Lindsey Graham

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Let me see if I have this right. There is an earned income tax credit you can receive based on need; is that right?

Mr. GRAHAM. I thank the Senator from Arizona. To conclude, this is not Lindsey Graham or Colonel Graham saying this. This is what General Dunford is saying. I know he is right. I clearly understand what he is telling us. I have seen it firsthand. To the folks at 435, who are in charge of the detainee population-- they lost two yesterday. An IED killed two of our civilian contractors, Paul and Michael, who were working out of the Pul-i-Charkhi prison. I know them well. I met them a bunch of times. They have been over there as civilian contractors for years trying to improve the Afghan detention facilities and legal system, and they gave their lives for a very worthy cause. All I am saying is we need to suspend aid. We are taking hundreds of millions of dollars of American taxpayer money and investing it in Afghanistan in a way that is inappropriate. After President Karzai's decision to release these detainees, we should cut off the money. Not a dime should go to economic development. No more money. I can't go to a taxpayer in South Carolina and say that they should write a check to a government that is being led by Karzai. Hopefully, as Senator McCain said, when somebody new comes along, reason will prevail. I thank my colleagues and need their support. I urge every Member of this body to speak out with one voice. I will conclude with recognizing my good friend from Connecticut. His son is a marine who served in Afghanistan, and he has been there many times. I want Senator Blumenthal to know that we are doing this today to let our marines know that their sacrifice will not go unnoticed, and we will not let these guys walk out of jail without a fight.

Mr. GRAHAM. I think this is a Ronald Reagan idea. If you are working, even though you may not have any income tax liability, we are going to give you an earned income tax credit. I think it is $500 per child; is that right?

Mr. GRAHAM. We are not going to get it. You are not going to get it for your kids because you make too much money.

Mr. GRAHAM. Yes, I know. But under the earned income tax credit----

Mr. GRAHAM. Ok. If the argument is that by adding a Social Security number requirement to the additional credit you are somehow burdening people, why isn't that an argument made against the EITC? Because to get the earned income tax credit you have to have a Social Security number. This new additional tax credit, on top of the earned income tax credit, doesn't have the same requirements. So those who come to the floor to say we are destroying families, why wouldn't you come down here and propose to do away with the Social Security number on the earned income tax credit? That would make perfect sense to me. If requiring a Social Security number is a bad thing for families, why do you tolerate it for the EITC? The reason you wouldn't propose that change is because people in Treasury would say you would be crazy, because now you have an additional tax credit, something new on top of the EITC, that Senator Ayotte has found without a Social Security number you have $19 billion in fraud. So I am curious. If you think requiring a Social Security number for a child to get an additional tax credit is destroying the family, why don't you come down here and suggest changing the law for the EITC? If you did that, you would get blistered by the auditor saying you are opening a new line of fraud. So could the Senator tell us what would happen to the American taxpayer, what benefit would inure to the American taxpayer if we followed the Senator's proposal and accepted her amendment of requiring a Social Security number?

Mr. GRAHAM. I think it is $500. But the point is, do you have to have a Social Security number?

Mr. GRAHAM. I thank the Chair. Does the Senator agree with me, if the budget deal had not been paid for it would never have passed?

Mr. GRAHAM. Most Republicans, and I am sure some Democrats, would not have voted for a budget deal unless it was deficit-neutral and paid for. I know it wouldn't have passed the House. So now, after the fact, if you fix the COLA problem without paying for it, haven't you basically blown the budget deal apart?

Mr. GRAHAM. What is the Senator proposing here?

Mr. GRAHAM. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. If I may, who was the person who decided to approve a year's lease on this piece of property in July after it had been attacked in June? They blew a hole in the wall that 40 people could go through on June 10. So somebody said: Hey, this is a great site; let's extend the lease for another year, to July 2013. They never reinforced it, never added any appreciable security, and denied all the security requests. This goes on and on. If we want to know about the bridge, that is great. If we want to know about what Chris Christie knew when and what he should have known, great, go for it. All fair. Does anybody care about what our President did that night? Does anybody really care if the President of the United States, for two weeks, talks about a protest that never happened, while all of the evidence suggests otherwise? Does anybody really care that the consulate was a death trap and nobody in Washington ever responded? Does anybody care that nobody has been brought to justice? Does anybody in this country care that somebody in the White House, on September 14, obviously for political reasons, took the intelligence and turned it upside down? Does anybody care that Susan Rice, who has nothing to do with Benghazi, was the spokesman for the country, telling a story not founded in fact, founded in political advantage? I think Americans do care.

Mr. GRAHAM. I think the White House, in my view--this is a reasonable conclusion but not a fair conclusion because we don't know exactly what happened yet. But I can tell you this: Somebody at the White House on September 14 pressured the intelligence community to change the story of Benghazi. And on September 15, why did they pick Susan Rice? She said that Secretary Clinton was tired and had gone through a lot of trauma. I am sure that is true, but I know Secretary Clinton pretty well. I think she is tough. Let's put it this way: She could not be on TV to talk about what happened at the State Department because she was distraught? I don't buy that. Does anybody believe that about Secretary Clinton? And if it is true, it is something the American people need to consider. I don't believe it is true. I don't believe she was incapable of going on television, as Susan Rice says. I believe they picked a person very loyal to the President who would say whatever needed to be said. What she said was so far away from the truth that it needs to be investigated. What she said was so beneficial to the President's reelection that it needs to be investigated. She was speaking definitively about Benghazi on September 15 while the FBI was interviewing survivors on the 15th, 16th, and the 17th. Why would any administration go on national television and tell the world what happened in Benghazi while the FBI is still interviewing people who were in the attack? And where did the FBI's interviews go? I talked to the Deputy Director of the FBI who is now retired. He said not one person interviewed by the FBI in Germany ever said there was a protest; all of them said it was a terrorist attack. So how could the FBI have interviews from every person on the ground in Benghazi who worked for the State Department saying that there was no protest and it was a terrorist attack, and that not get into the system? Did the FBI just sit on these interviews? Who did they give those interviews to? How could Susan Rice tell the American people and the world we know what happened in Benghazi before the interviews were over? She went on television to spin this story. How could the President of the United States, after the interviews were taken, go before the American people time and time again for weeks and tell a story about a protest that never occurred? This may not be a big deal to my colleagues, but it is a hell of a big deal to me. When Abu Ghraib blew up, Senator McCain and myself said: This is not a few rotten apples; this is system failure. Before the surge, when Iraq was falling apart, we said: This is not working, no matter what people in the Bush administration are telling us. We know better. We have been there. When Gitmo was a mess, we didn't sweep it under the rug. We worked with Senator Levin and Senator Feinstein, two great Americans, to get the definitive truth as best we could about failures at Abu Ghraib, about Gitmo, and we spoke truth to power when it came to Iraq.

Mr. GRAHAM. I thank my colleague for the question. I finally got to interview a survivor about a month or so ago with Senators Menendez and Corker. I have only been able to interview one witness after all of these years and months. If I could, I wish to thank the Intelligence Committee for doing a lot of hard work, but let's not lose sight that this is not just about the State Department. My focus is going to be comprehensive, and Senator McCain has called for a joint select committee, along with myself and Senator Ayotte, for over a year now. Why? You don't want to stovepipe this. The Intelligence Committee tells us in pretty good detail about the failures of the State Department, but here is my question: In the September 14 White House meeting where the Intelligence Committee prepared talking points for the White House that clearly established that this was a terrorist attack with Al Qaeda people involved--who changed those talking points in that White House meeting? I have an email--which I hope will be here in a moment--from General Petraeus. Basically, somebody in that meeting or before the meeting is saying to General Petraeus that the White House wants to take references to Al Qaeda out and basically sanitize the talking points. He is upset, but he says: Well, go ahead and do what they want. Nobody admires General Petraeus more than I do, but, quite frankly, somebody needs to revisit that. Where was the intelligence community for 2 weeks when the President of the United States--not Susan Rice--was telling the entire world: We think this was a protest caused by a video, when the intelligence community knew differently? To my friends in the intelligence community, you need to answer that question. What input did you give? Did anybody pick up a phone and call somebody at the White House? They need to tell the President to quit doing that because it is not accurate. Another question: On September 15, 16, and 17 of September, all the survivors were interviewed by the FBI in Germany. I have talked to one survivor. I can tell you, in a quick summary, the man was brave and the people on the ground in the State Department deserve medals for going through what they did. But let me tell you this: He said there was no protest. There was not one report from Benghazi about a protest around the Embassy. The Turkish Ambassador left not too long before the attack. Do you think he would have walked out in the middle of a protest? Do you think the Ambassador would have gone to bed if there was a protest? The people in charge of security never reported a protest because there was not one, and he said there wasn't one. He said: I saw on my screen--and he was in charge of security at the time--16 to 20 heavily armed people running through the gate and carrying a banner in Arabic. At the time, I didn't know what it said. I now know it was the banner of Ansar al-Sharia, the Al Qaeda affiliate. And to my friends the New York Times, journalism has died at that paper. Do you really believe this wasn't a preplanned terrorist attack with Al Qaeda affiliates in charge? The gentleman said there were four gun trucks around the compound. It was a coordinated military attack, and they were lucky to have survived. Who started this? Who planned this? The man's name was Qumu, the former Gitmo detainee. I can't say his last name, but I think it is Qumu. The man who started Ansar al-Sharia came from Gitmo. He was a former Gitmo detainee, a Libyan who went back to Libya and started this group. The ``60 Minutes'' report identified him and a Mr. Khattala as the organizers of this attack. All I can say is that there is no mystery about who planned this. It was an Al Qaeda affiliate in Libya. On August 16 a cable was sent back from Chris Stevens to Washington at the State Department saying: We can't defend the consulate because 10 training camps of Al Qaeda exist in Benghazi; the Al Qaeda flag is flying. By the way, the Red Cross had left Benghazi and the British had left Benghazi because of attacks by terrorist groups. This was long before September 11. Don't tell me we don't know. We do know. It was terrorists. It was a former Gitmo detainee who was bin Laden's bodyguard. What did he have to do--have a card? The guy who was in Gitmo whom we let go was core Al Qaeda. He was bin Laden's bodyguard. They caught him in Pakistan. He fought in Afghanistan. Now, what we don't know from this report is who in the White House changed the talking points. You want to know what Chris Christie did? Fine. Absolutely fair game. We know what he did when he found out what his people did about the traffic jam. He fired them. He got up in front of the whole world and said: I am embarrassed. It is my fault. I am going to fire the people who did this bad thing. Name one person who has been held accountable for this bad thing called Benghazi. Name one person at the State Department who has been fired for ignoring repeated requests for additional security on the consulate coming from people in Libya. By the way, the Accountability Review Board--what did I learn in my interview with the survivor? I found out for the first time that villas B and C--the places that were attacked in Benghazi, the State Department consulate--had their lease renewed in July for an entire year for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I didn't know that. It was leased for well over half a million dollars. So you are going to tell me they were going to close the consulate in December? That was the conclusion of the Accountability Review Board. That is not accurate. I will tell you what I think they were going to do. I think Hillary Clinton was going to go down in December and announce that the permanent facility would be open in Benghazi. To Hillary Clinton's and Susan Rice's credit, these two women pushed the President to keep Benghazi from being overrun during the war with Qadhafi. They got involved, and to their credit they pushed the President to get involved militarily to prevent the slaughter of everybody in Benghazi. I have been told that the plan for Benghazi was to have a permanent footprint and for Secretary Clinton to go down there as one of her last acts to say: We are here, and we are here to stay. The problem with that scenario is that the security had deteriorated because we had absolutely no plan to fall on after the fall of Qadhafi.

Mr. GRAHAM. We know he has answered one question. He said he wanted to be transparent and open and let everybody read the story of Benghazi. We have deployed a small force asking questions, and the answer to one question, finally: Did you call anybody in Libya, Mr. President, that night? No. We have a rescue team held up at the Benghazi Airport for 2\1/2\ hours.

Mr. GRAHAM. How can the Secretary of Defense know about the security environment in the Benghazi Consulate and the Secretary of State not know? All I can say is it does matter.

Mr. GRAHAM. Yes, we did. Now here we are, years later, and the families have no clue as to what happened to their loved ones. Quit blaming the dead guy. This suggestion that Chris Stevens had fault for his own death--Chris Stevens was in Benghazi because that is where he was supposed to be doing what America wanted him to do: Try to hold Libya together. So there is not going to be any blame on the dead guy. I wish to ask a question of Senator Ayotte. The Senator from New Hampshire has followed this as well as anybody. Can the Senator describe for us from her point of view the unanswered questions and whether she thinks there is evidence that this was a preplanned terrorist attack versus a protest?

Mr. GRAHAM. If the Senator will yield, I am trying to find the press statement of the White House official that says the President has consulted with his national security team--I am paraphrasing--about the threats we face throughout the world and that we are ready. This is on September 10. What does this report tell us about September 11? We were so far away from being ready that it is unnerving. So there is a lot to be asked. Why would somebody in the White House issue a statement on 10 September talking about being ready for any contingency anywhere and basically assuring the American people the President is on top of this when, clearly, he was not?

Mr. GRAHAM. If I could follow along with that thought, because it is a very good question, No. 1, if the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff publicly testified they knew it was a terrorist attack from the moment it started and told the White House, how did that get lost? How can they start talking about a protest and video when our own Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in real time tell the White House, but they only spoke to the President once with a prescheduled meeting just when the attack started? The Secretary of Defense----

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. If I may just conclude. I have a quote from Speaker Boehner, who said he would support the Obama administration if it decides to leave troops in Iraq beyond 2011. I remember Senator Obama and Senator Clinton not being particularly helpful to the mistakes made in Iraq during the Bush administration. In fact, the entire election in 2008 and the primary was about Iraq. I remember the politics of Candidate Barack Obama, who basically used the Iraq war to win the nomination, for lack of a better word. I remember during the campaign he talked about Afghanistan being a good war. We will talk about Afghanistan later. It is not a happy story either, I am afraid. But the bottom line is that there was bipartisan support for troop presence beyond 2011, a residual force. This administration chose to ignore the advice of the commanders, and they created the situation where the Iraqis could not say yes. Yet they want history to record this being a problem created by the Iraqis for not giving legal immunity to U.S. soldiers. History is going to be written about our times. How this ends, nobody knows. But I know this: It is not fair to say that the reason we have nobody left behind in Iraq is because of the Iraqis. It is fair to say that the administration got the result they wanted, and they should own that--good, bad, or indifferent. Don't create a straw person for the situation that you drove and you created. As to Syria, please understand that this whole conflict started when people went to the streets peacefully to ask for more political freedom after the uprising in Egypt; that this war in Syria did not start with a Sunni uprising or Al Qaeda invading the country. The conflict in Syria started when the people of Syria, from all walks of life, started demanding more from their government, from this dictatorship, and the response they received from their government was to use lethal force. It has broken down now to a regional conflict where the Iranians are backing Assad and you have Sunni Arab States backing parts of the opposition and you have Al Qaeda types coming from Iraq and other places filling in the vacuum created by this breakdown in Syria. At the end of the day, what Senator McCain had been talking about for 3 years is that once you say Assad has to go--no President should say that unless they are willing to make it happen. Assad was on the ropes. With just any effort on our part, a no-fly zone to boots on the ground, any assistance at all in the last couple of years and Assad would be gone, the transition would be well underway. It would have been bloody at first, but we would have behind us now a Syria moving toward stability because the good news is the average Syrian is not a radical Al Qaeda Islamist. Syrians have been living peacefully with each other--Christians, Sunnis, and Alawites--for hundreds of years. Now Syria has become the central battle for every radical Islamist in the region, and it is just sad and sorry to witness. But what does it mean to us? It means that if this war continues--our friend the King of Jordan is under siege. The Lebanese Ambassador testified a couple of weeks ago in our committee that the country is saturated. Almost 1 million refugees from Syria have gone to Lebanon. There are over 5 million in Lebanon today. They have added almost 1 million refugees from Syria. They didn't plan to get to 5 million people until 2050. The Kingdom of Jordan--the Jordanians have received over 600,000 refugees, with no end in sight. Syria is not a civil war. Syria is a regional conflict where you have proxies backing each side in Syria that are taking the entire region into chaos. It is killing Iraq. It is destabilizing Lebanon and Jordan. It has to be addressed in an effective way. If you want to be President of the United States, certain requirements come with the job: having a vision, making tough calls at the time when it would matter. On President Obama's watch, you had the Arab spring come about and you had a desire by this administration to leave the region at any and all costs. Now you have absolute chaos. The only way we are going to fix this is for America to get reengaged. We do not need boots on the ground, but we need leadership. It just breaks my heart to see how close we were in 2010. The surge did work in spite of opposition from President Obama as Senator and Secretary Clinton as Senator. In spite of their vehement opposition, the surge did work, and on their watch we are about to lose everything we fought for. Al Qaeda is the biggest beneficiary of our withdrawal from Iraq. Al Qaeda is the biggest beneficiary of our indifference in Syria. Al Qaeda is thriving, and our allies and our friends are in retreat.

Mr. GRAHAM. The bottom line is we have to change the momentum. We are not there. But Senator Menendez, to his great credit, is willing to release his hold on the sale of Apache helicopters to allow the Iraqi military an advantage over Al Qaeda. I think Senator Menendez did the right thing. So supplying arms in a smart way is part of the strategy to move forward. But we have to get the military in Iraq working with the Sunni tribal leaders. I would ask Senator McCain this question: On the other side of the border in Syria is complete chaos, is hell on Earth. I don't know how we stabilize Iraq long term until we deal with the dismantling of Syria where Al Qaeda occupies the region right across the Iraqi border. How does a breakdown in Syria affect Iraq?

Mr. GRAHAM. I would be glad to respond to the Senator's comments. No. 1, I understand the average American thinks of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as having been long and difficult wars costing a lot of money and a lot of American lives. But the point of the war is to make sure that radical Islam is contained and eventually defeated, and that is going to take an effort on our part. Does it matter that the Al Qaeda flag flies over Fallujah and Ramadi? I think it does. I think when Al Qaeda occupies a city anywhere in the world, it potentially affects every city throughout the world. Imagine the Nazis having come back in Germany and occupying part of Germany. We didn't let that happen. We had a following force in Japan and Germany to make sure the transition from totalitarian and dictatorial states to functioning democracies would occur. We are still in Japan and Germany. We are not taking casualties. To go into the Mideast and replace dictatorships and think you can do it in a matter of months or even a decade is probably not going to hold water, quite frankly. The good news is we were in a position in Iraq in 2010 where if we had left behind a residual force not to be in combat but to provide the logistical, air support, training, intelligence capabilities missing in the Iraqi Army, this would have been a very different outcome. And it does matter to my fellow citizens here in the United States. If Al Qaeda is on the rise anywhere, it does affect us. Remember Afghanistan? Remember when the Russians left and the Taliban took over and they invited Al Qaeda and bin Laden in to be their honored guests? The rest is history. The reason 3,000 Americans died on 9/11 and not 3 million is the terrorists, the radical Islamists, Al Qaeda and their affiliates can't get the weapons to kill 3 million of us. If they could, they would. So the goal is to create stability and marginalize Al Qaeda throughout the region. Unfortunately, as Senator McCain has predicted for a very long time, the absence of a following force allows security to break down and the vacuum was filled by the emergence of Al Qaeda in Iraq. I would like to go over some testimony from June of 2010, when General Austin was about to take over from General Odierno the command of our operations in Iraq. General Austin told me during my questioning that we were inside the 10-yard line when it came to being successful in Iraq. In other words, the surge had worked. The surge Senator McCain supported during his Presidential campaign worked. President Bush made his fair share of mistakes in Iraq, but to his undying credit he adjusted policies. We were all in. He gave General Petraeus all the troops we had to give and he stood behind General Petraeus, and over a 2- or 3-year period there was a phenomenal turnaround in the security situation in Iraq. The surge started in late 2007, early 2008. Here is what had existed in 2010 in June. Basically, we were inside the 10-yard line, and General Odierno said: I think the next 18 months will determine whether we get to the goal line or give the Iraqis an opportunity to hit the goal line beyond 2011. So we were in a good spot. The surge had worked, and we needed to close this thing out. I asked this question back in 2010: What would happen if Iraq had become a failed state? Let's say we are inside the 10-yard line but we are not smart enough to get in the end zone. What would happen? Here is what General Odierno said: . . . if we had a failed state in Iraq, it would create uncertainty and significant instability probably within the region. Because of the criticality of Iraq, its relationship to Iran, its relationship to the other Arab states in the region, if it became unstable, it could create an environment that could continue to increase the instability. I don't believe we are close to that. I believe we are very far away from that happening. I think we are definitely on the right path. But those are the kinds of things which would happen if we had a complete breakdown inside Iraq. Here was a quote: The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, has said repeatedly that Iraq is not yet fully capable of defending its own air space or land borders, and that it needs help in other areas such as intelligence and logistics. Our military commanders were telling us that the surge had worked, but we were not there yet. Here is what I would like to say to the administration: If you believe Iraq was the wrong war to fight and we shouldn't be there, own your decision. Don't blame the Iraqis. The truth is the administration, led by President Obama, had absolutely no desire to leave one person behind in Iraq because this was Bush's war and America was tired, and he ran on the idea of ending the war in Iraq. When it came time to make that fateful decision about a small 10,000 or 12,000, whatever the number was, residual force to maintain the gains we fought so hard and to keep Iraq stable, he now wants to tell the world it was the Iraqis. I know differently. I know, and so does Senator McCain, that this administration made it impossible for the Iraqis to say yes because this administration would never give the Iraqi Government a troop number from the White House as to the size of the force. I remember General Austin saying publicly we needed 18,000. The bottom line from the Pentagon was somewhere slightly north of 10,000. I remember the discussions in the White House got down to 3,500 and it was cascading down. I remember General Dempsey answering my question as to how the numbers were reduced: Was it as a result of the Iraqis saying, no, that is too many troops to leave behind in Iraq or were the numbers reduced because the White House did not want to have that many people left behind? He said the cascading down from 18,000 all the way to 3,500 had nothing to do with the Iraqis. It was the uncertainty and unwillingness of the White House to commit to a number. So what happened? We left the country with 200 U.S. troops advising and assisting, no capability. Everything they talked about happening if we do not get Iraq right and get into the end zone from the 10-yard line in 2010 is happening on steroids. Everything our generals told us about what would await Iraq if we didn't get this right is coming true at an accelerated pace. So I turn it back over to Senator McCain.

Mr. GRAHAM. As to the future of how to move forward, Prime Minister Maliki with all thought did go to Basra and take on the Shia militia. The political gains we made in Iraq are being lost by lack of security. If we would have had a residual force, the political momentum toward reconciling Iraq would have continued. Without security, people go back to their sectarian corners. I would argue that the Sunnis need to up their game too. But the immediate problem is how do you repel Al Qaeda from Fallujah and Ramadi? The way it worked before is you had the Sunni awakening, where the Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar had a taste of the Al Qaeda agenda and said: No, thank you. They were literally killing children in front of their parents for smoking. The stories coming out of Anbar Province about the abuse the people of Anbar suffered under Al Qaeda control would break your heart. So the Sunni leaders married with American military personnel to drive the Al Qaeda elements out of Anbar. We are not there now. So how do you get Al Qaeda dislodged from Anbar Province, Ramadi and Fallujah? You are going to have to get the Sunni tribal leaders to work with the Iraqi Army. I think now is a good time to send a former military commander of the U.S. forces--someone who is retired if that is what is required--to see if they can bring these parties together to form a military alliance between the Sunni tribal leaders and the Iraqi Army so the weight of the Iraqi Army can be brought into this fight. The distrust is high. But the way Al Qaeda was defeated in the past was the U.S. military working with the Sunni tribal leaders. We are not there.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Senator Ayotte mentioned this Washington Post editorial. The Washington Post is, in my view, a very good newspaper. I like the editorial board. They have been right on Syria and a lot of other issues. Sometimes we disagree, that is for sure. But this one editorial has gotten my attention to the point that I have to respond and, quite frankly, ask my friends at the Washington Post to reevaluate their position and think a little bit about what they are saying in their editorial when it comes to military retirees.

Mr. GRAHAM. This applies to disabled retirees as well, right?