Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

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

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes. Mr. Speaker, for those reading the Congressional Record or those listening to this debate, let us understand exactly what is going on here. Before the Second World War, America sent thousands of troops to the Philippines in order to defend that country and to deter war with Japan. During the war, of course, Japan attacked and occupied the Philippines and took tens of thousands of American troops into custody, and it was one of the most brutal incarcerations and treatment of prisoners in the history of humankind. In fact, it resulted in what was called the Bataan Death March, where these men, these Americans who had fought and been in our uniform, they were just marched for days and days without water and food, and thousands of them died along the way in the most brutal type of conditions. The United States has let those men down. We have told them if they held out in the Bataan Peninsula, that we would come and rescue them. We could not do it during the war because the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and we did not have the military strength to do it, so we let them down. Then, after they were incarcerated, they were sent to work camps and slave labor camps and concentration camps in Japan and in Manchuria. They were worked like slaves where, again, many of them died under the worst possible conditions. As the war ended and we put together a peace treaty with Japan, we let them down again. In the treaty, we put some provisions that sounded like we were waiving their rights to sue those Japanese corporations that had tortured them and used them as slave labor. But there was a provision in the treaty that said if Japan signs another treaty with another country that grants more rights to those citizens than our citizens have in the treaty we signed, those rights automatically become American citizens' rights, as well. So the Japanese, guess what, have signed other treaties, and other people have been permitted to sue those Japanese corporations. Are we going to let these American heroes down again out of consideration of some huge Japanese corporations who do not want to apologize or to give them some just compensation? I do not think so. This body voted overwhelmingly for that, on the side with our great heroes, overwhelmingly, and the Senate voted for it in a heated debate. All we are saying today is we are demanding that our conferees not take out this provision behind closed doors. The gentleman from California (Mr. Cox) has a measure that suggests that our government pay $20,000 apiece. At the very least, if they are not going to give the right to sue, they should at least come up with the $50 million needed to pay our people off by ourselves. Mr. Speaker, the bottom line is, our American POWs deserve truth and justice. They deserve their day in court. They do not deserve just a stipend from us. We did let them down, but we were not the ones who tortured them and worked them as slave laborers. They deserve their day in court, they deserve an honest opinion, they deserve an apology from Japan, and yes, they deserve compensation from those Japanese companies that worked them as slave labor. These are our greatest heroes. This is the message to send to our defenders: We will never let you down again; and those people who march off to defend this country, whether it is against them, the terrorists, or wherever it is, they will know that the American people will not let them down because they have not let us down. Mr. Speaker, let me just suggest to the gentleman from California (Mr. Honda), he has worked so hard on this and I deeply admire him for this, because he could have taken some personal criticism from people who tried to make this into a racial issue. This is not a racial issue. I lived in Japan as a young man myself, and we think nothing but good thoughts and goodwill toward the people of Japan. Most of the people in Japan, as we know, had nothing to do with this, but those Japanese corporations that did, they deserve to be held accountable. The patriotism of the gentleman from California (Mr. Honda) and his stepping forward and his courage at a time like this are deeply appreciated because it helps define the issue in the way it should be. I thank the gentleman very much.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, again, we need to take a look at what this is all about. The House and Senate voted overwhelmingly in the House, and yes, with a solid majority in the Senate, to make sure that the survivors of the Bataan Death March, our greatest American heroes, were able to sue those Japanese corporations that worked them as slave labor. After the war, there was a provision put in the treaty which prevented them from suing these Japanese corporations until the situation changed, which it did when Japan had agreements with other countries that permitted those countries and the citizens from those countries to sue. So what we have now is a situation that even after the status of their case and their ability to sue had changed, our State Department became the biggest block to having these heroes from the Bataan Death March exercise their right, because our State Department would intercede in their court cases and undermine their right to sue in court. What this bill does and why it is necessary to put it on this appropriations bill is, it prevents the State Department from using its resources or its people to interfere with the rights of those American POWs and interfere with their right to take their case to court. That is why it was important for us to get it on this bill. This was the vehicle. It was written in a way that was ruled in order, so the provision was ruled in order by the Parliamentarian. This gives us an opportunity to bring justice to these men. They are dying every day. Every day there is another survivor of the Bataan Death March who passes away. All of us have family members who were in World War II, and we are seeing them pass away, at great pain to us. We need to make sure that when they die, they know their country has done right by them. That is what this is all about. Every day that we postpone this, another number of these men pass into eternity. Let us let them go knowing their country backed them up and appreciated what they did. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I apologize for not being down here during the entire debate. I am the Chair of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the Committee on Science. We have a big discussion on the Space Station, which is another international effort. Let me say, I certainly support cooperative efforts like the International Space Station, and I supported NATO when it was necessary. NATO served its purpose. It protected us against the Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Now the Cold War is over. The best thing we can do now is to try to promote democracy in Russia, and expanding NATO goes in exactly the opposite direction. It slaps the Russians in the face. I believe the Europeans can now defend themselves. We no longer should be subsidizing their defense. Expanding NATO just puts us more into the position of subsidizing people's defense far away who can manage their own defense. It also takes away from our ability to cope with the real challenge to world freedom and peace today, which we will find in Asia in the form of an expansionary and belligerent Communist China. Lastly, let us note that we are engaged in a war right now, a war against terrorism and a war in Central Asia. Being part of NATO has not really helped us. In fact, the billions of dollars we spend in NATO can be used by our own troops in that battle, and only a limited amount of support has come from our NATO allies, the British and Italians, who would be giving it to us anyway. They would be with us anyway, without us having to spend tens of billions of dollars a year on NATO. While I respect my colleagues, especially Jerry Solomon and the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Bereuter) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos), I would suggest that expanding NATO is not a good idea.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the rule, but in opposition to the underlying legislation. Let me take a moment to salute Jerry Solomon, who was a dear friend. We will miss Jerry Solomon. It is a pain in our hearts that we will have as someone who meant so much to us and he is no longer with us. I worked so many hours on so many issues over the years with Jerry that I think that no doubt, on both sides of the aisle, he will be dearly missed. Now let us talk about NATO. NATO will not be missed. NATO has done its job. NATO deserves to pass on, because NATO accomplished its mission and now it deserves to dissolve. We called on this organization, we created this organization back when there was a major Soviet threat to invade Western Europe. Thus we created NATO in order to deter war, not to waste money, because that money was necessary at the time. But instead, to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. It did its job, and it did its job well. During the Cold War, it served to stand guard and to deter attack and that attack was deterred; and it saved lives and it helped us come to the end of the Cold War. But the Cold War is over. The price we paid for NATO in the tens of billions of dollars was worth it back then. It is not worth it now. In fact, what NATO today is is nothing more than a subsidy for the defense of Western Europe and in Europe as a whole. They can afford, our European friends can afford to pay for their own defense now. When NATO was first created, they were coming out of World War II, their economies were in a shambles; and yes, we stepped forward to protect the world against communism, just as we stepped forward to protect the world against Japanese militarism and Nazism. We can be proud of that, and we can be proud of the role NATO played. But today, the purpose NATO was created for has passed away, and the Europeans can afford to pay for their own defense. By staying in NATO, we are going to continually be involved in missions like those in Kosovo and Bosnia, right in our European friends' backyard, and we end up paying a major portion of that battle in Kosovo and Bosnia. That makes no sense. Our European friends are richer than we are. The European governments have many, many more services for their people than we have for our own people, because we are spending that money trying to police the world. By keeping NATO going, it just reinforces that policy that the United States is going to be the policeman of the world. Furthermore, by expanding NATO the way this bill is proposing, we are slapping Russia in the face. Come on. Come on, now. NATO was established to counter the Soviet Union, and now the Russians have done what we always wanted them to do: cast off this dictatorship. And what do we do? We try to expand this military alliance right into their front yard. That is wrong. Russia has disbanded the Warsaw Pact; it is trying to be democratic. President Putin is making efforts. In fact, he was the first one to call President Bush to offer his help when America was attacked on September 11. We should not be putting that type of pressure on a democratic Russia. We should, instead, be reinforcing that we are their friends and no longer consider Russia a threat. If Russia ever goes back to its old ways, we can reconfigure that. I would just say NATO is not helping us as much as they should in this current crisis, so why should we continue subsidizing our European friends.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I think what we also to have understand, if the President is successful in his strategy, missile defense will actually in the end cost us less, much less, than what President Reagan envisioned missile defense costing, because if President George W. Bush is successful, we will be working with the Russians, as Ronald Reagan had suggested we might do in a more peaceful world; and we could actually work with the Russians to build this shield. It would help bring down the cost. This is something that would make the world a lot safer. But for us to just suggest that no country, that we could rely on this mutually assured destruction, which was a policy from the 1950s and 1960s, is so ridiculous. China or Korea, for example, you have regimes that murder their own people by the tens of thousands. Why do they care then if we would retaliate against them and kill 100,000 or 200,000 of their people? They do not care. That does not deter them at all.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I bet he went to more States than George Bush did.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Than George Bush did, I am sure.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. He certainly did. I was looking back in my photos the other day. Sure enough, there we were. Which leads me to another thing about Bob. Bob really worked his heart and soul out for Ronald Reagan, and he worked his heart and soul out for George Bush, Sr. Let us all admit, Bob made people mad, we all know that. He got people angry because he is an Irishman who has got a temper. We all know that. But Bob never got the appreciation that he deserved for the things that he did. I know George Bush, Sr., he worked a full year trying to make sure that man became President of the United States. Then when Bob was down and out, as I say, he was there during the Reagan years, and it was not President Reagan, it was his staff, they did not do right by Bob.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman is right. This is a very good day for us to remember Bob Dornan, the day after Daniel Ortega has lost again in a free election in Nicaragua, because I have no doubt if it was not for Bob Dornan and a few stalwarts, and I was very proud to be at your side and at Bob's side during this time during the Cold War when very, very few people were up making the case for supporting the Nicaraguan resistance, Bob was there. And now we have free elections in Nicaragua, but not only just Nicaragua. Had we not had those freedom fighters that we were supporting to fight the Sandinistas, we would have lost all of Central America. There would not have been a disintegration of the will of the Soviet Union's leadership which happened during Afghanistan and Nicaragua. If they would have seen instead that the Communist forces were just making their way up Central America towards Mexico, you can bet they would have been emboldened rather than weakened as they were. That was an incredible fight. Bob Dornan, he does not get the credit for it; you are right. People look back right now, they are not going to give Bob Dornan credit for that, but I have no doubt that if it was not for the strength and the vigor and the energy and the excitement that he put into that, I do not think we would have won that. I can honestly look back and think that, because Bob was there 100 percent. When he was with you, he was with you 100 percent. The Afghans know that. The Vietnamese who were fighting the Communist dictatorship knew that. People all over the world who were struggling against Communist oppression, he would just pop in on them, he would pop right in and say, ``Hold firm, we're going to be with you. Don't worry about it. We're with you right now. What can we do?'' He would get right in the action. We have a cloakroom back here where the Republicans sit. Bob Dornan would sit there for hours telling us about these various personalities that he had worked with that love America, that need our help and were in a very precarious situation. Or he would be telling us about a new weapons system, because not only was he for strengthening those people who were struggling against the Soviet Union, he was for bolstering the strength of the ultimate freedom fighters, and those ultimate freedom fighters are the ones who wear the uniform of the United States of America, because he knew that our freedom fighters, the people in the United States military, had been done a great wrong, especially during the 1970s when we permitted their strength to be so drained that they were at risk. Their own lives were at risk, not only was our country at risk. Bob would talk about that. I remember him talking about the food stamps that these kids in our military had to be on at the time. Bob was there not only for the freedom fighters overseas but he was for our freedom fighters as well. When I was in the White House, and I was in the White House during most of the 1980s, Bob had had his ups and downs. I do not know if he remembers, but when he was on a down time one time in his career, I think he had given up his seat for somebody else, I think that is what it was, he ended up making my office sort of his command center. He took over my desk and, sure enough, he was right at home there.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. If the gentleman would yield, I think it is sometimes mind-boggling to be here and to just understand that there are people who will permit something that is so horrendous a threat to the United States of America and just brush it off, just not even think about it, just sweep their hand as if it is not an issue because it is so stupid even to consider it. There is an arrogance, a personality of arrogance in some of these debates that are overwhelming. Whether it is illegal immigration, where clearly, I mean, millions of people coming in, are bound to have a terrible impact on us in some way; or, I might add, during the last 8 years when I was up giving speeches trying to convince people we could not permit Afghanistan to go the way it was. Just the last administration, the Clinton administration, I might add, some of them, my fellow Members of my Committee on International Relations, just brushed it away as if I was being delusional or something, by suggesting that the last administration was actually having policies that helped the Taliban. Then missile defense, based, as Ronald Reagan said, on an immoral theory. The immoral theory is we should kill millions of innocent people because our innocent people have been killed. That is an immoral theory. We should have MAD, mutually assured destruction. We are not just destroying their military capabilities. It is based on the idea we are going to slaughter tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of women and children. Now, that is an immoral premise. That is what MAD, that strategy leaves us with. Having a defense system, as Ronald Reagan said, is a moral decision, is a moral stance facing this type of challenge. Instead of saying we are going to kill all of your women and children, you are saying no, we are going to defend ourselves.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Absolutely. I would like to thank the gentleman for, number one, his leadership, and also for helping us recall that Bob Dornan played such an important role on issues like this and other defense issues that have made the country safer. I am pleased to be standing here at your side now, and wish Bob a lot of success in his radio program that he has on, I guess, on a daily basis.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, let us note that for the record, I noted about a week ago on the Los Angeles Times editorial page, they had some leftist, as they always do, lamenting about Latin America and how horrible it was, this war in Latin America in which we stopped the Communists from taking over Latin America, and yes, it was certainly an imperfect war, and there never was a perfect war; innocent people were hurt and there were some unsavory characters on our side at times. But I say to the gentleman, there would be no democracy there; all of these countries would be like North Korea.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. The phoniest argument against missile defense that I know is that we should not build it because it will never work. Well, who would advocate building a system that does not work? If it does not work, it will not be built. The fact is that no one on this side of the aisle or either side of the aisle who believes in missile defense would ever consider building a system that did not work. But the major decision we have to make is if we can build a system that works, should we build it? And those people who are opposing the missile defense system, they do not want to face that argument. They just want to say it will not work, and, then, again, brush it away in an arrogant manner.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Or Cuba, if we would have lost then, but here we have in the L.A. Times, giving column inch after column inch to these old leftists who are proven wrong every time, and here again we have an election in Nicaragua where the people soundly reject everything this leftist was claiming about Latin America, everything he was claiming about Nicaragua, and the people down there do not believe a darned word of it. But guess what? Guess what? The L.A. Times gives people like that all of that coverage, and they would not say a good word about Bob Dornan in his entire career. The L.A. Times would not give him one column inch. Detractors, yes. People who were espousing the virtues of the Sandinistas and these people who would have enslaved the people of Latin America, the Communists, they get all of the space they need. Bob Dornan has never gotten a column inch.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. That is correct. I should say, if you are not getting people mad at you, perhaps you are not doing your job if you are a Congressman. But sometimes, I have to admit, Bob lost his temper. But I will say this about Bob, and he does not like it when I say this, he has a temper; but you can see through the temper and you know that he has, he had and has, a wonderful heart. He has a heart of gold. He hates me to use that expression, for whatever reason, but I think he does have a heart of gold. He had a lot of passion in him. He cared a lot. That can get you in trouble sometimes. With his own constituents, I know sometimes the news media would just take a picture when he had lost his temper about something. I will just have to say that I think it is, again when you say when someone is not appreciated, I think it is wrong what happened to Bob in the end in this body, what happened in the end here, we permitted, and I know that you worked a lot on this and so did I, but the rest of our Members did not. Bob Dornan did not lose his election. That last election that he had was stolen with the use of illegal immigrant votes. Everybody here knows it and every now and then when you try to confront people with it, they will pull you aside and say something, oh, well, Bob Dornan, he flies off the handle and does this or that. No, Bob Dornan won his election and his opponent in that election, or maybe not his opponent, maybe it was just his opponent's campaign team, who knows whether his opponent knew about it personally or not, but I can just say that clearly it was illegal alien votes that made the margin of victory. We should never have let that stand. When we let that stand, we did ourselves a disservice and we did Bob Dornan a disservice.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. The gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) was here a few moments ago talking to us about how illegal immigration has gotten so totally out of control. There is no doubt about this. Again he mentioned the fellow who was just caught up at O'Hare in Chicago trying to smuggle the knives and the stun gun onto an airplane. That is a horrible thing no matter who was doing it, but that person was here illegally. He was an illegal immigrant into our country. Not only should he have been arrested, of course, for trying to smuggle these weapons onto the airplane, he should never have been here at all. I think that it was during this time period when Bob's election was stolen from him and other people backed away that the message went out that government was not going to do anything about illegal immigration. We would even let one of our own Members have his House seat taken by a margin created by illegal alien votes. So I think that was a bad disservice for Bob, it sent a very bad message to the country, and we should regret it in many ways right now.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is correct.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. If the gentleman will yield further, as I get older, I realize that all of us, every single one of us, has our good traits and our bad traits. We have things that are very admirable and other parts of us that perhaps are not as admirable. Sometimes, because Bob had such a temper, it blinded some people to the very good things that he was doing. I know many times in technology development issues, most people think of me now because I am so involved with this Afghan thing that they think of me as the Afghanistan guy or the international relations guy, but actually I have spent a lot of time on technology issues in the Science Committee. I am the chairman of Space and Aeronautics. Whenever we would be in a tight spot and we needed to make sure that a critical piece of technology for America's space program that perhaps had dual use for our military as well, we would go to Bob and Bob would make sure it got done. I can think of two or three times where it was so important and Bob made sure he did it. He took the time and energy to buttonhole the appropriator and make sure that he understood the magnitude of the decision of how much money was going to be spent developing a piece of technology.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. That did not just happen.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, the war on terrorism continues; at home we deal with a chemical and biological attack, something that is unprecedented in our history; and overseas, our military forces are striking their targets in Afghanistan and they are involved in special operations in that country. This is a war on terrorism. This is a war in the truest sense of the word. But what is important for us at home now to fully understand is that before we can win the war, we must be able to define what victory means. That definition is as important now as is our efforts to win the war physically and militarily. Security at home is certainly an important goal that will mean victory or defeat. If we are not secure at home at the end of this conflict, there will have been no victory. Certainly we understand that: security and freedom for the United States of America. Number two, the war on terrorism as outlined by the President sets some very majestic and very admirable goals, goals that we should not forget. And as we pursue victory in this war, let us remember that, from this podium, the President has set these goals that we should achieve before we can claim victory has been achieved. One of those goals is setting a new definition for terrorism. Perhaps under George W. Bush, we will be at long last able to establish a definition of terrorism and unite the world behind the concept that it is no longer acceptable to target noncombatants in any type of conflict. So whether they are Palestinians blowing up noncombatants in front of a Pizza Hut, or whether it is Israeli troops involved with some sort of retaliation against unarmed civilians for an attack that they have suffered, or whether it is a bomb going off anywhere that kills unarmed people, or people who shoot unarmed people and kill them to achieve any end, that will no longer be acceptable in the civilized world. This is a laudable goal and a long-term goal. But before we can have peace, before we can have victory in this war on terrorism, there is at least one interim goal we must achieve; that is, peace in Afghanistan. Afghanistan for these last 20 years and the people of Afghanistan have lived under terror and repression and bloodshed in which so many of their noncombatants have been targeted. We must bring peace to the people of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, that country has been the target of so many of the other countries around it who wanted to dominate Afghanistan. This itself has led to the conflicts in Afghanistan, and the horrible price that we eventually had to pay for ignoring that ongoing tragedy in Afghanistan. Today I would submit that the King of Afghanistan, who has been exiled since the 1970s from that country, offers us the best hope, the only hope, of ending that ongoing tragedy. There are many forces trying to offer other solutions. But if you look right below, as far as the other solutions, they are nothing more than the countries around Afghanistan trying to dominate through a strong individual or a puppet the people of Afghanistan. The King of Afghanistan is the most beloved person in his country. The people love him. For years and years they have seen his rule, which lasted for 4 decades, as a time of peace and prosperity. They know that he will watch out for their benefit and is not someone who will be dominated by the Pakistanis or the Uzbekis or the Tajiks or any other group, but instead will look out for the people of Afghanistan. He has pledged to head a transition government that will only be in place for a few years while a democratic process is instituted so the people of Afghanistan can determine their own destiny and that must be our goal: peace in Afghanistan, and the people of that country being permitted to control their own destiny through the electorial process. This is what will bring peace to the world. And I would ask our State Department to side with this strategy rather than being manipulated by other governments, like Pakistan, who are trying to still, in some way, dominate that country of Afghanistan.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, first and foremost, I would like to thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) for exchanging his time with me. He will be speaking right after I am done, but I have a pressing appointment dealing with the very issue on which I am speaking, which really made it imperative that I speak at this time. I thank the gentleman from Maryland for the consideration that he has given me on this one. Mr. Speaker, it has been 1 month and 1 week since 6,000 Americans were slaughtered in New York and the Pentagon. Needless to say, our lives will never be the same. So much has happened, and at this moment so much is happening, that at times it is as confusing as it is awesome. But amid this chaos and runaway emotions, our President, George W. Bush, has proven a steady hand, and has refused to go off half-cocked. He has been courageous and decisive. He has acted with deliberation, and has been methodical in his approach. I was so proud that our President decided that a major humanitarian commitment be made as part of our battle plan in Afghanistan and against the terrorists in Afghanistan. With thousands of our own people being slaughtered, we could have just struck out blindly, but we are not doing that. A tremendous effort has been made in this volatile environment to protect the rights and safety of our own Muslim Americans, and we are reaching out to Muslim countries and their people. In Afghanistan itself, we are in fact limiting our retaliation to bin Laden's terrorists and to the Taliban regime that gave him safe haven. Underscoring the noble motives that still direct our actions, President Bush recently drew our attention to the larger percentage of Afghan children who are orphans, and asked that the children of America make it a personal project to help these Afghan youngsters who have suffered so much. What other country would be so gracious? President George W. Bush is not only our leader in this crisis, not only our Commander in Chief, but also a wonderful inspiration for us to live up to our ideals. America has not always been right, and certainly we have many black marks in our history, but we can be proud of our record because we have often tried to do our best; more often than not, tried to do what was right; and looked out, more than any other country that one can record, to do the right thing and to respect the human rights of people everywhere, even those of our enemy. We rebuilt the economies of our former enemies during World War II, and sent some of our young people, many of our young people, in fact, in the last century, to defeat the forces of tyranny wherever they were. Let us remind the Muslim world, for example, that the last two places that America sent her young people to intervene, our young soldiers, were in Bosnia and Kosovo. In both cases we sent our Armed Forces around the world to a place that had nothing to do with our own security in order to save Muslim people who were being murdered by armed thugs; and those thugs, of course, claimed to be Christians. We understand, of course, that Christians would not participate in the murderous and heinous crimes that were being committed against the Muslims in the Balkans. Similarly, we would hope that the Muslims of the world will make it clear, as many have, that the ghoulish slaughter of innocent Americans was totally inconsistent with their religious convictions, with the teachings of Islam. In terms of our country today, even though we have tried our best to help those around the world who are suffering, we have been the target of unprecedented hatred. Our open and free society is maligned and vilified with a staggering level of venom and vitriol. Perhaps to understand this, we need to go back a few decades to a far different time, during the Cold War. I worked in the White House during the years when Ronald Reagan brought the Cold War to an end, culminating with the dismantling of the Communist dictatorship that controlled Russia and its puppet States. Essential to a great victory was President Reagan's support for various people who were fighting to free themselves from Communist tyranny. The bravest and most fierce of these anti-Soviet insurgents were in Afghanistan. There are a lot of Monday morning quarterbacks these days who would suggest now long after that war has been over and the Cold War has come to a successful conclusion that we should not have supported those freedom fighters whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere because freedom fighters, of course, these insurgents, were not perfect people and, in fact, did commit some crimes, and there is no doubt about it. Those folks who are now complaining about that strategy which ended up saving the world from a nuclear holocaust and from a Cold War that went on and on, those folks who are complaining about it do not even have good 20/20 hindsight. Clearly and unequivocally the American people can be proud that we provided the Afghan people the weapons they needed to win their own freedom and independence from the Soviet Union, which was occupying their country. That Cold War battle was a major factor in breaking the will of the Communist bosses in Moscow, thus ending the Cold War. This, however, is where we must begin if we are to understand the grotesque crime committed against the American people on September 11. One of the common errors found in news reporting as of late has been the suggestion that those holding power in Afghanistan today are the same people who we supported in the war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The liberal press likes to suggest that we, meaning the American people, armed and trained those who have now come back to murder us on September 11. This by and large is wrong. It is factually in error. Yes, there are some of those currently in power in Kabul who also fought the Russians, but by and large we are talking about two different groups of people. Those who fought the Soviet occupation were called the Mujahedin, and during my time at the White House, I had the opportunity to meet most, if not all, of the leaders of the Mujahedin who fought against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. There was seven major factions, and it is significant that the current Taliban leadership does not include any of these wartime leaders against the Soviet occupation, not one. After I left the White House and was elected to Congress, I had been working with these Mujahedin leaders, and I felt very strongly about their cause. So when I was elected to Congress, but before I got sworn into Congress, I had 2 months on my own between November and January. So I took that opportunity and I hiked into Afghanistan as part of a small Mujahedin unit and engaged in battle against Russian and Communist forces near and around the City of Jalalabad. The muja I marched with were incredibly brave, but they were not senseless killers. They had religious faith, and certainly they were devout, but they were not fanatics. In fact, they prayed daily but I did not see them chastising the many Afghans who were with us who were not joining them in prayer. They faced death but their dreams were of life. In fact, a boy, probably 16, 17 years old, an AK-47 strapped over his shoulder, ran up to me as we marched through the Afghan countryside. It was at night and the cannons were going off in the distance. I could see them light up the sky. I could hear the thunder of the cannons roaring. This young man came up to me, and in almost perfect English said, ``They tell me you're in politics in the United States.'' I said, ``Yes, I am.'' He said, ``Tell me, are you a donkey or are you an elephant?'' I said, ``I am an elephant.'' He said, ``I thought you were.'' I asked this young man, ``What do you want to do with your life?'' He said, ``I want to become an architect because I want to rebuild my country when this is over.'' I do not know if he survived that war. I do not know if he survived the Battle of Jalalabad, but I do know there are young people like that whose lives have been wasted and talents wasted in war and conflict in all these years. The Russians retreated from Afghanistan about a year after that conversation, after that Battle of Jalalabad, and when the Russians left, the United States, which had been providing the resistance, a billion dollars a year to finance that war, we simply walked away from those people. We walked away and left Afghanistan to its own fate, this after years of death and destruction. We left them with no guidance, with no resources to rebuild or even the resources they needed to clear the land mines which we had given to them to plant in order to help them defeat the Russians. We did not even help them clear the land mines that we gave them. We left them to sleep in the rubble, and most importantly, we left them with no leadership except that of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two countries which have played a shameful role in Afghanistan over these last 10 years. After the collapse of the Communist regime in Afghanistan, the Mujahedin factions, with no direction from the United States, began bickering and fighting among themselves. This went on for several years and then in late 1996 a new force appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, the Taliban. These were fresh, well-equipped forces who had by and large sat out the war. They had been in Pakistan in what were called schools. Taliban of course means student, even though of course many of these so-called students are actually illiterate. All of the money that America provided the Mujahedin during the war it seems, which was billions of dollars, had gone through the Pakistani equivalent of their CIA, which is called the ISI, and apparently enough money had been siphoned off of that to create a third force which is what the Pakistanis did, the Taliban, and when the war was over and other factions were bled white, they moved forward to dominate Afghanistan. Also behind the Taliban not only are the Pakistanis but Saudi Arabia. During the war against the Russians, the Saudis provided the Afghan resistance with hundreds of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, that money mainly went to anti-Western, as well as anti-Communist Muslims. One of those was bin Laden. I remember as I was hiking through in that patrol that I took up to that battle, we hiked past a camp that had these beautiful white tents and suburbans and everything like that out there, generators. While most of the Mujahedin were sleeping in the gully eating cold food, there were these Wahabis, these Arab Mujahedin, who were living like kings. Guess what? They hated Americans so much that my Afghan friends told me, ``Do not speak any English, these people hate Americans as much as they hate Russians. Even though you are here to save us, they will come and attack and kill all of us if they know an American is with us,'' and by the way, they are being led by some crazy man named bin Laden. That was back in 1988. Years later, after the Soviet troops left and the muja factions were bickering, I knew something had to be done, so I met with the head of Saudi intelligence, a General Turki, and I suggested to him that we bring back the exiled king of Afghanistan. He was King Zahir Shah, who was overthrown in 1972, and that in his overthrow started a bloody cycle of events that led to the Soviet invasion in 1979 and then the subsequent war against occupation, the chaos and confusion and millions of deaths and maimings. But General Turki wanted nothing to do with bringing back a moderate, good-hearted exiled king. Instead, the Saudis and their Pakistani allies were in the process of creating this third force. And he told me there is going to be another force that will emerge called the Taliban. What he did not tell me is that the Taliban were designed just to do the bidding of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Why Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Why are they so concerned with Afghanistan? Well, there are three explanations. The first explanation is that they both share a common fanatic religion. Many of the people in Pakistan and many of the people in Saudi Arabia share the same fanatic crazy form of Islam which is totally out of sync with 90 percent of the rest of Islam. There are two other explanations, one for the Pakistanis, and that is when the Taliban took over they took over the poppy field. What does Afghanistan produce? What did it produce for all these years under the Taliban? Sixty percent of the world's heroin. And the Pakistan's ISI, their equivalent of the CIA, were up to their eyeballs in the drug trade and everybody knew it, and they did not want the Taliban overthrown for obvious reasons. They were business partners. And then of course the Saudis. The Saudis, who are now trying to make up for this past sin of putting the Taliban in power. They did not want the Taliban out because with the chaos and confusion of the Taliban, there would never be a pipeline built through Afghanistan so that the oil glut that we find in Central Asia, massive amounts of oil would never be able to make it to market because the pipeline had to go through Afghanistan to get that oil out to market. Guess what? That would have decreased the price of oil in the world by $3 to $4 to $5 a barrel. So it was oil and drugs and religious fanaticism. That is what kept the Taliban in power. That is what put the Taliban in power. As General Turki suggested when the Taliban first arrived, he suggested they would be viewed as liberators, as people who were going to bring stability, and that is what they were. By and large I will have to say that when the Taliban first arrived in late 1996, the people of Afghanistan were so hungry for stability and they were told that these were nice religious people, they accepted the Taliban and they wanted to believe that they would bring stability and peace to Afghanistan, and many people gave them the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, that was not what the reality was, which the people of Afghanistan were soon to find out. As the Taliban expanded towards the north, they were stopped by the people of the northern provinces who refused to let these unfamiliar troops just come into their territory and take over their provinces. That is when real battles begin to break out. Then the rest of the people who are under Taliban control and the rest of Afghanistan, as well as the rest of the world, were soon to discover that the Pakistanis and the Saudis had created a monster. The Taliban were and are medieval in their world and religious views. They are violent and intolerant fanatics, and they are totally out of sync with Muslims throughout the world, especially Muslims living in Western democracies. The Taliban are best known for their horrific treatment of women, but they are also broadbased violators of all human rights, human rights across the board. They have jailed and threatened to execute Christian workers who just dared to espouse a belief in Jesus Christ, and they ended all personal freedoms and freedom of speech and the press was not even under consideration. They ruled by fear and violence. That explains why they have been willing to give safe haven to the likes of bin Laden, the Saudi terrorist who has been in Afghanistan for years training terrorists and planning attacks on the West. Yes, bin Laden has an army of several thousand gunmen who have been marauding around Afghanistan like a pack of mad dogs, killing and brutalizing the population in order to keep the Taliban in power. These foreign religious fanatics have killed thousands of Afghans. In fact, the Taliban and bin Laden they are so despised by the Afghanistan people, and here is how we can understand that, these people have killed more Afghans than they have killed Americans. We grieve the loss of 6,000 Americans and we come from such a large country. These murderous Taliban and bin Laden's foreign troops have killed more Afghans than they have killed Americans, and there is only 13 million people in Afghanistan. For these last 2 years the Taliban, with the support of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have captured control of all but a small portion of that country. Only the northeastern Panjshir Valley, which is in northeastern Afghanistan, and in the Shamali Plain north of Kabul were free from the Taliban because they were under the command and under the protection of the legendary and dashing leader, Commander Masood and that area was the only area free from Taliban control up until this time. The day before the attack on the United States, however, there was an attempt to kill Commander Masood although he was reported dead immediately, he struggled on for life for another 5 days. That attack on Commander Masood told me that something horrible was about to happen. Something horrible was going to happen to the United States because Masood was someone that bin Laden's enemies would obviously turn to in an attack or a retaliation against the Taliban. I was so concerned and dismayed that I made an appointment to see the top levels of our National Security Council at the White House. My appointment was set for 2:30 September 11. At 8:45 that morning the first plane slammed into the World Trade Center. But the Taliban domination of Afghanistan need not have happened and it certainly need not have been able to keep its grip on power. As a Member of the Committee on International Relations for years, I pleaded with the Clinton administration to provide some kind of help for the Northern Alliance and to those others who were opposing the Taliban rule. President Clinton would have none of it. In fact, his administration was, in many ways, responsible for keeping the Taliban in power. Now, every time I suggest this, people go ballistic. They believe I am being partisan at a moment when, of course, national unity is the order of the day. And I beg people just to hear me out. I would never do this. It would be sinful to be partisan at a time like this. But it is an important truth, the things I believe to be true, and I am trying to express them, and this is not based on any type of partisan consideration. I take no joy in reporting that I, who have been more involved in Afghanistan than any other Member of Congress, have every reason to believe that the last administration had a covert policy of supporting the Taliban regime. As a senior member of the Committee on International Relations, after I came to this conclusion, I officially requested the State Department documents, the cables, the memos, the briefing papers that would prove or disprove my suspicion. The gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), chairman of the Committee on International Relations, joined me in that request. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on two occasions, officially promised me those documents and said that they would be made available to me. After all, I was a senior member of the committee with oversight responsibility of the State Department and American foreign policy. What happened was as alarming as it is appalling. I was stonewalled for several years. My request for those documents pertaining to the development of America's and our government's policy toward the Taliban was ignored. I was given meaningless documents, many times newspaper clippings by the State Department, in order for them to claim that they were trying to fulfill our request. The State Department made a joke out of Congress' right to oversee American foreign policy concerning the Taliban in Afghanistan. That is what we have been going through for 3 years. When I repeatedly complained that this could not be allowed to happen, that it was undermining Congress' right to oversee a very important policy, I was belittled and my requests were treated as if they were irrational. Well, I believe the reason those documents were kept from me is that they would have proven that the Clinton administration approved, all the way up to the President himself, in keeping the Taliban in power. This is even after it was clear that the Taliban were monstrous violators of human rights, especially women's rights, and it was becoming a safe haven for terrorists and drug dealers. Bin Laden was there and 60 percent of the world's heroin was originating there. By the way, in Afghanistan, let me note, and all of this is shocking to Americans and I was shocked by it all, but in Afghanistan it is commonly believed that the United States put the Taliban in power and that until recent hostilities, it has commonly been believed that we supported the regime. And there are many reasons for people to believe this. All U.S. foreign aid to Afghanistan in these last 5 years have been channeled through the Taliban, even though there were large areas at times where the Taliban did not control and were controlled by people who opposed the Taliban. More than that, when some others, like myself and others, would get together to try to put together humanitarian efforts that would go to the areas in Afghanistan controlled by anti-Taliban forces, we were blocked by the State Department. Not only did our government's aid not go to anyone outside the Taliban-controlled areas, the State Department blocked our efforts to get private aid to those people. Then there has been Voice of America. It has been so one-sided in its coverage that it is known in Afghanistan as the voice of the Taliban. So the Voice of America, all these years, has been so lopsided in favor of the Taliban it has been known as the Voice of the Taliban. And thank goodness just recently a new director of the Voice of America, Bob Reilly, has committed to undo this terrible deed. But there are some other actions that have taken place during the Clinton administration that go right to the heart of the charge I am making; and people should listen very carefully to an example that led me, which after this happened I just knew this was the Clinton administration and I could not deal with them, they were obviously not going to help us because they were undermining the efforts of the anti- Taliban forces, but in 1997, for example, the Taliban overextended their forces. Thousands of their best fighters were captured in northern Afghanistan. The Taliban regime was vulnerable as never before and never since. It was a tremendous opportunity. The opposition could have easily dealt a knockout punch to the Taliban. At that time I was personally in contact with the leaders of what is called the Northern Alliance, and I recommended a quick attack and bringing back old King Zahir Shah to head a transition government. Well, this was a turning point, because the Taliban were vulnerable then. They could have been taken out easily. Their best fighters and tanks and aircraft had been taken, and the old moderate king, he was ready to do his duty. Who at this moment of vulnerability saved the Taliban? Well, President Bill Clinton, that is who. Again, please, I beg of you do not dismiss what I say. Do not say he is just being partisan, because I am not. Again, that would be a horrible thing. This is the truth, so help me God; and I am trying not to be partisan in fact. What happened was, at this moment when the Taliban could have been eliminated, President Clinton dispatched Assistant Secretary of State Rick Inderfurth and Bill Richardson, our United Nations Ambassador, up to the northern part of Afghanistan to convince the leaders of the Northern Alliance not to go on the offensive but, instead, to accept an arms embargo against all parties and a cease-fire. Well, these people up in northern Afghanistan had been fighting the Taliban. This is very impressive to have someone at that level, Assistant Secretary of State and our United Nations Ambassador bringing words of the President of the United States. This was so impressive that they accepted the deal. These two high-level American officials sent by President Clinton convinced the Northern Alliance to accept a cease-fire and a supposed arms embargo against all sides. Of course, the minute the cease-fire went into effect, the Saudis and the Pakistanis began to massively rearm and resupply the Taliban and rebuild their forces. Our intelligence knew about this massive resupply effort. They conveniently kept Congress from knowing it, and they conveniently kept the Northern Alliance in the dark. The arms embargo against the Taliban meant nothing, but the arms embargo against the Taliban's enemies in the Northern Alliance was enforced and was expected to be followed and was still in place. So the Taliban rearmed; and as soon as they did, they drove the Northern Alliance nearly out of the country. They had been weakened, of course, by a one-sided arms embargo. And who put it in place? This was not an accident. This was a conscious policy. For years, before that and since that time, I begged the Clinton administration, our government, to do something about the Taliban. The only response I got was the stonewalling of my requests to find out exactly what the Government's real policy was towards Afghanistan. All the while, bin Laden, who had already killed American military personnel and had declared war on the United States of America, was running around Afghanistan using it as a base of operations and a safe haven for terrorist attacks. Let us not forget he was involved with trying to kill the Pope in the Philippines, and he was involved with terrorist activities elsewhere. Yet we let him stay there and let the Taliban regime stay in place and did nothing. We were, in fact, doing more than nothing; we were supporting the Taliban. Our aid went through there. They undermined any effort to send aid coming through the non-Taliban areas. Voice of America was making sure that anything that was anti-Taliban was balanced off by a Taliban spokesman. But if you had a Taliban spokesman, it did not have to be balanced off with someone else. So it was two-to-one coverage in favor of the Taliban on the Voice of America. Now, why is this? Why did we convince the Northern Alliance to go into a cease-fire and a one-sided arms embargo? I believe that it was part of a yet undisclosed understanding with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to let them dominate Afghanistan. This understanding was obviously turning into a nightmare. Now, by the way, that understanding might have happened during the Bush administration. George W. Bush's father may have had an understanding with the Saudis and the Pakistanis that they would let those people dominate Afghanistan. But once that understanding was turning into a nightmare and the full truth of what the Taliban were all about, we should have immediately ceased that agreement. And yet our leaders, with all of the evidence to show that the Taliban were a horrible blight on the decent people of the world and a threat to the world, our leaders lacked the will to change the situation and to say to the Saudis and the Pakistanis, No more of this. These people are human rights abusers. Look at the way they treat women. They have terrorists operating out of there. They are growing heroin. They are done. No, we could not get ourselves to say that. Over and over again, when I warned on the record and off the record, in dozens of places and during dozens of hearings that we could not turn our back on this Taliban threat or it would come back to hurt our country, nobody paid attention. Mr. Speaker, I insert for the Record some of the many statements that I made during that time to my colleagues warning them about the Taliban and what it might do. September 15, 1999--International Relations Committee Hearing ``I would again alert my fellow members of this committee that what is going on in Afghanistan is as important to America's national security as what is going on in Iran, because we have a terrorist base camp.'' August 11, 1998--Letter to Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister Pakistan, ``International Terrorists like Osama bin Laden will become the deans of terrorism schools in Afghanistan. For example, the recent bombings of US embassies in Africa are tied to Osama bin Laden and his thugs.'' May 21, 1998--Letter to Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House--``As you may know, Afghanistan has become the world's largest source of heroin. It is also one of the key terrorist training and staging areas in the world. Further, instability in Afghanistan limits the economic and democratic development of Central Asian states and negatively impacts US policy toward Iran. In short events in Afghanistan affect the lives of more than 200 million people in the Central and South Asian region.'' August 10, 1998--Letter to Karl Indefurth (Asst. Sec. State) ``I have been preparing serious alternatives for Afghan policy for the past six years. I have found no willingness on the part of this administration to even try the alternatives that I have suggested. I have come to the conclusion that our goals are different. But for the time being I will give you the benefit of the doubt. The stakes go far beyond Afghanistan. There will be no peace in central Asia, or on the subcontinent between India and Pakistan until the U.S. decides that there will be no peace in this region or elsewhere with a policy that is not based on the fundamental principles of representative government and opposition to tyranny.'' June 29, 2001 International Relations Committee Hearing ``This regime has permitted terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base of operations from which their country has been used as a springboard for operations that have cost the lives of people throughout the Middle East, as well as targeted Americans. That alone should give us a message about the regime and our commitment and what ultimately should have been done.'' July 19, 1999--Floor Debate on the American Embassy Security Act of 1999 ``As the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman) has stated, among the greatest threats to the security of American diplomatic missions and personnel is by Osama bin Laden and his legion of terrorists who train and operate out of Afghanistan. The primary benefactors of bin Laden's terrorists are elements in Pakistan and the extremist Taliban militia, who not only host and protect bin Laden but have imposed a reign of terror on the people of Afghanistan and especially on the women of Afghanistan.'' October 30, 2000--Floor Debate on State Department authorization ``This member and anyone who is in the Committee on International Relations will testify, for years I have been warning what the results of this administration's policy towards Afghanistan would be. For years, I predicted over and over again that, unless we did something in Afghanistan to change the situation, that we would end up with Afghanistan as a center of terrorism, a base for terrorism not only in Central Asia but for the world.'' November 9, 1997 House Floor Debate on Afghanistan--``A chaotic Afghanistan will eventually wreak havoc in the United States. It has already caused the lives of American lives and servicemen to be lost. A terrorist trained in Afghanistan helped blow up a building which housed our military people in Saudi Arabia. There was an assassination attempt on the Pope. They found out that the terrorist who was going to assassinate the Pope was trained in Afghanistan. We cannot let this go on, because not only is it immoral to let this go on, but practically speaking, if we do, it will come back and hurt us.'' April 12, 2000--International Relations Committee Hearing ``They (the Clinton Administration) have kept those documents (relating to U.S. policy towards Afghanistan) . . . away from my office, and prevented us from doing the oversight we feel is necessary. And with a regime in Afghanistan like the Taliban, anti-western, making hundreds of millions of dollars off the drug trade, involving the training and base areas for terrorists, that is a destabilizing force for the whole region and this Administration, I think bears full responsibility for whatever deals it has cut with whichever powers, whether they be Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or whoever this deal was cut for this Taliban policy. The historians will note that it is this Administration's fault for cutting such a corrupt deal.'' March 17, 1999--International Relations Committee Hearing ``In Afghanistan in the last few years, what we have seen is the emergence of a regime that is immersed in extremism and terrorism, and a regime that is certainly up to their necks in the drug trade. Doesn't what is going on in Afghanistan pose a threat to any of these future plans for growth, stability and democratic development in Central Asia?'' September 23, 1997--House Floor Debate ``The extremist Taliban Movement is not only responsible for the ongoing suffering of the Afghan people, they pose a grave threat of fundamentalist violence in neighboring countries, especially Pakistan, and their extremism permits Iran to have a greater political role in the region. The Taliban currently provides a haven for terrorists such as bin Laden of Saudi Arabia and the training for terrorist organizations now operating in Egypt, the Balkans, and the Phillippines.'' October 28, 1999--International Relations Committee Hearing ``Well, as I reminded the full Committee at a hearing last week, what is happening in Pakistan has been predicted for a number of years. I personally predicted it time and again saying that if we do not do something about Afghanistan that it would bring democracy down in Pakistan. I do not know how many times I have expressed that and the chickens are coming home to roost in terms of the policy by the United States government that led to this very situation.'' August 10, 1998--Letter to Karl Indefurth (Asst. Sec. State) ``In short, unless this administration, including your office, begins taking a more responsible approach, you will continue to fail miserably, with all the serious national security implications that apply to the United States.'' Well, I knew at that time that this would come back to hurt us; and I am sorry, and it makes us all heartsick to figure that this could have been averted. The heinous crimes committed against us in New York and at the Pentagon was a result, and let us make this clear, was a result not only of bad intelligence but bad policy. That bad policy started when George Senior walked away from the Afghan people. George Bush Senior was President of the United States and walked away. That policy was made worse when President Bill Clinton, who, for whatever reason, decided that he was going to go on quietly backing the Taliban. And again, that might have been an unspoken agreement that came from the Bush administration with the Saudis and the Pakistanis, but there was no excuse for any President to keep that agreement going when it was so clear that it was working against the people of the world and the security of the United States. So, in a way, we cannot fault bin Laden for being what he is. We cannot fault him for being a nut case that hates America. The same is true of Mullah Omar and the rest of his Taliban minions. They are mentally unstable and live in their own world. Putting this into perspective, Reverend Jim Jones, who spouted out Christian verses and coupled them with Karl Marx as part of his own dogma, he gave hundreds of his followers Kool-Aid, remember that, that killed them after leading them into a jungle fortress in South America. Yes, human beings can do crazy things and can be totally irrational. It is our government's job, however, to protect us against this type of dangerous insanity. That is why we spend billions of dollars on defense and intelligence. So that leaves us with the question of accountability. Yes, bin Laden and the Taliban, even though they are as crazy as they are, they must pay the price. The Taliban will be driven from power. They must be driven from power. And bin Laden and his gang of murderous thugs must be tracked down and executed by our forces or by the Afghan people, who they have tortured and murdered. Whoever, as long as these perverts and killers are eliminated. But that is not enough. We must also hold accountable those in our government who are supposed to protect us, but let us down; 6,000 of our fellow citizens were slaughtered by anti-American terrorists. Why were we not warned of the horrific attack about to be launched against us? This was the worst failure of American intelligence in our history, and those who failed must be relieved of their responsibilities if a repeat of this horror story is to be prevented. There was a headline in the Washington Post on September 14 suggesting that American intelligence services had been conducting a secret war against bin Laden for several years. If that is true, then even more we need to fire the incompetent leaders of that covert war. They were responsible for protecting us from this specific terrorist gang. The heads of our intelligence agencies were focused on bin Laden, and they totally missed a terrorist operation of this magnitude run by their number one targeted terrorist leader? I cannot help but remember a few years ago I was called by a friend who had worked in Afghanistan during the war against the Russians. He indicated that he could pinpoint bin Laden's location. This man is an incredible source. He has credibility. He worked in Afghanistan. I passed on his phone number to the CIA. After a week when they had yet to contact him, I called the CIA again. After another week, there was no response. Our CIA supposedly focused on bin Laden, a man who was a very credible source who knew Afghanistan had pinpointed bin Laden, they did not even call him off. I contacted the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss), chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and he ushered me in the next day to meet with a bin Laden task force, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI. Then I found out hundreds of people full time on our employment rolls being paid good salaries with all of the backup focused on bin Laden. I gave them my informant's number; and after a week they, too, had not called him. Finally, when I talked to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) and told him that even that group had not called my friend, he must have shamed them because eventually they called my friend. But when my friend got the telephone call, they acted like they were not interested and they were just going through something they had to do. Anyway, a month had already passed since he moved forward to try to tip us off on how to capture bin Laden. This is but one of many stories, many examples. I know this one is true. I have to believe some of the others are true as well. But it suggests that there has been less than an energetic commitment by the last administration to get bin Laden, and this was after he had bombed a military barracks on Saudi Arabia. After that attack on America, bin Laden was banished from Saudi Arabia, and he moved then to Sudan. This is where he set up al-Qaeda, and that is the organization which probably was behind the September 11 attack on New York and the Pentagon. It is significant then that after bin Laden left the Sudan and set up operations in Afghanistan, that the Government of Sudan offered the United States a file on bin Laden's terrorist network. They had all of his communications monitored. They apparently had all of his operatives around the world catalogued, as well as all of his secret bank accounts. This was information then from a credible source, a country who wanted to curry favor with us. Even if it proved inaccurate, we had nothing to lose by taking a look at that information. Our CIA refused to even look at it, much less take possession of it and copy it. The decision to reject this offer from Sudan, it is reported that this offer was rejected by Madeleine Albright herself, who insisted that the file not even be accepted, much less perused. Mr. Speaker, I submit for the Record an article detailing this incident. [From The Observer, Sept. 30, 2001] Resentful West Spurned Sudan's Key Terror Files (By David Rose) Security chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic repeatedly turned down the chance to acquire a vast intelligence database on Osama bin Laden and more than 200 leading members of his al-Qaeda terrorist network in the years leading up to the 11 September attacks, an Observer investigation has revealed. They were offered thick files, with photographs and detailed biographies of many of his principal cadres, and vital information about al-Qaeda's financial interests in many parts of the globe. On two separate occasions, they were given an opportunity to extradite or interview key bin Laden operatives who had been arrested in Africa because they appeared to be planning terrorist atrocities. None of the offers, made regularly from the start of 1995, was taken up. One senior CIA source admitted last night: ``This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks.'' He said the blame for the failure lay in the ``irrational hatred'' the Clinton administration felt for the source of the proffered intelligence--Sudan, where bin Laden and his leading followers were based from 1992-96. He added that after a slow thaw in relations which began last year, it was only now that the Sudanese information was being properly examined for the first time. Last weekend, a key meeting took place in London between Walter Kansteiner, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, FBI and CIA representatives, and Yahia Hussien Baviker, the Sudanese intelligence deputy chief. However, although the intelligence channel between Sundan and the United States is now open, and the last UN sanctions against the African state have been removed, The Observer has evidence that a separate offer made by Sudanese agents in Britain to share intelligence with M16 has been rejected. This follows four years of similar rebuffs. ``If someone from M16 comes to us and declares himself, the next day he can be in Khartoum,'' said a Sudanese government source. ``We have been saying this for years.'' Bin Laden and his cadres came to Sudan in 1992 because at that time it was one of the few Islamic countries where they did not need visas. He used his time there to build a lucrative web of legitimate businesses, and to seed a far- flung financial network--much of which was monitored by the Sudanese. They also kept his followers under close surveillance. One US source who has seen the files on bin Laden's man in Khartoum said some were ``an inch and a half thick''. They included photographs and information on their families, backgrounds and contacts. Most were ``Afghan Arabs,'' Saudis, Yemenis and Egyptians who had fought with bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan. ``We know them in detail,'' said one Sudanese source. ``We know their leaders, how they implement their policies, how they plan for the future. We have tried to feed this information to American and British intelligence so they can learn how this thing can be tackled.'' In 1996, following intense pressure from Saudi Arabia and the US, Sudan agreed to expel bin Laden and up to 300 of his associates. Sudanese intelligence believed this to be a great mistake. ``There we could keep track of him, read his mail,'' the source went on. ``Once we kicked him out and he went to ground in Afghanistan, he couldn't be tracked anywhere.'' The Observer has obtained a copy of a personal memo sent from Sudan to Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI, after the murderous 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It announces the arrest of two named bin Laden operatives held the day after the bombings after they crossed the Sudanese border from Kenya. They had cited the manager of a Khartoum leather factory owned by bin Laden as a reference for their visas, and were held after they tried to rent a flat overlooking the US embassy in Khartoum, where they were thought to be planning an attack. US sources have confirmed that the FBI wished to arrange the immediate extradition. However, Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, forbade it. She had classed Sudan as a ``terrorist state,'' and three days later US missiles blasted the al-Shifa medicine factory in Khartoum. The US wrongly claimed it was owned by bin Laden and making chemical weapons. In fact, it supplied 60 percent of Sudan's medicines, and had contracts to make vaccines with the UN. Even then, Sudan held the suspects for a further three weeks, hoping the US would both perform their extradition and take up the offer to examine their bin Laden database. Finally, the two men were deported to Pakistan. Their present whereabouts are unknown. Last year the CIA and FBI, following four years of Sudanese entreaties, sent a joint investigative team to establish whether Sudan was in fact a sponsor of terrorism. Last May, it gave Sudan a clean bill of health. However, even then, it made no effort to examine the voluminous files on bin Laden. So bin Laden and the Taliban must pay for their crime. There is no doubt about it. And if we are looking for accountability, let us look at George Bush, Sr., who walked away from Afghanistan and left the Pakistanis and the Saudis to do what the United States should have done, which is help them rebuild their country. There is accountability there. And the Clinton administration, as I have said, must bear a heavy responsibility for a policy, a secret policy, that made a bad thing much, much worse. Our intelligence agencies, they, too, must be held responsible because obviously there has been a great deal of incompetence that has led, and a malfeasance, that led to the death of 6,000 Americans by this terrorist gang who was supposedly the number one target of our intelligence system. But there are two other institutions that did not do their job and contributed to this tragedy that we face. Number one, let me note and this is going to be short, I think the news media has to bear some responsibility. I made these statements about Afghanistan on numerous occasions. The news media was there. There were lots of reporters listening. Not one reporter said the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) has a right to read these documents. We are going to do a story on one Congressman's battle to do the oversight in his committee that he is supposed to do. I did not see any of the newspapers, the Washington Post or the New York Times or the L.A. Times doing this. They did not follow-up. The news media were too concerned with what? They were too concerned about President Clinton's sex life and stories about the sex life of one of our fellow Members of Congress and some affair he had with an intern. Let me say certainly I am not saying that they should ignore these sex stories, but the news media did not have to spend all of their resources and all of their efforts and every story dealing with these sex stories when there were monstrously important stories to cover. Now we know with just a little bit of effort and time and energy and commitment to some research into what was going on in Afghanistan, we could have been warned by our news media and this could have been averted. The news media was so busy trying to sell papers with sex, get listeners in their broadcast area with sex stories, that they let the American people down; and they should take that seriously. Second, I think Congress bears some responsibility. We have oversight committees. I do not believe we take our oversight as seriously as we should. I say that for myself as well, even though as Members can see by this example today, I tried my best at least in this situation where I felt it was a life-and-death situation to do my job of oversight. There are far too many people who just accept baloney from government agencies. I have been briefed by the CIA so many times; I have been briefed by the intelligence services. They give us nothing, and we accept it. We in Congress must do this job that we have in protecting our interests. We have to be more serious about it in our oversight responsibility. I think we have to bear some of the responsibility ourselves. Mr. Speaker, the slaughter of these thousands of Americans must be avenged. We must see to it that this monstrous crime never happens again. To accomplish this, we must correct the flaws in our system, and all of us must do our job better than we are doing it today. Now when we are moving against the terrorists in this last phase, moving up to today, we must make sure we are united, and we must make sure that we are strong and smart. The last time America mobilized our forces and sent them to the other side of the world to fight a criminal regime was during the Gulf War; and that war fighting, that was a situation where we fought the war very well. Our troops did very well, but the political and the strategic decision-making during that last conflict 10 years ago was a disaster. Again, George Bush, Sr., was President, and just like in Afghanistan, he ordered America to walk away before the job was done. In the case of Iraq, two or more days of fighting would have brought Saddam Hussein down. Instead, we left him in power; and today his regime remains a major security threat to the United States and to the Gulf region. Would anybody be surprised to find out that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the murderous assault on September 11? We should not have left him alive; we should not have left that regime. We should have helped build a democratic alternative to Saddam Hussein's regime. Perhaps out of consideration to the Saudis, again, we did not do that; and we should have. It would have been consistent with our own ideals, and it would have been practical in the long run. So our policy was decided by George Bush at that time who left Saddam Hussein in power, and President Clinton in terms of his recent decision with the Taliban, we have left people in power; and we have ended up with America in danger, with American lives in danger. Believe it or not, some of the same old faces from the first Bush administration are popping up, and I am talking about George Bush, Sr., are popping up to fight this war, even though they screwed up in the last one. The advice that they are giving, as one would expect, is dead wrong. There are those, for example, in the State Department and the CIA who have argued from the onset of the current crisis that we should be satisfied with having bin Laden handed over to us; and the Taliban, they say, should be permitted to remain in power. This is vital for every American to understand. We have powerful forces in Washington working right now to have the Taliban stay in power. What? After we know what happened with Saddam Hussein, we are going to keep these crazy people in power? What is behind this suggestion? The suggestion is because we have to be considerate of Pakistan. Oh, something might happen to Pakistan. They were the ones that created the Taliban in the first place. They were the ones who kept the Taliban in power. Now, even after 6,000 Americans have lost their lives, senior American officials at the CIA and the State Department want American policy to reflect the wishes of Pakistan. It is absurd. Because of this mind-set we still have forces within the CIA to this day undermining potential alternatives to the Taliban Government and potential alternatives that the Pakistani Government would not like. They are even holding up support and supplies for these brave Afghanis who would fight with us to overthrow the Taliban regime. In the middle of a conflict in which these rag-tag armies who are opposing the Taliban are our greater allies, the CIA and the State Department have leaked negative stories about the so-called Northern Alliance. If Members have heard something negative about the Northern Alliance, it is because our own State Department and the CIA have been trying to undermine it. Our own government's foreign policy officials have been sowing this dissension and undercutting the support for these people because they would like to have someone else who is more acceptable to the Pakistanis to be the leaders of Afghanistan. Mr. Speaker, America should be in favor of the people of Afghanistan running their own government, and we have an alternative. Let us all remember, America's greatest allies in this are the Afghan people themselves. The desire to dominate Afghanistan by Pakistan is what created the evil force, the Taliban, in the first place. So what is our alternative? We have an alternative, and we should not be undermining it. First of all, we need to support those people who will fight to liberate their country from the Taliban. But there is another alternative in terms of government. It was a golden age which almost all Afghans remember; it was a moment like Camelot when there was peace and prosperity for decades in Afghanistan. That is when the old King, Zahir Shah, ruled Afghan. He ruled for almost 4 decades. As I say, he was overthrown in 1972 and that is what began that cycle of horror that they have not even finished yet. But millions of Afghans remember the King and they have told their children, that was a good time for our country. Well, King Zahir Shah still lives. He is 86 years old. He lives in exile in Rome. The old King is the most beloved person in Afghanistan. The people love him there, but our government under Bill Clinton and right now even our government with CIA officials and State Department officials in our government, they have done everything they can to suppress even the consideration of bringing back the King as an alternative. As I say, the people of Afghanistan love the King. There was a very famous meeting that took place among Taliban leaders and one that they were badmouthing the King, this good-hearted person everyone loves, and one Taliban leader says, ``Now, wait a minute, you can say anything you want about the King, but when I was a boy my mother asked me to pick berries along the river and the King was fishing at the river. I had a basketful of berries and when the King's guard tried to take it from me, I wouldn't give him the berries. The King walked over and said, `What's the confusion?' The guard explained to the King that I refused to give him the berries and I told the King that my mother sent me here to bring these berries back for my family. The King kissed me on my forehead and said, `Always obey your parents. Your mother is very wise. Bring these berries back for your family.' '' Then the Taliban leader turned to his other Taliban leaders and said, ``And there's not one of us in this meeting that wouldn't have taken those berries for ourselves and eaten them.'' That shows you even how much those people know that the King of Afghanistan is a very good- hearted person. Do not let anybody in our government try to undermine this alternative saying that the leaders of the opposition, the so- called Northern Alliance, which is now an alliance of commanders from all over the country, they call themselves the United Front now, those people have sworn their allegiance to the King because the King has said that he wants to go back to Afghanistan, he will do it for 2 years or 3 years as head of a transition government, and during that time period people with education will come back, they will lay the foundation for a civil government and they will have some sort of democratic process, and then the people of Afghanistan will then proceed to elect their leaders, instead of having our faith in some strong guy to come in and take control of Afghanistan who happens to be a friend of Pakistan. During the Cold War, we backed many tinhorn dictators, we backed despots and strong guys, and in the Muslim world we had a series of alliances with corrupt and repressive regimes, many of them just based, as I say, on a royal family or some tough guy who was willing to do our bidding. That is not what America is supposed to be about. It would be a better world if we would not be that way and we need not to continue that past mistake. The exiled King of Afghanistan wants to help in a transition for his country into a more peaceful and democratic nation, like the King of Spain did for his people after his people were plagued by a dictatorship for decades. The United States, in fact, should be working with other monarchies who are willing to do this, too, monarchies to evolve into a democratic process. The royal family in Qatar, for example, is establishing an electoral process in which the rights of women to vote are being respected. In Kuwait they are going somewhat in the same direction. But by and large America's dealings in the Arab world have not furthered the cause of liberty and justice. If we just stick with our ideals, stick with people who want to make a difference in this world, who have good hearts and want and believe in treating people decently and believe in democratic government, we will win. We will affect the entire world. We must make allies with those people in the Islamic world, for example, who want to live in freedom, want to have a democratic government and want to have a more peaceful and prosperous life for their children. Even in Afghanistan, these people would be on our side and they would throw away any relationship with blood-thirsty fanatics. We do not need to use our troops to invade Afghanistan. Let me make this clear. We are going to hear stories of dissension in the ranks of the anti-Taliban forces. No, there is no dissension. They know that they support the King, but they are going to be told by our own government that there is dissension. These people will do the job. The anti-Taliban coalition is ready to overthrow the rule of the Taliban. They might need some help from Special Forces teams or Rangers who can help them with logistics or with some ammunition, let us say, but the Afghans do not need us to fight. They know how to fight and they are willing to liberate their land from these fanatics and terrorists who have held them hostage. With our help they can free themselves and we can join with them after they free themselves from the Taliban in hunting down and killing every member in bin Laden's terrorist gang and bringing them to ultimate justice. I am saying this not as revenge, because that would be inconsistent with our own values, but killing bin Laden and his gang of fanatics and by joining in an effort to stamp out the scourge of terrorism, we are setting a new moral standard and we are deterring future such terrorism. The United States has led the world in the defeat of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. We can now defeat the evil of terrorism by elevating the commitment of civilized nations not to make war on unarmed people. Perhaps it will be called the George W. Doctrine. But what our President is suggesting is that targeting noncombatants anywhere in the world for whatever reason will no longer be tolerated. This can truly be a step forward for the forces of civilization if this becomes a new standard. We are indeed building a better world on the ashes of the World Trade Center. If it is to be a new standard and not just a justification for our retaliation for the September 11 massacre of our people, if it is to be a new standard, it will help us build a new world. If we are to build on the ashes, we have to start, however, by seeing to it that the bin Ladens of this planet are never again given safe haven. So it not only means hunting down the terrorists but a commitment by all governments of the world not to give safe haven, not to themselves make war on noncombatants but not to give safe haven to terrorists who make war on noncombatants. On September 11 marks the end of an era. The monstrous crime against our people has set in motion a wave of actions and reactions that will change our lives and change our government and change our world. There must and will be an accounting. At home, those top government executives and the policies that protected the Taliban, they will be held accountable. Those intelligence officers who were so incompetent that this attack came without warning and was so successful, they will have to be held accountable. Especially these people, they are very high-level people I am talking about. I am talking about people who are professional, they are in every department and agency, no matter who is in there, Republicans or Democrats, and they found that these are cushy jobs. They must be cleared out and fired and replaced by people who take their job seriously and have the energy and vision to meet the challenges and threats of today and in the years ahead. Those countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, have a price to pay. To be fair, the Pakistanis and the Saudis now understand the horrible things that they have done and are trying to work with us, but they have got to make up for the colossal mistakes they have made and we have got to make sure that we are the ones making the decision, not them making the decisions for us. Finally, the murderous terrorists themselves, they have the ultimate price to pay. On that, there can be no compromise. We will have a victory over these ghouls who murdered our defenseless fellow Americans and we will win because we are unified as never before and because this generation of Americans has the courage, the tenacity, the ideals and, yes, the leadership that has always been America's greatest source of strength. It is up to us, we will do our duty, and nothing will deter us.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I thank the gentleman very much. We have a very special system of government and we have a very special group of people that live in the United States of America. We are a group of people who are not one race, but we are every race on the planet because we have people who have come here from every ethnic and racial group. We do not represent just one nationality, because we have people who have come here from Europe, from Asia, from Africa, from Spanish-speaking countries and from French-speaking countries. We have Muslims and we have Buddhists and we have Christians and we have Catholics, and we have about every religion there is, but what ties us together as a people is a love of liberty and justice that was first discovered back about 225 years ago when our Founding Fathers saw that this was something that bound them together as a Nation, and that would be the unifying factor and established this government that we have. How government is made in our country and how policy is made is not just by passing laws like this but, instead, there is a competition of ideas and a national debate that moves forward on any important issue. What we just did with the leadership of the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) or should I say Chairman Weldon, not as chairman of our delegation but chairman in the Committee on Armed Services of a very important subcommittee, but what we did in this delegation is make sure that we became part of the national debate, first by educating ourselves firsthand as to what the people on the scene were experiencing and feeling, what was the information on the front lines, and to try to educate ourselves, and then to be articulate and to speak out on the issues as we see them. That is what has happened. We are now part of that national debate. I really appreciate the leadership that the gentleman from Pennsylvania has provided on this and, by the way, many of the other issues that I have personally involved myself on, I find the gentleman from Pennsylvania got there first and the gentleman from Pennsylvania was providing some leadership when I just sort of jumped on. I was very happy that on this trip I was able to contribute because I do have a long-term commitment to the people of Afghanistan, I worked with them while I was in the Reagan White House to help get them the weaponry they needed to defeat the Soviet Union. It was their defeat of Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s that permitted us in the United States to have an era, a 10-year period of prosperity and happiness and peace. The fact is we were spending $100 billion a year less on military than we did during the Cold War. This, because the Afghan people were so brave. But we walked away from the Afghan people. We walked away and we let them sleep in the rubble. We did not even help them dig up the land mines we had given them to fight the Russians. If there was one, not demand, plea, by the Afghans that we met on this trip, the field commanders who are standing up against the terrorist Taliban regime, the one plea was, please, yes, help us defeat the Taliban by giving us the ammunition we need to do the fighting, but please don't walk away and leave us alone once the fighting has started. Help us build a country where our children can be healthy. Help us build a country where we can have an education system. Help us build a country where people can live decent lives. Don't walk away and abandon us like you did the last time we fought a battle that so benefited the United States as well as benefitting ourselves. I heard that plea, I have heard that plea a long time before, but I am sure some of our fellow members of this CODEL had not heard that before. We did not do the right thing by Afghanistan, and it came back to hurt us. That was a mistake that we made. I will have to say that is not a partisan mistake. That was made by George W. Bush's father when George Bush, Sr. was President. There were some mistakes made. He made another mistake. One mistake he made is after the Gulf War, instead of finishing the job, he permitted his advisers to convince him not to finish off the Saddam Hussein regime. Well, I am afraid we are beginning to make some of these same mistakes again. We have now the ability to get rid of this terrorist Taliban regime that has so brutalized the people of Afghanistan, and at the same time, has its fingerprints all over the atrocity that was committed in the death of thousands of our fellow citizens in New York on September 11, this murderous Taliban regime that has been a haven for terrorists, for bin Laden. It has been a regime that has permitted 60 percent of the world's heroin to be grown and distributed from within its borders, a regime that makes a mockery of all human rights and has murdered so many of their own people that their own people are terrorized. That regime is not that much different than the regime of Saddam Hussein. We left Saddam Hussein in power and now there are those in our own State Department, perhaps some of the same people who advised George W.'s father to permit Saddam Hussein to remain, who are now advising George W. Bush to just demand that bin Laden be handed over and let the Taliban stay in power. That cannot happen. That would be making a lie out of George W.'s tremendous speech that he gave here just a week and a half ago. Either we rid the world of the terrorist regime, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, or no dictatorship and no terrorist will take our word and take it for granted that they cannot get away with their evil deeds in the future. We will be encouraging dictatorships and terrorist regimes in the future to believe that they can attack the United States, or harbor and help people who are attacking the United States and get away with it. No, the Taliban must be overthrown. Bin Laden must die. We learned on this trip that we have the means to do this. We have the means to accomplish this end. We met with the king of Afghanistan who is one of the most beloved people in his country. Poor Commander Masood was assassinated a short time ago right before the attack on the World Trade Center. But the king, he is in his 80s, as we met him, it was clear that he has a very sharp mind, but what is more important is that he is surrounded by the most educated and aggressive young Afghans who are willing to come back and provide the expertise needed to govern that country. The king has promised a temporary transitory regime, a regime that will be just a transition regime that after the overthrow of the Taliban would serve for only 2 years, as I am sure the gentleman has explained this already, and then after 2 years, would give way to some sort of a democratic process that would be put in place so that the Afghan people could control their own destiny through the ballot box. With our help in rebuilding their country, we can bring a new era of peace to Afghanistan, and instead of being a springboard to destroy the stability of Central Asia and undermine democracy and freedom in Russia and to be a terrorist haven that would murder millions of Americans, or at least thousands of Americans, Afghanistan can become a civilized part of the world community. We have got that opportunity now. We cannot pass it up. Our State Department, I do not know what has gotten into people's heads. I cannot understand the incompetence of people who are still advocating the policy of keeping the Taliban in power. By the way, we had incompetence as well with our intelligence community who permitted this attack to succeed in the first place. We need to clear out the executive level people in some of these agencies and departments. We need to make sure that we stand firm and that we send a message to the world, if you slaughter Americans, you will pay the price. It is not just rhetoric. We have got to make sure that those words mean something. It has been my privilege to serve on this delegation with Chairman Weldon. Without Chairman Weldon's leadership, we could not have, not only had the transportation but we could not have gotten the support we needed to have such a successful mission. Now we are back and we are part of the debate. It is what we are saying here tonight, and what we said out in our press conference today, and what we will say during our briefings to the senior members of this administration, will play a large role in making sure that the President chooses the right path, the path to long-term peace and tranquility which is the path of strength and courage and not deal-making with tyrants and terrorists. I am very, very grateful to the gentleman from Pennsylvania. I know all of us learned a lot. I think we have accomplished a lot with this journey to Central Asia, to see our friends in Turkey who are standing with us so solidly and to talk to also those people in Russia who want to be our friends, and in the future, build a better future for both our peoples and for the whole world.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at noon on Wednesday, September 19, 2001.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the business in order under the Calendar Wednesday rule be dispensed with on Wednesday next.