Opening Statement to the Joint Hearing on the Homeland Security Threat Posed by al-Qaeda and Its Affiliate in Iraq
Washington,
Jul 25, 2007 -
Thank you Chairman Skelton, Chairman Reyes and Ranking Member Hunter. I would also like to thank the witnesses for appearing before us today.
Mr. Chairman, I want to start out today by pointing to a critical piece of intelligence, perhaps the most important piece of actionable intelligence written in the unclassified NIE. It reads, “We judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment.”
When you read a statement like this, it’s impossible to not have thoughts turn to 9/11 and that fateful morning when al-Qaeda attacked the United States in a way it could no longer ignore. I think of what I felt that day, and I think of my family, and the families who lost loved ones as our nation watched, aghast, as the attack and its aftermath played out live on TV.
And when I think of all of this, I cannot help but ask, “Have we as a Congress done all we can to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to protect our homeland? Have we sufficiently prepared the nation for the long struggle we face in the fight against radical jihad?”
Unfortunately, Mr. Chairman, I believe the answer to these questions is no. And though I wish it, I fail to see how today’s hearing helps in this regard.
We have assembled before us top officials of DoD intelligence and counterterrorism, and for the next several hours we will subject them to all manner of speeches and questioning while ignoring the one critical area the Director of National Intelligence has told us needs our attention most: The comprehensive modernization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Director McConnell explained the problem thusly:
“[T]here are circumstances in which the Government seeks to monitor, for purposes of protecting the nation from terrorist attack, the communications of foreign persons, who are physically located in foreign countries, [and] the government is required under FISA to obtain a court order to authorize this collection.”
Further explaining the challenge, Director McConnell has stated, “We are missing a significant portion of what we should be getting.”
The Director of National Intelligence is telling us that we are missing vital intelligence that our nation should be collecting to protect our homeland.
The NIE is telling us, “We judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment.”
This is a call for action; this is a wakeup call for America! At a time of increased threat, we are handicapping ourselves in the fight against al-Qaeda and radical jihadism!
The hearing we should be having right now—that we should’ve had already—is one on moving legislation to fix the FISA problem and close the terrorist loophole.
We don’t need another hearing on the history of FISA and the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, and we don’t need another hearing for Members to restate already well-stated positions on Iraq under the guise of an intelligence hearing on Iraq.
We have a known intelligence problem, we face a heightened terrorist risk, we have a simple fix to address one of the major FISA problems and we have more than a week before Congress goes on August recess. Al-Qaeda is not going to stop its efforts to attack America and our interests in August; shouldn’t Congress do everything possible before then to stop them?
In a video released on July 5th titled, “The Advice of One Concerned,” Ayman al-Zawahiri lays out al-Qaeda’s strategy, which is built on the notion that in this world, there are outlying states, in places such as Asia, Africa, Latin America and other parts of the world, and there are the core states that are at the center of the global system: America and the European Union.
On the tape, Dr. Abdullah al-Nafisi states, “the only way to confront them--according to al-Qaeda’s theory--is by taking the war from the outlying states to the central states, in which case, the damage and consequences of this damage will all take place in the central states.”
In other words, al-Qaeda’s strategy is focused on attacking us here in America and our allies in Europe.
Zawahiri further states al-Qaeda’s “plan consists of targeting Crusader-Jewish interests … in our country and theirs, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Somalia, and everywhere we are able to strike their interests.”
The tale of the tape is clear: Al-Qaeda believes it is winning in Iraq, laying the foundation for a post-America Caliphate with its center there, and ultimately extending the “jihad wave” to the rest of the world.
If al-Qaeda intends to fight us globally and here in the homeland, then we must be prepared to do the same. We cannot expect to leave one part of the battlefield without consequence on another part. In short, it is my fear that if we precipitously leave Iraq, al-Qaeda has every intention of following us home.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I look forward to hearing what the witnesses have to say about the NIE’s key judgment: that we face a heightened terrorist risk, what challenges the intelligence community faces in collecting against the terrorist threat, what they are doing to address those challenges and any recommendations that they have for Congress to strengthen our intelligence capabilities against the terrorist threat.
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