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“TODAY IS A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H5494-H5497 on Sept. 11, 2013.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TODAY IS A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Valadao). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, this is a day of remembrance. It is a solemn day. It is a day that brings back tragic memories for all of us. And then, in some ways, it brings great hope.
We all remember where we were on 9/11/2001. And I know there are some that say, I just can't take seeing what happened that day; I don't want to see any more video. And I would only submit, it is important not to forget.
To fly planes into buildings, use them as bombs, is an act of war, just as dropping bombs in Pearl Harbor was an act of war. Even though there were no boots on the ground at Pearl Harbor, even though there were no boots on the ground in New York City or Washington, D.C., using bombs, whether planes or missiles are personally set, they're acts of war.
I wasn't aware until this past weekend that there's only been one time when article 5 of our NATO alliance has been triggered. That article of the NATO alliance is a mandatory requirement, and it requires that when any signatory to NATO, any member of NATO is attacked in an act of war, then all other members of NATO must take it as if they've been attacked in an act of war and go to war against whoever attacked one of the NATO members.
The only time that's been triggered was 9/11 of 2001 when the United States was attacked. Because of the treaty, it's not a voluntary act on behalf of the member states of NATO. It doesn't require the request of the attacked country.
But it had gone without my notice, but the countries that were part of NATO immediately, that day, 9/11/2001, were instantly at war with whatever country attacked us. The problem was we didn't know who attacked us; and, as a result, it did end up eventually causing other countries to go with us into Afghanistan and Iraq.
Actually, within about 4 months of going into Afghanistan, with less than 500 special ops and intelligence individuals, the Taliban was defeated. And then came our mistake, where we added tens of thousands of American troops and allied troops and we became occupiers instead of those that defeated the Taliban, and left the country back in the hands of those who should have had it.
But 9/11 should truly evoke the emotions that we had that day, as people were trapped 1,000 feet or so above the street surface and had to make a decision, do I want to burn up in a horrible burning death, or do I jump to my death?
I think most all of us resolved that day, including those of us who were not in Congress, that it should be our job, as a Nation, to ensure that Americans were never put to a choice like that again, ever.
Actions we knew had to be taken, and authorization of use of military force was passed. In the haste to get it passed to give the President authority to go forward, it had far too much flexibility. So we have been able successfully to rein some of that in in the past months. More work has to be done.
But in the Middle East, the question is coming up in the last few days from leaders over there who did not wish to be identified publicly, but the questions were asked:
Do the people in your government not understand that on 9/11 you had radical Islamists, Muslim Brotherhood people, al Qaeda, trained by the Taliban, but Muslim Brotherhood at the core, that attacked you?
And you went to war, you said, against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and that the Muslim Brotherhood supports them. And you're at war with them.
And then do you not remember that that's who you've been at war with?
And this administration, the Obama administration, has said they're not engaged in a war on terror. They're only at war with al Qaeda. And they mistakenly thought al Qaeda was on the run. Well, if they were on the run, it was a run toward killing more people.
And these leaders in the Middle East have asked: If you could remember that, then why did you come into Egypt and demand the ouster of your ally, with whom you had agreements, with whom you were working, with whom you were making sure, as best that you could, and the Egyptian leader Mubarak could, that he would try to maintain as much peace with Israel as possible?
So you had all these agreements with him, just like you do with us.
And then Qadhafi was a bad man. But after 2003, when you invaded Iraq, it scared him so badly that he became your ally. You had many agreements with him, he and family members, particularly family members. I remember meeting his son here, who said he was meeting with people in the administration, was going around Capitol Hill meeting. I didn't have a meeting with him, other than just meeting him, someone introducing him. But this was Qadhafi's family here because after 2003, he had become our ally.
And as some in the Middle East have pointed out, he was doing everything he could to provide you information with who the terrorists were. He was your partner. You had agreements with him. You had signed agreements, verbal agreements. He was your partner, and you turned on him.
And even Assad, as bad a guy as most people knew he was and is, you had Secretary Clinton out there saying, oh, Assad's a reformer. He's going to be okay.
But we have watched you, with the Northern Alliance, with Mubarak, with Qadhafi, with all of these people who were your friends, your allies with whom you had agreements, and you tossed them aside and ran them out of office, only to give control to the Muslim Brotherhood.
We do not understand what you're doing; and privately we ask among ourselves here in the Middle East, Which one of us, your allies, will you turn against next?
Which one of us will you decide is a throwaway, you don't need us anymore?
We're concerned, but we don't want to tell people because we don't want them to take that as a sign they need to be coming after us and us be the ones they discard next.
That's no way to have an international policy. It's no way to be the greatest peacemaker in the world, when your allies worry because they've seen you completely disregard signed agreements, verbal agreements, pats on the back.
I mean, you know, when you see the videos of our great Secretary of State Kerry sitting with Assad, having lavish meals and meetings and then all of a sudden he's such a horrendous ogre that you've got to hurt him somehow.
And this stuff about America is the only one that can effectively hit Syria, so we have to be the ones. Why wouldn't it be someone who is in harm's way who actually could perhaps put boots on the ground, go in and destroy chemical weapons?
{time} 1515
For heaven's sake, to see Vladimir Putin end up playing the high card, being the diplomat was incredible. It should have been the U.S. administration that said that we're going to do, actually, what George W. Bush did before the Iraq war. He tried every diplomatic approach he could. He went to the U.N. repeatedly. They got resolutions passed ordering Iraq to open up their weapons systems, ordering Iraq to do the right things, which they refused to do. The first reaction of the much-
maligned George W. Bush administration was to go to the U.N., get agreements, get resolutions passed, and then enforce those resolutions.
So we've come to a sad day, now 12 years after 9/11 of 2001, where we're not the ones who proposed diplomacy before we come in and act like a bully in a country in which there was no national security interest, just as our Secretary of Defense Bob Gates said before the administration bombed Qadhafi, destroyed his air force, and made it possible for the rebels, including all the al Qaeda that were immersed within them, to take over Libya; and that ultimately led to a year ago, when our Ambassador, Sean Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty were killed and others wounded.
Bad decisions have consequences. Most everyone is familiar with the old adage that those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it. The trouble is you cannot learn from history until you learn what the history was. So when some may be tempted to ask what difference it makes with what happened at Benghazi a year ago, it makes a difference in avoiding repeating history because we could not learn from history because the administration was hiding the truth.
I have come to meet and know surviving family members of those we lost in Benghazi. They feel like the blood of their loved ones should be enough to require truth. They would like to think if there was anything accomplished by the loss of their loved one, it could be that we could learn our lessons to be sure it didn't happen again.
Unfortunately, after two U.S. Embassies were attacked and people died in the late 1990s during the Clinton administration, the truth was not effectively and completely learned, and we didn't learn properly from those lessons. So we have to learn another lesson at Benghazi, which was a year ago today. But we can't learn a lesson when we don't know what the truth is.
And it scares our allies. They don't know if they can trust us. Members of Congress can be a big help in letting allies know that, hey, we appreciate the peace you're trying to bring. We appreciate what you're trying to do. Let us know if there's something we need to take up, hearings we need to have in Congress, an appropriation we need to get rid of because it's doing more harm than good. Let us know. It's a wonderful thing to have working relationships with people on the other side of the world that are in the hotspots.
I continue to communicate with Ty Woods' widow. Ty and Dorothy have a young son. She said he's got so much of Ty in him that he's more than a handful. Because that's an American hero. Ty and Glen were two men who heard that our people were under attack; and rather than go on planning for a campaign trip the next day or sitting down and having meals with others, casually going through conversations, whatever is done, that's not what these two former SEALs did. We knew there were two former Navy SEALs, but it's outrageous that when the names were released, this administration used the words ``they were killed while seeking cover.'' I didn't know Ty Woods and I didn't know Glen Doherty. I had never met them personally. I certainly have come to know them vicariously since. But I know enough SEALs, former and present, to know that those two former Navy SEALs did not die seeking cover. I knew it instantly when I read that. What an outrage.
When I was in the Army at Fort Benning, we were not at war. We should have gone to war with Iran over the attack, the act of war in 1979 against our Embassy. And I think if we had demanded their return within 48 hours or it would be the entire hell that America could bring to bear would come down on Iran if one hostage was harmed, and I always felt during those first few days when they kept saying the students had these hostages, that if we had had a backbone and made a demand and been willing to back it up, they would have released them. And if they had not and we had shown them we were not a paper tiger or a toothless tiger, that we would not have lost the thousands and thousands of Americans we have since. And it would not have been able to be used as a recruiting tool to recruit radical Islamists by telling them, look at what they did in Tehran. They fled Vietnam. The next incident is 1979. They did nothing. They were totally helpless, begging us to let their people go. That's all they would do.
There was a failed rescue attempt, which I would submit failed because of the leadership at the White House and the restraints that were put on them from the beginning. But there is a price when proper decisions are not made. And that weighs heavy on any President. I know it weighs heavy on President Obama. But, for heaven's sake, we have got to learn. It's been 12 years. A year ago, when it was just 11 years, our lessons had not been learned. And so more Americans die in Libya.
I know that people in this administration mean that they have love and respect and admiration for those who were killed in Benghazi; but I would humbly submit that love, respect, and admiration that leads to lies and coverups are not actually love, respect, and admiration. It is the lowest form of contempt. These heroes deserve better.
One of the greatest speeches I ever heard was by a man named Barack Obama. I heard the speech. It touched me deeply. We shouldn't be a red State or a blue State. We shouldn't be black or white. We should be Americans. And I want so desperately for this country to come together in that way, and I know it can happen, because I saw it happen on September 12, 2001.
I was a judge at the time, and I watched as hundreds of people came into our town square, as they did all over the country. America came together. There was no red America, blue America. There was not a single hyphenated America in this country on 9/ 12. We all held hands, embraced, touched in some way, as we sang ``God Bless America'' and ``Amazing Grace'' and prayed together. And I looked around and my heart soared as I saw Americans--skin color didn't matter, creed didn't matter, national origin didn't matter, age didn't matter. We were Americans standing together. But you can't have trust, you can't stand together when you know someone next to you is not being truthful. They are being deceptive. They are covering up.
So it's heartbreaking that this article today from CBS Interactive, Inc., says:
One year after the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, no arrests have been reported but the Justice Department says investigators have made very significant process.
On down, it says:
Last month, government officials confirmed that sealed criminal charges have been filed against suspects. They're said to include Ahmed Khattala, who gave interviews in Benghazi with several news organizations, admitting he was at the scene of the attacks but insisting he was not the ringleader. Khattala also said nobody from the U.S. Government had attempted to question him.
On further, it says:
The Obama administration continues to keep a great deal of information under wraps, citing an ongoing investigation, national security, and other reasons. The secrecy is an ongoing point of contention with Republicans in Congress.
The article goes on to say:
Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, demanding the Benghazi survivors be made available for interviews with Congress or else they may be subpoenaed. According to the letter, the State Department told Congress on August 23 that it was not prepared to support the request for transcribed interviews. If that doesn't change within 2 weeks, Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, Republican of California, said, I will have no alternative but to consider the use of compulsory process.
The FBI, CIA, Director of National Intelligence, Defense Department, State Department, National Security Agency, have all rejected or failed to answer multiple Freedom of Information requests made by CBS News, as well as appeals of the denials. The agency cites exemptions related to ongoing investigations of national security.
There's an article today by John Sexton from Breitbart, saying:
It's been nearly a year since the attack which killed four Americans in Benghazi. During that time, various minute-by-minute accounts of the attack have been published. In addition, the administration's decisions to refuse additional security requests and to revise its talking points after the attack have been examined in detail.
Further down, it says:
The general outlines of the CIA effort have been reported. One fact which has not been highlighted is that the U.N. arms embargo of Libya, which the United States helped pass in 2011, makes shipping weapons in or out of the country of Libya a violation of international law. Indeed, the way the U.N. resolution is written, even knowingly allowing such shipments to take place may be a violation of the agreement.
{time} 1530
Yet we keep hearing that guns were being shipped from Libya, perhaps to Turkey, perhaps making their way to al Qaeda rebels. Because the rumor that keeps surfacing is that the Turks that we got weapons to are the ones that decided where the weapons would go. And those did not go to people who had any abiding love or even patience with Christians, as we have seen as Christians have been decapitated, killed, maimed in horrendous ways in Syria by those this administration would have been supporting had we bombed Assad. This is all tragic. We need to learn from history, but we've got to know the truth to do that.
I love Darrell Issa, but the quote should not be that if the information is not forthcoming, as he says, ``I will have no alternative but to consider the use of compulsory process.'' In the name of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty, it should not be considered; it should be done. There should be a select committee to get to the truth. We should use all compulsory methods at our fingertips, including cutting off funding to any Federal agency that refuses to comply with proper oversight by Congress, because a Constitution that can be nullified by one of the three branches is a worthless Constitution. And if Congress cannot do meaningful oversight and examine what the money we are appropriating is going for, then that money should not continue to be appropriated to anyone who will not allow knowledge of how it's being spent and if it is being misused.
This has to stop. On 9/12/01, as a district judge in Texas, I was so heartened that on 9/12 we came together. On the congressional delegation trip last week in the Middle East, two Democrats I don't agree much with politically, but I got to know them a lot better, and I care deeply about them. They are very, very good people. We have the same desire for this country's freedom, liberty, peace, longevity of life--different ideas of how to get there.
I've been encouraged over the last week because of the way we can talk honestly, without impugning anyone's motives, and try to work toward answers. That's what I saw on 9/12, people wanting to work together. But I keep coming back to this fact that people in this administration need to understand, and our own Republican leadership needs to understand: we have got to get to the bottom of these matters; we have got to get the truth.
Jesus said, ``You will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.'' He was talking about a particular truth. But sometimes the truth comes out and it hurts the person that was seeking the truth or the people who were seeking the truth. And I would humbly submit, here it doesn't matter. We just need the truth.
One of the things that people around the world, as I've talked to people around the world, even going back to my summer in '73 of being an exchange student in the Soviet Union, people have admired the way the United States would expose the truth no matter how ugly it made it appear. People admired that.
Even in the Soviet Union, when they were not getting truth, privately--they couldn't say it publicly, but privately there were college students that pointed this out, We really do admire the way you bring out truth. And your own government's embarrassed, but somehow you manage to keep going on because you deal with truth.
One, in particular, said, I am concerned about my country because we don't get the truth.
Standing and looking at an exhibit in Moscow with a couple of Russian college students, I was amazed. One of them pointed to Gagarin. And I said, wow, Gagarin, the world's first man in space. There was an account that he had been killed during test piloting a jet in the Soviet Union. I was surprised that the two Russian college students would say, Yeah, we know that didn't happen.
I said, You don't believe what your government is telling you?
And he said, No, our government frequently does not tell us the truth.
Well, I didn't know if Gagarin was killed testing a jet plane or not, but I was struck by the fact that these Soviets, college students, knew that their government lied to them routinely. And they said, You seem to get to the truth in your country--it has taken a while with Watergate, but you seem to keep working toward the truth, and we don't do that here. We just have to accept what we're told.
I believe the expression was ``there's nothing to be done.''
Well, in America, there is something to be done. We have got to get to the truth. We owe it to the heroes that have given their last full measure of devotion for this country. We owe it to those who have put their lives on the line.
That means getting to the bottom of the rule of engagement for our military as well so that we don't have situations as we just read about this summer, a lieutenant--obviously very young--in charge of a roadblock at a security checkpoint. From the account--and I do want to do further investigation to get to the bottom of it--when waving, trying to get the attention of three people on motorcycles to slow down, to stop for the security--they were going fast, with no indication of slowing down--the lieutenant ordered shots be fired above their head. They didn't slow down. Knowing there had been people killed, Americans killed by so many green-on-blue attacks, knowing that his men were at risk if they had a bomb, he finally ordered his men to fire on the motorcycle riders; two died, one lived. That lieutenant is now reported to be doing 20 years in Leavenworth. That's just wrong. That's just wrong.
I've been in Afghanistan and talked to our soldiers there--soldiers, sailors, marines--and they tell me privately, Look, we have a hard time deciding, do I want to risk just letting someone kill me or going to prison when I get home? I kind of think I'd rather die as a hero and have an NAS burial than to be an embarrassment to my family by going to Leavenworth when I get back to the U.S.
We owe the 9/11 victims, the 9/11 survivors, the Benghazi victims, the Afghanistan soldiers, sailors, and marines that we have lost, we owe those who died in Afghanistan and Iraq, we owe them the truth. We owe them good rules of engagement so their lives are not needlessly put in jeopardy because of political gamesmanship.
We are owed the truth. And when Ambassador Chris Stevens' last words to his State Department colleague and friend, Greg Hicks, were, ``Greg, we're under attack,'' everything should have stopped. The personal, hand-picked representative of the United States President was under attack. Everything should have stopped. I really think if it had and this administration had done everything they could to get help to these people, this President would have won in a huge landslide because he stood up for people, our Americans who were in harm's way.
A year later, we don't even know what he was doing. We don't know what the Secretary of State was doing. We can't talk to the CIA agents, and they keep getting polygraphed every 30 days to make sure nobody's leaking any information to Congress because apparently that would be embarrassing.
I mentioned to some people earlier today about the doctrine of spoliation. It's a legal doctrine that applies in courts of law. And whether in a court of law or in the court of public opinion, credibility always matters.
We have seen, this week, a briefing by people who may well have gotten their talking points from the same person or persons who altered the talking points a year ago, falsified them, and handed them to what I believe was an innocent Susan Rice and sent her out to unknowingly be a dupe to spread things that weren't true about a video when it wasn't true at all. How do we know what we get in a classified briefing if we don't know who it was that made true intelligence into lying intelligence a year ago? We need to know so we know we can have more faith in what Susan Rice, John Kerry, Secretary Hagel, General Dempsey, in the things they're saying. Where did your information come from? Is it somebody that created some of the lies we got in the past or is this a totally truthful source? It matters. It matters.
It matters when we have Christian Navy SEALs killed in Afghanistan and American flag-draped coffins are mixed with Afghan flag-draped coffins. And an American chaplain is not even allowed to pray in Jesus' name, even though a chaplain may be a Christian and be taught that Jesus said, ``If you ask for it in my name, it will be given.'' Being prevented--as the First Amendment said the Federal Government should never do--from freely exercising his religious beliefs, and then compounding the problem by bringing an imam in Afghanistan to stand and give a Muslim prayer over our SEALs that includes basically the words that, in the name of Allah, the merciful forgiver, the companions of hell, where the sinners and infidels are fodder for hellfire, are not equal with the companions of Heaven. The Muslim companions of Heaven are always the winners. We let an imam speak in his language, say words that, when examined, appear to be gloating over the dead Navy SEALs that should have never been allowed to take off in that chopper, that should never have been allowed to stay on after the Afghans pulled out the Afghan soldiers on the manifest and put other Afghan soldiers on that apparently were disposable to them. It should have stopped there.
There were so many places it should have stopped. But we can't get all the answers about that, how it came about, why our best and brightest were put in harm's way. We can't really get to the truth as to why a good man--I've spoken with him personally, privately; I like him very much--Leon Panetta, why he would tell people who did not have security clearances that it was SEAL Team Six that took out Osama bin Laden; why Joe Biden, as Vice President, I know he meant no harm to our SEAL Team Six, but when he outs a SEAL team as the one that took out Osama bin Laden. And as one SEAL called his mother and said, Mom, you've got to get my name off all of our family stuff online; we've been outed. One parent said his daughter-in-law looked out the window right after Vice President Biden outed his SEAL team took out Osama bin Laden, the Marines had provided her a guard because they knew what it meant. It meant this administration had exposed our valiant fighting forces, our SEALs, to danger they should never have been in.
This is a day of remembrance, but if it is not used to get to the bottom of what happened a year ago and what has happened in the 12 intervening years since then, find out where we've made our mistakes so that we can correct them so that we do not have more Boston bombings or attempts like we had in Times Square--thank God for local police and people paying attention there. And thank goodness for a sweaty rear end of a bomber that was prepared to take out a plane and was attempting to do so on Christmas.
The Divine Providence, as our Founders and George Washington so often referred to as God's overseeing, will not protect us forever when we will not protect ourselves. God is good all the time. All the time God is good. But it's time to be better friends to our friends. It's time to stand up and be better enemies to our enemies. It's time that the blood of those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice was honored with the truth.
I hope and pray in the days ahead we will have the resolve, as Members of Congress across the aisle, to stand firm and say, Give us the truth. We don't care who is made to look bad, Republican or Democrat, let the chips fall where they may. The blood of our devoted, life-giving patriots cries out for truth. Let's finally get to it.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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