Jim Inhofe

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I understood that the junior Senator from Massachusetts referred to the NIE. I would like to ask a question because my interpretation was totally different. The NIE that was released yesterday states that worldwide counterterrorism efforts over the past 5 years have constrained the ability of al-Qaida to attack the homeland and have led terrorist groups to perceive the United States as a harder target to strike than on 9/11. It is a significant judgment that shows that our counterterrorism efforts have been working. It also notes that al-Qaida leadership continues to plot high-impact attacks, and the safe haven it enjoys along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has likely increased its capabilities to attack the United States. This doesn't mean, as some erroneously reported last week, that al-Qaida is as strong as it was pre-9/11. It does mean that al-Qaida may be strong enough to carry out an attack on the United States. The question I would ask, reading in context from the NIE, is, Do you agree with this interpretation?

Mr. INHOFE. I am glad to yield for a question, but we already heard this speech in terms of the interpretation of the vote we will have at 11 o'clock. We have an honest difference of opinion, I say to my good friend, the junior Senator from Colorado. He has expressed his opinion, and I want to express mine.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I will yield to the Senator from Colorado.

Mr. INHOFE. Yes. I understand. Mr. President, reclaiming my time.

Mr. INHOFE. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, first of all, let me say to my good friend from Iowa that while there are so many things in which we find ourselves in agreement as the months and years go by, in this area we find disagreement. I have to say this. I wasn't going to mention Guantanamo, but since that is a subject of interest to everybody--and it certainly has the interest of the Senator from Iowa--I only mention this. I have done this before on the Senate floor. I am very much concerned about this obsession we seem to have in this country politically to take care of these terrorists who are responsible for committing acts and killing Americans. I was down at Guantanamo several times. One time was right after everything started escalating and they started arriving there. Everybody was concerned about the methods of questioning these individuals, interrogating the prisoners. I remember going down and seeing a lot of them doing everything they could to antagonize the troops that we had down there to police that situation. It was really kind of pitiful. You sit there and look at these people, and these are prisoners who probably have never eaten better in their lives, have never had better medical attention in their lives, have never really lived better than they are living in Guantanamo. Yet these are individuals who are terrorists. These are the worst, and some have killed Americans. We all seem to have this propensity to be more concerned about them than we are for the lives of Americans. I want to give a different perspective. I have had the honor, I believe, of being in the Iraqi AOR--not always in Iraq, but the area of responsibility--more than any other Member. I have watched this on a monthly basis since we have gotten into this thing. As I look at it, I very carefully chose the word of ``invasion'' on Iraq as opposed to a ``liberation'' of Iraq. I remember so well right after the first Iraqi war, I was honored to go over to Iraq the day that it was actually declared to be over. This was in Kuwait City. We had a thing called the ``first freedom flight.'' Tony Cohelo was on that flight with me. Certainly, the Chair remembers him well. We also had one of the Kuwaiti nobility and his young daughter with us at the time. We got there, and they were burning the oil fields. It was obscure. Even during the daylight hours you could not see anything. The Iraqis didn't know that the war was over--those who were down there at that time. I remember so well seeing the devastation. This little girl, I think, was 7 years old at the time. They wanted to go back to Kuwait to go to their mansion on the Persian Gulf, a beautiful place, so she could go up in her bedroom and see her little dolls and animals. I remember going up there with her, and we found out that their residence had been used as one of Saddam Hussein's torture chambers. I remember going up to her bedroom with her and, in fact, that bedroom had been used as a torture chamber, one of Saddam Hussein's headquarters. There were body parts--ears, hands, just strewn all around the room. You thought: What kind of a monster could this Saddam Hussein be? This guy had spent 30 years of his life terrorizing his fellow citizens. We saw things like a little boy with his ear cut off. He was 9. The reason it was done was he had a little American flag in his pocket, and I guess they found that on him, and they considered that to be inappropriate. Looking into mass graves and hearing the stories of individuals going through grinders and begging to go head first so they would not torture them quite as long, being dropped into vats of acid, begging to be dropped in feet first. These are the kinds of terrorists that we are talking about over there. This is what Iraq was like. This is what Saddam Hussein was like. While I don't want to get into the debate about weapons of mass destruction, I never had that as the argument. It is a fact that training was taking place there; whether it was al-Qaida or not we don't know. In Salman Pak in Iraq, they were training terrorists to hijack airplanes. Whether they trained in that area the particular 9/11 perpetrators, I have no way of knowing. Nonetheless, this is something that had to be--all you had to do was look into the mass graves and hear the stories about weddings taking place and how they would raid them and rape the women and bury them alive. That was the scene, and that is what we were doing over there. I really came to the floor to voice my objection to the Levin-Reed amendment, No. 2087. Winston Churchill once said: Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy. . . . Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance. That was just as true in World War II when Churchill made the statement as it is today. Today, we face an enemy that is determined and willing to go to any means of terror and violence to win. He cannot be negotiated with. You cannot negotiate with a terrorist. We keep hearing that we need to negotiate with them, but we cannot do that. They will not be satisfied until the whole world is brought under their dreadful ideology. We have seen this kind before in Stalin and Hitler, but never before has our enemy metastasized this way. In a way, you could say it is more dangerous now than it was back then during Hitler and Stalin because the mentality is different. These are people who want to die and who are willing to die. This is their way of going to heaven. It is a totally different environment than under the other cultures in the different wars. There is no centralized headquarters or one leader that we can eliminate. There is no country involved. I don't think we have ever been involved in a war against an enemy who didn't have a country. When you defeat a country, you win the war. Well, there is nothing centralized that we can point to. Victory would come the way it always has: Destroy the enemy, undermine the support network, and expose the fact that they cannot win. Any plan to leave Iraq before we have had a chance to understand the outcome of the troop surge tells the enemy, first of all, they have been successful and that their methods worked. Those individuals who were perpetrating the crimes of terrorism will come back and do them again. It gives them patience to wait us out. Do you believe they do not watch our news or that they are not watching us right now, scouring our media for any chink in our resolve? Their survival depends on it, and they cannot win by force of arms. They can only win by attacking our resolve. Our country represents the light of freedom and democracy. Yet I fear that we have begun a terrible introspective and downward cycle. Our resolve lasts for a few months, or maybe a year, but all it takes is enough time and then we break. Our enemy knows this. Look at our mission in Somalia. I remember it so well. So does the Presiding Officer. They were dragging the naked bodies through the streets of Mogadishu and our resolve was broken. Look at our reaction to the bombings in Lebanon at Khobar Towers. Look at Vietnam. I am saying that we have to realize that while this introspection guarantees our freedom, it is also our greatest weakness. I recognize there have been mistakes made in Iraq. In his January 10 speech, the President also recognized this and has taken full responsibility for mistakes, which are made in every war. Yet we still find ourselves in difficult situations about the best way ahead. These decisions affect many lives, both of our soldiers and the American people they pledged to protect. We should debate. That is what the Senate body intends to do. It is what we have been doing. But how we fight and when we leave will determine the fight our grandchildren face. I think we all agree that it would be disastrous to leave Iraq precipitously. If we do, we know what we can expect: increased levels of violence and the spread of extremist ideology. Iraq itself would collapse into anarchy. We know this. A personal friend of mine, DIA Director General Maples, said this: Continued coalition presence is the primary counter to a breakdown in central authority. Such a breakdown would have grave consequences for the people of Iraq, stability in the region, and U.S. strategic interests. DNI John Negroponte and CIA Director General Hayden have also agreed with that statement and analysis. It is not too late to avoid this breakdown. I don't think it is time to start cutting our losses and hope all of this will somehow disappear, somehow it will go away. If we can assist Iraq to reach the point of sustainable self-governance, then we can bring defeat to our enemies and bring stability to the region. We all want this to happen. To those who say we cannot win, I look to Bosnia. I have to say, Mr. President, I was wrong in this case. That was a situation that many said and I said was intractable, that we would be bogged down for years and suffer thousands of casualties. I really believed this situation. I went back to Bosnia. It is peaceful. This is directly because of our military involvement. So I learned a lesson in Bosnia. When I heard President Bush ask for our support for a troop surge, I heard the same message from many soldiers whom I have talked to in Baghdad, Fallujah, Tikrit, Balad, Mosul, and other areas. They said they want to fight the enemy there and not at home. This is what the troops have told me on these 14 trips I have made over there. They said they are in a fight to win and that they will accomplish the mission. Their morale is very high, and they back this up by reenlisting in record numbers. I watched one of the Sunday shows, and they are trying to say: Look at the dissatisfying level. You can ask a question of all the troops over there and pull out some kind of answer that can be misinterpreted. The true test is those individuals who are fighting the hardest and facing the most risk are the very ones who have the highest reenlistment rate we have seen in modern history. We are seeing reenlistments in record numbers right now, and the sacrifice our service men and women pay demand we pursue every possibility to leave stability in our wake. The permanent Iraqi Government has only been in power since May. Many of the leaders have never had any kind of opportunity to run any kind of government before, let alone under the terrible circumstances they face. While Saddam was in power, they were in jail or were in exile. They were on the outside. Now they have to build coalitions and a democracy that took us many years to achieve in this country. I think sometimes we forget that fact. Last week, Hassan al-Suneid, a Shiite legislator and adviser to Prime Minister al-Maliki, was quoted in the Washington Post. This is what he said, an adviser to al-Maliki: If the Americans withdraw, the militias and the armed groups will attack each other, and that means a sure civil war. What concerns me really is that U.S. troops might submit to the Democrats' decision and withdraw without thinking about Iraq's situation and what will happen to the Iraqi people. We owe it to the sacrifice of the brave servicemember, we owe it to the Iraqi people, and we owe it to our children and grandchildren. Give our soldiers everything they need to win, and if Iraq doesn't step up, then it will be time to go but not until then. We haven't given enough time to see if the surge is working. July 15 was supposed to be an interim White House update. We know the 16 benchmarks. It is my understanding eight are proceeding as planned, eight are not, and two are mixed signals. We know the surge has enabled a number of things to happen, such as a new engagement strategy, which I will talk about in a minute. It is called the joint security stations. We have gotten a huge increase in tips. Tips are pieces of information that come from the Iraqi people that tell us where IEDs are, that tell us where individuals are, where terrorists are. These are the qualified tips. They are accelerating on a daily basis. It has enabled us to stage offensives throughout Iraq without significantly diluting our troops in Baghdad. It has enabled the commanders to chase down al-Qaida and keep them from regrouping and attacking areas that have been historical sanctuaries of al-Qaida. September 15 is when General Petraeus will give us a report. Let's not forget, that is what the law says. We passed a law. We passed a law either in March or May. The law says September 15 is the date he will come forth, this great general, General Petraeus, who is over there right now. It will give him time to say what our situation is and what we should do if a change is necessary. We owe it to him at this time. A total surge, of course, has just been in place for 2 weeks. We have some good indicators that the time to make that kind of change is September. We cannot change the terms of the deal now. That was the deal, and that is written into law. My colleague Senator DeMint stated it well: If we're going to govern effectively, we can't change our minds every week. Let's not give a knee-jerk reaction to the headlines of IEDs and sectarian killings. This is exactly what the enemy is aiming its propaganda toward. I recognize this is not the fight we thought we were going to be getting into, but it is the fight that is before us now. I admire Prime Minister Maliki's assessment. I quote him again: A fundamental struggle is being fought on Iraqi soil between those who believe that Iraqis, after a long nightmare, can retrieve their dignity and freedom, and others who think that oppression is the order of things and that Iraqis are doomed to a political culture of terror, prisons and mass graves. I want to share one last point. Before I do, I want to put up a chart. If my colleagues will remember, we had the Webb amendment which would have dictated terms of how we do our troops deployments. At that time, I used this chart. We have to keep in mind that one of the problems we had in orchestrating a surge and trying to address this now is that we went through a pretty tough climb back in the 1990s. As this chart shows, if we look at the black line, this is the 1993 baseline increase by inflation. In other words, if we did just what we took in 1993 and only increased it by inflation, this is where we would be in the year 2000. The Clinton administration is represented by this red line. If we take the difference between the status quo and what his recommendation was in his budget, it is $412 billion total. We, in our wisdom, saw we were able to raise it to this green line in the middle. But it still is $313 billion less. I suggest that a lot of that represents our troop levels because the most expensive thing we have in defense is the troop levels. We are in the situation now where we have to see if this is going to work, if it changes, the surge, General Petraeus and all his efforts are taking place. I mentioned the President's speech of January 10. I did it for a reason because I went back and reread that speech. If you read it, it talks about the victory being in a bottoms-up situation. In other words, instead of the top down, from the top political leaders down, it is going to be from the roots, from the people in these various communities. That is exactly what I witnessed. Mr. President, I will share with you what I witnessed the last time I was there. Keep in mind that just a few weeks ago, long before the full surge effect was taking place, I spent a lot of time in Anbar Province in Ramadi, Fallujah, as well as in Baghdad. I saw some changes. I think a lot of it was due to the fact that we have had a lot of the cut-and- run or surrender resolutions and the Iraqi people are very much concerned that is what we are going to do, and that all of a sudden got their attention. What I will share with you, Mr. President, I know we spend a lot of time and it is important we talk about the political leaders. Al- Maliki, we do talk about him. He is the Prime Minister. We talk about Prime Minister Jasim and Dr. Rubaie. What I noticed last time is a bottoms-up dramatic improvement, not coming from the political leaders but the religious leaders. This is what I witnessed. My colleagues might remember, we stood on the Senate floor a year ago and said the terrorists are saying Ramadi will become the terrorist capital of the world. Now Ramadi is secure. If you go next door to Fallujah--and we remember the World War II type of door-to-door activities that were taking place there. The marines did a miraculous job, but Fallujah at the time I got over there on this last trip was secure. The important thing is it was secured by the Iraqi security forces. They were the ones providing security at that time. I mentioned a minute ago the joint security stations. This is a bottoms-up type of thing. I noticed in Baghdad, where, instead of our troops going out into the field and coming back to the Green Zone at night, they stayed out there. They bed down in the homes with the Iraqi forces. I talked with people who experienced this, theirs and ours. I didn't see that in any of the previous trips over there. If I can single out one thing that is causing the bottoms-up improvement we have seen so far as a result of this surge announcement that was made just a few months ago, it would be the attitude of the clerics and the imams in the mosques. We monitor these, by the way. Our intelligence is at all these mosque meetings where they meet once a week. As most of us do on Sunday in our churches, mosques meet at different times. Nonetheless, they have weekly services. In weekly services prior to January of this year, 85 percent of the messages that were given in the mosques by the clerics were anti-American messages. They started reducing, and by April we went through the entire month without one mosque giving an anti-American message. That is why we are getting the support of the people, the bottoms-up we are talking about and the President was talking about back on January 10. We are seeing these individuals doing the same thing. I don't think there is a person watching us or present in this Chamber today who isn't from a State that has such programs as the Neighborhood Watch Programs. That is what they have over there right now, and they are watching and they are going around with spray cans and spraying circles around undetonated IEDs so that our troops don't get into them. This is the type of cooperation we have not seen before. This is what the President asked for on January 10. I think anything prior to our legal timeline of September 15 and getting an ultimate report from General Petraeus would be a great disservice to our fighters over there as well as to Iraqis. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, today, I want to reiterate something I talked about on Monday and maybe elaborate a little bit. I am one of the cosponsors of an amendment that several people will be discussing today, amendment No. 2020--it is primarily offered by my colleague, Senator Coleman, and myself and Senator DeMint and Senator Thune and, I believe, some others also--to prohibit the reimplementation of the Fairness Doctrine. Over the past few weeks, the Fairness Doctrine has received quite a bit of attention. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives had a vote on June 28, just a couple weeks ago. The House voted 309 to 115 to prohibit the FCC from using funds to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. Now, the Fairness Doctrine is a regulation the FCC developed to require FCC-licensed broadcasters to provide contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues. However, the FCC conducted a review of this regulation in 1985. I remember this well. This was back during the Reagan administration. They concluded--and I am quoting now the FCC: [W]e no longer believe that the Fairness Doctrine serves the public interest. In explaining why the FCC reached this conclusion, the FCC wrote--I am quoting again further-- [T]he interest of the public is fully served by the multiplicity of voices in the marketplace today and that the intrusion by government---- The intrusion by government---- into the content of programming unnecessarily restricts the journalistic freedoms of broadcasters. The FCC's refusal to enforce the Fairness Doctrine was later upheld in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. That is a little bit of the history that took place, and there was not much controversy back in those days. Everybody pretty much agreed this is something that should be driven by the market, driven by the people, as opposed to being spoon- fed to the people by some governmental agency or anybody else. So you might ask, why would a regulation that was found to be unnecessary over 20 years ago be controversial today? I can tell you why that is. It is because--and I happened to be in the middle of this when it happened--on June 22 I said something on a talk radio show that became quite controversial having to do with a statement I had made to a couple of the Senators of a more liberal standing in the Senate. They believed the content--which it is--of talk radio has a huge bias toward the conservative viewpoints. Now, I had made the statement--and I hate to sound rash when I do this, but I want to be accurate--I said: Well, you guys don't really understand. This is market driven. The market is driving it. There is no market out there for your liberal tripe. So it happened, coincidentally, that the day after I made that statement, the Center for American Progress came out with this report. It is called ``The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.'' Now, I am not critical of the people who are behind this. It is the people from the Clinton White House. Clearly, it is John Podesta, Mark Lloyd, and many others who are in charge of this program. I am not sure. I have heard that the Center for American Progress is supposed to be maybe another viewpoint from the Heritage Foundation. You hear all kinds of things. But this is what is interesting in this report. First of all, they go through and document the fact that in talk radio 91 percent of the content is conservative. I do not disagree with that. They say only 9 percent is progressive, or I would say liberal. I do not disagree with that. After they make their case, they try to state that there has to be a correction for it. I am going to read just a few excerpts from this report. They said: These findings-- Now, the findings we are talking about are the 91 percent-- may not be surprising given general impressions about the format, but they are stark and raise serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans. Now, that is really interesting, ``the listening needs of all Americans.'' What are the listening needs of all Americans? Who is going to determine that? Anyway, that is what they seem to be hanging their hat on. They said: Our conclusion is-- I am reading from this report which is from the Center for American Progress. That is John Podesta and Mark Lloyd and the rest of that group. Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multistructural problems in the U.S. regulatory system. It goes on to explain this. And then--I am kind of a slow learner. But after I figured out what they were talking about, they were talking about there are regulations that could be violated, or the intent of regulations could be in violation here. So they talk about some prescribed regulations to correct this problem. Now I move to page 11 of this report, and they come to this conclusion. They said: If commercial radio broadcasters are unwilling to abide by these regulatory standards or the FCC is unable to effectively regulate in the public interest, a spectrum use fee should be levied on owners to directly support local, regional, and national public broadcasting. You cannot get more socialistic than that in the comments. Now, the whole idea they are saying that not only then would talk show hosts who have a strong bias in one way or another lose their shows--let's say Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, any of the rest of them--but they also would have to be fined and that money would go to support public broadcasting. Now, that is what caused the interest after 20 years. When I say it is market driven, if you do not believe that, look at the effort by Al Franken and other liberals who tried to start Air America. Air America was designed to be on the liberal side. The problem was, nobody wanted to listen to it. So this is the problem that is out there, that people want to get away from what is market driven. We went through this same exercise, I might add, not too long ago, about a year ago, I think it was. We had various--let's see, Armed Forces Radio. I have it here somewhere. There are three different radio stations that reach our troops around the world--not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but around the world. So there was an effort to prescribe programming so it would be equally liberal and conservative. Then there was an uproar by our troops over there because they did not want that. So through their publications, the Army Times and some other publications, they determined what they wanted to listen to, and it was primarily conservative. So that is what has brought this thing up, and several people in the House and several people in the Senate--in this body--have said: We need to get the FCC to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. Now, the amendment that was passed in the House of Representatives by that huge margin I just mentioned was to prohibit the FCC from changing its viewpoint as far as the Fairness Doctrine is concerned. I have been outspoken on this issue for some time. For example, on the Defense authorization legislation we made quite an issue out of this. By the way, I might want to add, we won that battle. We ended up now so they are getting the programming they want, and it happens to be--this is quite a coincidence--it happens to be about the same--91 percent versus 9 percent--that the people are demanding today in terms of the market. The same principle applies again. I have long said that talk radio is market driven. There simply is not much market for some of this other stuff that is out there. Some Senators have made it clear they intend to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, but free speech is fundamental to what it means to be an American, and it must be protected. Reimposing some form of the Fairness Doctrine threatens first amendment rights. We all know that. But really what is most important is it gets to be very similar to some of these countries we criticize all the time where the government is trying to take over what comes through their airwaves. So I am pleased to join my many colleagues, including Senators Coleman, DeMint, and Thune, in supporting this amendment, and I urge the Senate to speak just as definitely against the Fairness Doctrine. I have a letter from the National Association of Broadcasters. In this letter--I will not read the whole thing--it winds up by saying: In the 20 years since elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, there has been a veritable explosion in alternative media outlets. Today, there are over 13,000 radio stations, more than 1,700 TV stations, nine broadcast TV networks, hundreds of cable and satellite channels, scores of mobile media devices and an infinite number of Internet sites that cater to every political persuasion and ideology. The Internet now enables consumers to obtain, and communicate to the world, virtually unlimited content. Of course, this is a strong endorsement of our position by the National Association of Broadcasters. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, today I honor a retiring soldier from my home state. Colonel Gary B. Carney demonstrated exceptional meritorious service as Commander of McAlester Army Ammunition Plant, MCAAP, Oklahoma, the largest U.S. government-owned, government-operated explosive ammunition plant. The plant has a storage capacity of more than six million square feet, and stores more than 700,000 tons of ammunition valued at more than $65 billion. He skillfully balanced management of this significant portion of the total defense ammunition stockpile mission with the plant's other mission as the sole Department of Defense source for bomb production. Colonel Carney effectively managed both manufacturing and depot operations stemming from Operating Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. During his tenure Colonel Carney oversaw an increase in revenue not seen since the Vietnam Era, totaling $228.2M. Also during his tenure the plant shipped 32,680 short tons of munitions, the largest tonnage shipped to date in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Expansion of the public/private partnership program occurred under his leadership as well. The commercial industry partnership business base at MCAAP increased four-fold under Colonel Carney's leadership. Additionally, MCAAP was selected as the integrator for the Excalibur guided projectile in partnership with Raytheon. The Raytheon/MCAAP team fielded the Excalibur, the newest and most accurate projectile, three months ahead of schedule, significantly enhancing our military's warfighting capability. Under his leadership, MCAAP led the way in Lean Six Sigma, LSS, with actual/cost avoidance savings of $5.319M. LSS training intensified so that 28 employees received green belt training while 18 received black belt training; 29 completed LSS executive training and 22 more completed project sponsor/project selection training. All MCAAP employees received Lean Six Sigma awareness training. In 2006 MCAAP's ammunition inventory accountability received an overall green rating in 10 out of 10 major functional areas during the Supply Depot Operations review. This rating and rapid turn-around is a marked improvement over previous years. This significant achievement was directly orchestrated by Colonel Carney through his initiative, leadership, tenacity and ability to motivate the work force. Colonel Carney's business acumen, dedication to duty, vision and ability to inspire and lead people reflect great credit upon himself, the Joint Munitions Command and the U.S. Army. On behalf of the U.S. Senate and a grateful Nation, I would like to wish him congratulations on a job well done.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I wish we were not in the position we are in. I can remember coming down here, I bet, every other week during the 1990s and talking about what was happening to the military, saying we cannot make these cuts. There it is on the chart, $313 billion below the baseline, just holding what we had together at that time. So now we are paying the price for it. Now we have to get the very most out of the personnel we have. We do have plans to expand that to 92,000 in the next 5 years. We know we are going to do that. Help is on the way. We cannot all of a sudden pull the rug out from under our troops, which is what we would do now in starting to micromanage this war from the Congress.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for yielding. It is my understanding--although I came down here thinking I had a little more time--that we are down to 2\1/2\ minutes or something.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, let me, since we don't have the time I thought, explain why this is unique. We already voted on the Webb amendment. I don't see that there is any difference here. There is something that hasn't been talked about since I mentioned this last Monday and that is that this President inherited a situation that was a personnel crisis. We are dealing with that now--a personnel crisis. I remember back during the 1990s, we were cutting down--I am not criticizing anybody, but we had this euphoric attitude that the Cold War was over, and we didn't need a military anymore. They cut back our modernization program and our personnel and defense spending. Let's look at this chart. If you look at this and put it into perspective as to why we should not try to micromanage this thing and let the military do it, this is where we were. During the early 1990s-- the Clinton administration--this black line represents the baseline from 1993 and where we would be in 2001, or at the end of that 8-year period, had we spent the amount of money we were spending from the baseline that was established in fiscal year 1993. If you take that and take what the President requested--the red line down here--fortunately, we were able to get some above that, but it still meant we were $313 billion less than we should have been. That is what put us into the position we are in today. It was a personnel crisis. So now we are going to have to get the maximum use. We are not going to be able to have mandated deployments and returns and be able to prosecute this or any other war. If we were not in this position, I would still oppose the idea of Congress micromanaging a war. That is what the military chiefs in the field are supposed to do and what they are trained to do. This shows you why we have the crisis today, and we are trying at the same time to rebuild a military that was torn down during the 1990s, and we should not have found ourselves in this position. This President has done a lot. We increased the number of Active Duty in the Army and Marine Corps, reducing the stress on the deployable Active-Duty personnel. Help is on the way. The increase would shorten deployment length and give soldiers and marines more dwell time at home, but it is not mandated from us. It is going to come from the resources we are expecting and anticipating we will have. While many units are close to a 1-to-1 deployment dwell-time schedule, certain units have been extended to 15-month tours. Look, all of us have Reserve units at home and Guard units, and we have our regular services going. We know the deployments are strained. This is why they are strained. We are trying to make up for the losses we sustained back during the 1990s. If we continue to do what we are doing now, the move we are making will allow the Army to ensure that Active- Duty units have at least 12 months at home. We are prepared to do that now. All of the services are rebalancing force structure and cross components to ensure they have the right types of units with the right skills in the greatest demand. These are some of the actions that have been taken now. If we leave this alone and in the hands of the chiefs, we have right now the great General Petraeus in a position where he is trying to get this thing done. I have to tell you that my 14th trip to the AOR showed me that things are working very well. If you remember what the President said back on January 10, he said we are going to have to win this war from the bottom up, not from the top down. That is what is happening now. These efforts have gotten the clerics in Iraq into a position where they are no longer having anti-American messages, and we are winning this thing from the bottom up. It is brand new. In all my trips there, I have never seen such a dramatic change as I did prior to this last trip. We actually have people going out now and doing what we do in neighborhood watch programs throughout America. We are now getting the Iraqis to do this. We have Iraqi civilians with spray paint cans painting circles around the undetonated IEDs. We have them doing these things. We have our troops going out, and instead of going back to the green zone, they are living with the Iraqi security forces in their homes. This is what we call the bottom up. It is working. We have monitored the clerics and what they were doing in their mosques in their weekly presentations. Prior to January, 85 percent of the presentations were anti-American. Since April, we have not had anti-American presentations. What is happening right now is the clerics realize we could cut and run on them and then the terrorists could come back in and they will be in control. They don't want that. This is a bottom-up type of support that we have at the present time. We have to continue this. The President said back on January 10 that we had to do this from the bottom up. That is what we intend to do. How much more time do I have?

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I am pleased to cosponsor, with Senator Coleman, an amendment to prohibit the reimplementation of the Fairness Doctrine. As we may remember, over the past few weeks, the Fairness Doctrine has received a lot of attention. Some Senators spoke about the need to reinstitute this doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine is a regulation the Federal Communications Commission developed to require FCC-licensed broadcasters to provide contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues. However, the FCC conducted a review of this regulation in 1985, concluding that ``we no longer believe that the Fairness Doctrine serves the public interest.'' In explaining why the FCC reached this conclusion, they wrote: The interest of the public is fully served by the multiplicity of voices in the marketplace today and that the intrusion by Government into the content of programming unnecessarily restricts the journalistic freedoms of broadcasters. The FCC's refusal to enforce the Fairness Doctrine was later upheld in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Why would a regulation that was found to be unnecessary over 20 years ago be controversial today? Well, we found out why. On June 22, the Center for American Progress issued a report called ``The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.'' Keep in mind that the Center for American Progress is a liberal think tank funded by George Soros and led by John Podesta and a lot of former Clinton White House people in it. The report issued was authored, in part, by a former Clinton White House adviser. This report, not surprisingly, found that 91 percent--I believe this to be true--of political talk radio programming was conservative and 9 percent was progressive or liberal. However, what is surprising is the report suggested antifree market and antifree speech recommendations to supposedly provide balance in talk radio programming. There is a very controversial statement I made in the presence of a couple of our fellow Senators not too long ago when they were talking about the fact that there is so much conservative bias in talk radio. I said it is market driven. That is what America is all about. It is market driven. There is no market for the progressive or liberal programming. I remember when the DOD was trying to feed the American Forces Radio and television services in the Armed Forces Network and have 50 percent of the programming be liberal. We fought that out on the floor of the Senate and we won because freedom of speech is more important. Consequently, we have gone back and let them decide--our troops--as to the programming they want. It is all done in a fair way so our troops at least can hear what they want to hear over talk radio. This is for those people who think they have balanced political talk radio. This is a report on that subject. As I go through this, first of all, it identifies the problem they consider--conservative bias. That is what the American people want. It says: If commercial radio broadcasters are unwilling to abide by these regulatory standards or the FCC is unable to effectively regulate in the public interest, a spectrum use fee should be levied on owners to directly support local, regional, and national broadcasting. That is this report. In other words, they are saying not only do these people who, because of their popularity, because of the content and the way they deliver it--not only would they lose their programs, but they would also have to give money to support public broadcasting. This is the most outrageous thing I have ever seen. I don't think this can happen in America. When you get John Podesta and the former Clinton White House team and their minds set to doing something, they are smart people, and I don't take this lightly. I ask as many people as possible to support our efforts to pass legislation to stop any effort to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I think we should call it something else, such as the Government-run broadcasting. With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, during the last week that we were not here during the Fourth of July recess, there was a lot of misinformation floating around about things that may or may not be happening concerning the war on terrorism. I would like to make some clarifications, if I could. I think it is very significant that we understand what is really going on, not what some of the media tell us is going on. I have found through my experience--and I say this: I come to the floor with probably having made more trips to the Iraqi AOR, 14 in total, than any other Member, so I have been there quite a few times. I have watched the changes as the changes have taken place. Let me share with my colleagues, first of all, a little background. The United States Code defines terrorism as premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents. Their goal is to inflict the maximum amount of damage and pain to civilians irrespective of age, race, gender, or religion. It will remain a global threat for the foreseeable future. It is global. I think a lot of people don't realize how global this is but, if we just look at the things that have happened recently, including terrorist attacks in Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania. We remember in those places the Embassies being blown up. The United States, France, Morocco, Turkey, Spain, Indonesia, Great Britain, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Algeria, Yemen, and Tunisia are just a partial list of some of the places where there have been terrorist attacks. The National Counterterrorism Center reported approximately 14,000 terrorist attacks occurred in various countries during 2006. Over 50 percent of the attacks occurred in Iraq or Afghanistan. Reported incidents decreased for Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Now, the following terrorist-related attacks occurred within the past 30 days outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. The mentality that somehow it is all happening in Iraq is false. There were some statements made in declaring certain areas in Iraq to potentially be the terrorism capital, but we will talk about that in a minute. A car bomb exploded outside of the Somalian Prime Minister's residence killing six people. This is all in the last 30 days. A bomb exploded in front of a crowded tea shop in Thailand killing 1 woman and wounding 28 others. That was on June 8. An explosion outside the Ambassador Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, killed 1 and injured 37. I might add that was a mere 3 days from the time I was actually staying in that hotel. A bomb exploded outside a clothing shop in Istanbul, Turkey, wounding 14 people. A car bomb in a Beirut seaside neighborhood killed 10 people and wounded 11 others. Suicide bombers drove an SUV into the Glasgow airport doors, injuring six people. A suicide bomber drove into a convoy of Spanish tourists, killing nine people and wounding five others. That is just what has been taking place in the last month. In the United States, President Bush organized and energized the Federal Government to pass the PATRIOT Act which broke down the walls between Federal law enforcement and intelligence communities. It created the Department of Homeland Security, merging 22 different Government organizations. It created the position of Director of National Intelligence to seamlessly integrate operations of intelligence agencies. We have had this problem for a long time. I recall when I was first elected, when I came from the House to the Senate, and my predecessor was David Boren, who is now the President of Oklahoma University, and the last thing he told me before I was sworn in was one of the biggest problems we have is in coordinating our intelligence communities so that everybody knows what everybody else is doing. We hadn't really done that until 9/11 came along and we started getting serious about it. I am sure President Boren will be very glad to know that this is an important improvement that has been made. We directed the National Security Agency to monitor terrorist communications and established a program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives. I know there is a lot of talk about what is torture and what is not torture. But we do know that HUMINT, human intelligence, is very, very important. It is something we have to consider, the lives of those who would be lost versus the lives of criminals who are being interrogated. We placed state-of-the-art equipment in major cities in the United States to detect nuclear and radiological weapons and biological agents. We placed advanced screening and equipment and Homeland Security personnel at foreign ports to prescreen cargo headed for the United States. I think it is very interesting that a lot of people are talking about how much this has cost. Everything I have read costs something. The question is, How many lives has it saved? That is something very difficult to ascertain. Fighting the terrorists is a coalition of more than 90 nations. It is not just the United States, it is the United States and 90 other nations--a coalition of nations that has sought to synchronize diplomatic, intelligence, law enforcement, economic, financial, and military power to attack terrorism globally. I believe it is working. As the President has recently said, to strike our country, the terrorists only have to be right once. To protect our country, we have to be right 100 percent of the time. As we learned on 9/11, and many times in other countries, it only takes one time for them to be successful. We know that some of the results are significant. We captured an al-Qaida operative named Ali Saleh al-Marri in the United States, who we believe was targeting water reservoirs, the New York Stock Exchange, and the U.S. military academies in December 2001. This was the first post-9/11 plot that was thwarted. Al-Marri offered himself as a martyr to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. He was his No. 1 man. He sent him to the United States after he received training in poisons at an al-Qaida camp. It is kind of interesting that people say there is no connection between Iraq and al-Qaida when, in fact, we know now and can release information on several training camps that were there. Very likely, he could have been trained in that particular camp. The British authorities broke up a plot to blow up passenger airplanes flying to America, which could have rivaled 9/11. We know that happened. The plot was foiled in August of 2006. They planned to blow up as many as 12 U.S.-bound passenger jets. They planned to use liquid explosives hidden in carry-on luggage. U.S.-British authorities had a group under surveillance for many months, and many of the suspects were British citizens of Pakistani origin. They thwarted that. That didn't happen. That could have happened and, very likely, would have except for all these efforts of the United States and other countries. We broke up two other post-9/11 aviation plots--one targeting the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the other targeting the east coast. An al-Qaida leader in Southeast Asia, known as Hambali, recruited Jemaah Islamiyah operatives of Asian origin. The plot was derailed early in 2002 with international cooperation. Library Tower is the tallest building west of the Mississippi, 1,018 feet tall. It is among the 25 tallest buildings in the world. That didn't happen. That was planned. It could have happened. It was stopped by this combined effort. Four men were indicted in an alleged plot to attack John F. Kennedy International Airport by blowing up a jet fuel supply. They planned to hit the fuel farms and a 40-mile aviation fuel supply pipeline, and they specifically targeted the symbolism of JFK, sought to invoke emotional reaction saying, ``It is like killing the man twice.'' That is their statement. Suspects were tied to extremist groups in South America and the Caribbean, specifically Guyana and Trinidad. One suspect was a former airport cargo worker. They sought massive disruption of the U.S. economy by cutting off this major artery of travel that connects the United States to the rest of the world--over a thousand flights a day, half of which are international, 45 million passengers and 1.5 million tons of cargo a year. They disrupted a plot by a group of al-Qaida-inspired extremists to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey, which was the result of a 16-month investigation by the Justice Department and the FBI. Suspects had taken an incriminating video to the store to be transferred to DVD. The video showed calls for jihad and radical and violent ranting in Arabic, including images of the men firing assault weapons. Terrorists attempted to detonate two car bombs using cell phones in London's West End. That happened over the last recess we had. It heightened public awareness and quick police action prevented detonations of two Mercedes car bombs. This was a concerted effort. We and the Brits were in on that. All others on this team worked very well and very effectively. Now, in Iraq, we have had success that is critical to our long-term fight against terrorism. Osama bin Laden calls the struggle in Iraq a ``war of destiny.'' Al-Qaida sees victory in Iraq as a religious strategic imperative, a base from which to launch new attacks around the globe. While I am troubled the war has cost us, I believe it is absolutely necessary for us to be able to have this success. I can recall a year ago standing at this podium in the Senate quoting al-Qaida, saying Ramadi--that province in Iraq was going to become the terrorist capital of Iraq. When I was in Ramadi a matter of days ago, we found that there are new groups of people cooperating now that never cooperated before. I think some of the people in this body who were talking about surrender resolutions and all that--it got their attention. Maybe that performed a useful function because all of a sudden the people woke up. I learned something there too. All these political leaders we hear about, such as Prime Minister Maliki and Defense Minister Jasim and Dr. Rubiya, and some of the rest--I thought they were the ones who were the leaders. I think it is the clerics in the mosques. All of a sudden, they became concerned and, up until that time, we had been monitoring all of the procedures and the performances they have had on a weekly basis in the mosques. Eighty-five percent of them have been, up until December of this last year, anti-American messages. As of April, there haven't been any anti-American messages. That shows that the clerics have gotten involved in this thing. In Tulsa, OK, we have neighborhood watch programs, where people get neighbors to watch and see what is going on. This is happening throughout Iraq, where they are spraying orange spray paint around IEDs that haven't been detonated so our troops could disarm them. Those things have happened. I think the joint security stations have been very successful in Baghdad. Instead of our troops going out and coming back into the green zone at night, they stay and get to know and develop close, intimate relationships with the Iraqi security forces and their families. That has had a tremendously positive effect. The future will be difficult in the fight against terrorism. It is not a sprint, it is a marathon. We have to remain vigilant, determined, and strong. I want our troops to come home as badly as anybody. When you think about the consequences of losing this thing, all it would take for these people who are crying out about their feelings and saying let's get out of Iraq, all it would take is one successful terrorist attack similar to those that have been stopped through this joint effort. We would have to pay dearly. I hope people will sit back and realize we have access to information the general public doesn't have. Sure, the polls show the majority of people would like to have our troops come back. I would, too, but when you ask the questions and give them the alternatives, they would rather win this war than resign from it.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to allow Air Force Fellow Daniel Wolf of my staff floor privileges for the duration of the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act, S. 1547.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. Presdient, I ask unanimous consent that Jeffrey Gonzalez and Mathew Pollard, both of the Senate Budget Committee, be granted floor privileges during consideration of H.R. 1585.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Go ahead.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I move to waive the applicable points of order against my amendment and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, there have been some misconceptions about this amendment. First, my State of Oklahoma is a corn State. It is a livestock State. If my colleagues will look at the groups of people that have joined in and said we need to have this safety valve, it is virtually everyone: the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the Chicken Council, port producers, Restaurant Association--all of these recognizing that in the event something should happen with a severe drought--and these are easy to predict--we should have some kind of a trigger that would allow the mandate to be reduced. All this does is simply provide that if the USDA determines because of weather patterns there is going to be a real problem in the crop of corn, the mandated limit can be reduced by as much as 15 percent. In other words, we are still going to have an 85-percent mandate. I suggest my colleagues look very carefully at this amendment. This is going to offer some assistance in the event of a serious drought or something that will affect the corn crop in America. I ask my colleagues to support my amendment.

Mr. INHOFE. That is correct.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent to add Senator Gregg as a cosponsor.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to include Senator Pryor as a cosponsor of amendment No. 1666.

Mr. INHOFE. And on the other side?

Mr. INHOFE. On my side?

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, how much time is remaining on both sides?