Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, our most important duty as Members of Congress is to ensure our Nation's security. National security is the single-most essential purpose of government. All of the other blessings of our liberty flow from it, our strength and vitality as a people depend upon it and, our economy and our way of life are reinforced by it.
A strong, bipartisan tradition has been at the core of America's national security policymaking for much of our history. A succession of American Presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy, guided this Nation through two world wars and some of the tensest days of the Cold War. Their leadership was based on asserting America's power in a way that advanced the ideals of our Founders and which made America a beacon to millions of people who were suffering under fascism and communism.
Most importantly, these men knew the limits of any one nation's ability, and they saw the wisdom of marshalling our strengths with that of other freedom-loving people, and they listened to the counsel of these allies abroad and Members of both parties here at home.
Harry Stimson, who served as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of War throughout the Second World War, was a Republican. Harry Truman cooperated with a Republican Congress to pass the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, which were instrumental in rebuilding postwar Europe and halting Soviet expansion.
But unlike these giants of the 20th century, who put the Nation's security before chauvinism or partisanship, the current administration has too often believed that it had all the answers and did not need to pay attention to the ideas of others.
This refusal to listen to other voices and excessively partisan and ideological approach has resulted in an America that is more isolated than it should be and less safe than it needs to be. Around the world, among nations that should be our strong allies, we are often seen less as a force for good in the world, and this has jeopardized the cooperation that we need in the war on terror.
In Iraq, a stubborn refusal to commit enough troops to save the lives and pacify the country in the months after the invasion has led to a protracted fight against Baathists and Islamic insurgents and increasing sectarian violence that has claimed more than 2,300 American lives and wounded thousands more.
At home we have wasted valuable time in making real strides to safeguard the Nation from terrorist attack. Most significantly, we have failed to reckon with the Achilles heel of our national security, our reliance on foreign oil to supply our energy needs.
Clearly, Americans want and deserve change. Last month, Members of our party from both the House and the Senate unveiled a comprehensive blueprint to better protect America and to restore our Nation's position of international leadership. Our plan, the Democratic plan, is called Real Security. It was devised with the assistance of a broad range of experts, former military officers, retired diplomats, law enforcement personnel, homeland security experts and others, who helped identify key areas where current policies have failed and where new ones were needed.
In a series of six Special Orders, my colleagues and I will share with the American people our vision for a more secure America. Two weeks ago, we discussed the plan as a whole and laid out the five pillars that make up that plan. I would like to go over some of these in summary before we turn to the pillar that we will discuss tonight.
These five pillars of security are the creation of a 21st century military, the successful prosecution of the war on terror, a more successful strategy to provide real homeland security, a way forward in Iraq, and the securing of energy independence for the United States of America.
One of the pillars of our Real Security plan focuses on the war on terror. It devises a strategy to destroy al Qaeda and finish the job in Afghanistan. It would have us double our special forces and improve our intelligence-gathering processes. It would eliminate terrorist breeding grounds. It would use preventive diplomacy and bring new international leadership, recognizing that we are strongest when we cause the world to join us in a cause.
Secure loose nuclear materials by 2010, this is one of the greatest vulnerabilities we have. You might recall in the debate between Senator Kerry and President Bush both acknowledged that the number one threat facing the country was that of nuclear terrorism. In fact, when we had testimony in the Nonproliferation Subcommittee, I asked Jim Woolsey, former director of the CIA, what was the most likely suspect if a nuclear weapon went off tomorrow in New York, Los Angeles or Washington? He thought about it for a moment and then he said, ``al Qaeda.''
I said, ``I think that is exactly right. But if al Qaeda is the number one threat, then the most likely delivery vehicle is not a missile, it is a crate, and why are we not doing more to secure those materials that al Qaeda has said they want?''
Osama bin Laden, who has called it a religious duty of Muslims to obtain the bomb and use it against the United States, who wants an American Hiroshima, at the pace it is going it is going to take years, if not decades, to secure the nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, and this makes our Nation at risk of calamity.
If you think the debates we have now over civil liberties and national security are difficult, imagine the world after a nuclear detonation here in this country or against our troops in the theater. All of that debate would be moot. This Nation would be a very different Nation. It would be one we would not recognize. It would certainly not be one we would want to live in.
All efforts must be made to deal with this threat, and too little has been done. Precious little has been done, and time is not on our side.
We must redouble our efforts to stop nuclear weapons development in Iran and North Korea. Too often the administration's policy in this area has been on-again off-again, as if we can only focus on Iran right now and we can take our focus off North Korea, where 6 months ago we could focus on North Korea to the exclusion of Iran, or we couldn't focus on either while we were focusing on Iraq.
The reality is we must continually focus on all of the above, and we must marshal the international community to stop this weapons program in Iran and in North Korea. Only through sustained and vigorous and dedicated efforts to pressure Russia, to pressure China and to bring that world community together do we have a chance to stop that nuclear weapons development in Iran and North Korea.
Let me turn to one of the other pillars of our Real Security plan dealing with homeland security. In the weeks to come, we will be going through the details of this pillar, which involves implementation of the 9/11 Commission recommendations. We support the immediate implementation of those recommendations.
The 9/11 Commission, probably no other commission in the last half century has done a more valuable job, a more bipartisan job of analyzing the vulnerabilities of the United States and making good, strong and sound recommendations about what we can do to address them, many of which affect this body. In fact, it is an irony not lost to anyone here, or shouldn't be: those recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that affect how we organize our business in the Congress are the last to have been implemented. Most of them have not been implemented.
But a great many of their recommendations are being ignored at our peril, and, indeed, what I was talking about a moment earlier, in terms of dealing with the loose nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, this was something that the 9/11 Commission paid great attention to and is one of the great deficiencies in our response to their recommendations. We should put those recommendations into effect now. Under the Real Security plan, that is exactly what we will do.
Another pillar: part of this pillar of homeland security is screening all containers and cargo. Again, if the threat to this country comes in the near term, in the near term, in a crate and not on a missile, then why aren't we investing more in that portal technology to keep nuclear material out of this country, to keep a nuclear weapon out of this country, to keep a radiological weapon out of this country?
Why is it in terms of cargo coming in through our airports that when you go to the airport to get on a flight and you have to take your shoes off and your belt off and you have to be wanded down, that at the same time in the cargo hold of that plane, where half of the cargo on most passenger jets is commercial, it is not your luggage, it is commercial cargo, 98 percent of that cargo or thereabouts is never screened for explosives? So you have to take off your shoes, yes; but you could ship a bomb the size of a small piano in a crate, and it may never be inspected for explosives.
That doesn't make sense. That is a real deficiency that has to be addressed. We cannot afford to wait until there is a calamity. Terrorists don't need to fly planes into our buildings to destroy the economy of this country. It would be enough to destroy that plane in mid-flight. We simply cannot afford to take these risks, and we must screen all containers and cargo.
The job at our ports is an even more difficult challenge, but it is one that can be met. It can be met through a homeland security plan that is tough, that is smart, and where the priorities match the nature of the risk. That is exactly what we have to do in homeland security. We have to prioritize, what are the greatest risks facing the country, and that is where we need to devote our greatest resources.
We need to safeguard our nuclear and chemical plants, which still have not been adequately safeguarded.
We can't outsource our security of our ports or airports or mass transit to other interests. We have to train and equip first responders. I had a group of first responders from my district in to visit with me today from the cities of Burbank and Glendale and other parts of Los Angeles to talk about their lack of interoperable communications equipment. They can't talk to each other across the cities. They are starting to be able to. They are patching this system together.
But here we are, years after 9/11. Can it be that our emergency responders still can't talk with each other, don't have that capability? That is simply inexcusable. We saw on 9/11 the communication problems we had. The fact that we have not dealt with that problem still years later is beyond comprehension.
Finally, we have to invest in public health to safeguard Americans. You might recall it was just a few weeks ago the burning issue in the Nation was the avian flu. It still ought to be a burning issue in the Nation. Yet we saw when this was at the top of the news how unprepared we are.
We are still unprepared. That hasn't changed. The issue may have fallen out of the top of national news. It hasn't fallen out of the tomorrow of the national dangers facing this country. Those are not even man-made disasters.
Terrorists purposely attempting to spread a biological pathogen, perhaps at multiple locations in the United States at the same time, imagine the havoc that would ensue. Are we prepared? We are not nearly as prepared as we must be.
Let me turn to another pillar of the Real Security plan, that dealing with Iraq. The Real Security plan proposes that 2006 be a year of transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, that we have a responsible redeployment of U.S. forces, that we work harder to promote Iraqi political compromise to unite the country.
We saw this week that we had a change in the position of prime minister, and that is hopeful and we all hope that leads to the formation of a unity government. But those hopes have too often been disappointed. We must ensure that within the next 30 days that government is stood up, and it is a government that is representative of Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites that the Iraqi people will defend.
Ultimately, if the Iraqis choose civil war, if they choose to murder each other in large numbers, there is not much that we can do to stop it. But if they decide to be one country, if they decide as one country to take on the foreign jihadists and the terrorists, that is a fight they can win and a fight we can help them win. But if they are determined to squander this opportunity, if they don't form this unity government, then they have to understand that the patience of the American people is running out.
We must encourage our allies and others to play a more constructive role in Iraq, and we must hold the Bush administration accountable. We had a hearing in the International Relations Committee on Iraq this week. It was one of the first hearings we have had in years on Iraq.
I asked the panel, which included top level DOD, Department of Defense, and top level Department of State officials, I asked them, given the history of I think fairly well-recognized mistakes in the prosecution of the war, of course, the failure to find WMD, the standing down of the Iraqi Army, the failure to bring enough troops in to maintain order that allowed the insurgency to get out of hand, who has been held accountable? Who has been held accountable for these errors?
And I ask my colleague, Mr. Inslee from Washington State, do you know what the answer to me was?
Mr. INSLEE. I do, actually. There is only one person that the Bush administration has fired involving Iraq policy. There is one single person. And that person was General Shinseki, who was right about Iraq.
He had the huge error in this administration of being truthful, forthright and accurate when he said we needed 400,000 to 500,000 troops to provide security in Iraq so it would not degrade into anarchy as it has done.
And as a result of that, the President, in the way they do this with the military, effectively fired him. He is the only person who the Bush administration has removed from office in Iraq, not the people really responsible for the problem at Abu Ghraib, not the Secretary of Defense, not Paul Wolfowitz who came to us and told us the incredible falsehood that this whole operation was going to be paid for, because Iraq was going to pump more oil, and it would not cost a penny to the American taxpayers. And you know how many billions of dollars now the taxpayers have suffered.
None of those people who have gotten almost every single thing wrong in Iraq that you can imagine. If you were going to design a train of errors, misjudgment, inefficiency, incompetence, acceptance of outright fraud in the contracting procedure, it would be hard to design a more inept train of abuses than this one, yet this President has sat there and done nothing.
Now, I have to admit he has not said they have done a heck of a job. He has not used that language. But he has failed to hold anybody accountable. And one of the things that I am very pleased that you have been a leader on, is holding the administration accountable for this, is accountable for U.S. tax dollars.
You know, there was a Democrat, Harry Truman, during World War II, who convened the Truman Commission in the U.S. Senate, and he insisted that during war time, even during war time, it is important to not allow the abuse of U.S. taxpayer dollars. And he ferreted out some of the fraud and abuse in military contracting that was going on in World War II even when our whole Nation was in jeopardy, in an existentialistic sense was in jeopardy, but he still said we need to be careful with these dollars.
We have had umpteen billions of dollars disappear into the sands of Iraq with nothing to show for it, no meaningful reconstruction, but tens of billions of dollars gone. We have seen multiple GAO reports, Inspector General reports.
We have seen multiple contractors, many of whom have been very closely aligned with this administration; there is no secret about that. What we are saying as Democrats is real simple. The U.S. Congress needs to do its job to ferret out these abuses, find the people responsible, relieve them from duty, and hold these contractors responsible to the American taxpayers. That is not too much to ask.
This Congress has been a lap dog. It has been a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil group, while one of the greatest abuses of the American taxpayer ever happened in the sands of Iraq, despite the tragic loss, which of course is a thousand times worse of our men and women in Iraq.
So the Democratic Real Plan for Security is that it is the job of Congress to hold the administration accountable to the American people, and the American taxpayer, and we will do that job at the right moment. So I am glad that you have brought this issue up.
Mr. SCHIFF. I thank the gentleman. This was precisely the nature of the testimony in the committee. When I asked that question of the witnesses, who has been held accountable, it was really quite remarkable what happened. There was an incredible silence as the witnesses looked at me and then looked at each other, and then looked at me, and then looked at each other. And it seemed like an eternity before anyone could respond.
And I said, your silence speaks volumes. To me, and I expressed this to the committee, the only one who has been held accountable was General Shinseki, and he was accountable for speaking the truth.
Now you mentioned the Truman Commission, and I was thinking about just the same thing when I was mentioning just a few moments ago that as part of our homeland security pillar we intend to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.
And probably not since that Truman Commission have we had a group of former Members and elected officials, experts on national security, come together and had such a credible work product that was so deserving of our respect, attention, and implementation as the 9/11 Commission, not since the Truman Commission. Would you agree?
Mr. INSLEE. I certainly will. I will point out that Democrats do not claim to be the sole source of genius and wisdom in America. Republicans have great ideas too, and they did in the 9/11 Commission, chaired by ex-Senator Kean of New Jersey, a Republican. He was one of the co-chairs of the commission.
A group of Republicans and a group of Democrats got together and did an evaluation on what this country really needs to do. And they have since then, they have made their recommendations, have issued this score card to evaluate the administration's performance to see whether those bipartisan recommendations have been implemented.
And if it was your son or daughter's score card, the kid would not be going to any movies or watching any television, because it was full of Ds and Fs. The most amazing part that is important, I represent the area in Seattle, we have a huge port. And when I tell people that despite this bipartisan Republican and Democrat recommendation to do screening of all of our containers coming in, of radiological materials, either a dirty bomb, the makings of a dirty bomb, or worst case scenario, a fission bomb coming in through our containers, and we know the proliferation that has gone on in the last few years, when you report to people that despite that foreknowledge, the administration can only tell us a tiny little percentage of those are screened for radiological material, that is a sorry state of affairs. And there is no excuse for that failure. We have had a bipartisan consensus, at least on the commission, to get that job done. And the job simply has not been done.
And the administration has had its eye off the ball of this major league threat. This is the big threat, by the way, at least in my estimation, and I think of the 9/11 Commission, of a dirty bomb or some day a fission product coming into this country. That is the real threat.
By the way, it is probably 1,000 times more likely to be delivered in a container coming through Los Angeles or Seattle or Boston or Gulfport, than coming in from 10 miles up in space in an ICBM that none of these countries have, at least at the moment. That is where the real threat is.
But, instead, the administration has been off spending billions of dollars on the Star Wars Project, and refuses to do more than 3 or 4 percent of the containers, which is a known threat, which is a known vector of radiological material; and they refuse to act.
That is unconscionable. We Democrats intend to implement a bipartisan approach to this, which is what was in this 9/11 Commission. And people can look it up. It is on the Internet. You can look at the report card.
You know, I thought, I was hopeful after that report card came out that the President would get his Cabinet together and hold that report card and say, what is going on here? This is absurd. I am President of the United States, the most powerful Nation in the world, and we are getting Fs on securing our ports, when we have got the technology to do this.
I thought that he would do that. Instead, you know what he did? He walked around handing out Medals of Freedom to Paul Wolfowitz who got every decision you could possibly imagine wrong on Iraq. He told his homeland security people they are doing a great job, when 95 percent of the cargo is not screened coming into our ports. That is not a heck of a job. And he has failed to respond to that report from this again bipartisan commission in any way that I can fashion.
That is one of the reasons Congress needs to act. There is a reason the framers set up a couple branches of government, so that when one branch was not doing the job, which right now is the executive, Congress can act.
Mr. SCHIFF. If I can interrupt the gentleman, this has, I think, precisely been the problem. It has been a shared responsibility. There has been the failure of the executive to act promptly on the 9/11 Commission recommendations that have put us at risk, and most probably, I agree with you 100 percent, most prominently that risk is something coming in through our ports or on the back of a truck across the border that has nuclear material in it. That is, I think, the chief threat that we face.
But it is a shared responsibility, because we here in Congress have done nothing about that. Because there has not been oversight of the executive; the majority has been allergic to doing oversight. I am on the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the International Relations Committee.
We have had 6, 8, 10 hearings. The majority of them I believe have been on what, are they on overseeing problems within our own government? No. They have been on the United Nations. When you do not want to oversee what you are doing, what do you do, you oversee the United Nations.
Now, admittedly the U.N. has got plenty of problems and is in desperate need of reform, but that cannot be the sole area of our oversight. We have had hearings in the subcommittee on Iraq, as our chairman recently pointed out. You know what it was on? How bad a man Saddam Hussein was. As I said at the outset of the hearing, I think we can stipulate that Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, was a tyrant, was a dictator, was guilty of crimes against humanity. That is not in dispute.
But what we ought to be overseeing is whether we are implementing the Ð9/11 Commission recommendations that make us safe; we ought to be investigating the Inspector General's analysis that $9 billion in reconstruction funds in Iraq is unaccounted for. We ought to be looking into, this is something that has really troubled me, I raised it with the Secretary of Defense during our briefings, how is it that we continue to have problems with equipment and material to protect our troops.
How is that possible? I mentioned to the chairman of Armed Services that if this was a problem of production, my constituents would line up around the block to work on up-armoring vehicles, provide state-of-the-art body armor.
There was no lack of will. But none of the country, other than those people in uniform and their families, have been asked to sacrifice at all. And we are desperate I think around the country to make a sacrifice to be part of the greater good and the greater effort protecting the country. We have not been asked to do it. The Congress has not asked. The President has not asked. We have not done the oversight to even ask the hard questions. And so we are a Nation at risk. A Nation that is not as well prepared as it should be, and as it really must be.
Mr. INSLEE. Well, I would agree with you. You have to ask, why has this happened? And I think it comes from an attitude of unbridled rose-colored glasses and feel-good politics. The administration wanted to have a war we could all just kind of feel good about, not have any personal sacrifice associated with it, not have any concern on our tax policy about that whatsoever.
It was feel-good politics, and the attitude is that we try to all feel good over here, and the only people who would be suffering are the men and women in Iraq. That is a wholly irresponsible way to fight a war, and that is what has gone on.
I wonder if I can address a little different issue of our Real Security plan, and that is what I like about the aggressiveness of the Democratic Real Security plan, because as you know, you have been a leader on this, we Democrats feel we need to be aggressive in disarming our enemy.
The most effective effort is offensive. And we want to be offensive, not meaning disliked, but offensive in being aggressive and assertive to disarm our enemies. And I want to mention two ways, one short and one not so short.
The short way we want to disarm our enemies, we want to make sure that they cannot get access to fissionable materials, which frankly are as loose and insecure tonight as we speak; it is roaming around places around middle Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, which is still secured with maybe a bicycle lock. I pay more attention to my Chinelli bicycle than some of these old failed States in the middle part of Europe to fissionable material.
And we need to secure that. And as numerous reports have indicated, the executive branch of this government has failed to secure the number one threat to this country, which is that fissionable material. And we will get that job done. We will make the investment it takes to do that, because that has got to be an extremely high priority for this country.
So one way you disarm your opponent is you take away their fissionable material that is laying around all over the world right now. And we will get that job done.
But the second thing is even bigger. We need to disarm our enemy from their financial resources to attack us, and that means that we have got to be energy independent and stop sending our dollars to the Middle East. We have got to start sending them to Middle Western farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks, in this regard.
Because of that $3-plus, one of my staffers paid $3.35 this morning, that $3.35 gallon, a good part of that goes to the CEO of Exxon, who just walked away with $400 million in a bonus package, and the rest, a lot, goes to the Middle East to arm our enemies.
And we know that many of those regimes have been playing footsie with al Qaeda and various other groups. We know that our money we are spending is going to arm our enemies, and so we believe what we need in this country is an energy independence program that is not just rhetorical, but is real. And I was pleased to have the President give us some rhetoric during his State of the Union speech. He said, we have an addiction to oil. Well, welcome to the land of recognition, Mr. President. We have been waiting 6 years, but, nevertheless, it is good to hear the rhetoric. But the problem is we are not seeing the reality.
The week he talked about breaking our addiction to oil, he fired 100 scientists at our renewable lab in Boulder, Colorado. When the press suggested that seemed somewhat inconsistent, those pink slips were pulled back, and those scientists were back on the job.
But we think we need something as bold as John F. Kennedy about in the 1960s, we need an Apollo project, we are going to go the moon, we will invest in the capital and wisdom and technical brilliance in this country. We are going to take a big step forward, one big step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
We need now a giant leap in energy policy in this country to depend on the technical prowess of this country, because Kennedy knew, and he stood right behind you right there. We are in an historic place here. He stood there March 9, 1961, and he said, we are going to go to the Moon. That was an amazing point. Our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. We had launched a little softball into orbit. We hadn't even invented Tang yet.
A lot of people thought that was an absurdly ambitious goal, but he understood a central tenet of the American character is that when challenged, we respond, number one. Number two, we are the greatest tinkers since, you know, whoever in Space 2001 invented the bone as a weapon. We are the people that can invent our way out of this.
We need to make the investments to do that. If you look at what the President has done in his budget, it is a pathetically insufficient commitment to this goal. We got so far two words from the President. We got energy independence.
We got two words, but we have no funds to do the job from him, no bold strategic challenge, no commitment to science, no commitment in our academic institutions. You look at the money, he came out, and I was listening carefully to the State of the Union address. He had this bold rhetoric and he said, therefore, I am committing a few million dollars to this project. He has committed to this budget for biofuels less than we spend in Iraq in about 18 hours. That is what we have committed to this project.
We have men over there fighting a war now for 3-plus years at about $80 billion a year, and he is committing less than 18 hours of what we are spending in Iraq to try to disarm our enemies. That is not a wise strategy. We need a significant energy plan to solve this problem.
We have it in the new Apollo energy project, H.R. 2828, that I have introduced and others. That is a bold step, leap for mankind that we will get this job done. So I am happy that the Democrats have embraced real policies and not just rhetoric.
Mr. SCHIFF. I have to take my hat off to my colleague from Washington, because no one has led more consistently and more strongly on this issue than you have.
Before our caucus had a strategy jointly that we have put forward before the President came forward, JAY INSLEE was there, and you have been just the most powerful advocate for years for an Apollo-like project to bring about energy independence.
Let me touch on the first point you made, and then I want to go a little bit more into energy independence and talk about some of the other pillars, and then get to the pillar we are going to focus on this evening.
You mentioned that the priority has to be placed on securing this nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. I agree with you exactly. When you look at what is preventing al Qaeda from detonating a nuclear weapon on our soil, you might look at the difficulty of getting the material in the country.
Well, that is not very difficult. Unfortunately, as we have discussed, we don't have the portal technology engaged to the degree that we need it, and how would you get a nuclear weapon in the country? Well, I like to quote the chancellor of UCLA, Chancellor Carnesale, who says, well, you could smuggle it in a bail of marijuana. That is one way you could get it in. That is sort of the magnitude of the problem of keeping it out. That is a tough strategy at the border.
Well, then, you might ask, what about the technology? Maybe it is tough to actually build the mechanics of the bomb. But that is not hard either. That is a 50-year-old technology. Cal Tech is in my district. I bet I could pick any two Cal Tech students and they could design a crude nuclear weapon for me using information on the Internet.
What is the obstacle? Is it the will of al Qaeda? It is not the will, as Osama bin Laden has talked very plainly about the imperative to bring about an American Hiroshima. I think those writings and those speeches he has given are basically his own Mein Kampf, and we ignore that at our own peril.
So if it is not lack of will or the lack of technological prowess or the lack of ability to get it into the country, the question is why hasn't al Qaeda brought this off? The answer is, it is hard to get the material. It is still hard to get the material. That is the only real prevention we have. You know something? It is just not hard enough. It is just not hard enough.
As you point out, some of this material is secured with a chain link fence and a night watchman and a bike lock. Some of it is more secure. But much of it is in the form of highly enriched uranium at research reactors. Some are defunct or stockpiled. It is all too accessible. We cannot wait for a disaster.
Turning to your second point, one of the pillars of the real security plan is the energy independence by 2020, which would eliminate our reliance on Middle East oil and all of the distortions that accompany our foreign policy as a result of that dependence. It would increase production of alternative fuels in America, promote hybrid and flex-fuel vehicle technology and manufacturing. It would enhance energy efficiency and conservation incentives.
I believe exactly what you do. We are the American people. We are the best entrepreneurs and inventors anywhere in the world. This isn't like where we were in terms of putting a man on the Moon. It is not like we were when we had to embark on the Manhattan Project. We are so much farther along on this goal technologically. A lot of these technologies are already in existence.
It is a question of making sure that they are made better and that they are made much more use of, would be a large part of the solution. It is not that we can imagine these technologies; they are out there, many of them. It is just the lack of will and the lack of leadership, and it is having a crippling effect on our economy now with gas prices at the pump, on our foreign policy, and I just want to thank you again for your tremendous leadership on this issue.
Mr. INSLEE. Well, I appreciate your words, but in a sense it is easy in contrast to brand X. If you look at the energy bill that the Republican-controlled Congress that was promoted by this President, it is hardly a secret that this President had substantial history in the oil and gas industry, and it would not be surprising if that affected decisions, just like the secret meetings that the Vice President had when he designed the energy independence. In the secret meetings the President has always refused to tell us about, I doubt that they were hatching a plot to create biofuels and energy independence from the oil and gas industry. I suspect that was not a discussion, had we been a fly on the wall to listen to what they were talking about. Maybe they were talking about a way to increase the profits of the oil and gas industries that led to $3 a gallon of gas and the largest profits of any corporation in the solar system history in this quarter in the oil and gas industry. Maybe that is what happened. Can't be sure.
But in any event, the policy that this Republican-controlled Congress came out with that was promoted by the President of the United States, according to the Department of Energy, this is the Bush's own governmental agencies, will increase our imports of oil from the Middle East. I want to say that again because I think it is very, very important.
The President, in his State of the Union Address, said, I want to break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. That is the White House, the President of the United States. The Department of Energy, which works for him presumably, their analysis of his policies have concluded that the imports from imported oil from the United States will increase after full implementation by a significant amount. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but I was shocked at how much they would increase when I looked at this report, under their policies.
Why is that? First off, to me it takes a little chutzpah to talk about it up there and out there in the real world have a policy that will increase your imports. But why is it such a grand failure? Well, it is because they refused to do the things that we know that works.
You know, we know it works. Brazil is now energy independent. Last week, actually, they achieved total domestic energy independence. The way they did it principally was to develop a biofuels industry. They didn't mess around. The President of Brazil didn't just give some nice speech and say, I believe we are going to break our addiction to oil. He actually did some policies.
What they did is they made sure that consumers in Brazil when they bought a car would have a car that would burn either gasoline or ethanol. They freed Brazilian consumers to make sure that you get to decide what you burn, not the oil companies and not the automobile manufacturers. They insisted that every consumer when you buy a car, you get a flex-fuel vehicle that can burn either gas or ethanol.
When they did that, that immediately created an enormous demand for an ethanol industry. Without subsidies for the Brazilian government, boom, 40 percent, 6 years later, 40 percent of all the transportation in Brazil is run on ethanol, which does not feed the Middle East and the sheiks, has zero emissions of global warming gases, because it is circular, it has no net increase of global warming gases.
Brazil achieved that not because they are smarter than we are, not because they have better natural resources than we do. We have got the Midwest, we have got Microsoft, we have got Intel, we have got Google. You know, they have got some smart people, too. But what they had was leadership that had actual policies rather than just rhetoric. That is what we need.
The second thing I just want to point out, we have had experience in achieving this in the United States. It was during the late 1970s. We improved the efficiency of our cars by over 60 percent in 5 years. We were on a path of doubling the efficiency of our cars while increasing safety, I might add, while increasing safety for 5 years in this country. Then those policies were stopped under a Republican President.
The fact of the matter is that had we continued on that path, if we had simply continued to improve the efficiency of our cars, as we did for those 5-year periods, today you and I would not be having this discussion because we would have been free of Middle Eastern oil today. That is the opportunity cost that we experience when we got off this bandwagon at doing smart things in energy.
I just point this out; you know, we have a history of success in this. We just need the policies to get it done.
Mr. SCHIFF. Well, you pose an interesting question. How can the administration's policy, which is dubbed a ``reduce our dependence on foreign oil,'' be a policy which, if you actually play it out over the years, will increase our importation of foreign oil? I can only say, because this is Washington.
This is the same place where 3 weeks ago the majority announced its deficit reduction package, which was, I don't know, $30- or $40 billion in spending cuts, and about $70- or $80 billion in tax cuts, which more than offset the spending cuts. So the net effect was increasing the national debt, and that was a deficit reduction plan? I guess if that is a deficit reduction plan, then the administration's energy plan is subject to the same logic.
Mr. INSLEE. We have seen some pretty amazing rhetorical epiphanies here in this Chamber. For the last year Democrats on three separate occasions have attempted to pass a bill to make sure that the Federal Trade Commission has the explicit authority to investigate and punish price gouging by the oil and gas industry. We wanted to make it real clear that we wanted that investigation, and even when there is a lack of complicity, where there is price manipulation, that should be shut down. I think Americans are with us 100 percent on that. Three times we tried to pass that. The Republicans blocked us every single time.
Now, last week I heard the Speaker of the House say, we demanded an investigation of price gouging in the oil and gas industry. Welcome, I guess; better late than never. But we will see if we really get that law passed here. It will be interesting. We heard the press conference. If we had the vote, we could have done that today. It will be interesting to see.
Mr. SCHIFF. I think this is part and parcel of the broader problem, where there is a lack of accountability, there is a lack of responsibility. The reality is that our friends in the majority have been in the majority now for years. They control this body, they control the Senate, they control the White House, they have got a pretty favorable Supreme Court, and there has been not only inaction on energy independence, but actually we have lost ground and are moving in the wrong direction.
There is really only one party to blame and one party responsible for that failure. And for several years the blame was all placed on the Clinton administration. Everything that was going on years after the Clinton administration was the fault of the Clinton administration. But at some point you have to take responsibility when you are in the leadership. When you are in the majority, you have to take responsibility.
Let us take the pillar that we wanted to highlight tonight, and that is the 21st century military, the part of our Real Security plan that would strengthen our military and that would rebuild a state-of-the-art military; that would ensure that we have the world's best equipment and training; that will provide accurate intelligence and a strategy for success; that would bring about a new GI Bill of Rights for the 21st century, and that will strengthen the National Guard.
Let me talk briefly about a couple of those items, and then I would love to hear your thoughts as well. In poll after poll, the American people have demonstrated they have more faith in the military than in any other public institution in this country. I have been to Iraq three times, I have been to Afghanistan twice, I have met with our troops there and have spent a lot of time with military personnel here and around the world and other places, and that confidence in the troops is well placed. America does have the finest military in the world.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen and marines have done everything we have asked of them and more. But since 9/11, our Nation's Armed Forces have become overextended. We have had recruiting goals that have not been met, forcing the armed services to enlist less qualified men and women.
Because of the poor planning by the administration, many units are on their second and third tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Army and Marine Corps personnel still don't have adequate body armor and sufficiently armored vehicles to the degree they should.
We are committed to ensuring that the United States military remains second to none and, more importantly, committed to building the Armed Forces to confront the threats of the 21st century. The Real Security plan, which I went over, has these elements that will rebuild the state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary.
Second, we will guarantee our troops have the protective gear, equipment, and training they need and are never sent to war without accurate intelligence and a strategy for success.
Third, we will enact a GI Bill of Rights for the 21st century that guarantees our troops, active, reserve, retired, and our veterans and their families receive the pay and health care, the mental health services and other benefits they have earned and deserve.
Finally, we will strengthen the National Guard in partnership with the Nation's Governors to ensure it is fully manned, equipped and, available to meet missions at home and abroad.
Building this 21st-century military begins with the acknowledgment that we are in a new era with a new set of challenges and threats distinct from those we faced in the Cold War. Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle delight in accusing our party of having a pre- 9/11 mindset. But their stewardship of the Nation's defenses makes it clear that it is the majority that has been living in the past.
We need a military that is highly mobile, self-sustaining, and capable of operating in small units. On the one hand, our ability to use air power has extended our global reach and allows us to engage enemies without large numbers of ground troops being employed, as was the case in Kosovo and Afghanistan. On the other hand, the war on terror, ongoing operations in Iraq and the increasing need for American forces to play a stabilizing role as peacekeepers and peace enforcers demands the sustained commitment of American forces.
Our friends in the majority used to deride these types of operations as nation-building. But in a post-9/11 world, we cannot allow states to fail and become havens for Islamists and other radicals to plot attacks against us. Clearly, we need to increase the size of the active-duty Army and Marine Corps.
These are just some of the steps we will take. There are others I want to highlight, but I will be happy to yields to my colleague from Washington.
Mr. INSLEE. I just want to preface my comments about the strategies and tactics, about the people we have in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think any discussion needs to center on them, at the point of the spear, at our request.
When I think about these issues, I think about the soldiers I met in Landshtul, Germany, just before Thanksgiving, where most of our badly wounded go after they leave Iraq. We have an amazing medical system, which I am happy about, taking care of our men and women.
By the time they get to Germany, a lot of them are conscious, and so I had a chance to meet these folks. I met a couple of young men from Bremerton, Washington, just south of my district, both of whom had very severe injuries. Their legs were up and pins were sticking out and tubes coming every which way. One guy had both arms shattered, up and attached to pieces of metal. They were very seriously injured guys. I just wanted to say thank you to them and asked if there was any way we could help them.
I asked both, What do you have in mind? And both of them said, in fact all of them I talked to, said one thing: I want to get back to my unit as soon as possible.
Mr. SCHIFF. Just to interrupt for a second. I visited our troops in that very same hospital, as well as here in Bethesda at Walter Reed. That is exactly what they told me also. They just want to get back to their unit. These young people, and they are so young, that is the most striking thing when you meet them in the field. They are so committed, it just can't help but take your breath away.
Mr. INSLEE. Whatever you think of the Iraq operation, whatever you think of the strategy, I think anybody who met these people would be incredibly proud and reach one bipartisan conclusion, that they deserve the best that America can provide.
And you have to ask the question: Have they gotten the best that America could provide? And the answer is a resounding no, they have not. They have not gotten the personal body armor, they have not gotten the armored Humvees, they have not gotten basic equipment, on occasion, that we have talked about. The National Guard in particular has been shorted some important equipment. They simply have not gotten the best that America can provide.
And when you ask the administration, Donald Rumsfeld, why we sent these people in, not in cardboard, but essentially thin-skinned Humvees with no protection, his answer was, and I am paraphrasing, well, we didn't know anybody was going to be shooting at us in the rear. We have the armor up in front. But, geez, the guys in the rear? Who could have imagined that an Iraqi would be unhappy that a Western occupation army of 150,000 people roaming through might be unhappy about that, and might be shooting at our people, and might be doing improvised explosive devices? That was beyond our comprehension.
Just like it was beyond their comprehension that the levees could be topped during Katrina. Those two failures of obvious common sense I think have to go down in the top 10 of ineffective, incompetent, uncaring, rank mistakes, and that is too easy a word to use, in American history. Levees won't be topped and people won't be shooting at us back in the streets of Baghdad for the years we were going to be there. That was the working assumption of Donald Rumsfeld and the President of the United States when they sent our troops into harm's way.
I can't think of a possible excuse for that bone-headed assumption. As a result, our people aren't coming home, a lot of them. And the anger I feel is matched by a lot of my constituents who feel this way, whether they are for or against the Iraq war. They deserve better than they are getting.
And the Democrats are going to insist that when our people go into action they are going to be fully equipped, and we will not go in there with sort of a hallucination that it is going to be like the film clip of the Champs Elysees in 1944. They should have anticipated that. So I wanted to get that off my chest. But I want to say one thing about intelligence, if I can.
Mr. SCHIFF. If I can add one thing, before you do, and that is one of the things that really concerns me, and here again is the failure of us in this body to do the oversight we should, to have the majority support that oversight, and that is have we moved as quickly as we can, as quickly as this great Nation can to provide the technology to defend against these improvised explosive devices that have taken so many Americans lives? I think the answer is, no, we have not done all we can. We have not moved as fast as we could.
I know certainly in Congress, when these questions have come up, we haven't gotten the answers, I think, to go home to our constituents and say every rock is being turned over, every effort is being made, every resource is being expended to make sure we are protected against the IEDs. I think there is more we could be doing.
And the L.A. Times had an analysis recently of a promising new technology and the frustration of those that have been working on this program about how difficult it is to get that technology actually out into the field. That is inexcusable. If there is promising technology, it needs to be fast-tracked, and it needs to be put to immediate use.
The fact that we would lose a single life because of the failure of the richest Nation on Earth to provide the body armor, the up-armored vehicles, or the technology to defeat the IEDs is just inexcusable.
Mr. INSLEE. Well, I agree. And I want to, if I can, talk about intelligence for a moment because I think that in the nature of the warfare we are involved in with terrorism, intelligence, if not everything, is most of our ability to stop a terrorist attack.
What I want to point out is that we have an enormous shortfall of HUMINT, or human intelligence. We have an enormous shortfall of human agents around the world. And Democrats have committed to ramping up that capability in this country because we recognize that in the new threat environment we have, the new threat is much more likely to come from an al Qaeda ring personally delivered by a taxi cab and bus than it is by an ICBM from some particular other place on the planet.
You wonder why this administration is not ramping up the human intelligence around the globe. There are a couple of reasons. One, is they would rather put the money in the Star Wars projects by the tens of billions of dollars. That is number one. And number two, frankly, because this President worked so ineffectively with the rest of the world leading up to Iraq that we have had some difficulty in having as many alliances around the world as we need in this war on terrorism.
We are certainly experiencing that in Iran right now, when we are trying to rally the world on a sanction policy against Iran, and we are not getting as much cooperation as we should. And, frankly, one of the reasons is that the rest of the world is not particularly pleased that the President refused to work with the rest of the world in Iraq.
So what I would say about the Democratic approach to intelligence is there are two things we believe are the most effective in intelligence work, or at least two things we are vastly short in: electronic surveillance, very important, and we can talk more about that in a minute; but we have to boost the human intelligence, the number of effective agencies that have penetrated these cells around the world and can work with other governments in that regard.
Two, we have to rally the world to a global alliance that is against us. And when we have a chief executive officer that tells the rest of the world to go fish on Iraq and global warming and on the land mine treaty, and you name it, it doesn't make you a very effective rallier of troops. And that is a problem.
Mr. SCHIFF. And this is precisely the problem. When we discuss where we are in the rest of the world, what our standing is in the world, and some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will pejoratively say, well, we don't care about the court of public opinion, we are not in this to be popular. Well, it is true we are not in this to be popular. But when we alienate the rest of the world, it has a real cost to us in terms of our own security.
We are dependent, like it or not, on information about al Qaeda's operations from other nations. If we can't get their cooperation, that affects our security. If we communicate to the rest of the world that we don't care about their priorities, when we go to them about ours, when we go to them about North Korea or Iran or Iraq, how can we expect a warm and ready and welcoming response? We can't. And that puts us more at risk.
So this has had real consequences. When I consider where we were in the world's estimation and the kind of cooperation we could get pre-9/11, and I look now, when it should be that much greater given what took place on 9/11, but it is that much more problematic because these world leaders, even if they wanted to help us, and many of them do, because they recognize the threat to themselves from terrorism as well, but if our Nation is that unpopular, or our chief executive is that unpopular and politically they can't afford to do it, that is a real problem.
When people are running for office in foreign capitals of our allies on a platform of who will be most opposed to the United States policy, that is a problem for our security. It is not about popularity; it is about security. And this is why we need a change. We need a change that will, as you say, bring the world together in a great cause. Because in the end, this fight we have with terrorism unites us. It is an attack on civilization. And was it Ben Franklin who said, ``We have to hang together or we shall all hang separately''?
Mr. INSLEE. I don't think it was Yogi Berra.
Mr. SCHIFF. I thank the gentleman from Washington for his great work.