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“TERRORISM” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S10533-S10535 on Sept. 13, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TERRORISM
Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I want to raise the issue today of how we, as a nation, are continuing to address the question of terrorism.
Yesterday, the committee which I chair, the Subcommittee on State, Justice, Commerce, a subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, had the chance to hear from the Attorney General, Janet Reno, who is, I think, doing a very admirable and effective job as Attorney General, on what the policies are of the administration relative to the issue of addressing in a strategic way the threats of terrorist acts directed at Americans, not only in the United States but overseas.
Clearly, I think we now understand, America understands that this is our primary international threat to American lives and American interests. We may have instances going on in Iraq today which are significant. We may have wars going on in Bosnia which are significant. But as it relates to the threat to America, nothing right now is more significant than the threat of terrorist actions.
Coming out of the cold war, I think we, as a nation, decided to become a little more complacent. We felt we had gotten past one of the great hurdles of history: a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, a confrontation which was always overlaying with the issue of nuclear annihilation and confrontation on a variety of fronts, but, most important, the possibility that mankind might end up in a nuclear war.
With the end of the cold war, there was a great sigh of relief, obviously, and appropriately so. We, as a nation, went back to looking after problems which are American problems and our perspective became one of looking at our internal issues.
But in the process, we couldn't step out of the world arena, and the fact is that the United States remains the single most influential nation in the world. As would be expected, because we maintain that position of influence, we obtain enemies and people use us as their foil and they use us as their rallying point as they try to gin up, or generate, their concerns and their own issues in other parts of the world.
We have, therefore, become targeted by large groups, a large number of groups, disparate in nature, as the opposition. Many of these groups are motivated for religious reasons, fanatical religious reasons. Many of them are motivated for reasons that they see themselves as oppressed and they see the capitalist marketplace approach that we take to the world as being an oppressive approach, which, of course, is wrong, but it is their attitude.
We view ourselves as a generous people, and we are a generous people and a people that has a history of not seeking any territorial gain, not using our military forces for the purposes of exploiting other nations.
We have been through two major world wars where we have been left as the most powerful nation on Earth and have not used that for any purposes of aggrandizement of the American situation, but have rather, in a most generous way, rebuilt our enemies and allowed them to proceed on a course which has improved the lifestyle of our enemies we confronted in past wars.
So it comes as a surprise to the American people that there are people out there, that there are interest groups out there, that there are actually even nations out there that view us as their enemy and wish to exercise against the American people horrific acts, acts that involve the killing of innocent individuals--children, people who have no involvement in the military.
Yet, that is the way it is in today's world, and we must be realistic about it, and we must acknowledge the fact that as we move into the next century, and certainly in the beginning of the next century, that our most significant threat to Americans is going to be generated by terrorist action. It is not only terrorist action which may involve a bomb placed on an airplane, it is terrorist action which could well go beyond that. It is terrorist action which could involve, of course, a threat of chemical activity, biological activity and, of course, even of nuclear activity.
So the issue for us as a Government must be: How do we reorient ourselves as a nation, which for years structured its defensive mechanisms for the purposes of confronting the Soviet Union, a definable threat, a threat which, although huge, massive and awesome, was at least able to be brought into focus because the Soviet Union was a definable entity, how do we shift from that sort of a threat to a threat which is so amorphous, to a threat which comes at us from so many different directions, and a threat which is so much more difficult to tie to rational thought, and respond to it in a rational way? That becomes the main issue for us as a nation relative to how we structure our defensive policies over the next few years.
So the hearing which we held yesterday was for the purposes of trying to get an idea as to how the White House and the administration is approaching this issue. The way that they appear to be approaching it is that they are going to put more money into certain agencies which have responsibilities for addressing questions of terrorist threat. They have sent up a supplemental package of spending which represents about $1.1 billion. They sent it up about a week ago. Many have asked whether or not the package was structured for political purposes or whether it was structured for substantive purposes. And that is probably a very legitimate question in the middle of a Presidential campaign, because the fact is that over a year ago the President set, theoretically set in place, an Executive order which should have led to the definition of the policy which would have then led to the commitment of resources.
It is ironic that it has taken a year for that policy to evolve to the point where money comes forward--or a proposal to spend money comes forward just a few weeks before an election, whereas, clearly, one would have presumed that if there was a need for more dollars to be spent, and you had a 1-year lead time, that you would have requested those additional dollars at the beginning of the appropriating process, which occurred back in March and April of this year.
But independent of that question of whether or not it was a primarily political motivation for bringing this forward at this time, there is a question of whether or not the request comes in the terms of a strategy or whether it comes in the terms of a haphazard response to the issue, to the threat of a terrorist action against the United States.
For the part of these dollars which are under the jurisdiction of the committee on which I serve, which is the State, Commerce and Justice Committee, of the $1.1 billion that the President requested, about $300 million of that comes under my committee's jurisdiction. Our committee, about 5 months ago, took a look at the way we were approaching terrorism and responding to terrorism, and decided we were not doing enough.
Our committee has jurisdiction over the FBI, over the State Department, over the DEA, over the INS, over a number of agencies which clearly have front-line responsibility on the issue of terrorism. So we set up a proposal which essentially outlined a number of basic approaches to how we could better address the issue of terrorism.
First, we asked that the White House give us a strategic plan by November 15. We picked November 15 because we did not want it to end up being a political plan. We wanted it to end up being a substantive plan. Thus, we pushed it past the election so that it would not end up in the political whirlwind that occurs before every Presidential election.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to proceed for an additional 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GREGG. It is absolutely critical that we get such a proposal.
Second, we felt that if we were going to adequately address the terrorist issue, we should do it in an orderly manner, that first we should address what the threats are. And that means we have to beef up a number of functions in the Federal agencies that have responsibilities, specifically the FBI area. We need to put more agents on-site on this issue. We need to also be improving our ability to respond to a chemical and biological attack.
In the international arena, we need to make sure that our personnel who are serving overseas are protected from attack, and, therefore, we need to significantly increase the security, physical security of people who are serving overseas, not only the people who are serving, but the physical security for their families, which is very important.
We should not be putting at risk either an individual who works for the Government or the family of that individual who has gone overseas to live with that individual.
Fourth, we addressed the interrelationship of the Federal agencies and the State agencies, because although this is a uniquely Federal role, the role of protecting this country against terrorist action, there are tremendous strengths which can be drawn by a coordinated policy of State agencies.
So we took all this together and had a package that I think was put together in a fairly thoughtful and concise way. We came up with a need for additional dollars, about $150 million. And we took money out of other accounts--other accounts--and moved them into the spending accounts which were necessary to pay for these additional resources to improve our efforts relative to terrorists.
Now the White House comes along, and they increase that number from
$150 million to $300-plus million. There is some overlap here. We are not absolutely sure what the dollar difference is, but let us presume the dollar difference is over $100 million. Yet, in doing this, they have suggested no offsets; they have not suggested where we should take this money from. They said simply, let us put more money into this and that and more money into something else. That is not really a responsible way to do this.
To the extent more dollars are needed than the package which we put together, it should be paid for. We should recognize that the priority in protecting this country from terrorism is high enough so that those dollars that we are going to allocate to terrorism should represent a reallocation and should not just be used to aggravate the deficit. That is the first thing.
Second, if the White House's decision is to spend this additional money to expand those accounts, they have to do it in a coordinated way. This, I guess, is where I have my greatest concern.
I asked the Attorney General about this, and, of course, the Attorney General feels there is coordination. But as you look at what is going on, and how the different instances of terrorism that we have seen so far have occurred and how they have been reacted to, you sense maybe there is not as much coordination as there should be.
For example, has the President of the United States ever sat down with the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the CIA, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of State around the table, and said, ``What is our strategy on approaching international terrorism? How do we get about anticipating a terrorist act against the United States?''
We are very good, I believe, once a terrorist act has occurred, in reacting and investigating. And the FBI, I am absolutely confident, will reach the bottom as to what happened, find out what happened in the TWA situation and in the Atlanta situation and in the Saudi situation. But we should be ahead of that as much as possible, ahead of that curve. To be ahead of that curve, you simply have to have cooperation at the top, with the senior officials within the Government, and it has to be made a priority with the President. The President actually has to physically sit in that room for at least a few meetings and drive the process so that we get a substantive strategy, the purpose of which is to anticipate where the terrorist threat is coming from and be ready to take action prior to the incident occurring.
My sense is that although strides have been made in this area, and although there is a sincere effort on the part of all the major players, certainly in the Defense Department, the intelligence agency, the CIA, in the State Department, and at Justice, my sense still is that there is not an attitudinal approach which says, we intend to anticipate, we intend to coordinate, and we intend to have an effort which tries to strategically position ourselves to be ahead of the curve in the area of addressing the terrorist threat.
We should be approaching this with the same thought process that we used relative to the Soviet Union when we considered it to be a threat. When we saw the Soviet Union as a threat, basically the Defense Department spent an inordinate amount of time--not inordinate, an appropriate amount of time, a huge amount of time, dollars, resources and people on developing scenarios anticipating various events.
We do not have that type of structure. We do not have that type of dollar commitment or personnel commitment yet in the area of strategic planning. We have it in the area of reactive planning. It is improving. Just yesterday, the FBI asked that they be able to move 200 senior agents into the Terrorism Activist Unit, which is a very appropriate action to take, not putting green new agents into this area. We are putting our best into this area. That is a good decision by the Attorney General and the Director of the FBI. We are going to increase the terrorism functions within the FBI by 5 percent, so basically 10 percent of the FBI effort would be directed toward counterterrorism.
The fact is that we still do not have a strategic structure overlaying this. That strategic structure and how it gets overlayed and how the process gets evolved really has to come from the White House with the President. We are going to see, unfortunately, that the failure to have this type of a structure probably was one of the problems in Saudi Arabia. There will be a report coming out sometime next week that will point out that there was not adequate anticipation of the threat, even though there was knowledge of the threat, there was not adequate participation and anticipation of the threat, and that the senior officials within the Government simply did not react properly.
Why did they not act properly? I think probably because there was not a protocol in place because there had been no strategic planning put in place for how to get ahead of the curb. We still are taking the view that we wait until the act occurs rather than taking the view that we go on the offensive.
I recognize that the White House is trying hard in this area and the administration is trying hard. I greatly admire the efforts of the Attorney General in this area. I think the effort is incomplete. We have recognized but have not yet absorbed the nature of this, its significance to us, and the fact that we as a nation are going to have to use all our resources, all our creativity and our imagination in order to address it.
I yield the floor.
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to proceed as in morning business until the hour of 11:30.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my understanding is at the hour of 11:30 there is, by previous consent, an opportunity for the Senator from Wyoming and others to make a presentation. I believe there is an opportunity following that for others of us to make presentations.
I wanted to introduce a piece of legislation and I will do that in just 5 minutes, but first I want to comment about the bill on the floor.
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