Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Let me reclaim my time for a second and answer a part of that. My colleague from New Mexico touched it. When in a legal proceeding we get a warrant against an individual, or a criminal proceeding here in the United States, we target that individual and all of the calls or all of the communications of that individual then are monitored. Some of these calls may be the kind that the criminal system wanted to intercept, talking to another drug kingpin or whatever. But at the same time they may pick up a call from his mom, his kid's teacher, his dentist, a pizza guy, or whatever, and those are all listened to. What some folks wanted to do on an alternative to this FISA legislation that we passed in August was a guarantee that when you targeted this foreign terrorist, somebody that we knew was a foreign terrorist and you have to guarantee that that person, whoever he is talking to, is also going to be a foreigner, you kind of sit there and say, wow, how do you do that? This cell phone has an area code of West Michigan; so if someone is calling me and has this number, they are probably calling West Michigan. No, I am in Washington, D.C. And for my BlackBerry, if they call my BlackBerry, it has got a West Michigan number on it, I could be in Europe. You don't know where they are going to call, but they said you have to guarantee that it's going to be foreign to foreign. You can't do that.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Reclaiming my time, as the gentlelady recognizes, when Admiral McConnell, the Director of the National Intelligence Agency, the former head of NSA during the Clinton administration, I think, for three or four years testified in front of our committee that on occasion, in military activities involving the security and safety of American soldiers, that there were instances where there was a requirement, the safety and the security, not of the homeland, but of our troops who are in harm's way that it required the intelligence communities to go to a court in the United States to be able to listen to foreigners, terrorists, jihadists to get the information that was necessary to protect our troops. And in a time of war, as we talked about it on an Amber Alert, whether it's 12 hours, whether it's 24 hours or whatever, that's too long. And if you're a soldier under fire, or at risk, you want the intelligence community to have every tool to keep you safe and from preventing the terrorists from being successful where you are because, in your environment for the terrorists to be successful, the terrorist objective is very simple. They are over there, you are over here. You're in a hostile environment. Their objective is to kill you. It becomes very, very real for them.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Baker, a former official at the Justice Department spent a considerable amount of time with the committee explaining to us exactly how the emergency process works. And so often people have focused on just the last part of the emergency process saying, call the Attorney General and he'll approve it. And that can take, that can be almost done at the speed of light. The Attorney General knows the call's coming, and it's kind of like you can get the approval very quickly. If that were the full extent of the emergency process, it might work. But Mr. Baker, in his testimony, says the emergency process, there are complications to it. I don't mean to sit here today, that you push a button, or it is not like, click, buy now on the Internet. It does take time. He goes on, so why does it take time? So the intelligence community has to do their investigation, make a judgment about what targets they want to pursue, when they've done that; and when they've reached a point where they realize that they need to do collection immediately, they start talking to us. The ``us'' is the Justice Department. Going on, he says, then we work through the legal facts, the legal issues, the factual issues, at the same time that they are dealing with the technical stuff that they need to do. Then, when all of that is ready and they tell us we are ready to go, and they say, yes, we resolved all legal issues, we have no problem; then they call the Attorney General. Calling the Attorney General and getting an answer back, it's not like super-time intensive unless a complicated case. Oftentimes we'll go down, prebrief the Attorney General what the case is all about, what the request will be, so that when the call comes, it can happen quickly. But before that call is made, Mr. Baker goes through, we work through the legal facts, the legal issues, the factual issues at the same time that they are dealing with the technical stuff. Then, when that's all ready, and this is what my colleague from New Mexico is talking about, this is what the two inches of legal documents preparation that needs to be done before these folks in the Justice Department and in the intelligence community feel comfortable enough calling the Attorney General or one of his designees and saying, hey, it's time to go up on an emergency FISA.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Reclaiming my time for just a minute, I think we need to go back to what you said where folks have said, well, you know, common sense just says that if there's an imminent threat, just call him. Don't worry about getting the stuff, and just go or just start listening. Like you said, that's a felony. And in the FISA law----

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Just to talk a little bit about the difference between the threat that we face with radical jihadists versus what we faced in the former Soviet Union. You know, when we developed some of these tools, they were targeted against a specific location, an embassy in Washington, D.C. or embassies overseas. We knew who these individuals were; we knew where their locations were. I mean, it is a nation-state. They carried passports of certain countries. We knew where their embassies were and all of those kinds of things. They were relatively easy to identify, and the threat wasn't necessarily imminent. What we now face with radical jihadists is we have got groups of people who, as we have seen in taking a look at their own words, have a passion for attacking the United States. And there are all different kinds of levels within this group. You have got the radical jihadists who are clearly linked to al Qaeda who take direction from al Qaeda. We call it the al Qaeda Central in the Pakistani-Afghan border region, the Fatah, the federally administered tribal areas. So you have got that network that is committed on a larger scale to attacking the West. And then you also have individual cells that might be franchises of radical jihadists who have aligned their goals and their missions with al Qaeda but may not be directly linked or taking their direction. And then that goes all the way over to the thing that we see with homegrown terrorists, people who may have become radicalized in a local mosque, or individuals that may actually become radicalized through the Internet. So, the intelligence community needs to be focused on each of these types of threats in different ways, and it is a very difficult threat to get a handle on.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Until we fixed it. But in the FISA, you know, there was not a commonsense exception. I'm sure that there are lots of people in America today who have paid a penalty or whatever, believing that what they were doing was, you know, it's just common sense. And they went in front of a judge or maybe they got called in front of a committee in Congress and they found out that their definition of common sense happened to be very different than maybe what the Members of Congress would have defined common sense; and when they got in a court of law, they found out that there wasn't a common sense objective or a common sense exception and found that they'd violated the law. I yield to my colleague.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If you take a look at the information right almost immediately after 9/11, as the President convened the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate, along with the bipartisan leadership of the Intelligence Committees, they recognized that the FISA law wasn't going to work against this new kind of threat. So almost immediately, as the President consulted with this bipartisan leadership of the Congress, they talked about exactly what is this threat that is out there. And as they took a look at the statements, as we did earlier tonight, of what bin Laden was saying, what others in the al Qaeda organization were saying about we want to attack the West, we may use a nuclear weapon, we made a portable nuclear weapon, or something like that, they were unsure of exactly what the threat would be and they were unsure of what the organizational capabilities of the radical jihadists and al Qaeda were. So they made a decision. They said, we are going to do everything, we are going to unleash the NSA onto radical jihadists and intercept their communications so that we can determine and get a better insight as to exactly what they are doing. Because the President and the leadership, bipartisan leadership, recognized that it was their responsibility, and they made a commitment back then that said, we are going to do everything in our power to make sure that we prevent another attack against the United States. So they took the policies and the practices, and they made the decision to adapt it and extend it to recognize the changes that had taken place in technology. The current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker Pelosi, briefed four times in the first 12 months of this effort, talking about exactly how it was working, who was being targeted, the information that was being collected, the kind of impact that it was having on the threats against the United States and how American's civil liberties were being protected. And consistently over a period of 3 to 4 years, as Members of Congress, we are consulted and briefed on this program. They all walked out of those briefings saying, this is essential, this is a necessary tool to prevent another successful attack against the United States. That all changed when the New York Times published the existence of this program. It made America less safe. It tipped the radical jihadists off as to what some of our capabilities might be. They changed the way that they communicated. They changed the way that they operated. But the end result is this is still an effective tool and a balanced tool that we now need to bring up to date through the legislative process. We did that in August. I yield to my colleague.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. So even before the attacks of 2001 and the implementation of the terrorist surveillance program, for 21 years the intelligence community had developed a strict regimen of here is what we do if our surveillance touches on an American to make sure that we protect the civil liberties, and that whole process for 23 years has been able to be reviewed by the Intelligence Committees of the House and the Senate, and those procedures from 2001 were extended and applied in the same way under the terrorist surveillance program.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Let me reclaim my time, Mr. Speaker, and yield to my colleague from Connecticut.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Reclaiming my time for just a minute. When we take a look at the threat that we face today, it is a fight against radical jihadists. As my colleague pointed out, this is a fight that is very different than what we fought in the cold war. But even in the cold war we had a very specific strategy laid out and a very specific objective. Now, we need to transform our intelligence community to make sure that it is as good and as quick. Actually, it has to be better and it has to be quicker, than radical jihadists. These people who have perverted their Islamic faith to achieve what they hope will be ultimately a world in which their view of Islam dominates everyone, and you either bend to their will or you are killed. Remember, their objectives are very simple: They want to take down the government in Iraq; they then want to destabilize the region; eliminate the State of Israel; establish their caliphate, Northern Africa, Southern Europe, the Middle East, reaching down into Asia, and they want to put it under sharia law; and, at the same time, they want to continue on in the West. Remember, that for radical jihadists, as they look at the rest of the world they say, you have three options: you have the option to convert to Islam; you have the option to pay the tax, the hadid, or you will be attacked and you will be killed. And that is how they view the rest of the world. And that is why, when you take a look at the statements of bin Laden, al Qaeda, and other radical jihadist groups, it is why they are so focused and why bin Laden, in one of his latest messages, said that they need to escalate their efforts against the West. They need to escalate the killing. And why, if by the grace of God he is given a nuclear weapon, he will decide whether they will use it or how they will use it. It is why we need to use every tool at our disposal, tools that we refined and that we learned how to use during the cold war. We developed a great capability against the former Soviet Union, against other enemies during the cold war, and we ought to now take our knowledge of how these tools worked, how we put them in practice, to make sure that we got the information that kept us safe, that prevented the Soviet Union from ever being able to attack us and attack us successfully. How did we develop those tools to make sure that we got the information that we needed at the same time that we protected American civil liberties, privacy and American rights and the American way of life? We had a good balance. We got the intelligence that we needed. We kept America safe. We had a period of 50 years where we developed these tools. We developed them at their various intelligence organizations where we refined the practices in such a way that they are now positioned as we target them at different threats, and perhaps a more serious threat than what we have ever seen before, radical jihadists. These are the tools that will enable us to meet our commitment of saying we will do everything we can to prevent a successful attack against the homeland. I will yield to my colleague.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Reclaiming my time. We steal secrets. Correct?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentlelady will yield.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor Dorothy ``Dottie'' Johnson, a passionate and dedicated leader both in Michigan and at the national level in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors. I am proud to say that Dottie and her family reside in my district, yet spread their passion for philanthropy, volunteerism and nonprofit initiatives throughout the country. She is truly an inspiration. Mr. Speaker, Ms. Johnson's list of accomplishments is long and impressive. Each has significantly impacted individuals and communities on a myriad of levels. For 25 years she served as the Council of Michigan Foundations, the Nation's largest associations of grant makers and has created other regional associations of grant makers in the United States and overseas. A significant amount of Ms. Johnson's energy has been focused on our country's youth. She founded the Michigan Community Foundations Youth Project, involving more than 1,500 high school youth in philanthropy annually in Michigan and now an international movement in more than 38 States and 18 countries. She created Learning to Give, an internationally used Internet resource of more than 800 teacher- prepared and tested lesson plans on giving and the nonprofit sector for K-12 education. She founded the Michigan AIDS Fund, the oldest statewide private response to HIV/AIDS in the Nation. She also initiated a number of other statewide efforts, including the Michigan Community Service Commission and Michigan Nonprofit Association. The list of awards bestowed upon Ms. Johnson is yet another indication of the level of her dedication and success with which she pursued her work. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Grantmaker Award from the Council on Foundations--the highest award from the Nation's leading association on philanthropy. She is also the recipient of the Women of Achievement and Courage Award from the Michigan Women's Foundation. She serves as a trustee on the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek and serves as a trustee of Grand Valley State University, which is now home to the Dorothy A. Johnson Center on Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership. She has served on numerous national boards, such as Independent Sector--the voice for the Nation's Nonprofit Sector. Ms. Johnson retires this month as a trustee of the Corporation for National and Community Service, where she served since 1998, and has the distinction of having been nominated by both Presidents Bush and Clinton. As a former Chairman of the Oversight subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Corporation, I can say firsthand that she is a wise and trusted counsel. She was the architect of significant grant process reform and program policy reform at the Corporation and a leader on AmeriCorps rulemaking. Madam Speaker, Dottie Johnson has led a long and distinguished career deserving of the recognition of the U.S. House of Representatives. Please allow me to submit my remarks for the Record.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding. I come to the floor today opposed to this bill. This budget reconciliation conference report before us today creates five new entitlement programs and abuses the protection of the reconciliation procedures. A number of programs that were a part of discretionary spending, that depended as to whether the money was available in the budget or not and whether we had the money available to fund those programs, determined exactly how much money would be spent on those programs, but now they will be moved into entitlement status. More money, rather than going through a process where we review the spending every year, is on automatic pilot. And sure, the bill says that these programs will sunset, but those of us that have been here for a while know that entitlement programs never sunset. They just grow larger and larger and larger. And the Federal Government and this Congress loses control over that spending. The discussion about the student loan interest, cutting it in half, it goes down and scales down over a period of 4 or 5 years and in the 5th year it comes back to its full amount. Why? Because we can't afford it or the other side hasn't been able to find the 20 to $30 billion that's estimated would actually be necessary to continue this program in the past. Will they find it in the future? Probably. It will be called deficit spending. This bill is a massive attack on the private sector. There are significant increases in new Federal mandatory spending. It grows government one more time. It puts the Federal Government in control of more parts of the education sector, the education process, squeezing out the private sector, squeezing out parents and inserting big brother and big government in the process. But under this administration, when it comes to education, why am I not surprised that we're talking about more government and less parental involvement?

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, today it is my honor to welcome Major Jonathan Etterbeek to the House of Representatives to deliver the House invocation. He is a native of Holland, Michigan, and he is a chaplain of the U.S. Army's 32nd Medical Brigade. The House is honored to have you with us today. We appreciate you being here to deliver this invocation. It is a time-honored tradition in this historic Chamber to request God's guidance as Congress conducts the business of the American people. We thank you for doing that. Major Etterbeek is a graduate of Holland High School, Hope College, and Western Theological Seminary, and he is currently stationed in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. While he has many accomplishments and a distinguished record in the military, it was especially important in 2005 where I had the opportunity in front of a hometown audience to present him with the medals that he earned for his distinguished service while he was in Iraq. I was honored to award him the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, the Meritorious Service Medal, the Iraq Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and the Combat Action Badge. Major Etterbeek, thank you for being here today. Thank you for your service to this country.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson).

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, the Senate rejected transferring al Qaeda terrorists from Guantanamo to facilities in the United States by a vote of 94-3. Senator McConnell stated at that time, ``It is better for the safety and security of the American people that terrorists at Guantanamo Bay are not moved to American communities. It is the sense of the Senate that detainees housed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including senior members of al Qaeda, should not be transferred stateside into facilities in American communities and American neighborhoods.'' Many senior members of al Qaeda are secured at Guantanamo Bay, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed approximately 3,000 Americans; Majid Khan, who developed plans to poison water supplies inside the United States; Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, who orchestrated the attacks on the USS Cole which killed 17 United States sailors. This is just a sampling of the people that are in Guantanamo Bay. Are Americans better protected by bringing these terrorists to our homeland, or by keeping captured members of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations 528 miles and an ocean away from the homeland? Terrorists held at Guantanamo are treated in accordance with United States and international law and are held at the highest level of security, ensuring that they are not a threat to the United States citizens. Gitmo alternatives include the use of up to 17 military detention facilities. Less secure facilities allow for the recruitment and radicalization of new members within the detention population as well as enhanced escape opportunities. Domestic detention facilities may become prime targets for terrorist attacks on United States soil and they will create uncertainties about detainees' ``constitutional rights.'' Standards at Guantanamo are equal to or better than similar institutions in the United States. They are relatively new facilities. They have culturally appropriate meals. They have Korans and respectful silence during Islam's five daily prayers. The detainees receive medical care and at least 2 hours of daily outdoor recreation. An inspection official from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in March 2006 called it a model prison. Bottom line, the Guantanamo Bay facility is a clean, safe and humane facility for the terrorists housed there, as well as a facility that affords security and protection for American citizens. We should accept the Senate language in their bill and make it clear that these prisoners should stay at Guantanamo Bay and that they should not be transferred to facilities in the homeland. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I compliment my colleague. I thank you for the support on this motion to instruct, and with that, I would also then like to yield 4 minutes to my colleague from Utah (Mr. Bishop).

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time. I will be the last speaker, and I will close as soon as my colleague yields back.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I shall consume. Mr. Speaker, the Senate rejected transferring al Qaeda terrorists from Gitmo to our homeland. That was a wise decision. That is a decision that my colleagues here in the House should support tonight. Gitmo is a facility that is working. It's working in many different ways. It's keeping terrorists, these terrorists, away from the homeland. It's providing us with an opportunity to get the information that may be necessary and may be helpful in keeping America safe. When the Senate acted, they acted overwhelmingly, 94-3, to say make sure that these individuals do not come to the United States. It provides us with the alternatives and the flexibility that, as we move forward in defeating radical jihadists, that we will have the strategies in place to keep us safe, to get the information that we need, provide us with the background to implement the correct strategies. We are safer keeping these terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 528 miles away from the homeland. I encourage my colleagues to vote for this motion to instruct conferees. It is a good motion. It's a good decision, a good direction that was put forward by the Members of the other body; and I hope that we stand with them tonight. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if it is in order, but I would like to ask unanimous consent, recognizing the generosity of the Chair to this side, that my colleague from the State of Michigan also be given an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I reserve the balance of my time.