Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROGERS of Michigan. Thank you very much.
And I congratulate Mr. Reed on the amendment. I think it is wholly appropriate that we commend all of the intelligence services and our elite Special Forces who participated in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. And it really wasn't a victory over one person or one leader, but a blow to the entire network, to the belief system of those that believe violence, killing innocent men, women and children of all religions, is a way to promote your political gains.
If you think about the incredible accomplishment that happened after, and started really after 9/11, we had to make up for huge gaps in humint intelligence. And through the help of this body and this Congress and President Bush and then on to President Obama, we began to reassemble the abilities and capabilities of our intelligence community. Through interrogations, information was developed about how al Qaeda works and we understood its logistics, how it finances and recruits and moves people, how it recruits people to do suicide bombings, how it plans operations. All of that came in the early days.
Then 5 years ago through an integration, there was a little piece of information, a nickname applied to an alias with someone who was hanging around other folks who were probably using nicknames applied to an alias who may be a courier for Osama bin Laden. And through all of our collection agencies, signals intelligence, satellite intelligence, other forms of intelligence, a case was slowly and surely developed that finally allowed, with a few lucky breaks and some great determination from our intelligence community, the ability to locate the place where they believed Osama bin Laden was hiding out. Once that was determined, they brought in our Special Forces community, who did an exceptional and superb job in bringing him to justice in what was a difficult situation.
So I want to compliment Mr. Reed and Mr. Grimm for bringing this amendment forward to give a small sense of recognition to all of the work on behalf of the entire intelligence and Special Forces community, and the soldiers too who risked their lives in holding ground in places like Afghanistan to reestablish security there so that al Qaeda won't find safe haven there when they leave. All of those things and all of those capabilities are incredibly important. All of that service and all of that sacrifice led to last Sunday's successful event.
Let us not forget, al Qaeda may be hurt, they have lost their operational and inspirational leader; but they are not down. This is not the time to back off. This is not the time to say that we should do other things or maybe we shouldn't be places at all. This is the time to step on the gas and break the back of al Qaeda as a threat to the world as we move forward.
Again, I want to congratulate Mr. Reed and Mr. Grimm, and I wholeheartedly support this amendment.
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Mr. ROGERS of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, it's laudable that they would commend the men and women of the intelligence community. We certainly thank them for that. We just did that a few minutes ago. That would certainly qualify for the department of redundancy as we would move forward.
The one that I find mystifying, we came so close, so close, to finally making this a bipartisan product. So the first part was great. You said thank you very much to the folks and hid behind the great work of the men and women of the intelligence community. But then you blow up the entire intelligence bill by prioritizing of funding.
Two things that does. One, it blows up the work, the framework. There's a priority framework in the intelligence community that sets these standards and tells the intelligence community, here are your priorities, given place, given region, given resources. That happens already. So you basically say, well, we don't believe that you ought to be doing that. We should be doing that. Wrong answer.
The second part of it is we have a classified annex and it talks about very important investments that we in a bipartisan way have worked to get to--code breaking, cybersecurity. What you are saying is cybersecurity isn't as important. You think this is more important. That is not for us to determine.
We just went through months and months of work to tell the intelligence community to put the classified annex together to say, here are the intelligence priorities as we go forward. This bill is intended to gut the work of the last few months that we have just done in a bipartisan way.
I tell you, it's a little frustrating knowing that we came that close, Mr. Speaker, to getting a bipartisan product that represents the values of the intelligence community, the resources that they need, and, yes, says thank you to the men and women who will never be known for the work they do to keep America safe.
I recommend a strong rejection of this amendment.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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