The Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE, FOREIGN OPERATIONS AND RELATED PROGRAMS APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - June 20, 2007)

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Mr. KIRK. I want to thank Mr. Wolf and our chairwoman for building a bipartisan bill that I think we all should support.

This legislation funds critical programs that advance our values overseas, it supports key allies of the United States, and it meets many of the humanitarian aspirations of the American people to do our part to relieve human suffering.

As a staffer, I helped found the global program on AIDS in 1985, and in this bill we have record funding to accomplish a great humanitarian mission of fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

In this legislation, we support our best ally in the Middle East, Israel, now caught between two satellites of Iran: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. In this bill, I helped sponsor language that increased the audit responsibilities over UNRWA programs in the West Bank and Gaza, a $2 million audit especially to look at incidents in which an al Qaeda cell was allowed to form in a UNRWA camp now bedeviling the Government of Lebanon, and where we saw Gaza Islamic University, a U.S.-funded foreign assistance recipient who is running in its chemistry lab a cell of Iranian military officers training students in the chemistry of making suicide bombs.

In this bill, I also helped fund increasing assistance in the Frontier Autonomous Tribal area of Pakistan. This is a program of almost theologic importance to the people of the United States because it is in north and south Waziristan and surrounding areas, that we think the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, is hiding. And with this $20 million assistance package, we will bring new links and new friends in this region to help complete the arrest and bringing to justice of Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden for the murder of 3,000 Americans.

In this bill we also preserved new funding in fiscal year 2007 to help Christian communities in Iraq. There are still 600,000 Christians in Iraq, now concentrating in the Nineveh plain.

The $10 million designation we do there is a great help to these communities.

This bill makes a major forward step also in supporting a new democracy program for Syria, that one day that murderous and pernicious dictatorship may one day be replaced; and also backing women's rights programs in Iran, another country in need of a serious democracy make-over.

Lastly, this bill continues funding for Radio Free Asia and a voice supporting Western values, democracy, and human rights in a critical part of the world.

Before I was elected to Congress, I was a staff member with this subcommittee. I want to thank Christine Kojac and Rob Blair, Mike Ringler and Nisha Desai, Clelia Alvarado, Steve Marchese, Craig Higgins and Michele Sumilas, Mark Lopes, Lucy Heenan, Molly Miller, and my staff member, Richard Goldberg, for their work on this legislation.

In sum, this appropriations bill is bipartisan. It is supporting the interests of the United States, and it is strongly backed by our allies. It makes peace more likely and achieves important humanitarian goals of the United States.

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