Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Authorization Act - Motion to Proceed - Continued

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, now that the results are in, I think it is time to talk again--as we did 5 years ago--about what is happening on what I consider to be the greatest failed foreign policy we have experienced.

When we look around the world and we see what happened and what is going on now--and this may be a narrow opinion--it is a result of the apology tour President Obama took immediately after becoming President of the United States.

I remember standing at this podium at that time and saying you don't go to the Muslim world and say: I will not make a speech until we have the Muslim Brotherhood coming with their required numbers. That was not good. This is a deviation from what we always stood for and that was certainly a slap in the face of our best friends in the Middle East, Israel.

Two weeks ago, three Israeli teenagers were found dead in shallow graves in a West Bank village, and it was such a tragedy, and, of course, reciprocity has taken place since then. Hamas has launched over 365 rockets indiscriminately into the Israeli civilian population. I have to say that when I look at some of the things we have worked on together with Israel--for example, the iron dome has performed very well during that period of time. Also, I will say that Prime Minister Netanyahu responded with some 700 or so airstrikes primarily using F-16s and doing it very well. This started 5 years ago, and we have had unrest in that area ever since then.

The Israeli Defense Minister said this week: ``We are preparing for a battle against Hamas which will not end within a few days.''

Obviously, I strongly support our greatest ally in the Middle East, and so often we do what we can to directly and indirectly continue that support. There has been unrest in Israel for the past 5 or 6 years.

We sent letters to the President some time ago regarding Iraq in 2013. We said when you leave Iraq, be sure to leave the intelligence and the logistics. You cannot just walk out. Yes, we have great trained fighters in the Iraqi security force, but they cannot be totally on their own. They needed to have ISR support. ISR is intelligence and reconnaissance. We have to learn a lesson from this so we don't make the same mistake in Afghanistan. But nonetheless, we did. So now Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists have returned and have overtaken key cities.

ISIS is the most terrifying terrorist group out there. They have taken over towns such as Mosul, Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah.

I have a guy who works for me as a field representative in my State of Oklahoma. His name is Brian Hackler. Prior to the time he came to work for me, he was in the Marines. He was actually deployed twice to Fallujah. If you will remember, Fallujah was the closest thing we had to door-to-door combat like we had in World War II, and we lost a lot of lives.

When I called him, he had not yet heard that we lost Fallujah after they took it over. He actually physically cried. He said, the blood, the sweat, and the tears of all of my friends. He said, we had that secured, and we have now lost it.

We are doing everything we can now to rectify that situation. I am glad the Obama administration is doing what we asked them to do 2 years ago. While we will lose lives, hopefully we can keep the terrorists from having a safe haven in that area.

I am very much concerned about what has happened in Iraq. While the President continues his assessments, it leads me to wonder what the people in our embassy have been doing over there. We are empowering Russia and Iran to lead and become key influences in the region.

Iran reportedly has two battalions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, in Iraq. It is kind of funny. Right now a lot of people are saying Iran is our friend. Let's keep in mind that our intelligence determined quite a number of years ago that Iran will have the weapon and the delivery system for that weapon by 2015. Well, 2015 is on us now, so I think if anyone out there is naive enough to think we can depend on Iran to help our situation, they are sadly mistaken.

We have a very serious problem now in Iraq. While the United States has most recently provided some equipment intelligence, this is what we should have been doing and preparing for 2 years ago. Since January, Prime Minister Maliki has asked for help, and the President waited until it became a dire crisis.

Then there is Afghanistan. We know what is happening in Afghanistan. Currently the Presidential election in Afghanistan has taken place. The primary took place and the runoff took place, but the problem is it is obviously a sham. The election is not an honest, transparent election. I believe there is no greater threat that can be imposed on us than by allowing the people of Afghanistan to look at an election and find out it is a rigged election.

I will give an example. While we have not taken sides in this country between Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, I personally would fall down on the side of Abdullah. It seems as though all of the real problems in that election ended up benefiting Ghani as opposed to Abdullah.

For example, in one province--it was Wardak Province--17,000 votes were cast in April. Now the runoff came along and 170,000 votes were cast. If you stop to think about it, that is mathematically impossible, so we know that is rigged. While everyone agrees that Ghani's support is in the rural areas, I would defy anyone to come down to the Senate floor and point out an election that has ever taken place where you have a much larger percentage of rural votes as opposed to urban votes. There is a logical reason--rural voters have to walk a long way to get to the polls and some voters can't get there as easily.

The results of the runoff: There was a 75-percent turnout from the rural areas as opposed to a 24-percent turnout in the urban areas. That couldn't happen. We have to have an audit. I think everybody agrees we have to have an audit, but it has to be a thorough and transparent audit. We have to be sure the Afghan people, when they determine the outcome of this election, know it was a legitimate election so they can rejoice in it.

I think most everyone knows a few hours ago Abdullah declared victory in spite of the fact that the first count I described showed him as losing.

We have this problem right now. It is a problem I hang on President Obama and his administration because we told them in advance what needed to be done to avoid this type of situation from happening.

We are now looking at a situation there that is one where we can act now and preclude something from happening there and is happening as we speak in Iraq.

Remember what took place in terms of the five Taliban terrorists who were released. We thought--and I felt all the time--that was a very controversial issue. A lot of people wanted to close Gitmo, and I have strong feelings against that. We need to have that facility and that resource, which I will explain in a moment.

When the President turned the five Taliban leaders loose--these were the most brutal and heinous of all the terrorists who were in Gitmo. There were five of them. When they found out, they were celebrating. One of the terrorists released was referred to as the toughest of all of them. One of the top people who was on the other side of the Taliban said in response to the release of the terrorists that this is the Taliban rejoicing that the President has turned loose five of the terrorists who were incarcerated in Gitmo. They said it is like putting 10,000 Taliban fighters into battle on the side of jihad. Now the Taliban have the right to lead them into the final moments before victory in Afghanistan.

We all knew the President should not have done it. Anticipating that the President was going to do this, the last bill we passed before the current one, which is on here, we put language in there anticipating that the President, in order to reach his goal and ultimately close Gitmo, might take some of the worst individuals and turn them loose. We put language in there from section 1035(d) of the Defense Authorization Act.

He said the President had to notify us 30 days in advance if he was going to release or make any transfers from Gitmo. He blatantly broke that law and did not do it. Everyone was on our side in terms of why we should not let this, what they referred to as the ``Taliban dream team,'' be turned loose. Right now, supposedly, there is some kind of a deal made where they are in Qatar for a period of a year, but even if they were able to enforce that--stop and think about the theory behind this. The President is saying in essence we are going to turn you guys loose but you have to promise not to kill Americans for a period of a year. Because it says for 1 year they have to remain under some level of control by a country that hasn't even told us how they are going to do that. Consequently, I have no doubt they are free to go anywhere they want.

We had reviews conducted by the Department of Defense, Department of State, the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, the National Intelligence, and all the rest of them saying these five people are too dangerous to release. Leon Panetta, who was the Secretary of Defense at that time, made the same statement. He said these people are too dangerous, as did General Dunford. By the way, General Dunford, who is the commander in Afghanistan, was not even notified in advance this was going to take place.

So we have all of these circumstances that are going on right now. We have the law that was broken. My feeling has always been, as we are getting down midway into the President's second term, looking at what he is going to have for a legacy, one of his desired legacies would be to close Gitmo. He has talked about that for a long period of time. I think the American people have now caught on, because there is a poll on June 13 by Gallup that shows 66 percent of Americans oppose the closing of Gitmo. So this has changed now.

Why is it important? There is no place else anywhere in the world where we can put these enemy combatants. These guys are not criminals; they are enemy combatants. They are terrorists. And when the President came up with the original idea of putting them into our prison system, we had to go and make sure everyone was aware they are terrorists and not criminals. By definition, they teach other people to be terrorists. If there is anything we don't want in our prison system, it is for all of those criminals to learn how to become terrorists.

We have had Gitmo since 1903. It is one of the few good deals we have wherein we pay a little over $4,000 a year for that facility. We should stop and see the advantages we have in Gitmo as opposed to putting them someplace else where they can either get out through jail breaks, as has been happening, or if they were to be intermingled in the United States with our prison population.

One of the places, incidentally, that the President first wanted to send the Gitmo inmates was to Fort Sill in my State of Oklahoma. I went to Fort Sill and they said, We don't have the capability here to get this done. So what we want to do is--in fact, the lady who runs the facility at Fort Sill said, I don't know what it is that individuals don't understand. She said she had three deployments to Gitmo. It is the perfect institution for these people. They are well taken care of. The Red Cross and everyone who goes down there says, Yes, the health facilities are better than they have ever had before, the food is the best they have ever had. So it is a facility we need to continue to use.

BENGHAZI

Lastly, before I completely run out of time, I want to jump ahead a little bit and mention Benghazi. I think it is important for us to understand there are four people in our system who advise the President of the United States. We have the CIA Director who, at the time this happened in Benghazi, was John--anyway, the CIA Director; the Director of National Intelligence, that was James Clapper; the Secretary of Defense, who was Leon Panetta; and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey. All of those people said they knew unequivocally, in Benghazi, when they bombed the annex, it was an organized terrorist activity. I think right now people are realizing that was the real issue. It is not who is responsible for it; it is the fact that we knew it was going to happen. Our Ambassador, who was killed, gave us ample warning for well over a month and a half before it took place that it was going to take place.

So I think we understand now why Gitmo is important and we understand the whole reason this is taking place. I am certainly hoping we can stick together and make sure we don't end up losing one of the most valuable facilities we have in this day of terrorists by having to close it down.

We have a serious problem. I think if there is anything we should learn from this, it is, No. 1, we have a valuable institution called Gitmo. No. 2, what is important is that we don't let happen this year what happened last year. Last year we didn't get the NDAA bill until December. If we had gone to December 31, there would not have been hazard pay and a number of bad things would have happened, but we ended up finally at the last minute getting it done. I have talked to both the majority and minority leaders about the advisability of bringing the NDAA to the floor of the Senate, and consequently we now have invited Members to send their amendments down. We have almost 100 amendments already on the floor. So I am hoping during the next week, we can come down with a specific date--hopefully before the August recess--where we can bring up the NDAA and let the people know who go over there risking their lives that we are going to be here to support them. We are going to be putting together an NDAA bill.

I know my time has expired. I will not suggest the absence of a quorum quite yet because no one has arrived.

Going back to Benghazi, everybody had the information on Benghazi. I neglected to mention we also had General Hamm come in and testify before us, again, that he was one of several who was fully aware of what happened.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source