The Truth is What Can Save America
Floor Speech
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Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I am on the House floor today to express my thanks to Senator Rand Paul for his 11-hour filibuster of the PATRIOT Act reauthorization on May 31.
I voted against the USA FREEDOM Act, which would have reauthorized the PATRIOT Act, because the NSA spying program allows for the Federal Government to gather bulk private data on law-abiding American citizens, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.
I also commend Senator Paul for his courageous statement a couple of weeks ago. He said: ``ISIS exists and grew stronger because the hawks in our party gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched by ISIS. They''--the hawks in our party--``created these people.''
Unfortunately, Louisiana's Governor, Bobby Jindal, criticized my friend Senator Paul by saying he is ``unsuited to be Commander in Chief.'' It is obvious Governor Jindal does not know about the manipulation of intelligence that led us into the Iraq war.
In a 2006 article for Time magazine, Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, whom I met with shortly after he wrote the article, stated: ``From 2000 until 2002, I was a Marine Corps Lieutenant General and Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness and, therefore, a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq, an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense.''
Later in the article, Lieutenant General Newbold states: ``The distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war led us to the unnecessary war in Iraq.''
The distortion of intelligence, Mr. Speaker, is what led us to that war in Iraq.
Last month, when Governor Jeb Bush justified his brother's war in Iraq, my friend Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, appeared on MSNBC's ``The Ed Show,'' where Wilkerson said: ``The intelligence was fixed, and everyone should know that by now. It was a failure of the intelligence agencies, but it was also a failure of the political people who manipulated the intelligence failure to their own benefit. It destroyed the balance of power in the Gulf and produced what we have today: the chaos we have today; al Qaeda in Iraq--never there until we invaded; ISIS--never there until we invaded; the mess we have in Yemen. Everything that's happening in the Middle East today can be attributed to our having destroyed the balance of power that we had carefully maintained for half a century with the invasion in 2003. It was a disaster.''
Thank you, Lawrence Wilkerson, for telling the truth.
Like Colonel Wilkerson said, everyone knows the intelligence was manipulated to trick the American people and the Congress into thinking the Iraq war was necessary. In fact, it was not, and it created the vacuum of power that exists today and that ISIS takes advantage of.
Also, I would like to say, Mr. Speaker, as I have a poster here of the Air Force removing an American hero from the plane in a flag-draped coffin: because of that unnecessary war in Iraq, we lost over 4,000 Americans; because of that unnecessary war in Iraq, we had over 30,000 wounded.
So in closing, Mr. Speaker, I would first like to thank our men and women in uniform, their families, and the families who gave a child dying for freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I also would like to say: Thank you, Senator Paul, for standing up for the truth. The truth is what can save America. Thank you, Senator Paul.
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