Michael Oxley

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of October 16, 2001, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3004) to combat the financing of terrorism and other financial crimes, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf).

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon).

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Grucci).

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Green).

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Kelly), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Leach).

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

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New Jersey (Mrs. Roukema), the vice-chairman of the committee.

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 3004, the Financial Anti- terrorism Act of 2001. The Committee on Financial Services overwhelmingly approved this bill last week in a near unanimous vote of 62 to 1, signalling a strong consensus among Republicans and Democrats alike, administration officials, and the financial services industry, that the time for business as usual is far over. There is little dissent among us. Strong anti-money laundering measures are needed and needed now. We recognize that failure to move swiftly could leave an open door to future attacks against U.S. citizens and refuse to stand idly by. This bill and the strong bipartisan support it enjoys represents a resounding pledge of congressional support for the President in fulfilling his vow to starve terrorists of their funding. In the months since the devastating attacks of September 11, we have learned how easily the terrorists used American dollars and the world- class services of the American financial system to underwrite their deadly operations. At our October 3 committee hearing, we heard testimony from Treasury undersecretary for enforcement, Jimmy Gurule, on how terrorist operatives from bin Laden's organization, al-Qaeda, utilized checks, credit cards, ATM cards, wire transfer systems and brokerage accounts throughout the world, including the U.S. He testified that al-Qaeda uses banks, legal businesses, front companies, and underground financial systems to finance the organization's activities, and that some elements of the organization rely on profits from the drug trade. He also pointed out how some Islamic charities have been penetrated and their fund-raising activities exploited by terrorists. Another witness, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Criminal Division, Mary Lee Warren, warned that the United States is fighting with outdated weapons in the war against money laundering and flagged serious problems associated with international smuggling of bulk cash and wire transfers of funds that enable criminals in one country to conceal their funds in another. Chief of the Financial Crimes Section of the FBI's Criminal Investigations Division, Dennis Lormel, echoed that concern when he testified how terrorists and other criminal organizations rely heavily upon wire transfers. He flagged correspondent banking as another potential in the financial services sector that can offer terrorist organizations a gateway into U.S. banks. The private sector money laundering experts subsequently described in detail how underground black market banking operations, like the ancient South Asian Hawala money transfer system, are used by criminals to finance their operations. Mr. Speaker, I applaud the efforts the administration has already taken to disrupt the financial infrastructure of international terrorist organizations. Those actions include the creation of a new foreign terrorist asset tracking center, the issuing of a strong executive order to block the financial assets of terrorists and their supporters, the passage by the United Nations of a U.S.-drafted resolution calling on all governments to freeze terrorist assets, and the immediate widespread mobilization of the U.S. financial services industry to assist in ferreting out the money trail of these terrorists. To supplement these early initiatives, H.R. 3004 gives the administration new and improved tools to fight the financial war against terrorism. Here is how. First, the bill significantly strengthens the hand of law enforcement by enhancing bulk cash smuggling laws, making it easier to prosecute illegal money service businesses, making the provision of material support to terrorists a predicate offense for money laundering, barring the entry of aliens suspected of money laundering, and strengthening procedures for obtaining foreign bank records relevant to terrorism or money laundering. Second, the bill enhances private-public cooperation between Federal agencies and the financial services industry. The bill requires the creation of a private-public task force on terrorist financing, as well as the establishment of a secure website to accept reports from financial institutions about suspected terrorist activities, and to alert them to matters requiring immediate attention. The bill also seeks to reduce the number of bank-filed reports where they are unnecessary for law enforcement, and requires Treasury to report regularly to industry on the utility of the reports that are being filed. Third, in order to deal with international money laundering risks, including those associated with terrorism, the bill prohibits U.S. correspondent banking privileges for off-shore shell banks, and authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to take special measures if a foreign country, institution, or a particular type of transaction or account is deemed to be a primary money laundering concern. In closing, let me simply say that this package is balanced and comprehensive. It reflects input from Members on both sides of the aisle, as well as from the White House, the Treasury Department, and the Justice Department. I want to personally thank my good friend and ranking minority member, the gentleman from New York (Mr. LaFalce), for his tireless efforts on this bill. I know he has been a leader on this bill over a number of years, and it has finally come to fruition, thanks to his cooperative efforts. I urge my colleagues to give H.R. 3004 their full support and vote aye. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 3004 and to include extraneous material on the bill.

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, could I inquire whether the gentleman from New York has further speakers?

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

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that this Congress is going to give our law enforcement and intelligence communities the tools they desperately need to track down terrorists and prevent another murderous attack on our people. September 11th ushered in a new era in American history. We are vulnerable here at home, not just to the fanatics who hijacked those planes, but to other terrorists who have access to biological, chemical, and maybe even nuclear weapons. This threat will not end in 2 years, 5 years, or 10 years. The provisions in this bill will help to put the FBI and CIA on a more equal footing with terrorists who are using electronic communications to plot with impunity. I have long warned that our wiretap laws have not kept pace with advances in technology. Law enforcement needs to be able to monitor cell phone calls and electronic communications, just as it has been able to listen in on old-style rotary phones. Simply put, if we can't hear what terrorists are saying, we can't stop them. Under the sunset language in this bill, these new authorities could expire in as little as 3 years and possibly in 5 years. Establishing that ``sunset'' date is a mistake. It sends an unintended message that our resolve is fleeting. It also tells a law enforcement community working around the clock that their power to protect us is provisional. And it suggests to the American people that in a few years, we might let down our guard. We will not give our Armed Forces anything less than our full support in this war. Intelligence gathering is going to be every bit as important to this campaign as our military. Surveillance is restrained by a body of agency rules, judicial approval, and congressional approval. As a former FBI agent, I applied for wiretap orders. They are not easy to get. The electronic surveillance provisions in the bill are constitutional and achieve the proper balance with our constitutional rights. I happen to think that safety and security during uncertain times is a most important civil liberty. Through the actions we take, Congress must show that the U.S. will stay the course with the war on terrorism for the long haul. I hope that our law enforcement community will be able to deal with the inconsistency that the sunset poses, and use these common sense authorities to protect us from the terrorists who we have already been warned may be poised to strike again.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, for those who might have missed it, I would commend to the attention of my colleagues a piece by Andrew Sullivan from today's Wall Street Journal. Mr. Sullivan skillfully delineates the egregious errors of many on the radical left who would dare to blame the recent terrorist attacks on our nation's policies--even as other liberal groups recognize and properly condemn the atrocities of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime that supports him. [From the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 4, 2001] The Agony of the Left (By Andrew Sullivan) One of the most telling things I have seen since the Sept. 11 massacre was an early ``peace movement'' e-mail. It listed three major demands: stop the war; stop racism; stop ethnic scapegoating. A liberal friend had appended a sardonic comment to the bottom. ``Any chance we could come out against terrorism as well?'' One of the overlooked aspects of the war we are now fighting is the awakening it has spawned on the left. In one atrocity, Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism of the powerful postmodern left. For the first time in a very long while, many liberals are reassessing--quietly for the most part--their alliance with the anti-American, anti- capitalist forces they have long appeased, ignored or supported. collective knee Of course the initial response of left-wing intellectuals to Sept. 11 was one jerking of the collective knee. This was America's fault. From Susan Sontag to Michael Moore, from Noam Chomsky to Edward Said, there was no question that, however awful the attack on the World Trade Center, it was vital to keep attention fixed on the real culprit: the United States. Of the massacre, a Rutgers professor summed up the consensus by informing her students that ``We should be aware that, whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.'' Or as a poster at the demonstration in Washington last weekend put it, ``Amerika, Get A Clue.'' Less noticed was the reasoned stance of liberal groups like the National Organization for Women. President Kim Candy stated that ``The Taliban government of Afghanistan, believed to be harboring suspect Osama bin Laden, subjugates women and girls, and deprives them of the most basic human rights-- including education, medicine and jobs. The smoldering remains of the World Trade Center are a stark reminder that when such extremism is allowed to flourish anywhere in the world, none of us is safe.'' The NAACP issued an equally forceful ``message of resolve,'' declaring, ``These tragedies and these acts of evil must not go unpunished. Justice must be served.'' Left-wing dissident Christopher Hitchens, meanwhile, assailed his comrades as ``soft on crime and soft on fascism.'' After an initial spasm of equivocation, the American Prospect magazine ran a column this week accusing the pre-emptive peace movement of ``a truly vile form of moral equivalency'' in equating President Bush with terrorists. Not a hard cell, but daring for a magazine that rarely has even a civil word for the right. Most moving was Salman Rushdie's early call in the New York Times to ``be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions.'' Whatever else is going on, the liberal-left alliance has taken as big a hit as the conservative-fundamentalist alliance after the blame-America remarks of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It's not hard to see why. Unlike previous Cold War battles, this one is against an enemy with no pretense at any universal, secular ideology that could appeal to Western liberals. However, repulsive, the communist arguments of, say, Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro still appealed to a secular, Western ideology. American leftist could delude themselves that they shared the same struggle. But with Osama bin Laden, and the Islamo-fascism of the Taliban, no such delusions are possible. The American liberal mind has long believed that their prime enemy in America is the religious right, what does that make the Taliban? They subjugate women with a brutality rare even in the Muslim world; they despite Jews; they execute homosexuals by throwing them from very high buildings or crushing them underneath stone walls. There is literally nothing that the left can credibly cling to in rationalizing support for these hate-filled fanatics. This is therefore an excruciating moment for the postmodern, post-colonial left. They may actually have come across an enemy that even they cannot argue is morally superior to the West. You see this discomfort in the silence of the protestors in Washington, who simply never raised the issue of bin Laden's ideology. You see it is Barbara Ehreneich's sad plea in the Village Voice: ``What is so heartbreaking to me as a feminist is that the strongest response to corporate globalization and U.S. military domination is based on such a violent and misogynist ideology.'' You see it in the words of Fredric Jameson, a revered postmodernist at Duke University, arguing in the London Review of Books that the roots of the conflict are to be found ``in the wholesale massacres of the Left systematically encouraged and directed by the Americans in an even earlier period . . . . It is, however, only now that the results are working their way out into actuality, for the resultant absence of any Left alternative means that popular revolt and resistance in the Third World have nowhere to go but into religious and `fundamentalist' forms.'' The only adequate description of this argument is desperate. And, of course, it ducks the hard question. What does the left do now that these forces are indeed fundamentalist? The other rhetorical trope that is fast disintegrating is the anti-racist argument. The doctrine of ``post- colonialism'' which now dominates many American humanities departments invariably sides with Third World regimes against the accumulated evil of the West. So the emergence of the Taliban is a body-blow. If dark-skinned peoples are inherently better than light-skinned peoples, then how does a dark-skinned culture come up with an ideology that is clearly a function of bigotry, misogyny and homophobia? One immediate response is to argue that the U.S. itself created Osama bin Laden in its war against Soviet communism. This isn't true--but even if it were, doesn't this fact, as Mr. Hitchens has argued, actually increase the West's responsibility to retaliate against him? What Suppression? It may be, in fact, that one of the silver linings of these awful times is that the far left's bluff has been finally called. War focuses issues in ways peace cannot. Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views raises the spectre of domestic repression. But in a country with a First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly over- represented. The real issue, as pointed out this week by Britain's Labour prime minister, is that some on the left have expressed ``a hatred of America that shames those that feel it.'' The left's howls of anguish are therefore essentially phony--and they stem from a growing realization that this crisis has largely destroyed the credibility of the far left. Forced to choose between the West and the Taliban, the hard left simply cannot decide. Far from concealing this ideological bankruptcy, we need to expose it and condemn it as widely and as irrevocably as we can. Many liberals are already listening and watching--and the tectonic plates of politics are shifting as they do.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 2510, the legislation just passed, and to insert extraneous material on the bill.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support for the reauthorization of the Defense Production Act and the amendment that will be adopted by the House today. As you are aware, the Defense Production Act gives the President important emergency powers to ensure that industry produces needed material during times of military or civil emergencies. Unfortunately, with the events of September 11, we find ourselves in the midst of both. The President's authority under the DPA expires on Sunday, and it is important that we renew these powers during this critical period in our Nation's history. The House passed a clean 3-year reauthorization on September 5. The Senate returned the bill to us late Friday night, limiting the President's authority to only one year. With the clock ticking, we don't want to be back in this same position next year. Therefore, in the best spirit of compromise, we are amending the Senate bill and splitting the difference--extending the DPA for 2 years. I know that some of my colleagues in the other body have some concerns about the powers granted to the President under the DPA, and particularly in how they have been used in the past. They have my assurance that we will look closely at those concerns in the interim, and make changes where they are necessary. I want to thank Chairman King, and ranking members LaFalce and Maloney for their help in moving this bipartisan legislation forward. I urge my colleagues to support this bill and this amendment.

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take from the Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 2510) to extend the expiration date of the Defense Production Act of 1950, and for other purposes, with a Senate amendment thereto, and concur in the Senate amendment with an amendment.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I was absent from the House floor during yesterday's roll call votes on H.R. 717, the Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy CARE Act, and H.J. Res. 65, making continuing appropriations for the 2002 fiscal year. Had I been present, I would have voted in favor of both H.R. 717 and H.J. Res. 65.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take from the Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 2510) to extend the expiration date of the Defense Production Act of 1950, and for other purposes, with a Senate amendment thereto, and concur in the Senate amendment with an amendment.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I once again ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 2510, the legislation just passed, and to insert extraneous material on the bill.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 2589--the Mark-to- Market Extension Act of 2001. The Committee on Financial Services approved unanimously this legislation on July 25, 2001 and reported [House Report 107-196] to the House on September 5, 2001. The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs considered a similar bill on August 1, 2001. H.R. 2589 will extend authorization of the Office of Multifamily Housing Assistance Restructuring, also known as OMHAR, which is currently a separate office within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The authority would extend by three years the office through FY 2004 and extend the Secretary's authority to provide mark- to-market services through FY 2006. We believe that HUD will be provided the special tools necessary to restructure developments that receive both project-based rental section 8 payments and Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance. As I understand, the original Act was enacted in 1997 and was designed to curtail exploding section 8 rental costs for units renting at far above the prevailing market rates. Without this Act, section 8 contract renewals could top $7 billion dollars and account for as much as one-third of HUD's future budgets. Because the authorization for this office sunsets September 30th of this year, it is necessary that this bill pass the House today. The Committee majority and minority staff worked with our Senate counterparts to agree on a legislative solution. Moreover, this Committee worked with the Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to accommodate their concerns. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this compromise language will result in savings of over $307 million dollars. Mr. Speaker, this is a good bill and deserves favorable House consideration. Housing Subcommittee Chairwoman Marge Roukema and Ranking Member Barney Frank are to be commended for their leadership on this issue.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 1850--the ``Senior Housing Commission Extension Act of 2001.'' The Committee voted unanimously to support this legislation on June 27, 2001 and reported [House Report 107-147] the bill to the House on July 19, 2001. This legislation makes certain technical corrections to legislation enacted in October 1999 creating the Commission on Affordable Housing and Health Care Facility Needs in the 21st Century. As I understand, it took one year longer than anticipated for Congress to appoint Commission members. As a result, we are extending the Commission's reporting deadline and termination date by one year. We also clarify the Commission's authority to use agency employees as details on a non-reimbursable basis. As many of you know, our population is aging, particularly for low- and moderate-income families and individuals. According to the Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, in July 1999 there were more than 35.5 million Americans over 65 years of age, and the Bureau projects that by the year 2075, more than 55.7 million, or one in eight Americans, will be over 65 years of age. These are purely technical corrections worked-out between the majority and minority staffs along with the Commission's Executive Director--Gerard Holder--that will empower the Commission to provide the type of report and recommendations necessary to assist Congress in addressing elderly housing issues. Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of this legislation.

Mr. OXLEY

Mr. OXLEY. I yield to the gentleman from Alaska.