Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on Defining and Focusing on the Fight Against Terrorism

Mr. President, last week, some of our colleagues came to the floor to discuss the President's recent appearance on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, and the propriety of that appearance. I, however, come to the floor today to discuss some of what the President said on the Lincoln, especially with regard to the fight against terrorism. So, Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the fight against terrorism. I rise today to talk about global terrorism - an effort that is surely our highest national security priority. I want to spend a few minutes talking about the fight against terrorism today, Mr. President, because it is not at all clear to me that we are as focused on this mission as we should be. I fear that our mission has become obscured, and our approach unfocused. I also fear that this confused approach will undermine our goal rather than enhance our security.

Mr. President, I had planned to make these remarks even before yesterday's terrible terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia. Early reports indicate that those deplorable attacks killed several, including at least ten Americans. Many more innocent people were wounded. Al Qaeda is strongly suspected to be responsible. Mr. President, of course my heart and all of our hearts go out to all of the families who are grieving today, and to those who are left with terrible uncertainty as they wait to hear news of loved ones. More information will surely be emerging shortly, but Secretary Powell has already pointed out one of the most important conclusions that can be drawn from this incident in Saudi Arabia is that those forces who would have us live in fear have not been destroyed.

Mr. President, I have no doubt that everyone in this chamber was gratified to hear the recent, better news about Pakistan's arrest of several members of an important al Qaeda cell, including a Yemeni man believed to have been involved in the October 2000 attack on the U.S. warship Cole in Yemen. I look forward to more information about this development. But I also look forward to more information about another, related matter.

The President reminded us on the U.S.S. Lincoln that he has pledged that terrorists who attacked America "would not escape the patient justice of the United States." I think that the country expects nothing less. But how many people noticed when, according to reports, 10 men escaped from a prison in Yemen on April 11th - ten men who apparently were being held on charges of involvement in the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 American sailors, including one from my home state of Wisconsin? I want to know. Is this so? If so, how did they escape? Did they have assistance? And, critically, why aren't we hearing more about this? This escape occurred just as our brave troops were entering Baghdad, at least in part in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism. But no one seems to be discussing, at all, this potentially dangerous lapse in Yemen. Did the perpetrators of the murder of 17 Americans on the U.S.S. Cole escape or not? And what does this mean?

Americans pledge everyday to never forget September 11th, 2001. We pledge this to ourselves, to each other, and to the rest of the world. But I fear that the administration and the Congress are losing sight of our most important goals and priorities.

September 11th is invoked in some surprising and, I think, largely unrelated contexts. Sometimes, the very idea of terrorism is used by some on the right and on the left as a politically convenient attack on whomever or whatever they do not agree with. Rhetoric about September 11th and the fight against terrorism seems to be everywhere, and our distinguished colleague, the Senior Senator from West Virginia, raised this very same issue in his remarks last week. But in many ways, the actual business of combating the terrorist organization or organizations responsible for the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, for the horror of September 11th, and now, possibly, for last night's attack in Riyadh, seems to be lost in the shuffle.

Mr. President, a few days ago, from the deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln, our President told the American people that "the Battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001." And polls indicate that a majority of the American people believe that the Saddam Hussein regime was involved in the September 11th attacks. But I have never - not in hearings, not in classified briefings - I have never once heard our officials assert that we have intelligence indicating that is the case.

President Bush was, of course, right to praise our dedicated servicemen and women during that speech, for they have performed their duties with skill and bravery and superb professionalism. I enthusiastically join the President in thanking them, and in welcoming those who are now coming home. But I cannot and will not join in any attempt to blur what must be the necessary and principal focus on the international terrorist threat by too easily merging it with different issues, including the issue of Iraq.

Last October I was not able to support the resolution authorizing the President to use force in Iraq. I felt that, both in terms of the constantly shifting justifications for an invasion and in terms of the mission and the plan for the engagement's aftermath, the administration had not made a case sufficiently compelling for Congress to grant war powers to the President. I had no problem granting such powers to the President to make war on those who attacked this country on September 11th. But Iraq was a different issue - which is of course why it required its own resolution authorizing force. If in fact there was a connection in planning together for the 9-11 attack by Saddam Hussein or his agents and the perpetrators of 9-11 and al Qaeda, then I believe that there was no need for any additional authority. The administration had, and continues to have, all the authority required. But Iraq was and is a different thing, and in fact many of us feared it would be a distraction from the urgent task of fighting terrorism. I said on this floor in October, after the President's speech in Cincinnati, that the administration's arguments regarding Iraq did not "add up to a coherent basis for a new major war in the middle of our current challenging fight against the terrorism of al Qaeda and related organizations."

But of course, a majority of my colleagues in this chamber voted in favor of authorizing the President to use force in Iraq. And we did proceed, and the brave men and women of the United States military answered the call to service and performed brilliantly.

It was certainly my understanding when the Senate voted to authorize the use of force, and it remains my understanding today, that most Senators were convinced by the most compelling argument that the administration put forward - the one relating to Iraq's failure to comply with its obligations to verifiably dismantle and destroy its weapons of mass destruction program. All of us recognized this as a serious issue. But now we are talking less and less about those weapons, it seems, and there is less and less clarity about this matter.

Before returning to the principal issue of the fight against terrorism, let me spend a few minutes on this issue of WMD in Iraq. Mr. President, I raise this issue not in an attempt to revisit the debate about the wisdom of our approach in Iraq, and not because I am searching for a smoking gun. I raise it because I do think that it matters whether or not we find WMD. Most importantly, it matters because if those materials were in the country in the first place and we cannot find them now, that is a security problem. Where did they go? Whose hands are they in? These are obviously very serious questions, and accounting for these materials cannot be written off as some sort of distraction or legalistic irrelevance.

Just yesterday, Mr. President, the New York Times reported that the nuclear expert for the Army's Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha was unaware of any U.S. policy as to how to handle radioactive material that may be found in Iraq - material that could be used to make a "dirty bomb." And on Sunday the Washington Post reported that the group directing the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is "winding down operations" after a host of fruitless missions.

For months, Mr. President, for months I and others asked the administration what is the plan was for securing these weapons. We tried to understand how we would use the intelligence that was shared in the briefing room to quickly secure weapons of mass destruction and the means to make them. And we asked the question for good reason. We were concerned that in the midst of the disorder and disarray likely to accompany military action and the fall of Saddam, WMD could be spirited out of the country, or sold to the highest bidder, compounding the threat to the U.S. rather than eliminating it. We were right to ask about this issue. And today, it appears that either we had a problem with our intelligence, or we had an inadequate plan. Either way, we are talking about a serious problem that should be examined carefully, and one that should not be repeated.

I also think that the issue of weapons of mass destruction matters in terms of how the rest of the world and history will understand this undertaking - and those perceptions and judgements do affect our security and global stability. We cannot afford to have the world believing that the United States will conjure up pretexts to wage wars and overthrow governments around the world at will. That is not who we are, and it is not in our interest to be perceived in that fashion.

Do not misunderstand me - I am not suggesting at all that this was conjured up - there is no doubt that Iraq was not in compliance with Security Council Resolution 1441 when this conflict began. But I think we need to continue to focus on disarmament to keep from muddying the waters with regard to our intentions, and I believe that we should accept credible and qualified international assistance in this regard.

Yes, Mr. President, what the rest of the world thinks surely matters and now turning back to the paramount issue of the fight against terrorism, I believe we have to keep this truth about how we are perceived throughout the rest of the world in mind. Perhaps the most important form of American power projected over the last century has been the power of our ideas and values. If we lose our capacity to lead in that sense, then all of us, all of us in government, will have presided over the greatest loss of power in American history, regardless of how much we spend on our mighty and admirable military forces. And we will have put ourselves at a great disadvantage - likely a decisive and crippling disadvantage - in the fight against terrorism, which is our first national priority, which is our first priority in terms of national security.

So Mr. President, I recognize that many issues are interlinked, that our approach to one policy issue may affect the course of the campaign against terrorism. But Mr. President, there can be no doubt about our primary responsibility and our most important security concern. We should be having a more focused dialogue, and exercising our oversight responsibilities in a more focused way. A tremendous number of questions came to the surface on September 11th. How can we win a war against a shadowy network of non-state actors? How can we define success? How will we know we have been victorious? All of us, Democrats and Republicans, the Congress and the Executive branch, waded through these questions, recognizing that some answers would take time to take shape. And so today many questions remain. Where are we in this fight against terrorism? Our colleague Senator Graham of Florida, one of the most respected members of this body, suggested recently on the Today show that the war on terrorism has been "essentially abandoned over the past year," and that it is "a fundamental mischaracterization" to describe the war in Iraq as part of the fight against global terrorism. Both issues should be the subject of intense focus here in Congress. How are we finding our way in this new kind of conflict? How stable and robust is the multilateral coalition committed to combating terrorism of global reach?

I think the task at hand is difficult enough without obscuring the issues. Recently when Secretary Powell testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he noted that Americans have concluded that terrorism must be eradicated. But, he said, "Some in Europe see it differently. Some see terrorism as a regrettable but inevitable part of society and they want to keep it at arm-length and as low key as possible."

At this point, I am uncertain as to how to interpret this. Are our European partners really unconvinced of the need to fight terrorism? Which partners is he talking about? What steps are they unwilling to take to combat international terrorist organizations? These are real issues and the Secretary is quite right to raise them. But I am left uncertain. Are we conflating policy divergence on Iraq with divergence on international terrorism? Is that what we are talking about?

The President has asserted that "any person involved in committing or planning terrorist attacks against the American people becomes an enemy of this country, and a target of American justice. . . . Any person, organization, or government that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent, and equally guilty of terrorist crimes." But if it is our policy to eradicate terrorist networks of global reach, then what does it mean when U.S. forces sign a cease-fire agreement with a designated foreign terrorist organization, as they did on April 15th with the Iraq-based Iranian organization known as the People's Mujahedeen or more formally as the Mujahedeen Khalq, the MEK? Are we making peace with terrorist organizations? For what purpose; to what end? Is there a question about the way we apply the terrorist organization designation? Now we read that the organization is surrendering weapons to U.S. forces in a reversal of the April 15 decision. What are the terms of this new agreement? The issues are difficult, but the elected representatives of the American people should be working on shaping the answers together, not picking up hints about ad-hoc decisions by scanning the wires.

Mr. President, few would argue with the fact that this administration is intensely secretive. And, in this atmosphere of tightly controlled information, too often the elected representatives of the American people are stifled in our ability to fulfill Congress's very important oversight role. With only vague information at our disposal, it is difficult to assess progress or the wisdom of our policy course. Mr. President, I think the absence of clarity and the absence of data are dangerous. I think it endangers the American people.

Mr. President, the President was right when he said that we have not forgotten the victims of September 11th. We have not, and we cannot. But in the same vein, we must not allow the mission that we accepted in the aftermath of that day to become an ever-shifting idea, one that we can never pin down in order to evaluate our performance and take stock of our needs. So, let us hear less rhetoric and more about disturbing reports, such as the possible escape of the perpetrators of the dastardly attack on the U.S.S. Cole. That surely relates to the fight against terrorism. Mr. President, we cannot permit the fight against terrorism, permit this most serious of issues, this horror that unites all Americans in resistance and resolve, to become a matter of rhetorical convenience. Our national security is at stake. We need clarity, we need focus, and we need candor. The American people deserve nothing less.