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“RADICAL ISLAM AND THE ``T'' WORD” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2242-H2244 on April 23, 2013.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
RADICAL ISLAM AND THE ``T'' WORD
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Yoho). 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.
I must say how proud I am of the Members of Congress from the class that came in 2 years ago and of those who are coming in now. It's an honor to serve with folks who care so much about the country and where we're going; but to know where we're going, it's important to know where we've been.
Of course, over the last week or so, we have endured terrible heartache because it wasn't just Boston that was attacked, and it wasn't just the little town of West, Texas, that lost so many people. E pluribus unum--``out of many, one.'' When tragedy strikes, we come together as one people to mourn. That has been true in the past. That's why it's so heartbreaking when Americans note that some gloat when other Americans are killed. Thank goodness it's such a rare thing. But with the tragedies in Boston and with the horror of the explosion and fire down in West, down in Bill Flores' district, we will continue to pray for those who are enduring such suffering, for those who have lost loved ones. There is no easy way to lose a loved one. Everyone in America has either lost a loved one or will; and when it happens, it allows you to empathize and sympathize so much more easily with those who have lost loved ones. So we grieve; we mourn.
An important after-tragedy aspect for those who are in government is to make sure that we figure out exactly what went wrong so that Americans are spared this tragedy in the future. A former Secretary of State once asked in the aftermath of a tragedy, which she was overseeing in the department, what difference does it make? Having had Embassies attacked before--and yet this consulate in Benghazi was not adequately protected--it raises very serious issues, and the answer should be very clear when the question is: What difference does it make?
It makes a difference in not having to console those who have lost and mourned with those who have lost and consoled and help those who are trying to heal. It means all of that suffering doesn't happen if we find the mistakes and make sure they are not replicated in the future.
It was difficult--and it continues to be difficult--to get information out of the State Department, out of Homeland Security in having questioned the Secretary of Homeland Security myself and finding that she couldn't even answer how many members of the Muslim Brotherhood were part of her closest advisory council, the Homeland Security Advisory Council, or what backgrounds people had that would indicate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood within her Countering Violent Extremism Working Group. It's called the Countering Violent Extremism Working Group because, heaven forbid, we should offend anyone who is trying to kill us and wants to destroy our way of life.
It's also interesting as we dig into the situation--I mean, I've been hammered in the last week and accused of being an intolerant racist simply because people did not know the facts when they leveled such allegations, but I don't expect any apologies as they find out the truth that, yes, there have been radical Islamists who have been known to have changed their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and to have falsified their identification documents so they would appear to be Hispanic and then make their way across our southern border.
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There is nothing racist in that. In fact, it actually can be construed as a compliment because these people knew that radical Islamists were not wanted in this country and that in this country most of us are greatly appreciative of the heritage that Hispanics bring.
As I've said many times, I think something that has been a foundational part of making America great has been, generally speaking--with a hat tipped to atheists and all the other religions in America--traditionally there was a faith in God, there was a devotion to family and there was a hard work ethic. And generally speaking, that's what I see more than any other things in the Hispanic culture. I'm hoping that culture will help revive those aspects in our American culture. So it's certainly not intended as a snub, and, in fact, it is just stating a fact. This is something that's occurred. But it's always apparently a fun game for liberals to preach about tolerance and then be the most intolerant people in the country when it comes to conservatives or conservative Christians.
Jesus told us 2,000 years ago, You'll suffer for my sake. I didn't suffer as a Christian growing up, but some are all too willing to oblige nowadays to make sure that Christians do suffer, that they are persecuted, that they are condemned for their religious beliefs; and they go after Christians in a way that they would never seek to condemn even radical Islamists.
But I hope that out of the disaster and the heartbreak and the harm and damage that came not just to Boston, Massachusetts, but to a central heartbeat of America and Boston, which is such an important and integral part of America--we all got hit on 9/11. We got hit as Americans when our consulate was hit and four Americans were killed in Libya. We got hit when rebels took the weapons that this administration helped provide and killed Americans in Algeria.
We all take a hit when there are mistakes in judgment, mistakes in judgment like helping bomb Qadhafi, even though this administration had agreements with him. He was providing intel on radical Islamic terrorists. Well, that source is gone now. And this administration, despite being warned by many of us that, Look, we know there are al Qaeda that are actually embedded in the revolutionaries; don't help until we know who we're helping, but this administration made clear it didn't need congressional approval and it did not need congressional authority. It had been asked to help by the Organization of Islamic Council and by NATO. So forget what all the elected Representatives of Texas and all 49 other States and all of the territories think, I'll just do what I want.
I am proud to count Michael Mukasey as a friend. I had tremendous respect for him as a judge back when he presided over many trials, but particularly the trial of the Blind Sheik after the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. He did a great job, and the prosecutors did great jobs. Andrew McCarthy should ever have the thanks and the acclaim he deserves instead of the condemnation he often gets. When you're around Andrew McCarthy and Michael Mukasey, no matter what your IQ is, the average is quite high.
As a former attorney general, former Federal judge, Michael Mukasey said in his article that was printed April 21 by The Wall Street Journal--there are so many fantastic points that need to be brought out. These are Michael Mukasey's words. He said:
If your concern about the threat posed by the Tsarnaev brothers is limited to assuring that they will never be in a position to repeat their grisly acts, rest easy.
The elder, Tamerlan--apparently named for the 14th-century Muslim conqueror famous for building pyramids of his victims' skulls to commemorate his triumphs over infidels--is dead. The younger, Dzhokhar, will stand trial when his wounds heal, in a proceeding where the most likely uncertainty will be the penalty. No doubt there will be some legal swordplay over his interrogation by the FBI's High-Value Interrogation Group without receiving Miranda warnings. But the only downside for the government in that duel is that his statements may not be used against him at trial. This is not much of a risk when you consider the other available evidence, including photo images of him at the scene of the bombings and his own reported confession to the victim whose car he helped hijack during last week's terror in Boston.
But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and what they represent, then worry--a lot.
For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was finally put in place by the FBI after so-called ``underwear bomber'' named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.
At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America and other self-proclaimed spokesmen for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?
Will we see another performance like the Army's after-action report following Major Nidal Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout ``allahu akhbar''--a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as ``workplace violence''? If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army's diversity program.
Presumably, the investigation into the Boston terror attack will include inquiry into not only the immediate circumstances of the crimes but also who funded Tamerlan Tsarnaev's months-long sojourn abroad in 2012 and his comfortable lifestyle. Did he have a support network? What training did he, and perhaps his younger brother, receive in the use of weapons? Where did the elder of the two learn to make the suicide vest he reportedly wore? The investigation should include, as well, a deep dive into Tamerlan's radicalization, the Islamist references in the brothers' social media communications, and the jihadist Web sites they visited.
Will the investigation probe as well the FBI's own questioning of Tamerlan 2 years ago at the behest of an unspecified foreign government, presumably Russia, over his involvement with jihadist Web sites and other activities? Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al-Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad--born Carlos Leon Bledsoe--who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn't count Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.
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If the intelligence yielded by the FBI's investigation is of value, will that value be compromised when this trial is held, as it most certainly will be, in a civilian court? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers, as they have every right to do, will seek to discover the intelligence and use it to fashion a case in mitigation if nothing else, to show that his late brother was the dominant conspirator who had access to resources and people.
There is also cause for concern that this was obviously a suicide operation--not in the direct way of a bomber who kills all of his victims and himself at the same time by blowing himself up, but in the way of someone who conducts a spree, holding the stage for as long as possible, before he is cut down in a blaze of what he believes is glory. Here, think Mumbai.
Until now, it has been widely accepted in law enforcement circles that such an attack in the U.S. was less likely because of the difficulty organizers would have in marshaling the spiritual support to keep the would-be suicide focused on the task. That analysis went out the window when the Tsarnaevs followed up the bombing of the marathon by murdering a police officer in his car, an act certain to precipitate the violent confrontation that followed.
It has been apparent that with al Qaeda unable to mount elaborate attacks like the one it carried out on 9/11, other Islamists have stepped in with smaller and less intricate crimes, but crimes that are nonetheless meant to send a terrorist message. These include Faisal Shahzad, who failed to detonate a device in Times Square in 2010, and would-be subway bomber Najibullah Zazi and his confederates.
Is this, as former CIA Director Michael Hayden put it, the new normal?
There is also cause for concern in the President's reluctance, soon after the Boston bombing, even to use the
``t'' word--terrorism--in his vague musing on Friday about some unspecified agenda of the perpetrators, when by then there was no mystery: the agenda was jihad.
For 5 years we have heard, principally from those who wield executive power, of a claimed need to make fundamental changes in this country, to change the world's--particularly the Muslim world's--perception of us, to press the ``reset'' button. We have heard not a word from those sources suggesting any need to understand and confront a totalitarian ideology that has existed since at least the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.
The ideology has regarded the United States as its principal adversary since the late 1940s, when a Brotherhood principal, Sayid Qutb, visited this country and was aghast at what he saw as its decadence. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, al Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and on the USS Cole in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, and those in the dozen years since were all fueled by Islamist hatred for the U.S. and its values.
There are Muslim organizations in this country, such as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, headed by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, that speak out bravely against the totalitarian ideology. They receive no shout-out at Presidential speeches; no outreach is extended to them.
One of the Tsarnaev brothers is dead; the other might as well be. But if that is the limit of our concern, there will be others.
Michael MuKasey is a great, patriotic American, a brilliant American.
And now, we have those who have told us that we must pass gun control legislation that they, most of them, even acknowledge would not have affected the horror at Sandy Hook at all. But they say you must pass gun control legislation for the benefit, in the memory of Sandy Hook, utilizing that horrible murder spree to try to justify their political agenda.
My first question is: Will the legislation you're proposing, would it have changed the outcome at Sandy Hook or Colorado or any of the mass murders? When the proponents say no, it wouldn't have changed Sandy Hook at all, then the next question is: All right, what other legislation do you have, something that might make a difference? Don't bring things that won't make a difference other than to further your political agenda. Let's do something to change what has happened in the past so it won't happen in the future.
So now we're told: Oh, gee, you should not use the Boston bombing as a wake-up call to make sure that we look more closely at people coming in who might want to harm us. The FBI got a heads-up from Russia, for heaven's sake, and I understand that they would have viewed the Russians' complaint and their information with a jaundiced eye because they'd say: Well, they don't care for the Chechens anyway. But they got a heads-up. And we've already seen, and I can't go into what was classified--it shouldn't have been; it shouldn't be classified--but all of the documents that have been purged from the FBI training materials because we had heard and read and found out from people involved in the FBI that they're eliminating words.
I had a chart up here that explained, under the 9/11 report, the words
``Islam'' and ``jihad'' and ``radical.'' These were words used commonly in the 9/11 report. But since then, since we had a new President and new regime and new Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder, and since the FBI had partnered with CAIR, one of the two known, as the Federal Court in Dallas and in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had said, the two largest Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, CAIR, the Council of American-Islamic Relations, and ISNA, the Islamic Society in North America, those are the two largest front organizations for Muslim Brotherhood, and this administration had embraced them and responds to them regularly and has the president of ISNA to the White House and even to the State Department and gets his input on things of importance.
So we have Muslim Brotherhood front organization members leading, guiding, directing this administration. They kept telling the President apparently, from what we've seen, because certainly that's what the President and Secretary of State Clinton said, hey, they don't dislike the administration, don't watch them burn the President in effigy, no, they love him, but it's just they're mad about a video. Or they're mad about perceptions of the U.S. They love our President.
Well, read the polls overseas and you'll find out that's not the case.
But for those who say: Look, the lesson from Boston ought to be that we need to rush through at least 11 million--some think it may be as high as 20 million--people who are in this country legally--or illegally and make them legal as quickly as possible because that will allow us a complete and thorough report on these people, but I would only submit, if the FBI is still using the purged lexicon where they can't talk about jihad or can't talk about all of the things that were removed from their training manuals and FBI agents were told they can't use anymore, how do you go question a proponent of killing Americans, a proponent of radical murderist jihad without talking about jihad, without talking about the words that radical Islamists use?
That must have been quite an interrogation of the now-deceased Tamerlan since they couldn't use the words that would have told him what he really believed in. And now, FBI agents who are so overworked they couldn't even do a proper investigation of a guy after Russia gives them a heads-up and gives them information, and now the solution, we're told, is to bring in 11 million more, rush them by the FBI, and then we'll know whether they're terrorists? You think?
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Or are we going to come down here and repeatedly have to express truthfully and honestly how our heart breaks for Americans that were killed because we never learned our lesson, because we had people that thought, what difference does it make?
America deserves better. We have a pledge that we take to protect this country, this blessed country, from all enemies, foreign and domestic; and I hope and pray we'll begin to better live up to that oath.
At the same time as I pray and mourn for those who've lost, who are suffering, it is my prayer that God Almighty will wrap His protective hands around this country, and that this country will give the Good Lord reason to do so.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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