security Council, and Syria will not let our neighbors be characterized in any way as terrorists, and yet our friends call for the involvement of the international community, meaning the United Nations.

I would note that we pointed out last week in a similar venue that the media somehow has seemed to overlook this scandal. They go smelling around and looking for scandals any time the Bush administration makes a decision, but when the facts come to light in the United Nations' largest scandal ever, they simply ignore it.

They also have overlooked the 400,000 mass graves that have been found in Iraq and seem to be fixated on other problems overlooking the damages that were done during 35 years of Saddam Hussein.

I would like to associate myself with the comments by my other colleague from the other side of the aisle who said put Sandy Berger in jail. If it would help, I would second that and call for a vote immediately on the floor of the House.

It looks like Mr. Berger rolled up documents, stuck them in his underwear and stuck them in his socks and carried them out. These were documents that related to his service during the Clinton years and as it dealt with terrorism.

I suspect then that we begin to put some of the facts in place as we consider Richard Clarke's testimony where he began to tell the American people that there is absolutely no evidence that Iraq was ever supporting al Qaeda ever. This is Richard Clark who was the head terrorism expert under President Clinton.

If one looks back to his initial memos, immediately after 9/11, while the Nation is still sorting through the grief, Mr. Clarke is beginning to e-mail and memo his colleagues that we should begin to cover our trails. It looks like Mr. Berger may have been doing the same thing there in taking documents from the archives, continuing to cover trails that they felt like were damaging.

But the 9/11 Commission came out today with their final report today, Mr. Speaker, and we found several significant findings.

First of all, they declared that there was no smoking gun. The 9/11 Commission's report is very clear in its finding that the terrible events of September 11 could not reasonably have been prevented. The findings produce no smoking gun and place blame at the feet of no single individual or institution.

Furthermore, they go on to quote that since we believe that both President Clinton and President Bush were genuinely concerned about the danger posed by al Qaeda, approaches involving more direct intervention against the sanctuary in Afghanistan apparently must have seen, if they were considered at all, to be disproportionate to the threat. That is on page 349 of the document.

Furthermore, they commented that we do not believe, this is the 9/11 Commission quoting, that we do not believe it is possible to defeat all terrorist attacks against Americans every time and everywhere. A President should tell the American people no President can promise that a catastrophic attack like that of 9/11 will not happen. Again, history has shown us that even the most vigilant and expert agencies cannot always prevent determined, suicidal attackers from reaching a target. That is quoted on page 365.

The report goes on, Mr. Speaker, to establish a very clear link to al Qaeda, and I would remind this body about former Vice President Al Gore's quote. You will recall that in the height of his emotion about 60-days ago, former Vice President Al Gore quoted, the President convinced the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda. I suspect that we should see Mr. Gore coming out now to say that the 9/11 Commission was subjected to those same forged and blatantly false documents because the 9/11 Commission says that there is a clear link between Iraq and al Qaeda. The Commission's report provides ample evidence that there was a strong and real link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Quoting from the report, page 66, it describes similar meetings between Iraqi officials and bin Laden or his aids may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some reported strings with the Taliban. According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides hatred of the United States.

Again, on page 61, the 9/11 Commission finds that bin Laden himself met with senior Iraqi intelligence officers in Khartoum in late 1994 or 1995.

On page 66, again, the 9/11 Commission report quotes, in March 1998, after bin Laden's public plot against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with bin Laden.

Mr. Speaker, I suspect that Mr. Gore should apologize to the American people for blatant, false comments or he should provide the documentation for his rhetoric.

The 9/11 Commission, Mr. Speaker, also comments on the fixation on Iraq. Over the past year, there have been numerous reports from people in the media and from our friends on the other side of the aisle that the Bush administration was fixated on attacking Iraq in the wake of 9/ 11. However, the Commission's finding strongly refutes such a claim.

On page 335, the Commission quotes, Secretary Powell recalled that Wolfowitz, not Rumsfeld, argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of terrorist problems and should, therefore, be attacked. Powell said the President did not give Wolfowitz's argument much weight. Though continuing to worry about Iraq in the following week, Powell said President Bush saw Afghanistan as the priority.

It goes on on page 336 to quote that, on September 20, President Bush met with British prime minister Tony Blair and the two leaders discussed the global conflict ahead. When Blair asked about Iraq, the President replied that Iraq was not the immediate problem. Some members of his administration, he commented, had expressed a different view, but he was the one responsible for making the decision. Again, the September 11 Commission finds no fixation on Iraq.

Page 336, they continue speaking about General Franks, in quotes, Franks told that he was pushing independently to do more robust planning on military responses in Iraq during the summer before 9/11, a request President Bush denied, arguing that the time was not right. The CENTCOM commander told us he renewed his appeal for further military planning to respond to Iraqi moves shortly after 9/11. Franks said that President Bush again turned down the request.

So our friends on the other side of the aisle would like to characterize the attacks on 9/11 as being easy to contemplate, easy to forecast, and yet, the 9/11 Commission says it is not possible at all.

There is also great testimony on the other side that there was absolutely no link between Iraq and al Qaeda, and the 9/11 Commission report says blatantly that there was connection between the two. They also comment that President Bush did not have a fixation on Iraq, that actually he felt like the problems were elsewhere, Afghanistan or other places.

Finally, the 9/11 report, Mr. Speaker, comments about our urgent need in this country. It comments that perhaps the most powerful finding of the 9/11 Commission is that fighting the global war on terror is a total call to arms.

The Commission goes on to say that one of the key structural failures that the Commission identifies, referred to as a lack of imagination, that was the lack of the imagination of anyone in America to conceive that any persons could hate America so much as to do the attacks on 9/ 11. In failing to connect the isolated pieces of intelligence in the past, leaders did not understand the urgency because they underestimated the terrorists' singular goal of destroying every American.

Therefore, the September 11 report continues, one of the larger points that the Commission makes is that the war on terror is about killing terrorists before they kill us.

The report said that bin Laden and Islamic terrorists mean exactly what they say. To them, that is, to bin Laden and the terrorists, America is the font of all evil, the head of the snake, and it must be converted or destroyed. It is not in a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate.

With it, there is no common ground, not even respect for life on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated.

The report goes on to say that bin Laden said we do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They are all targets in the spotlight. That is, bin

Laden is saying that if you are dressed in a uniform, you are no more of a military target than people walking on the streets in any town in Iowa, Michigan or New Mexico.

Furthermore, the report goes on to clarify that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing signaled a new terrorist challenge, one whose rage and malice had no limit. Again, this is the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, following on 10 years later with the more brutal attack.

But considering the 1993 attack Ramzi Yousef, the Sunni extremist who planted the bomb, said later that he had hoped to kill 250,000 people, all of those being Americans.

The recommendation on page 367 of this 9/11 report, this bipartisan report that just came out today, this month's long study of the 9/11 catastrophe, the recommendation is that the U.S. Government must identify and prioritize actual or potential terrorist sanctuaries. For each it should have a realistic strategy to keep possible terrorists insecure and on the run using all elements of national power.

Mr. Speaker, after 9/11, the President came on TV and said we must do three things. We must first of all uproot the Taliban to where they cannot continue to train and turn out terrorists onto the streets. We must uproot the Taliban from Afghanistan and its training camps. Secondly, we need to choke off the funding for the Taliban for the terrorists. Thirdly, we need to take the fight to them.

Mr. Speaker, in Afghanistan we did uproot the Taliban and put them on the run. They are not able to sit and take shots at us because they are in a defensive mode moving constantly. So the President followed through on the first of his objectives.

On the second objective, that is squeezing off funding to the terrorist groups worldwide, the President and members of the international community have done a very good job. Just recently, Secretary Powell reported that even in Saudi Arabia that the leaders there acknowledged within the last 30 days that they have a tremendous problem with terrorism and they committed to seek to end the funding that Saudi nationals have given to terrorists.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, in response to the third mantra that he laid out, the President did take the fight to the terrorists. Liberating Iraq is the right thing to do. He has taken the fight to them. He has uprooted them, and we have begun squeezing off their funding sources. Mr. Speaker, the only thing that could cause us to lose this war on terror is for us to lose our resolve.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) at this time for observations that he has in dealing and talking with Iraqis here in this city this week.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.

Mr. Speaker, in the last year I have had the opportunity to meet a man in New Mexico and I have become friends with him. In looking at things he has in his story, I told him you have been in China for a very long time.

He said yes, since the late sixties.

I commented to him you had to be one of the only Americans there during that period of time. I said how did you go there?

He very truthfully and straightforwardly responded, and his comment was, ``To my internal shame, I was invited to mainland China in the late sixties because of my campus radicalism. I went there with the greatest hope to help fight the war for communism and to spread it.'' He said, ``I was not in China more than 30 minutes before I realized it was one of the deepest and biggest scams I had ever seen.''

He continued to live in China, eventually marrying a Chinese woman. They watched as her father was carried to the edge of town and summarily shot.

Mr. Speaker, we defeated communism for the most part in this world because of the efforts of Ronald Reagan. But I feel like there is as much lack of truth in this argument about al Qaeda and Iraq and the dangers that

terrorism presents to the United States and to the world today as there was back in the 1960s and 1970s about the Communist regimes throughout the world.

There is much work to be done if we are to find freedom and liberty for more people. Freedom and liberty cannot live together in the same world as terrorism. We are finding that out. What the world is going through right now is a decision process: Are we going to accept terrorism, or are we going to root terrorism out? Are we going to have liberty, or are we going to have tyranny? This is one of the most important discussions in our history because at this point terrorism has the potential to be spread worldwide.

Terrorism has as its main focus instability. The terrorists understand they could not militarily defeat the United States. Their attempt was to destabilize us financially. On 9/11, the high estimates are that over $2 trillion worth of losses occurred in the U.S. economy. $2 trillion represents almost 20 percent, Mr. Speaker, of our total economy. How many countries could have suffered that kind of loss and still bounced back with an economy where we could be concerned about the production of jobs? $2 trillion and over 3,000 lives in one split second. That is what happened on 9/11.

If the terrorists are not defeated at every turn, they have stated their intent to get vials of disease, to unleash chemical weapons, to unleash nuclear weapons. Whatever it takes to defeat freedom, they are willing to do. Those attacks on freedom are going to continue to be targeted at the United States first because they realize that this country is the heart and soul of freedom worldwide, that this country is a shining light of liberty to those countries that would aspire to it.

Mr. Speaker, we can make no mistake. We must choose sides in this. We cannot appease terrorists. We cannot act like it will get better. We have read into the Record earlier tonight an entire list, two pages, double-spaced, of attacks into the United States or to United States troops by terrorists. Mostly those went unresponded to, but President Bush made a bold decision that we will take the fight to the terrorists. He should be commended for his activities, Mr. Speaker, because it is that boldness that has forestalled any future attacks.

The investments in homeland security, the investments in our defense have been somewhat successful. I agree with the 9/11 report, though, that says that any President should promise the American people that we cannot fight a defensive battle all of the time. That is the reason I favor taking the fight to the terrorists. We must take the heart out of the fight for them. We must take the will to damage this country away from the heart of terrorism.

Mr. Speaker, the 9/11 Commission report gives us valuable information about this Nation's lack of preparedness, the lack of preparedness that extended across more than one administration. I would recommend that Members of this body on both sides of the aisle begin to discuss the findings of the 9/11 Commission, that commission which stated that there is a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, that there was no preoccupation with Iraq as far as President Bush is concerned, and, finally, that we must either kill the terrorists or accept that they are going to kill us.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments again.

And, Mr. Speaker, I would note that during this week we were allowed and privileged to hear the Deputy National Security Adviser. He commented that much of Iraq is still very stable. Always when the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) and I were in Iraq at the end of October and the first of November, it appeared that about 75 percent of the country was very stable, that there were areas of difficulty in Fallujah, Mosul, that there were areas of problems but that most of the country was doing exactly what the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) said. People were trying to live normal lives.

As we drove up and down the highways, it was obvious that we were Americans. We had American flags on the convoy. We had armored vehicles. We were in armored vehicles, and yet there were no signs of obvious dislike or distrust of the Americans. People just seemed to be living their lives. Occasionally we would give waves. No overtly aggressive actions were taken toward us. Small kids sometimes waved and gave us the thumbs up. But that is the picture now of Iraq now under the transitional government, that people are trying to get out and live their lives, and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) pointed out very well that while we were there they brought in fliers and showed us that these days of national resistance, if they take their child to school, they will either kill them or blow the school up. People still were selecting to send their kids to schools. About 50 percent of the school kids went that day with those difficult threats about them. Different fliers announced, Do not go shopping, Do not go into the business district today or we will kill you there. And yet the Iraqis, in trying to live normal lives, normal lives where they could expect to come and go, normal lives of freedom, the things that we take for granted and have somewhat become complacent about in this country that they are doing under the threat of death day in and day out.

So to find this transitional government operating actually quite well, we were actually able to hand the power over to them a couple of days early, and in fact many of the ministries were operating even before the handover date. By a couple of weeks they had already been operating. So we find the stability of the transition to be remarkable, and what we are finding also, according to this Deputy National Security Adviser, is that the Iraqis are buying more into the need for them to be out on the frontlines, and as they provide security in their neighborhoods, as they provide border security, they are able to do it better because the United States is not under the tremendous pressure that the international community would bring, and the Iraqis do not face that same pressure either. The Iraqis can act more decisively. They can act with more abruptness. They can act with far more retribution than what the Americans could do, and there is an acceptance in the international community when the Iraqis act in that fashion.

So, Mr. Speaker, if this country will maintain its resolve, if both sides of the debate will begin to discuss the actual truth instead of what they would like to be true, then, Mr. Speaker, we can win this war on terror.

One of the things that I think is very critical is for the media to begin to discuss it truthfully. The media has had it correct back as far as 1999. Many in the news media were publicly reporting the ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. It was only under President Bush, when they decided that they wanted to be against him, that they wanted to discredit him at any cost, that the media began to change their story. Mr. Speaker, I would hope that the media would take a look at the 9/11 Commission, that they would put that beside the Senate Select Committee, which had many of the same findings. I would hope that the news media would compare it to the Butler report on British intelligence and begin to report the truth, that this is indeed a war on terror, that this is indeed the war on terror that is going to determine the outcome of world history.

Mr. Speaker, the media had it right back in 1999. Newsweek Magazine ran an article on January 11, 1999, entitled Saddam + bin Laden? It read in part: ``Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas, assets that would allow him to establish a terrorism network. U.S. sources say he is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of masterminding the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa last summer.''

Mr. Speaker, ABC News on January 15, 1999, also had a report in which they acknowledged the links between Iraq and al Qaeda, and yet now they are claiming that there is no link. But on January 15, 1999, ABC News said: ``Intelligence sources say bin Laden's long relationship with the Iraqis began as he helped Sudan's fundamentalist government in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.'' This according to ABC news. It goes on to say that ``ABC News has learned that in December an Iraqi intelligence chief named Faruq Hijazi, now Iraq's Ambassador to Turkey, made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Three intelligence agencies tell ABC News they cannot be certain what was discussed, but almost certainly, they say, bin Laden had been told he would be welcome in Baghdad.''

Those findings are similar to the findings of the 9/11 Commission that I reported on earlier in this discussion tonight.

Another well-reported article and news source, NPR reporter Mike Shuster reported in an interview with Vincent Cannistraro, who was the former

head of the CIA's counterterrorism center.

Mike Shuster reports on NPR that Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years to at least 1994 when, according to one U.S. Government source, Hijazi met with him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Some experts believed bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.

Mr. Speaker, the news media has had it correct in the past. I earnestly hope that they will return to the truthful reporting of the past and give this 9/11 report the hearing in front of the American people that it deserves. The American people need to know the truth, and the news media needs to be certain that the American people should and will know the truth, whether or not it comes from them.

Mr. Speaker, again, I would begin my wrap up comments by saying that Mr. Berger's removing of documents from the archives absolutely appears to have been criminal contact. I would recommend that this body and all other bodies responsible look into these sorts of illegal activities, to bring this to the highest level of examination.

Mr. Speaker, it is obvious that Mr. Berger wanted to take documents, some of which he has not returned, some of which supposedly have been destroyed. Mr. Berger needs to be held accountable for the illegal activities that he conducted while he was working with the Kerry campaign. I think, Mr. Speaker, that the Kerry campaign needs to also be very straightforward with the American people about their association with Mr. Berger.

Mr. Speaker, I would offer one last time to yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank you for your tolerance in allowing us to speak tonight about this very important subject, that of understanding the tie between Iraq, al Qaeda and the international war on terror. It is the most significant thing that this generation faces. We are either going to leave the world more safe, or we can leave the world without freedom.

Mr. Speaker, it is up to this body, it is up to this government, it is up to this President, and it is up to the American people. We must decide. We are going to decide this year which way we are going to pursue this particular war on terror.

Mr. Speaker, I would request humbly that all of the citizens, all of the people throughout this country, and especially the people in this body, would give that discussion their fullest attention and arrive at decisions, so we can explain to the next generation that we took the responsibility and handled that responsibility wisely.

Mr. Speaker, Pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 479, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. Speaker, I would assume that is eastern time midnight and not time in my district midnight. We could always hope, but I will make the assumption that is eastern time.

Mr. Speaker, before I start into the text of my discussion tonight, I would like to commend the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) for her comment that the U.N. Security Council must pass a resolution that has teeth. That was exactly the position many of the Members on this side of the aisle felt like 1441 should have been, a resolution that had teeth in it. But, actually, it turned out not to be, and that is unfortunate. But her point is well made that the Security Council lacks the ability to enforce things that should be enforced.

Mr. Speaker, I am joined tonight by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter), and the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop). We want to talk about Iraq and al Qaeda.

It is one thing when politicians flipflop, and we have an example now. One of the Presidential candidates, Senator Kerry, has shown a willingness to flipflop and play both sides of an issue. But it is especially reprehensible when our media begins to flipflop. As we discuss this issue tonight on Iraq and al Qaeda, we are going to show instances where the media, in 1999, 2000, and beyond, were perfectly content, under the Clinton administration, to acknowledge the ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. Yet under President Bush, they have decided that they will disaffirm that; that instead of the truth, their agenda is more important. They have elected to now say that there is no connection, when the facts clearly show that there has been a strong connection between al Qaeda and Iraq.

In reviewing this, I am reminded of the New York Times scandal where the

writer from the New York Times was just simply making up stories and writing things without facts. CNN produced even an eye witness, a teenage boy, that they declared was talking about how the President had coerced him into denying pressure. When the young man was actually talked to, he explained that, no, the White House had never contacted him at all. The CNN reporter simply made up the story and was allowed to do that by her superiors.

It is this manipulation of the truth, it is this flipflopping on the issues that makes it very difficult for Americans to understand exactly what is happening.

For the first section on tonight's discussion, I would like for the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) to discuss an account that occurred today when Iraqi women visited in this Capitol and visited with Members of Congress. The Iraqi women were being asked, should America have come to Iraq, and was the war the right thing to do.

Mr. Speaker, I would yield to the gentleman to discuss the responses that were given today.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for those comments. Liberating Iraq was the right thing to do, and these women had the courage to come here to the United States Congress and to testify about the evils that have occurred under terrorism, under Saddam Hussein.

I think the compelling question that I heard from people who attended the event was, why did the world take so long? Why did you watch millions tortured and hundreds of thousands die before we came? Forty- eight members of one woman's family just cannot be found. She does not even know where they are buried. And we in this country have a press who is trying to indicate that there was no reason to be there.

I was especially ashamed when former Vice President Al Gore was quoted as saying, ``The President convinced the country with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam Hussein was in league with al Qaeda.'' I am sorry, but Mr. Gore must not have read the comments from the 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, the comments made on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, June 16, this year.

Mr. Kean said, ``Yes, there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there.''

Richard Clarke was quoted as saying, ``There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was ever supporting al Qaeda. Ever.'' Mr. Clarke was the head terrorism expert under President Clinton. It appears that he is covering his own trail because, again, the Vice Chairman

of the 9/11 Commission says, ``I don't think there's any doubt that there were contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's people.''

Lee Hamilton, the Vice Chairman, also spoke on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer on June 16, 2004. Keep in mind that Mr. Hamilton is a former Democratic Congressman from Indiana who served for 34 years in this institution, and he is the one who is saying, ``I don't think there's any doubt that there were contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's people.''

And so we have members of the other party who are out on the stump every day accusing the U.S. and accusing President Bush of manufacturing documents when the 9/11 Commission has been very clear that there does not seem to be any doubt that there was cooperation between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

The 9/11 Commission staff statement 15 says, ``Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting with bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.''

We have many, many examples of the cooperation and the attempted cooperation between al Qaeda and bin Laden.

The Butler report on British intelligence affirms many of the same things, just in case there are those who believe that only the U.S. 9/ 11 Commission is finding the cooperation. The Butler report on British intelligence says, ``We have reached the conclusion that, prior to the war, the Iraqi regime, A, had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons; B, in support of that goal was carrying out illicit research and development and procurement activities to seek to sustain its indigenous capabilities; and, C, was developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than that permitted under relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions.''

The Butler report continues, ``We conclude that on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time covering both Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union address of 28 January, 2003, where the President stated that the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa was well-founded,'' the Butler Commission concludes.

Before I go on, Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) to address this issue if he would.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments and appreciate his attention to the key questions in this conversation.

I traveled to Iraq at the end of October and the first part of November with the gentleman from Michigan, and we saw the same things each day at noon for 3 days. Each day at noon and in the evening meal we were in chow halls with 6 and 7 and 800 young men and women from America. I would wander throughout giving New Mexico flag lapel pens to young men and women. The constant question I heard from young men and women there was why do my parents not know the truth about this war and why do they not know the truth about what we are doing here, the good that we are doing in reconstruction? Those were random contacts throughout every chow hall from Kirkuk to Baghdad to Tikrit. There is no explanation why the press refuses to tell the accuracies and instead to tell just one side, often not even telling that side with truth.

To address the concepts of why the press might act in such ways, I yield to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop).

Mr. Speaker, I thank both the gentlemen from Utah and Michigan, and am always compelled to understand that this institution is inhabited by people with great insights and great skills in communicating them, and they are demonstrating that tonight.

Mr. Speaker, as we conclude our time, I would like to mention that not only do we have the 9/11 Commission that has contradicted both Richard Clarke and former Vice President Al Gore, but also the Butler Report and the Senate Intelligence report which just came out had several conclusions, and I will just briefly go through those, because we have so many things to cover in the last 5 minutes.

But Conclusion 1, Iraq was procuring dual use equipment that had potential nuclear applications, this from the U.S. Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence reporting on the U.S. pre-war intelligence assessment on Iraq.

Also the intelligence reporting did support the conclusion that chemical and biological weapons were within Iraq's technological capability, that Iraq was trying to procure dual-use materials.

Conclusion 91, that the CIA assessment that Iraq had maintained ties with Palestinian terrorist groups was supported by intelligence. The CIA was also reasonable in judging that Iraq appeared to have been reaching out to more effective terrorist groups, such as Hizbollah and Hamas.

Conclusion 92, that the indicators of a possible Iraq-al Qaeda relationship was a reasonable and objective approach to the question.

Conclusion 93 was the CIA reasonably assessed that there were several likely instances of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda throughout the 1990s.

Conclusion 94 supports it.

Conclusion 95 supports it.

But if we go back to the news media, again looking at the news media's flip-flop on this issue, back in 1999, many in the news media were publicly reporting the ties and contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Newsweek Magazine, the January 11, 1999 issue entitled ``Saddam plus bin Laden,'' which read in part, ``Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas, assets that would allow him to establish a terrorism network. U.S. sources say he is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of masterminding the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa last summer.''

That article from Newsweek, January 11, 1999.

ABC News, on January 15, 1999, reported that intelligence sources say bin Laden's long relationship with the Iraqis began as he helped Saddam's fundamentalist government in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. It continues that ABC News has learned in December an Iraqi intelligence chief named Faruq Hijazi, now Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Three intelligence agencies tell ABC News they cannot be certain what was discussed, but almost certainly they say bin Laden had been told they will be welcome in Baghdad.

NPR reporter Mike Shuster reported in an interview with Vincent Cannistraro, who was the former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, he says that Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years to at least 1994, according to one U.S. Government source. Hijaz met with him when bin Laden lived in Sudan.

Mr. Speaker, when the news agencies declare these contacts under one President and disaffirm them under another, it makes them appear to have no more credibility than the National Enquirer.

Mr. Speaker, we have got several quotes here from Senators, and I recognize that my time has drawn to a close.

Liberating Iraq was the right thing to do. The war on terror, al Qaeda, have close relationships with Iraq.

We will continue the discussion next week, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 12 o'clock midnight), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, July 19, 2004, at 12:30 p.m., for morning hour debates.