Ted Strickland

Mr. STRICKLAND

Mr. STRICKLAND. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. STRICKLAND. It is almost incomprehensible that the person who was responsible for attacking our country, who has claimed responsibility, who has boasted in claiming that responsibility is a person who is free tonight. He ran and he hid, and the President does not even utter his name. It is as though we have forgotten that the real enemy, the real architect of the attack upon our country was Osama bin Laden. He has been referred to as Osama bin Forgotten, and it is quite sad to me that we have not been able to bring to justice the leading terrorist in this world. As we contemplate a possible terror attack on this country, there has been discussions that it may happen before the election, that it may happen around the inauguration of the next President. We are not afraid that that attack is going to be directed and masterminded by Saddam Hussein. He is in jail. We are concerned about al Qaeda. We are concerned about the terror network that was established by Osama bin Laden. We are concerned about Osama bin Laden and his effect. Just this week we heard from our military leaders in Afghanistan that they believe Osama bin Laden is actively calling the shots, even today, and yet, as I repeat, during the Republican Convention in New York, with all of the discussion of September 11, it was as if the person responsible for September 11 was unknown. The President did not utter his name during a 63-minute speech. This is the man that we should be going after. He is the one responsible for killing nearly 3,000 of our citizens. He is the one that is heading up the al Qaeda terror network. He is free tonight somewhere on this Earth. We do not know for sure, but I want to tell my colleague I think we would have had this man in custody if we had not diverted attention and resources and our intelligence apparatus away from the hunting of Osama bin Laden to Iraq.

Mr. STRICKLAND. Every day, sadly, tragically, we are losing soldiers in Iraq. It is almost as if it is no longer news when we lose one or two or three or seven at a time. It is almost as if we have become numb to that reality. We are up to well over 1,000 now. Senator McCain has indicated that he thinks we could be in Iraq for 10 to 20 years.

Mr. STRICKLAND. If I can speak to that issue.

Mr. STRICKLAND. The President frequently says we have this coalition; and it is true that there are a number of countries, for one reason or another, some of them maybe with very noble reasons, who support us in our policy there. But the fact is that we have somewhere around 135,000, 135,000 American troops there. The next country with the largest number of troops is Great Britain; and they have, I believe, less than 6,500. Most of the other countries have a few hundred troops. It is the American troops that is the target. We are losing the lives. We are paying the bill. About $200 billion thus far.

Mr. STRICKLAND. If we paid for it.

Mr. STRICKLAND. If I could reclaim my time, Mr. Speaker, during that debate on the $87 billion, the vast majority of the people in this country, according to public opinion polls, felt that we should provide assistance in the form of a grant, a grant that would be paid back to our citizens once Iraq was stabilized. And the gentleman is right, the President said that if we did that that he would veto the bill.

Mr. STRICKLAND. That is right.

Mr. STRICKLAND. Oh, absolutely.

Mr. STRICKLAND. Well, as someone said, it does not make sense for us to be opening firehouses in Iraq while we are closing firehouses and laying off firefighters in this country. But the fact is this $87 billion vote is being used in the most political way, and there have been accusations that somehow when Senator Kerry opposed that, that he was opposing body armor for our troops. I would just like to point out something that I have shared with my friends here in this Chamber before. The war started in March of 2003. We did not have that vote on the $87 billion until months after the war started. Our troops were initially sent into battle without body armor. And that was a decision made by Secretary Rumsfeld and ultimately the responsibility of the President as the Commander in Chief. We sent our troops into battle without body armor. Now, that is a fact that cannot be disputed. And it took the Pentagon one full year, from March of 2003 to March of 2004, to provide me with a letter stating that finally, after a full year, our troops had been equipped with body armor. I questioned how many of our troops were unnecessarily injured or wounded or how many lost their lives simply because this administration sent them into combat without body armor. That was not a money problem; it was a planning problem. And the letters that I received from Secretary Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Myers, verified that it was a supply problem. They did not order that equipment in a timely manner. Months passed leading up to this war when those orders could have been placed. That body armor could have been available at the time the war started, but it took 12 full months for this administration to make sure that our troops were fully protected with body armor. And even tonight, now, Mr. Speaker, we have troops in Iraq driving around in Humvees that are not armored in a way that will provide them at least some protection from these roadside bombs that are maiming and killing so many of our soldiers on a daily basis.

Mr. STRICKLAND. If the gentleman will allow me to reclaim my time, it seems, and I think this is verified by the September 11 Commission, that al Qaeda has gone from being an identifiable group to becoming a philosophy and an idea and a movement. And the fact is our policies have spread terror around the world. We now have Taliban/al Qaeda operatives in Iraq. There is no evidence that they were there before we invaded that country. There are now huge cities in Iraq referred to as ``no-go zones,'' where our troops cannot enter those cities. They are under the control of al Qaeda and Taliban operatives. Huge geographic areas of Iraq that we liberated, supposedly, are now under the control of terrorists, terrorists that prior to our invasion of Iraq were not in that country. We have created a breeding ground for those who hate us. We may be there 10 years, 20 years, no one knows. How many more deaths are going to result from these failed policies? We have already had over a thousand. Ohio lost two soldiers last week, a 19-year-old man and a 36-year-old man. How many more? Now we stand here and talk about this. Some may wonder why go over history, why talk about past failings and past circumstances.

Mr. STRICKLAND. Because the same people who have brought us to where we are tonight, who have created this debacle that we face in Iraq, the same people who have made the decisions which have led to this terrible tragedy and loss of life and horrible injuries, these same people want to remain in charge of the decisionmaking apparatus of this government. I think it is fair to ask: What will they do next? They have acted in the most naive manner. The Vice President and others indicated that we would be welcomed into Iraq. Just yesterday we had helicopters that fired on a group of Iraqis that were celebrating around a dysfunctional piece of U.S. military equipment. Many of those people laughing and dancing around were children. They were children. You could see their pictures, they could not have been more than 10 or 12 years of age. What are we doing in Iraq, we are creating hatred toward our government. That hatred is spreading around the world. That does not make us safer. I believe the President has an obligation to stand up and admit mistakes, but there is a difference between an irrational pursuit of an ideology that is failing. What we need are mature leaders that will act upon a rational basis to secure friends around this world and help us extricate ourselves from these terrible circumstances.

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to yield to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) but before I do, I would like to say the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) absolutely spoke the truth when he said this Nation will make a decision on November 2 regarding whether or not they want to tolerate the continuation of our current policy or whether or not they think we should change course. The President says we either have to stay the course or cut and run. Well, I think there is a third possibility and that is to change course. The fact is if there are mothers and dads listening to us tonight who may feel disconnected from this war, who may feel they have no part of it, they do not know anyone who is participating in it, they do not know anyone who has lost a life or been seriously injured, but if they have a child, they should listen because if this administration continues its current foreign policy, I believe it will be mandatory that we impose a military draft. We cannot maintain our personnel numbers with this current foreign policy without imposing a draft. We can no longer continue forever to keep our reservists and our national guardsmen on active status. We cannot withdraw soldiers from all over this world simply because of what is happening in Iraq. So every American should be engaged in the same kind of discussion we are having tonight. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee).

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, the first death was too many, and every death that has followed has been too many because for that individual and that individual's loved ones, it will absolutely be the most devastating experience they will ever endure. I do not think we should develop that type of amnesia. The second amnesia that I think is very dangerous to us is to some degree the executive branch is developing amnesia about who actually attacked us, which was al Qaeda. You have talked about this earlier, I believe. But we cannot have the Commander in Chief leading us in this war to preserve our security and not identify who the enemy was that actually attacked us and go a year now without identifying the name of the person who is Osama bin Laden that the President refuses to even say. That lack of leadership has infected to some degree our efforts to track down and cut off al Qaeda. Let me give you an example in the real world how that is. I found out a week ago that we have more employees in the Department of Treasury tracking down American tourists who go to Cuba than we do Treasury officials trying to cut off the money going to Osama bin Laden. What kind of prioritization is that? Why have we developed amnesia about how deadly al Qaeda is? Another piece of amnesia. We have loose nukes all over the former Soviet Union, all this fissionable material that we know al Qaeda wants to get. But we cannot get the cooperation of the executive branch to put money into the system we have for vacuuming up those loose nukes and keeping them out of the hands of al Qaeda. Why has this amnesia happened? It is pretty clear. The executive branch took their eye off the ball of Osama bin Laden and put it on Iraq. And this amnesia is a more dangerous situation rather than a less dangerous one. Let me just suggest why I think the President has been successful to some degree in conflating Iraq with what happened on September 11. That is, that we have all sort of, I think, gone down a little primrose path calling this the war on terror. I am not sure that is the right nomenclature for us to use for this reason. It is really important to realize who your enemy is. Our enemy is a person and a group, not a tactic. Terror is a tactic. It is not a country, it is not a group, it is not an individual. It is a tactic. Calling this a war on terror frankly is a little bit like calling our response to Pearl Harbor a war on torpedo planes. Torpedo planes were a tactic. They were not the enemy. We need to call this what it is, a war on al Qaeda and a war on some fundamentalist Islamic movements that are way out of the mainstream of Islamic belief in this world and have perverted that faith and taken advantage of it for their nihilistic ends, and that is an enemy we need to keep in our sights.

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friends for joining me for another hour of Iraq Watch. I look forward to continuing this next week.

Mr. STRICKLAND

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, if it were permissible under the rules of this House, I would call upon the Vice President to apologize to the American people for making the following outrageous statement. Yesterday he said, ``It is absolutely essential that 8 weeks from today on November 2 we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice, the danger is we will get hit again.'' Does the Vice President not understand that we have parents with sons and daughters fighting in Iraq who are members of the Democratic Party and who support Senator Kerry for President? Does he not understand that at this very moment and at the moment he spoke, there were Democratic soldiers in Iraq fighting for his freedom, as well as the freedom of all of us? It is shameful, shameful, that the Vice President would interject such a divisive bit of rhetoric into the public discourse in this country. Has he no shame?

Mr. STRICKLAND

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

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Washington State for yielding. It is a sad fact that just yesterday we observed the 1,000th death of a soldier in Iraq, and that is a tragedy. When you think of what that means, not only to the individual lives that have been lost, but when you think of the pain and tragedy of the families who are left behind, the moms and dads, the children, the loved one's wives, husbands and so on, they will have to endure the rest of their lives without their loved one. I sometimes talk to people about this war, and they seem sort of uninvolved. The war seems to be something that is distant to them. They know of no one who is currently serving in Iraq. They know of no one who has been lost or terribly injured over there, but I say to them, if you are a mother or a father and you have a child, a son or a daughter, especially a teenage son or a daughter, you had better be paying attention to what is happening in terms of this war. Senator McCain has said publicly that it is possible this war will require our soldiers to be in Iraq for 10 or 20 years, and if the administration currently in power and the people who are advising this President remain in power and they continue the same kind of foreign policy that we currently have, I believe it is inevitable that we will have to impose a military draft. So every mom and dad who does not want to see their son or daughter sent to fight this war in Iraq ought to be paying attention. I would just like to take a few moments to share with my colleagues here, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel), and the gentleman from Washington State (Mr. Inslee), and my friend, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt). We hear a lot of talk, and there have been a lot of political charges about the $87 billion supplemental bill. The President recently made the accusation, I believe at his speech in New York, implying that when Senator John Kerry voted against the $87 billion, he was voting to deprive our troops of body armor, and so I would just like to share the truth about the body armor issue. I would remind my friends that the war began in March of 2003. March of 2003. And at that time, long before there was ever a vote on the $87 billion, in fact 7 or 8 months before that vote occurred, this administration, this President, this Secretary of Defense sent our American soldiers into Iraq in that initial assault, an invasion of Iraq, without protective body armor. The body armor that I am talking about is the interceptor vest, the body armor that was first available, I believe, in 1998. It is a high- tech piece of equipment. It is made of Kevlar, with ceramic plates. These ceramic plates have the ability to stop an AK-47 round. We knew, because they were used in the Afghanistan conflict, which was the war on terror, by the way, we knew that they were used in Afghanistan and that they protected American lives. The Pentagon has indicated that a number of American soldiers were probably saved because they had interceptor vests, this body armor. When we sent our soldiers into Iraq in March of 2003, thousands of them went into that country without this protective body armor. And I repeat, this was months before the $87 billion vote on the supplemental request. Now, last September, in September of 2003, I received a letter from a young soldier in Baghdad. He happened to be a West Point graduate, a gung-ho Army guy. He said to me in that letter, Congressman, I am so proud of what we are trying to do here, of the effort we are making to help these people. But he said to me in that letter, Congressman, the men that are serving with me are asking me why they do not have this body armor for protection, this interceptor vest. That was in September of 2003. I wrote Secretary Rumsfeld a letter that September, and I asked him how many of our soldiers had been killed or unnecessarily wounded because they were not protected with body armor. I asked him to commit to us that he would not make this protection available to foreign troops until all of our American troops were protected, because there were reports in the press that we were making these interceptor vests available to some of the foreign troops before our troops were equipped. And I asked him if he could give me a date certain when all of our troops would have this protection. Now, that letter I sent to Secretary Rumsfeld in September of 2003, long before the vote on the $87 billion supplemental. I received a letter on October 27 from General Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said that Secretary Rumsfeld had asked him to respond to my letter. And in his letter to me, General Myers said that they expected that our troops would be equipped with this body armor by December of 2003. Lo and behold, the very next day, on October 28, I received a letter from Secretary Rumsfeld's chief of staff; and in his letter he said it would probably be November of 2003. So even Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers were not able to agree on the issue. In regard to my question about how many troops had been killed or wounded without this protection, I was told in the letter from Secretary Rumsfeld that they did not collect that information on the battlefield, so he could not answer that question for me. Well, at least, I thought, I can believe what Secretary Rumsfeld has said and General Myers, that our troops will be protected by November or December. Lo and behold, before we left this city for the Christmas holidays, I am talking about last year, the Pentagon held a briefing; and in that briefing a high-level Pentagon spokesperson told us that our troops would probably not be equipped with this body armor until January of 2004. Now, I emphasize the war started in March of 2003. Now they are saying it is going to be January of 2004 before they are equipped. So I wrote a second letter to Secretary Rumsfeld in mid-January of this year. I reminded him that he had failed to keep his word regarding having our troops protected with this body armor by November, and I asked him once again to please step up to the plate, accept responsibility, and provide this equipment to our troops. Finally, in March of 2004, one entire year after the war started, the war started in March of 2003, finally in March of 2004 I get a letter from the Pentagon telling me that at that point all of our troops had been given this lifesaving protection. It was not Senator Kerry that made the decision to send our troops into combat without this protection. The responsibility rests with George W. Bush, the President; with Secretary Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. That is where the responsibility rests. And it troubles me that the President would stand before the American people and fail to accept responsibility. The President talks a lot about accepting personal responsibility, and yet he is trying to shift the blame for our troops going without this vital equipment, when it was the President and the Secretary of Defense that sent our troops into battle. And for those who may listen to this discussion and question me, I would just urge all Americans to check with the soldiers that are or have been in Iraq. Ask them how long they went without this protection. Ask them how many of their friends were injured, some of them killed, unfortunately killed because they were not adequately protected. That is the truth. I have the letters that I sent to Secretary Rumsfeld and the letters that I received from him, which I would be happy to make available to every Member of this Chamber to verify what I have shared with my colleagues this evening. Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. STRICKLAND. If the gentleman will yield for one moment, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. STRICKLAND. In the letters I received from Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers, there was never a mention of a shortage of money. They said there was a shortage of materials, which means that there was a failure to plan ahead. We knew months before this war began that we would likely need this body armor, and yet the plans were not made. The fact is that initially they were not even wanting to give the body armor to all the troops. In the letters that I received from General Myers, he said that the body armor was initially planned only for the troops that were on foot. If a soldier was in a Humvee or in some other mechanized vehicle, they were not even issued body armor, and there were no plans to issue body armor to these. Only those who were foot soldiers, basically, were to be provided with this protection. Now, as my colleagues know, many of our soldiers that have been so terribly injured are injured as a result of being in vehicles and there are explosions and other kinds of artillery fire. This body armor could have protected many of them. I am afraid some were wounded unnecessarily.

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, the President frequently says, I will not allow our troops to be under the control of foreign commanders. Well, that may be technically correct, but what the gentleman has pointed out is the fact that our troops are serving at the behest of the Interim Iraqi Government. They are being told, you cannot go into this city, you can go into this city, you can go there, you cannot go there. It troubles me that young men and women from my district, from southern and southeastern Ohio, many of them have probably never traveled very far from home ever, are now in a foreign land, and they are basically serving the needs of the Iraqi Interim Government rather than looking out for the international interests of this Nation.

Mr. STRICKLAND. I just want to point out that the person who was responsible for the attack on this country was Osama bin Laden. He has taken credit for that. He has boasted to the international community, to the world, that he was responsible for the attack upon our country. The President stood right at that podium and he said, Osama bin Laden can run, but he cannot hide. Well, he ran and thus far he has hidden. Osama bin Laden is somewhere free on the face of this Earth tonight planning the next attack upon our country. So the person who was responsible for attacking us has gone free and we have diverted our resources to Iraq, costing 1,000 of our soldiers' lives, 6 or 7,000, I guess nearly 7,000 injured now. And Osama bin Laden is a free man tonight.

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) would yield, what we have here is a situation where we have lost 1,000 of our troops, nearly 7,000 injuries, $200 billion has been spent, and we are in effect giving over Iraq to the bad guys. The President is not willing to admit it, but when we have huge cities and large geographic areas in Iraq where American soldiers cannot even enter, it seems to me that we are capitulating, that we are giving in and giving over this country that we have shed blood to try to liberate. I would just like to say something, though. I know our time is nearly coming to an end. We have talked about several things here. What we have talked about I think can be characterized as miscalculation. That is the word the President used. He said he miscalculated. He miscalculated, and 1,000 soldiers have died. He miscalculated, and almost 7,000 soldiers have been injured. He miscalculated; over $200 billion of the taxpayers' resources have been spent there. But this is what I would like to just emphasize in my closing remarks. The only people sacrificing really for this war are the soldiers who are fighting and risking their lives and the families back here at home who love them and who worry about them. They are the only ones sacrificing. None of us here in this Chamber are sacrificing, or over in the Senate Chamber, or down there at the White House. We do not have sons and daughters fighting this war. I think there may be two Members out of the 535 Members of the House and Senate with a child that is an Active-Duty soldier, and I do not know how many at the White House. I doubt if there are many, if any at all. And yet it is easy, it is easy, under those circumstances to talk tough, to say we will pay any price. We are not paying a price. We are not even paying for this war. The cost of this war is being passed on to the children and the grandchildren that will follow us. They are the ones being asked to pay the cost of this war. What did the President asked us to do to sacrifice for this war? He told us to go shopping. He told us to go shopping. Where is the sacrifice other than those who are at this very moment risking their lives for us, the moms and dads who are grieving and will grieve for the rest of their lives over the loss of their son or daughter, the husbands and the wives and the children who will live out the rest of their lives without their loved one because of the miscalculation of this administration and their unwillingness to even recognize what they have done? That is what bothers me. We all should be sacrificing and sharing in the sacrifice, but we are not being asked to do so. Go out and live our life. Go shopping, go to the ballgames, spend money, do what we want to do, and let someone else's kid fight this war for the Iraqi Interim Government. That is totally unacceptable.

Mr. STRICKLAND. If the gentleman will yield for a moment, I remember being in the Chamber that night of the State of the Union address and looking up there and seeing Mr. Chalabi. I believe Mr. Chalabi was fairly close to Vice President Dick Cheney. Now, the accusations are, as the gentleman says, and they are credible accusations, yet to be proven but under investigation, that Mr. Chalabi got information from a member of this administration, from the Pentagon, took that information and shared it with Iran. Iran, this country that we all now recognize is developing nuclear weapons, probably a much greater threat to this country directly than Iraq ever was, and it is under investigation that this man took information and shared it with Iran. If that proves to be true, that is a terribly, terribly serious thing that has happened.

Mr. STRICKLAND

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, here we go again contemplating the passage of another free trade agreement before we have done the basic reforms that we need to do to protect the American company, the American workers, the American community. The truth is we need a moratorium on any further trade agreements until we reach a political consensus in this country about what those agreements are going to be like. For example, there is such inconsistency in the decisions we make in this body. Are people aware that we cannot go visit Cuba as free American citizens? And the administration has just recently decided that those who live in this country with relatives in Cuba can only go there every 10 years to visit their loved ones. Why? Well, because Cuba is a communist country. Fidel Castro is an authoritarian dictator. And, yet, we are encouraging free trade with China. We want our citizens to travel to China. We want our companies to invest in China. The last time I knew or heard, China was a communist country, it was authoritarian, it was a country that routinely violates human rights, puts those of religious faith in prison. Why the inconsistency? Why the inconsistency? Now, my friends talk about how we are going to sell all of the wheat, agricultural products to Morocco. Those who like these free trade agreements enjoy talking about all of the products we are going to export. They never talk about all the products that are being flooded, poured into this country. Every day that passes, this country has a $1.5 billion trade deficit, every day, $1.5 billion. I have here a copy of the economic report of the President. He submitted this and transmitted it to Congress in February of this year. His signature is on this economic report. I think that makes him responsible for what is inside it. On page 25 of that report under a section titled ``International Trade and Finance'' are these words: ``When a good or a service is produced at lower cost in another country, it makes sense to import it rather than to produce it domestically.'' I read it again for those who may have thought they were unable to believe their ears. In the President's economic report to the Nation are these words: ``When a good or a service is produced at lower cost in another country, it makes sense to import it rather than to produce it domestically.'' I ask Mr. Don Evans, Secretary of Commerce, reported to be one of the President's closest personal friends, if he would give me a list of the products that cannot be produced at lower cost in another country, a country like China where they use slave labor, where they violate human rights. We need to wake up in this country. The American people need to demand that the President and those of us who serve in this Chamber put their needs first.