Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, that is correct. Most of the Navy Theater Wide funding to date has gone to support the new interceptor required to destroy incoming ballistic missiles. Additional funding for radar development is needed to assure that the system is capable of detecting and tracking ballistic missiles in flight.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, that is true. In essence, this date is direction to the Navy to get started now on a radar development program in a way that best supports the Navy Theater Wide.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Solomon) for turning the Committee on Rules into an Armed Services Committee and then a National Security Committee. It has always been, I think, reassuring to Members on both sides of the aisle when we have had our bill moving through the process to know that the Committee on Rules was going to take up our bill under the leadership of a Member of Congress who finds that the constitutional duty to protect this country is of primacy. Whether he is in a Republican Conference, in an in-house conference or speaking to the full House or making sure that some important mission of the Committee on National Security works and is successful, the gentleman from New York has been a real fighter for a strong national defense. Along those lines, I think we are in some danger in this country. We have been telling the President as we boosted his defense budget every year on the Committee on National Security and then in the full body, we have increased President Clinton's budget, we have been telling him every year that we do not have enough, that we are losing people, that we have got pilot shortages, that we have got technical shortages. We now have sailor shortages in the Navy. We are losing people. We are building a navy at a rate which if you consider new construction will give us a 200-ship navy when we had a 600-ship navy just a few years ago. We are seeing the North Koreans now achieving ballistic missile capability that the CIA said they would not have for years, achieving that right now, and we have no defense against it. We have an army that has been cut from 18 to 10 divisions. We see a desperate need for stealthy, tactical aircraft and we do not have them. Yet we are trying to move that program along. I think we have cut defense perilously. Yet the President has rejected our overtures for the last four years. This year, I notice, if you read the papers now, President Clinton is now writing letters saying defense has been cut too much, that we have to do something about it. Mr. Speaker, we have done something about it in this bill with the very limited dollars that we have. Our great leader the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spence) on the Committee on National Security has assigned us all our various areas. I have worked on modernization. We have tried to increase the tactical fighter program. We have tried to put money in the Joint Strike Fighter, the F- 22. We have added extra shipbuilding money. We desperately need more. We have moved out on missile defense. We have tried to take steps, although they have been small steps, in a number of areas that are absolutely national priority with respect to national defense. The best thing we can do right now is pass this conference report and then regroup and put an additional 10 or 20 or $30 billion a year in our national defense, do what we have to do to remain the supreme military power in the world and also have the ability to meet the new threat of terrorism.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. He rammed it through.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thought it would be appropriate today to talk a little bit about national security, especially in the wake of the President's remarks. We have had some remarkable statements by the President in the last several days regarding national defense. They are remarkable not because they display any insight that is unusual, from my perspective, but that they are the first admission by the President that our military is broke and needs fixing. When I say it is broke and it needs fixing, I mean it is dramatically underfunded. We spent about $100 billion more per year in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan than we are spending today, if we look at real dollars. We do not have the soviet empire to contend with, but we still have fragments of the soviet empire, including Russia, which still has nuclear weapons which are still aimed at the United States. We have now a number of nations exploding nuclear devices, like India and Pakistan. We have Communist China racing to fill the shoes, the superpower shoes, of the Soviet Union. Also we have a number of terrorist nations, or would-be terrorist nations, around the world, including North Korea, which are now testing missiles and developing missiles much more rapidly than our intelligence service ever thought they would. Particularly, I think, we were alarmed when we saw just a few days ago, really, the North Korean Taepo Dong-1 missile, a three-stage missile, fired over Japan in a very long flight, or what would have been a very long flight, had they let it go all the way. We realized suddenly that they were years ahead of our intelligence estimates in terms of building and deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs. ICBMs have an important meaning to the United States because that means to us as Americans, those are the missiles that reach us. Short- range missiles like the Scud missiles that Saddam Hussein used to kill some of our troops in Desert Storm of course can still threaten troops in theater. That means that if we have American Army personnel, Marine Corps personnel, or Navy personnel around the world, those Russian-made Scud missiles, which are proliferating to a lot of outlaw states like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and others, can fire on our troop concentrations. But ICBMs have a special meaning to Americans because those are the missiles that reach us in our cities. That means, to a serviceperson who may be serving in the Middle East, there are lots of little missiles that can reach him in his role as a uniformed serviceman for the United States, but the missiles that are being developed now by the outlaw nations can reach his parents and his family, his city, his community. That has a special meaning to us. Along with my good friend, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Curt Weldon) and the chairman of our committee, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Floyd Spence), I have taken to asking a lot of questions concerning our progress in missile defense to the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs when they appear before us. My favorite question is, if an intercontinental ballistic missile was fired today at an American city and was coming in, do we have the ability to stop it before it explodes in our community? The answer always is no. The reason I ask that question is not because I think maybe the Secretary does not know the answer, but because if we ask the average citizen in the United States or a lot of average citizens in the United States whether or not we have a defense against missiles, most will tell us, sure we do. I remember watching one focus group when they were explaining to the monitor, good American citizens, hardworking, why they thought we had a defense against missiles. The guy that was running the program said, how would we shoot them down? One person said, we would scramble the jets. Of course, we know, a lot of us know, that one cannot possibly catch up with an ICBM that is traveling as fast as a 30-06 bullet or faster with a jet. Another person said, we would shoot them down with cruise missiles. We know we cannot do that, those on the committee, because cruise missiles are very slow compared to ICBMs. Another said, I thought Ronald Reagan took care of that program. But he did not take care of the program, President Reagan, that is, because he was stopped by the people who sit in this Chamber, by the U.S. Congress. We derided his warning to us that we were entering the age of missiles and we had to have a defense against missiles; that they would be proliferating around the world to outlaw states, and that even if the Soviet Union went away, we were living in an age of missiles, we could not get away from that, and we had better start learning how to defend against it. I think it is kind of interesting, Mr. Speaker, that you are here today, the great gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bass). I want to make sure you are still there, because I remember when I was going on and on in one of our meetings about the need for missile defense and I invoked the name of Billy Mitchell. I reminded my colleagues that Billy Mitchell was warning the United States in the 1920s that we had entered the age of air power, and he so enraged some of our service leaders that when he sunk some ships, some Navy ships, with bombs to show that planes could sink ships, they promptly court-martialed him for his candor. He criticized, incidentally, the state of national defense. But he was trying to warn the United States that we were entering an age of air power, of air battles for which we were ill-prepared. We learned that. And only by our industrial base roaring back in the 1930s and 1940s to take on the Axis Powers did we finally prevail. But his warning was a righteous warning it was a right warning, it was accurate. That, of course, was the Speaker's great uncle, the great General Billy Mitchell. Well, today we are living in the age of missiles. Yet we have given short shrift and not enough money to missile defense programs. That means that if a leader in North Korea brings his generals in and says, What if we have a tank war with the Americans? Can we beat them? His generals say, No, they have the best tanks in the world. What if we try to take on their Navy? Can we beat them? No, they have the quietest submarines in the world. We will never beat the Americans at sea. What can we do to the Americans that they cannot stop? His generals will tell that North Korean leader, as I am sure they do on a very regular occasion, They cannot stop ballistic missiles. Why not? I do not know. We were watching television, they might say, watching international television and we saw all these congressmen, I guess they are called, getting up and fighting against the missile defense. They said it was a bad thing to have war in the heavens and to stop an incoming ballistic missile. We cannot figure it out, but the Americans decided to not have any defense. They want to be totally vulnerable to a missile strike. What is that North Korean or Libyan or Iraqi or Iranian leader going to tell his Department of Defense? He is going to tell them, Go where they are vulnerable. Build missiles. We cannot beat their tanks. We cannot beat General Schwarzkopf's Army on the ground, or what is left of it under the Clinton administration. We cannot beat the Navy, but we can throw missiles at them and they have nothing to stop it. Mr. Speaker, we need to spend a large chunk of money. And I know there is going to be some waste and I know there is going to be some redundancy, but we better spend a large chunk of money under a national emergency framework. That means get all the regulators out of there, get the guys out of there that say we cannot test at this test range because there are certain mockingbirds that will not sleep when we are testing missiles out here. Or we cannot test here because this is a historic site. It means that when the bean counters come in and the Pentagon says we cannot go to the system yet because we have not checked off the 30,000 boxes and the small business set-asides on that, it means we have to sweep them out of the way and go on an emergency program that is just as important, I think, to our national survival today as the Manhattan Project was at the end of World War II. My father was a U.S. Marine who had been in the Leyte Gulf operation in the South Pacific. He was in marine artillery and he was waiting for the call for his unit to deploy and invade the Japanese mainland. He did not have to do that because we came up with the Manhattan Project that built the nuclear weapon that we were forced to use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That precluded what we estimated to be 1 million U.S. casualties in trying to take the Japanese mainland. One of those casualties might have been my father. So, as tough a decision as that was for Mr. Truman to make, I think it was the right one and I think most Americans agree. Well, today we are in a race. It is almost as important as that race in World War II. This is a race not to throw offensive systems at people and kill a lot of Russians or kill a lot of Iraqis or kill a lot of Iranians. This is a defensive system that will shoot down a missile in flight so that we do not have to kill a lot of our adversaries in a retaliatory strike. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that this Congress, under the good leadership of our Speaker, Mr. Gingrich, and the leadership of Mr. Lott and a lot of right-minded Republicans and Democrats who realize that now missile defense is an emergency, will come to the fore and support a very strong, robust emergency missile defense program. We need to build on an emergency schedule a defensive system that will handle the missiles that North Korea is just now testing; that will handle the Iranian missile that was tested a short time ago; and, will handle in fact intercontinental ballistic missiles of all shapes and sizes, because we can bet they are going to be coming out us. Mr. Speaker, let me move to another part of the national security bill that I think is important. Incidentally, this bill was shepherded forward, was passed today with a big vote and it is the result of a lot of hard work by great members on the Committee on National Security, Republicans and Democrats, starting with our good chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Floyd Spence), a very strong advocate for national defense. I was sorry to see that it was the last time this bill was going to be shepherded through the Committee on Rules by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gerry Solomon), chairman of the committee, one of the best national security Members I have ever seen. Mr. Speaker, want to talk a little bit about this bill. I am the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Procurement which helps to authorize our ships and our planes and our tanks and those things. This bill does provide for ships and planes and tanks and a lot of other things like trucks and radios and generators and ammunition. But I can tell my colleagues, although we provided for all those types of things, we did not provide for much in terms of quantity. For example, we are only going to build this year 1 F-16. We are only going to build 30 F/A-18 tactical aircraft. We have money in for the Joint Strike Fighter, which I think is important. We have money in for the F-22. We are going to build some remanufactured Kiowa Warriors. We are going to build other aircraft that are on the periphery in all three of the services in terms of being support aircraft and combat support aircraft, but we are not going to build a great many of those aircraft. We are not going to build the B-2 bomber. Remember, Mr. Speaker, we only have 21 B-2 stealth bombers. The great thing about those bombers was that one of those bombers flying into a mission area could evade and avoid enemy air detection with their radars, could avoid enemy SAMs and could knock out the same number of targets as 75 conventional aircraft. So the B-2 bomber was a great multiplier. One B-2 equals 75 conventional aircraft. But we killed that program. President Clinton killed that program last year, and we are only going to have 21 B-2 bombers. So, we built none of them in this particular bill. We are only building enough ships, just enough to keep up to what I call the 200-ship Navy. President Ronald Reagan had an almost 600-ship Navy just a few years ago. Today, we are building toward the 200-ship Navy, a very small Navy. In the area of ammunition, we are still billions of dollars short. We are about a billion and a half dollars short of basic Army ammunition. We are still $300 million short of basic Marine Corps ammunition. Mr. Speaker, let me go to some of the personnel problems. We are going to be short, now we know, over 800 pilots in the U.S. Air Force. We are going to be short also of Navy pilots. We are going to be short lots of sailors, the people that go out and make the ships actually sail and deploy and do their missions. I am told now by members of the U.S. Navy that when our Navy ships come in we are so short in certain munitions that we have to take the munitions off the decks of some of the incoming ships and put them on the decks of outgoing ships. That means we do not have very many. If we have to expend those ammunitions in a war or conflict, we are going to be short of ammo very, very quickly. We did something in this bill that I do not think is a good thing, but we did it at the request of the conferees. Something we could not get through the conference, although the House did, I think, the right thing. That is we did not separate men and women in basic training. Mr. Speaker, I have seen the requirements of infantrymen. I have seen the requirements of being able to carry a buddy who may weigh 220 pounds off the field, while at the same time maybe carrying a weapon and some other things. I have seen the mixed platoons, that is men and women in infantry platoons, and I will simply say that I think we are disserving the parents of America who are counting on having an Army where the guy next to their son is able to carry him off a battlefield, along with equipment, before he is killed. In many, many other areas, but especially areas involving physical endurance, we are shortchanging not only the young people in the service who have to rely on their buddy, but we are also shortchanging, of course, the parents who invite them and ask them to join the uniformed services. So, Mr. Speaker, we tried to get that provision through to maintain a separation. We know that there are many, many personal problems that have emanated from the lack of what I would call good, practical, common sense oversight with respect to training and mixing of the genders in training. I do not think we have done a service to either the families of the young women or the young men whom we have thrown together in these very tight environments in basic training. Nonetheless, it was insisted by some of the conferees that we maintain that experiment in human behavior. But I will tell my colleagues that this committee is going to be watching very closely. The gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spence) and a lot of other folks who are really concerned about that are going to be monitoring it, along with myself. We are going to see to it that if there is not a reversal in the numbers of incidents that are arising from that mixed training, and other problems and disciplinary problems, we are going to come back with the bill that we had this year. Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to yield to a gentleman who is a great friend of mine, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development, who knows his stuff on defense and has been a champion of ballistic missile defense, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon).

Mr. HUNTER. Maybe they think, I would say to my colleague, maybe the Clinton administration thinks that they can talk those missiles down with the Japanese.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank my friend for his excellent comments and for his leadership. I remind him that a couple of years ago, I think it was 1987, when the Israelis were building the Lavi fighter or embarking on the Lavi fighter program, which was kind of a mid-range fighter aircraft that they thought they needed, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) and I and several other members on the Committee on National Security sent a letter to the Israeli leadership saying, if you had an attack by aircraft from a neighboring Arab country, and I think then we were thinking of Syria, you would shoot them all down before they got to Tel Aviv. But if you were attacked by ballistic missiles, Russian-made ballistic missiles coming from a neighboring Arab country, you would not be able to stop a single one. That is the essence of our letter. We urged them to begin the Arrow missile program, the Arrow missile defense program. As a result of that, partly as a result of our letter and the result, I think, of a lot of other factors and also the importance, the realization by the Israeli leadership that they were in the missile age, they realized that even if we do not and they would have to defend against these missiles sooner or later, they began that program, the Arrow missile defense program. And it is going very well. They have had a number of successes. I have often thought that here we have a very small country, and it seems that they have been able to do more with a handful of scientists and a couple of pickup trucks than we have been able to do with this big defense apparatus, big Department of Energy apparatus and this huge bureaucracy. And maybe it is because we have a huge bureaucracy, but I think more important than that, it is because we have an administration in the White House that does not really want to do it.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague and thank him for his contribution here today. I think he is one of the great experts in defense in our House and he has done a great job as the R&D subcommittee chairman. Mr. Speaker, how much time do we have left?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, one other thing I wanted to comment about today, because it is coming up on the House floor, is so-called fast track, and I just want to tell my colleagues why I do not think this President, this administration, should be entrusted with fast track. Fast track is power. It is a power that we give American presidents, we as Congress, who are vested under the Constitution, or chartered under the Constitution with the obligation of making trade agreements. We give up some of that trade agreement power, power to negotiate the agreement, to the executive branch; to the President. And so the President, instead of all the Congressmen making the deals and the committees being involved in all the details, the executive branch goes out and makes the deals, like NAFTA, and then they bring them back to the House of Representatives and to the Senate and we vote on them. Now, I would say, first, a couple of things. First, I think that the negotiating team that the President has, that he has utilized for trade deals, has not been a very competent team. And I am thinking of the port entrance treaty that we made, or agreement that we made with Japan where we were going to be able to get some liberalization from Japan for other people coming in and unloading in ports around Japan. In that deal we were totally finessed. I think of NAFTA, primarily negotiated by another administration but, nonetheless, by a bureaucracy that started with a $3 billion trade surplus in favor of the U.S. and today is in a $15 billion trade loss. Now, the great thing about being a free trader, and I like free traders, I have a great sense of humor about them, but the great thing about being a free trader is they never have to say they are sorry. If we have a trade surplus with a nation, they say that is great; and if their deal makes a trade loss with a nation, a loss for America, they say that is great, too. Today we have a $15 billion trade loss with Mexico. We went from a surplus of $3 billion to a $15 billion loss.

Mr. HUNTER. President Clinton pushed NAFTA.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, we are in a race, and the participants in the race, along with the United States of America, are nations like North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Communist China, and to some degree, Pakistan and India. The other participants in this race seem to understand that it is a race because they are doing everything that they can to develop offensive missiles that have increasing capability and can go long distances, now almost to the point where this last shot that was fired over Japan by the North Koreans, the so-called Taepo Dong 1 missile, a 3-stage missile, had enough range to reach portions of the United States of America. That is the North Koreans now, years before the CIA ever thought that they would be this far, have now developed a missile that has ICBM capability. That means the capability to reach parts of the United States. Now, on the other side of the race is the American effort to develop defenses against these missiles, and this American effort really started in 1983 when then President Ronald Reagan told the Nation that we were entering the age of missiles, and that we had to do something about it, and that rather than just have the ability to retaliate; that is, throw our missiles back at that enemy, whoever it might be, we needed to be able to develop the ability to shoot down incoming missiles. Now, that lesson that Ronald Reagan gave us in 1983 was driven home in the early 1990s during the Gulf War when we saw ballistic missiles, Scuds at that time, for the first time in the history of warfare, being delivered on a battlefield. My colleagues may recall, Mr. Speaker, those Scud missiles destroyed a number of American barracks and killed a number of American soldiers. We shot some of them down with our Patriots. Our Patriots were the Model T of missile defenses. They are very slow. According to MIT, they did not hit any of the Scud missiles. According to the U.S. Army, our Patriots shooting at those Scuds had close to an 80 percent success rate. Probably the truth is somewhere in-between zero and 80 percent. But now, our potential adversaries, like the North Koreans, are racing to develop offensive missiles, and Mr. Speaker, we are stalled in the development of our ability to defend against those missiles. If we look at the so-called PAC-3 upgrade, that is just an upgraded Patriot. That is maybe, if not the Model T, that is maybe the 1965 Chevy of our missile defenses. We are not going to even deploy that until the year 2000. And, Mr. Speaker, the so-called Navy Lower Tier, that is a system that cannot even shoot down the type of Dong I missile, 3-stage missile that the North Koreans just fired, that they now have and have the ability to fire right now. That Navy defensive system, so-called Navy Lower Tier, it is a fancy name for the Navy missile defense system, will not even be deployed until 2 years after the next century starts; that is, 2002. The so-called Airborne Laser that we are working on, we do not deploy that until 2006, and the THAAD system, which has a very difficult time hitting any of its test targets today, even if it is successful and is not terminated, will not be deployed until 2007. And of course, the Navy Upper Tier, and that is a system that barely has enough capability, if everything works out, to knock down this North Korean Taepo Dong I missile, that is not going to be deployed until 2008. So the North Koreans today have a missile that can out-perform the American defense, and that missile is capable today, and the American defense against that missile is not going to be on line until 10 years from now, in 2008. So, Mr. Speaker, we have to redouble our efforts. We have to reorder our priorities. We may have to spend some billions of dollars, but we must have a defense against incoming missiles, whether they are incoming missiles coming against our troops who are in theater like our troops in Desert Storm, or coming into American cities. The first question I ask the Secretary of Defense when he appears before our Committee on National Security is this: Can you stop today a single incoming ballistic missile coming into an American city? And his answer always, and this last year again was, no, we cannot stop a single incoming ballistic missile. We must change that situation, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, many prominent members of the national security community gathered last week at the Heritage Foundation to recognize the lifetime achievements of John M. Fisher. Last week's luncheon was sponsored by the National Captive Nations Committee and it honored the man who organized the American Security Council in 1955 and has served as its Chairman for the last 43 years. I have known John on a personal as well as a professional level for many years, and I have a great deal of respect for him. I am serving as one of the House Co-Chairmen of the bipartisan National Security Caucus (NSC). The NSC is now the largest Congressional Member Organization and it was established in 1978 primarily through John's efforts. John is also the Chairman of the non-profit National Security Caucus Foundation which works with the NSC on a wide range of public policy development, education and research programs. Born in Fairhaven, Ohio, in 1922, he served as a youthful commissioned officer in the Army Air Corps during 1943-45, flying 28 combat missions for which he was decorated several times. He studied at Miami University of Ohio, and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1947. Later he was a student at Brooklyn Law School (1950-51) and at Northwestern University. For six years he was a F.B.I. Special Agent, and then in 1953 he became the National Director of Security with Sears, Roebuck and Company. While he was a Sears employee, he became the part-time director of the American Security Council, working with General Robert E. Wood, the then Sears Board Chairman. Since 1961, John has devoted all of his time to the operation of the American Security Council. In the intervening 43 years, John Fisher has devoted himself to national security in the broad definition of the term. His concerns embrace not only military preparations and defense; but also democracy, and human rights. He has devoted countless hours to efforts to advance freedom and self-determination in former Soviet Union and in such diverse nations as Afghanistan, Angola, Cuba, Nicaragua and all of Eastern Europe. In 1966, John Fisher led the board of the American Security Council in the purchase of Longlea Farm, the 933-acre estate of the late Alice Glass Marsh, located in Boston, Virginia. There he established the Congressional Conference Center, and with the support of generous donors, he built an additional housing facility for seminar participants and other guests. The American Security Council facilities now include three major buildings on the Boston property. The magnificent manor house is today known as the Gustavis A. Buder Seminar Center. The residential quarters are known as Ogle Hall, and they are named after Arthur Ogle, who was a prominent Ft. Lauderdale, Florida businessman. The administrative building and library is known as the Sol M. Feinstein Research Library and contains an impressive collection of research material on defense and foreign policy issues. Throughout the years John Fisher has worked hard to promote peace and freedom. He has worked closely with every president since Dwight Eisenhower, with leaders of both parties in Congress; with Secretary of State, Defense; with leaders of national organizations, and with state and local leaders across the nation. A pioneer in direct mail and public relations, John Fisher has mounted many national campaigns to gather support for a host of worthy causes in the U.S. and abroad. His efforts in 1978 led to the creation of the National Security Caucus, a coalition of 275 Members of Congress, who focus attention on defense, foreign policy and international economic issues. John has always been a practitioner of bipartisanship, and one of his guiding principles was best stated by the late Senator Henry ``Scoop'' Jackson: ``In matters of national security, the best politics is no politics.'' Having founded the American Security Council and directed its course since the early years of the Cold War, John Fisher has lived to see the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the withdrawal of Russian and Cuban forces from Afghanistan and Angola, the democratization of much of Central and South America, and the progress of democracy in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. Much credit must be given to the heroes of the Cold War. A due recognition must also be assigned to a truly remarkable American leader, who despite lacking governmental portfolio, has contributed mightily to the nation's well-being and security: John Morris Fisher, the Chairman of the American Security Council and the National Security Caucus Foundation.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his observations, and I think the recent nuclear tests in India and Pakistan reflect this to some degree also. We were surprised by this activity. It reminded us once again that there is no substitute for having a person in the plant or a person in the planning group or a person in a particular government agency. And especially to relate back to the tragic bombings that have just occurred, when there is a likelihood that this is State- sponsored terrorism, it is going to be more and more important for us to beef up our intelligence budget. Finally, one last thing that has always occurred to me in the 18 years that I have been here in the House of Representatives is this: We admire and we respect our Armed Forces and the men and women who serve in them. But in some corners in Congress, there has always been a resentment, if you will, of our intelligence agencies as if these men and women who put their lives on the line in remote places of the world where they do not come home to ticker tape parades like our military sometimes does, as if they are something less of American servants than the people in uniform. Actually these people, our intelligence personnel, perform an enormous service for our country, and they do it, generally speaking, in a way in which they receive very little credit for what they have done. In the end, at the end of their career, they know what they did. One or two other people, or maybe a handful of people, may know what they have done for their country. But, as I said, they do not come home to ticker tape parades. I think we have to adjust our attitude about the value and the patriotism of the folks who work in the intelligence services for our country. I hope we get to the bottom of what happened in Africa. I hope that it serves a warning bell to us in this House that we need to put more resources into the intelligence and the counterterrorism area. I wonder if my friend, the gentleman from New Jersey, has any comments.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, it is important, obviously, to have what is called human intelligence. That is, when a group of terrorists are planning to bomb an embassy or do something else that takes life and property, it is good to know ahead of time what is going to happen, because this is not a big military operation where, by national technical means, that means by satellite overheads and other things, we can see large events developing, like tanks massing for an attack and other things that would indicate a large movement of a military force. But in this case, an attack may be promulgated by a small group of people, meeting in a small room somewhere. It is important for us to have human intelligence, to have a person who sees that group or a person who sits in with that group or a person who knows what that group is doing to report to us so we can stop that terrorist act. Having a large human intelligence capability requires a lot of funding. It requires money. It is expensive to have good intelligence. I think that one of the things that we are going to have to realize as we move from the Cold War into this new era, an era that I would call the era of terrorism and State-sponsored terrorism in many cases, is that we are going to have to meet this age of terrorism with a lot of investment in human intelligence along with national technical means. Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my colleague, who is really an expert in terrorism, for his views. I yield to my friend from New Jersey (Mr. Saxton).

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for yielding to me. I want to thank him first for being the Chairman of the Task Force on Terrorism and U.N. Conventional Warfare. I know he has got a lot of things to do as a member of the Committee on National Security and chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. But this is a very important area. I agree with the gentleman very strongly that, when we have a State- sponsored terrorism where assets and resources are funneled to terrorists to kill people around the world, in many cases Americans, it only makes sense to deter that type of State action, whether it is Iraq or Iran or Libya or others, to deter those States from putting the full force and effect of their State treasury into terrorist activities. The way we do that is by hitting them in the pocketbook. That means when we have a judgment, taking assets; that means freezing assets where you can; that means hurting them economically around the world. We do need to have the full cooperation of our own State Department to do that. That is really the only way we can establish a policy of deterrence.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to take a minute this morning to wish happy birthday to Vivian Correia, who is the matriarch of one of our leading fishing families in San Diego. The fishing industry, the tuna industry, has been a great part of our heritage. It is mostly gone now because of a lot of regulations with respect to the tuna industry and a lot of economic factors. But that community gave great character to our city and county in San Diego, California. We hope someday to be able to retrieve that industry. But, for the time being, to Vivian, and to Joe, her loving husband, and to her children who served that industry so well, happy birthday.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I wish to announce to my colleagues that our good friend, our Top Gun ``Duke'' Cunningham, who underwent surgery today, has come through that surgery successfully. He is doing great. He has already made one attempt to sneak past a corpsman and get back to work, but they apprehended him and he is back in bed to rest for a little bit. He just wishes all of you well. It would be great, if anybody would like, we would love to have you come to the Republican cloakroom, Democrats and Republicans, and sign the get-well card that we put together for Duke. He is doing well and he is going to be back shortly.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to show my respect for the claim filed by Hill International, Inc. against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Hill International is a New Jersey-based company located in the district of my friend and colleague, Representative Jim Saxon, and is one of nearly two dozen companies who filed claims against the Saudi government for tens of millions of dollars in uncompensated engineering work conducted in the late 1970's. After years of trying to settle these claims, Congress was forced to set up a claims resolution process in 1993. Since then, the Kingdom has settled each claim save one--the $55.1 million debt owed to Hill International. During the House consideration of the FY98 Defense Authorization Bill, I supported directive report language offered by Representative Saxon to commission a formal report on the status of remaining claims against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Similar language was by included by Representative Chris Smith in the State Department Reauthorization Bill that passed the House and Senate earlier this year. These efforts are intended to illustrate the lengths to which the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bander, has been willing to go to deny an American company payment for services rendered. I am also interested in seeing this matter resolved in memory of the late Representative Bill Emerson, a dear friend of mine and someone who worked diligently on the Hill International claim prior to his passing. Bill Emerson successfully negotiated a claim against the Kingdom in his home district and graciously offered to broker a similar compromise on the Hill International matter. Despite six months of hard work by Representative Emerson and repeated assurances from Prince Bandar that Bill's good faith efforts would be honored, the Saudi's have yet to pay Hill International--full three years after Representative Emerson produced a fair settlement figure. In that time, Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson has tried to help Hill International implement her husband's compromise, yet repeated requests for a face-to-face meeting with Prince Bandar have gone unheeded. No matter how large or small the debt, this behavior cannot be tolerated from one of our allies. Until Ambassador Bandar decides to play a leadership role in this matter and until the Hill International claim is settled, my House and Senate colleagues will continue to take to the floor and highlight the Kingdom's failure to honor its debts.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time. A couple of facts here are incontrovertible. One is that we have over 1,500 Americans still missing in Vietnam, including all 448 American pilots who were shot down in Vietnam-controlled Laos. That can mean only one thing. Not one of those pilots came home out of that 448. It means the North Vietnamese leaders had a policy of execution of the pilots that went down in that area. That is a war crime. There should be war trials for the criminals, for the Vietnamese communist leaders who propagated that policy of execution, if we could find them, if we could apprehend them, if we could lay hands on them. If we had treated Himmler and Goering like we are treating the Vietnamese communist dictatorship, they would be attending World Trade Organization meetings instead of the Nuremberg war trials. I think if we keep devaluing the sacrifices of our veterans like we are doing with this bill, someday we are going to have a war and they are not going to come. Support Rohrabacher.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to add my condolences to the families of the officers.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, when just a couple of days ago the Iranians tested an intermediate range ballistic missile, one that has the range to strike Israel, our administration was once more embarrassed, because they had predicted a number of times that the Iranians could not achieve this capability until sometime late next year. Well, the Iranians were a year ahead of schedule. Only one person predicted they would be able to do it much earlier in this body, and that was the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon). He is working on a piece of missile defense legislation. The gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Saxton) is putting in legislation a number of us are cosponsoring which directs the President to conduct an emergency program to build a defense against the systems the Iranians are developing right now. Mr. Speaker, now is the time for the President to act. With the same urgency with which our enemies are building the ballistic missiles, we must act with the same urgency to build defenses against those missiles.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, a lot has been made about the label of this debate. Is it over ``normal trade relations'' or is it over ``Most-Favored-Nation status?'' In reality, it is over $64 billion. It is a $64 billion question, because we send to China $64 billion more each year than they send to us. The second question we should ask is, is it in America's interests to send $64 billion a year to China? Well, let us examine some of the things they are doing with that money. They are buying missile cruisers that were designed by the then-Soviet Union to do one thing: kill American aircraft carriers and the men and women who operate those aircraft carriers. That is one thing they bought with the money we have given them. What are some of the other things they have done with the money we have given them, some of that $64 billion? They have upgraded their strategic systems. That means the Long March missiles, some of which are aimed at American cities like New York, like San Diego, like Los Angeles. So they have built and deployed and aimed nuclear weapons at some of our cities with some of the money that we have given them. What are some other things they have done with some of the $64 billion we have given them? They have proliferated poison gas components and nuclear weapons components to such adversaries of the United States as Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. They have sent poison gas and nuclear components with some of that $64 billion that we have given them. Mr. Speaker, I say to my colleagues, if this is a business deal, the currency of this business deal may be death in the future for young Americans in uniform, and that is the worst kind of trade deficit. Vote up on this resolution.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for yielding to me, and I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Ken Calvert) for his great work, along with the gentleman from California (Mr. George Brown) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Jerry Lewis), and, of course, the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Mary Bono) in putting this bill together. This thing is really beyond being a remediation of a terrible problem. This total project, including the Salton Sea and the New River, is going to create one of the biggest wetlands in the United States. This is great news for people that love wildfowl and waterfowl and all the bird species. There are some 380 bird species that utilize the Salton Sea. As the gentleman from California (Mr. Duke Cunningham) said, it is a major piece of the Pacific flyway. It is a stop-over. In Imperial Valley, in fact, we actually have a bird festival, a waterfowl and bird festival, that attracts now thousands of people because the south end of the Salton Sea is one place where they stop on that sojourn from Canada, in some cases down to Mexico, in other cases all the way down to Central and South America. We are going to build, along the 50 miles of desert river, from where New River enters the United States at Calexico and Mexicali, we are going to build 50 miles of marshes. And through those marshes we are going to sift New River. So we really have three legs to this project. One is a desalinization problem. And that is the idea of diluting this salt before it gets up to 60,000 parts per million and kills the Sea. The other part of this project, of course, is the Mexicali project. And that is the part I have talked to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) about, in many cases, and that is the part in which we join with Mexico, which we are doing right now, to wean the Mexican sewage system in Mexicali, Mexico, off the New River. Right now that system still breaks down at times and pours stuff into New River, and that waste ultimately makes it way up to the Salton Sea. So we are doing a totally new project with Mexico. And, lastly, we are doing the third leg, of course, which is this 50 miles of desert river that we are going to build into 50 miles of marshes that will host hundreds of bird species and be an enormous boon to everyone who loves wildlife and loves conservation. This is a great, great program. And I just want to say one last thing, and that is simply that we had to have an exemption to the Clean Water Act because we cannot clean a river with marshes, according to the lawyers, under the Clean Water Act. It says if we take out the first bucketful of water, we have to return it in drinking water form. And using marshes to clean up rivers, which is environmentally accepted, is an incremental process. Some of the river is cleaned up in the first mile, some of the river in the second mile, some of the river in the third mile. There are bull rushes, there are duck weed, there are pond weed, and all this various aquatic plants that take the bad stuff out of the water. Our environmentalists like that process. Unfortunately, when we wrote the law up here as congressmen, we made a little mistake and we made it so tight that we cannot use marshes to clean up rivers. So we have what ``60 Minutes'' has called the most polluted river in North America. So let us use that good old common sense. We really worked with the environmental community in putting this thing together. We extended the time, the study period, from 12 to 18 months, because Secretary Babbitt thought he needed 18 months. Instead of blocking judicial review, we cannot have people sue in Federal Court every day until the Sea dies, so we just told the court to expedite that review. If somebody sues, give them their day in court, but do not wait years to bring them to court while the Sea dies. We think that is reasonable. That is something a lot of environmentalists should like, the fact that we are going to clean this thing up so it does not languish in courts. So we have touched on all those bases. And once again I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert), the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Bono), and the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis), who has really been a driver in this process; but also the gentleman from California (Mr. John Doolittle), who came over here pretty much under the weather and really worked with us as we were putting this thing together. This is a great bill. Let us pass it and let us celebrate for the environment.