“FREEDOMS ENDOWED BY OUR CREATOR” published by Congressional Record on June 14, 2013

“FREEDOMS ENDOWED BY OUR CREATOR” published by Congressional Record on June 14, 2013

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Volume 159, No. 85 covering the 1st Session of the 113th Congress (2013 - 2014) was published by the Congressional Record.

The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.

“FREEDOMS ENDOWED BY OUR CREATOR” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H3649-H3651 on June 14, 2013.

The publication is reproduced in full below:

FREEDOMS ENDOWED BY OUR CREATOR

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Meadows). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) for 30 minutes.

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We are living in interesting times--it's purported to be a Chinese curse to live in interesting times--but when you see what is confronting this country, what is taking our liberties, what is threatening our way of life, it's clear we are on the front lines of either winning back or losing for all times the greatest freedoms ever given and secured for one group of people.

This is an extraordinary country, and it is because, just as our Founders pointed out repeatedly, they recognized that our rights are provided by our Creator; but just as any inheritance can be taken by those who are evil, greedy, power hungry, it must be defended or you lose it.

We have people who make no bones about the fact that they want to destroy our way of life, that they think the freedom afforded the American people leads to debauchery, leads to ways of life that are evil and wrong, and therefore they must destroy the freedoms which have provided people the chance to make wrong choices. Our Founders would prefer the freedoms and so would the people here.

Unfortunately, there are good people who believe that they are so much smarter and know better than everyone else, that, gee, since we're in Congress, we should tell people what they can do, how they can live, how they can make a living, whether they can make a living, or that we may just pay you to do nothing and to never reach your God-given potential.

Then, as we heard today, we had an amendment made by our friend on the Democratic side, Mr. Polis, that would have required a new addition to the chaplain corps of every branch of the military. It would be a new addition to the chaplain corps for those who are nontheistic--or atheistic--for those who believe there is no God. I had no idea that people who do not believe that there is a God needed help and encouragement and support for their unbelief. Astounding.

If people truly are atheistic, why would they need help in remaining so?

Could it possibly be that, the more people look around, the more they see things like Ben Franklin did--80 years old--and, yes, he enjoyed what some people would call ``pleasures'' of different types when he represented us in France and represented us in England. He was a brilliant man, and the massive painting outside these halls shows him sitting front and center at the Constitutional Convention.

It was there at that Convention when he finally got recognized after they'd been there nearly 5 weeks. Some across the country are still mis-educating children, unfortunately, by telling them he was a deist, someone who believes there is something--some force, some thing, some deity--that created nature, that created all of mankind and all of the things in the universe, and if such deity or thing still exists, it, he, she never interferes with the ways of men. Obviously, you see Ben Franklin's own words, and you know that's not what he believed. When he was 80 years old--2 years or so away from meeting his Maker--he finally got recognized after all the yelling back and forth that was done there at the Convention, and someone noted that Washington looked relieved when Mr. Franklin sought attention or, as some at the Convention called him, ``Dr. Franklin.''

He pointed out during his remarks--and we know exactly what he pointed out because he wrote it in his own handwriting. People wanted a copy of what he said. Madison made notes, but Franklin wrote it out.

Among other things, he said:

I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth--that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings--

He called it ``sacred'' by the way--

that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.

He encouraged those at the Convention that he also believed, in his words, that without His concurring aid--he was talking about the same God, the same Lord he had just referenced--we shall succeed in our political building no better than the builders of Babel. We will be confounded by our local partial interests, and we, ourselves, shall become a byword down through the ages.

That was in 1787 that Franklin said those words, late June. Now here we are, all these years later since 1787, and we have a motion to create chaplains in the military to help people not believe in what Ben Franklin said was the God who governs in the affairs of men, generically speaking. But it is important that people have the freedom to choose what they believe. As the Founders believed that God gave us freedom of choice, that He--our Creator--gave us those rights, they also believed that people should have the chance to choose right or wrong as well.

As an exchange student in the Soviet Union back in the seventies, I saw people and became very good friends with some college students who didn't have our rights, who envied our rights, who would love to have shared the rights that we have. Ultimately, we saw that play out a couple of decades later when many across the former Soviet Union demanded those rights. Of the 15 states that made up this socialist republic, some have gone back to those ways. I was intrigued that some are scared when they're given that much freedom to choose where they work.

{time} 1520

Do you mean I've got to find a job? But I've never had to look for a job. It's a little scary. As so many Americans, particularly over the last 5 years, have found it can be very difficult to find a job. So the idea that the government may just tell you what your job is, tell you whether you get a chance to go to college or not, that sounds good. I don't have to think about those decisions. Let the government do it for us.

It's shocking, but there have grown to be many in America who like the idea of the government telling them what they can do, when they can do it, and how they can do it. It takes away the need to really wrestle with those things or, as so many of the signers of the Declaration believed, to have to pray about it and to struggle with the decision and try to find out, as many of them did, what is God's will for our lives.

We have a statue of Peter Muehlenberg from Pennsylvania that was just down the hall. But when the visitor center opened, he was moved. He is the Christian pastor who is depicted in the statue of taking off his ministerial robe as he preached from Ecclesiastes, There is a time for every purpose under Heaven. He also told his congregation, There is a time for peace and there is a time for war and now is the time for war. And he led men from his congregation to join the military and to fight for freedom.

His brother, Frederick, who also has a statue here, was the first Speaker of the House under our new Constitution. He had not actually immediately been in favor of the Revolution, but after his church was burned down by the British, he kind of thought maybe it was a decent idea for ministers to be involved in a revolution and for ministers to be involved in government where there was self-government of a people. So that brings us to today, from the Revolutionary years, to the Constitution after the Articles of Confederation fell apart.

Now, there was debate on Ben Franklin's proposal, because under the Continental Congress, they had had prayer every day to start their sessions. But the only way they could do that with the diverse Christian denominations, including the Quakers, was to agree on a minister that they believed would not offend the others and pay him to be the chaplain. But as they pointed out during the debate over Franklin's proposal, We don't have money. We're not getting paid. We're here for a constitutional convention, but we don't have money like we did in the Continental Congress. We can't hire a chaplain. But once the Constitution was passed and ratified, from the time of the first Congress, that first day--actually, when George Washington was sworn in at the Federal building in New York, made his way down to the chapel that is still there--the only building that was unaffected at Ground Zero as the towers fell--they had a prayer session for the Nation. Then each Congress ever since, House and Senate, began each day with prayer before they ever begin their session. It's still true today. But, again today, we have the feeling that those who believe there's no God are insecure enough that they need somebody to encourage them in their unbelief.

One of the dangers, though, we have come to face and come to realize is that many in our Nation are choosing political correctness over safety. Yes, we all in this body, all of the Armed Forces when I was in the Army 4 years and we took that oath, we were supposed to support and protect the Constitution. Everybody I knew was prepared to die for it and to die for their country if necessary. Those people are still serving.

We found out, though, that if you get too involved in political correctness--and it's politically correct to look the other way when people are talking about hatred for America and wanting America to have the Constitution subordinated to shari'a law--that, gee, it's just politically correct not to face the facts that those people exist and that some of them are in the military. So they pass a man up the system so that he is there to counsel Christians, atheists, and others who need counseling.

With the people I've talked to in the military, especially in Afghanistan and when we were in Iraq, when you have a Commander in Chief who on his watch does not allow you to fire at people who may be firing at you, unless you can be sure you won't hit a civilian--at least that fear is put into those individuals. And I have asked for an official response from the Department of Defense, to put in writing exactly what our rules of engagement are that our soldiers are fighting under. We were told, That's classified and it can't be provided in answer to your question.

Well, somebody has passed it on to the military in harm's way, just like in August of 2011 when we had SEAL team members where a target was put on their backs by this administration when, first of all, the Vice President of the country violates the classified information laws and sets out in his speech who the commander was who brought down Osama bin Laden and about his great SEAL team.

Yes, he was paying them compliments, but he put a target on their back. I know our Vice President did not intend to do that. He was just so excited, just as he was when he revealed where the undisclosed location was. He didn't mean to breach national security. He was just happy and whatever he was to reveal those kind of things. But he put peoples's lives in danger.

One SEAL team member's father told me that right after the Vice President's speech, his daughter-in-law looked out the window. She had a marine guard out front. Karen and Billy Vaughn, they talk about how Aaron called them part of SEAL Team Six after they were outed. And it's been printed in the media that Leon Panetta, as a Cabinet member, was meeting with people who could receive the classified information.

But this administration wanted all the kudos they could get before the election, of course, and so they had producers of what I thought was a pretty good movie, ``Zero Dark Thirty,'' and gave them classified information and told them who took out Osama bin Laden. But in August of 2011, our SEAL team members paid the ultimate price of this administration's carelessness. They paid with their lives.

It would be nice to have it out where we could talk about it as a Nation, just exactly what the rules of engagement are that our military are dying under. Because there was a C-130 gun ship there--and this was not from some classified source. I got it because it was information that was given to the family members, although the military may not have known what they gave. There's testimony from the C-130 gun ship, a pilot and others, that they saw this group moving like a military group. They were not allowed to take them out. They even saw them shoot down our Chinook and kill our Americans, but there was a chance they might have hit civilians if they had killed the people that took down our SEAL Team Six members. So they couldn't even kill them after they killed our people.

We need to know what the rules of engagement are. We need to address the political correctness that is blinding our agencies and blinding our military of its ability to see who the enemy is, because it's getting people killed in harm's way.

{time} 1530

When you refuse to acknowledge that the Afghans you're training may be willing to turn the guns you've trained them on and kill you, just as an Aggie friend had happen here recently in Afghanistan, what they call a ``green on blue killing,'' until we recognize that and recognize who our enemy is, and that our enemy may be among us and that our enemy can be in uniforms that we're supposed to be friendly with, then more Americans are going to be killed needlessly.

And when the political correctness of the FBI and the Justice Department and the State Department, intelligence department, for that matter, is that you've got to leave mosques alone where people are being radicalized, and even though there were sting operations that identified people who were radicalizing Americans before this administration changed the policy and they had to get friendly and reach out and partner, as the FBI said it originally did with CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, even though they've said they're not partnering with them, anytime CAIR says this offends us, then the FBI says, oh, gee, we better change it.

When you've had the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals confirm that, yes, the evidence shows that CAIR and Islamic Society of North America, those are front organizations for the Muslim Brotherhood. They want shari'a law to be the law of the land, not our Constitution. And that is what we did not take an oath to allow to happen. We took an oath to the Constitution, and that means no law shall be above our Constitution.

And so that brings me also to the conversation, the question and answer with the FBI Director this week. I have a great deal of respect for him. He has been a patriot. He fought in Vietnam. He's a warrior. He cares about the country, but he has done great damage to the FBI. He instituted an administrative policy that has caused thousands and thousands of years of experience to leave the FBI and say, Under the new policy, I have to leave.

So you have very willing, able young FBI people who are in charge, but they have not benefited from the years of experience that others who had to leave had. I think that contributes to some of the problems that we see with our rights being protected, that we see with poor investigations. They just have not been the beneficiary of enough years of experience, and they've been taught by a lexicon, a language that does not allow them to talk about or see our enemy.

I've been making the point for months that the Boston massacre had clear potential to be completely avoided. And then we find out Russia gave our administration information to say the older Tsarnaev brother has been radicalized and he's going to kill people; you better look into it. Then all we've heard since the Russian bombing from this administration is the Russians should have given us more information.

Now, I grew to know a little bit about the way they think, and I don't entirely appreciate some of it, but I appreciate this: if they give information that says this person is going to kill Americans, understand we really don't care whether they kill Americans, but we would like for you to recognize that these are the kinds of people that will take out your government and will take out our government, and we'd like you to look into it. There's a mutual concern.

And when they put our government on notice and the reaction of our government is, well, we did some interviews. We looked into it. We didn't find anything.

The Russians: Are you kidding us? We hand you somebody who is going to kill Americans, and you can't find anything? What's wrong with you?

There's a great article, and I used it in questioning our FBI Director. It is entitled, ``Obama's Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers.''

It says:

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover sting operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.

Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of chairman, members and staff are kept secret.

The FBI Director did not want to provide those as well.

So the FBI Director, as I pointed out to him here before I asked the question, I pointed out that according to this article, the Bureau did not even contact mosque leaders for help in identifying the Boston bombers' images after those images were captured on closed-circuit TV cameras and cell phones. The FBI Director attempted to correct me. He said, You said facts that aren't true. In fact, he said, Your facts are not all together--and I understood him to say not true, and so I demanded that he point out specifically what facts were wrong.

And he said, We went to the mosque prior to Boston. We said we went to the mosque prior to the Boston happening. We were in that mosque talking to imams several months beforehand. I couldn't during the questioning hear what he said at the end. What he said at the end, It was part of our outreach efforts.

If I'd heard that, I would have known and could have followed up and said, Wait a minute, that was part of your outreach effort to a Muslim mosque? It was not to follow up on the Tsarnaevs. And then, knowing that he had not properly followed up, knowing the FBI did not properly follow up with the mosque, I then asked about the mosque that was started, there are a couple of them, started by the Islamic Society of Boston, and were you aware that a founder was al Amoudi, because our Director knows who al Amoudi is. The FBI arrested him in 2003 or 2004 at Dulles Airport, as they could have done with al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone bomb, as ordered by our President, that caused a lot of folks on both sides of the aisle to say, wait a minute, is that a good idea to kill American citizens without a trial?

And why is he an American citizen? Well, he's an American citizen because we have a policy, and a misinterpretation I would submit of the 14th Amendment, that if someone comes here on a visa and has a baby, then they're American citizens. So al-Awlaki's family was free to come in on a visa for college and then take him back to Yemen and radicalize him so that he hated America, and then he could come back here, and as he did, lead prayers here on Capitol Hill with congressional Muslim staffers and also have contact with people in the administration.

But I guess we won't ever know who all he had contact with because they blew him up while he was in Yemen. But he was free to come and go and radicalize people in America because he was an American citizen because his father and mother got a visa to come in here where he was born.

Al Amoudi was free to come and go here in the United States; that was until he was arrested at Dulles Airport and was tried and convicted and is doing over 20 years in Federal prison for supporting terrorism. And our FBI Director said at the hearing, he kind of had his head down and said it quietly, but he said it, no, he was not even aware that al Amoudi in prison for supporting terrorism was one of the founders. In fact, he is the one listed on the articles of organization for Massachusetts for the Islamic Society of Boston that started this. He didn't even know that.

Until we get past this political correctness so that we can see our enemies, see those who want to destroy our way of life and subjugate our Constitution to their ideas, then we are not protected, and we've got to get over that.

How about that? When Director Mueller testified before, he said, Oh, yeah, we have these great outreach programs to the Muslims. So apparently this is a part of it. I asked how is the outreach program going for groups like Christians and Catholics, Jewish, Buddhists, I forget who all I named.

{time} 1540

But anyway, it was interesting, there's no such outreach group specifically for them, but there is a specific outreach group that didn't want to offend people who are radicalizing and being radicalized.

So it is pretty clear, we need to protect our borders from people who want to come in to destroy us, all avenues of entry. We need to deport those who overstay their visas. We need to reform our immigration service and our immigration process so that it is more effective, more efficient, and gives people proper answers more quickly.

We must stop allowing members of terrorist groups to consult with this President or his administration. We must stop discarding our allies who have fought with us and for us and throwing them under figurative buses.

We've got to stop rewarding our enemies so that when they say they want to destroy us, that we're our enemy, we don't send them $1.3 billion and tanks and jet planes.

And then, also, we have got to educate our Federal protection agencies on whom the enemy truly is.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

____________________

SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 159, No. 85

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