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.
“AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H1506-H1509 on Jan. 29, 2014.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized for 40 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it has been an honor and a privilege and a pleasure to work with Trudi Terry here in the House. I really hate to see her retire. She has put up with me more times than most people have had to, and kept a wonderful spirit and cooperative atmosphere in this body, in this Chamber, and I will be forever grateful. Thank you. I really hate to see you retire. So I guess to add to the bad news of Trudi Terry retiring, there are other things going on.
One story that hits home for me as someone with other friends like Dana Rohrabacher and Steve King, who have met with Baloch leaders from the Balochistan area of Pakistan--it is the area where most of Pakistan's minerals are located. It is an area where Pakistan has, for many years, terrorized the Baloch people, persecuted them mercilessly. They want the Baloch area's minerals and assets to keep Pakistan going and basically radicalized, but they don't want to let the Baloch people live in peace.
I proposed in a previous op-ed a couple of years ago that perhaps it is time to look at encouraging a new Baloch state, a new country of Balochistan as independent of Pakistan so that the people can live in peace, so they don't have to be worried about Pakistan officials and military coming through and committing, really, crimes against these people. After I wrote that op-ed and included a statement that perhaps it is time to join in the encouragement for a new Balochistan state, there was an article in a Pakistani daily paper that said in essence maybe it is time to quit persecuting the Baloch, reach out to them and figure out a way to let them live in peace because to Pakistan that area was important. The op-ed from the Pakistan paper also indicated that perhaps they needed to quit funding and helping the Taliban defeat the Americans in Afghanistan and just concentrate on their own country. That would have been wonderful, and would still be.
This story is out from the Toronto Sun, and it regards the Balochistan province in Pakistan. By the way, I have heard from numerous members of our American military and from others in Afghanistan that most of the supplies to the Taliban are coming from Pakistan through the southern Baloch area of Pakistan, and that is why the thought was triggered, maybe if Balochistan was independent of Pakistan, that would cut off the supply to the terrorist Taliban in Afghanistan and would save a lot of American lives. Since that has been said, we have lost hundreds more American soldiers. More American blood has been shed because we have failed to neutralize the Taliban, and they have continued apparently to grow in their efforts to take over Afghanistan shortly after we leave.
This article, though, says:
It would have been inconceivable that any U.S. official, let alone a Secretary of State, would host a delegation from Serbia the day after mass graves were discovered in Srebrenica in 1995. Yet on Sunday, a day after bullet-ridden bodies were discovered in suspected mass graves in Pakistan's military-controlled province of Balochistan, Secretary of State John Kerry was toasting a delegation of Pakistan security officials at the State Department. Balochistan and human rights officials say 169 bodies have been uncovered so far. Pakistani officials put the number at 15. Victims and families of Baloch youth who have disappeared and who are feared to be among the decomposed bodies being unearthed from the mass graves had hoped that Kerry would raise the issue with his Pakistani counterpart.
Instead, they heard Kerry say to the Pakistanis, ``We are really delighted to have you back, and I look forward to our continued conversation.'' America looked the other way in 1971 when the Pakistan Army slaughtered a million of its own citizens in what is now Bangladesh.
What emerged was a country that hosted the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, allowed Osama bin Laden to operate on its soil for more than a decade, and whose terrorists have been involved in numerous jihadi attacks around the world ever since the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the attack on USS Cole off Yemeni waters.
Yet America continues to give Pakistan billions of dollars in aid, which is then turned around to generate more hatred toward the West and produce more jihadi terrorists.
Inserting parenthetically into this article is my oft-quoted statement that you don't have to pay people to hate you; they will do it for free. We continue to send billions of dollars to nations that hate us and want us gone from the map. They want to see us suffer, and we keep sending them money to hate us. We can use that money here. We could save raising some taxes. We could get some roads and some of the infrastructure that the President promised if we gave him $900 billion, basically, in a stimulus package right after he took office, and that was going to fix all of the infrastructure, but maybe 6 percent of $900 billion went for infrastructure, and so the President is back out saying we have got to build these roads.
I mean, we have been talking about this for 5 years. He has. So you didn't do it with the stimulus money--why don't we just save some of the billions that we are giving to people who hate us, and then we don't help them kill Americans. We don't continue, as this administration is doing, to assist Syrian rebels who are killing Christians.
For anyone who happens to believe that there is a God as reflected in the Bible, the question will have to be asked: If there is such a God as reflected in the Bible, which I believe, is it going to bode well for a Nation which is funding and helping nations that are killing, torturing, kidnapping Christians around the world?
{time} 1200
This article goes on:
Now the U.S. is giving the same Pakistan army another pass as it carries out the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Baloch people from their homeland.
In response, the Baloch have taken up arms and are fighting their fifth war of independence since 1948, when the Pakistan army invaded and captured the independent and sovereign state of Kalat.
The article goes on.
But the fact is we have people in this administration demanding that what they say are indigenous people--despite the fact that the children of Israel occupied the promised land 1,600 years or so, 1,700 years at least, before a man named Muhammad was born. There are people who say: Oh, but these Palestinians--a name that arose as Newt Gingrich pointed out in the last 40 or so years--these Palestinians are indigenous, so you have got to give them their land.
Yet they are not saying it about Balochistan. They are not saying it about the Baloch people that are being killed and persecuted by Pakistan. Oh, no. We are helping kill and persecute the Baloch people by giving aid and assistance to a government that is killing and persecuting them.
If there is a just God in the universe, would there not be a price for a country as powerful as the United States that continues to support those who kill, maim, torture, horrify innocent people, Christians, Jews, secularists, and oftentimes they are even more brutal to moderate Muslims that are not as radical as they think they should be?
That is why in Egypt, for those who really have eyes and really have ears to hear, we had an incredible event last summer. This was the real Arab Spring, but it came in summer. This is when moderate Muslims, Christians, Jews, secularists rose up, some reports of 30 to 33 million people, larger than any demonstration in the history of the world. They rose up and said: We don't want radical Islamists running Egypt. The radical Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood that were controlling Egypt--
as we knew they would if they had election too quickly--the Muslim Brotherhood became desperate because they knew, to have a new Ottoman Empire running around the Mediterranean that would become a worldwide caliphate, they could not afford to lose Egypt from under their iron fist.
So what do they do? They immediately start burning down churches, killing Christians particularly, and so many others. That is why I was so encouraged. Over 90 percent of the people voting--which was a higher percentage than we have voting here in the United States--came out and voted for the new constitution that has been drafted under the chairmanship of Amr Moussa.
I was very pleased that Chairman Moussa was willing to come on the Sean Hannity radio show a few weeks ago when I was guest hosting for Sean Hannity. It is really encouraging what is going on in Egypt by those who want a democratic form of government and who do not want terrorists running Egypt, who don't want a worldwide caliphate, who don't like the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are not as blind to the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood as the leaders of this administration are.
If one will just go look at one of the symbols used by the Muslim Brotherhood these days, you find the crossed swords, the signs and wording in their language denoting the Muslim Brotherhood, and that is fixed over a globe of the world. It is not just Egypt, Iraq, Iran, not just in the former Ottoman Empire. Oh, no. This is fixed over a globe that is revolving, and the United States of America passes under those swords of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It is true that the Muslim Brotherhood here in the United States does not want to utilize violence right now because they have made so much progress in this administration that they are afraid violence right now might do damage. Violence in Egypt, the same Muslim Brotherhood feels it was necessary because they had just been caught. They had been rejected by moderate Muslims--the majority of Egyptians--and they became desperate. So their violence had to occur. Christians, according to these radical Islamist Muslim brothers, had to die.
Once America starts figuring out that the goal is global caliphate--
including the United States--then they will be participating in horrendous violence here, as they have in other places in the world.
Some of our moderate Muslim friends in the Middle East asked some of us last September: What is wrong with you in America? Don't you understand? You call it al Qaeda, but that is really just an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. They are the ones that attacked you on 9/11/
2001. These are moderate Muslims asking these questions.
Why do you not understand: Yes, it was the Taliban, but it is really the Muslim brothers behind it that you were at war with in Afghanistan? They are the ones that did more killing of Americans in Iraq, and yet you are helping the Muslim Brotherhood, you are running to their aid and assistance; and in Egypt you are demanding that either they put the radical Islamists back in charge of Egypt or we are not going to provide them the Apache helicopters, the tanks, and the jets that we were going to provide to the Muslim Brother leaders of Egypt.
They asked: What is wrong with you people? What are you not getting? You are helping the people that want to destroy you. People can see that around the world, but here in Washington, D.C., it is apparently one of the hardest things to find and see.
We hear people saying: Well, we really need all the people's most private information about phone calls, every phone call they make; we need to have that as part of the government because one time we believe it may have stopped a bombing.
Well, if this administration would do their homework, they wouldn't need the logs of every phone call of every American. We could go back to what the Constitution does require and the Court should require, and that is probable cause, before you start giving out personal information, before you let the government start monitoring every email of every person in America.
We were promised my freshman term that if the PATRIOT Act were extended, specifically section 206 and 215, that that would only apply if someone were in contact with a foreign terrorist, but Americans would never have to worry unless they were in touch with foreign terrorists. Then after Edward Snowden, we find out that actually what they promised was not true. And yes, that was during the Bush administration. I don't care. I don't care if it was a Republican or Democrat. I don't care where it started. When we find out it is still going on, it has got to stop. We are supposed to have some privacy in this country.
Those Democrats that were suspicious of the Bush administration wanting that much power were right. Where have my friends gone now that it is a Democrat administration? I certainly don't have a problem calling out a Republican administration when they are not doing the right thing. I wish my friends across the aisle would do the same thing and join me.
What about the Boston bombing? The Russians took a huge risk in giving this administration information and saying: Look, Tsarnaev, this guy has been radicalized and you are letting him back in America. You are headed for trouble. This is a bad guy. They took a risk in giving us that information because, when any country gives intelligence to another country, then sometimes it allows that country that gets the information to figure out how that other country is getting intelligence just by the information they get.
So now we have people here in this administration saying: Oh, the Russians, shame on them. They didn't give us enough information.
Are you kidding me? They told you a person had been radicalized.
When I asked the Director of the FBI in our hearing about not even going to the mosque to investigate, he says, ultimately: Yeah, we did go to those mosques--and I didn't hear it at the hearing. I didn't hear it until the replay. And he said: Under our outreach program.
Under the outreach program? Well, that is the FBI's ridiculous former program where they have special outreach to Muslim communities to try to be friends with them. It is not the FBI's job to be friends with people. It is the FBI's job to enforce the law and, in so doing, protect us.
When Tsarnaev, the older brother, came back into this country from a place on the globe where we know radicalization is occurring--and as I understand it, he didn't even have his passport; he had his legal permanent resident card--he wasn't even pulled aside for extra questions when there should have been bells and whistles going off everywhere. The best I can find out, all they did, basically, was talk to him and his mother, and he said: No, I am not radicalized.
No, my son is not radicalized.
They didn't go to the mosque and start asking questions that would tell them has he been reading Qutb, which is the author, the Muslim brother from the sixties that was involved in trying to commit assassinations and other terrorist activities, and he wrote a booklet called ``Milestones'' that Osama bin Laden credits with helping turn him radical.
If you know about the people that hate you and want to destroy you, then you can ask intelligent questions to find out if someone is your enemy. But because of the purge of training materials at the FBI, the intelligence departments, at the State Department--as one intelligence officer told me, we are blinded to our ability to see our enemy, because there was a young man named Tsarnaev who wanted to kill innocent Americans at a Boston Marathon and they got a heads-up from the Russians. They got all the information right before them that they could possibly need, and we don't even stop him coming into this country after he has been radicalized. What more did you need? We shouldn't have needed a heads-up from the Russians. All the signs were there for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
But we were so busy in our outreach program to a mosque that was founded by the Islamic Society of Boston, the founder of which is a man named al-Amoudi, who is in prison today for 24 years, I believe, for supporting terrorism, despite all the assistance he allegedly gave to the Clinton administration helping them find good Muslims to help in that administration. After 9/11, a couple of years or so after 9/11, it has been determined that he has been supporting terrorism, and now he is in Federal prison.
A man named al-Awlaki, who this President ordered a drone strike on in Yemen, though he was an American citizen, because his parents came over on a visa to study, had him, he is an American citizen. They take him back to Yemen. He learns to hate America, comes back and works on radicalizing Americans, except, of course, when he led prayers of Muslim staff members here on Capitol Hill.
{time} 1215
Otherwise, this President determined that he needed to be killed without a trial because he radicalized Americans, and he was a threat to this country. al-Awlaki had attended the Boston mosque where the Tsarnaevs attended.
I mean, how many heads-up notices do you need to figure out there is a problem, and innocent Americans are going to be killed and maimed as they were in Boston? It is time to wake up. Yet we get this story from Matt Apuzzo. The picture was from the Associated Press, January 15:
``U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents.''
The Attorney General, who came here last night, sat here for the State of the Union address while he is in contempt of Congress, while he is being lawless in not following the law and providing information. They wouldn't even give me all of the documents that they provided to convicted terrorists in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. I asked repeatedly. We finally got a letter many months after the request, basically saying, We will give you the 500-or-so documents that were entered into evidence in the trial, and we have got some others you can come look at.
I still don't understand, Mr. Speaker. If they will give boxes and boxes of information to the terrorists who are convicted ultimately as terrorists, why can't you give that to Members of Congress? Is it because the convictions occurred in 2008 under the Bush administration?
Then this Justice Department came in and stopped any further prosecutions from going forward even though there were a couple-
hundred-or-so named coconspirators in that case who were unindicted. My understanding from former Justice Department folks is that the plan was, if they could get the first convictions, then they would move forward with more and continue to follow up until they got this network that was allegedly supporting terrorism. We know five of them were supporting terrorism.
Could it be that this Justice Department doesn't want us to see all of the documents that they provided to the terrorists that actually show they are terrorists? Could that be the reason they don't want Members of Congress to see?
It is because then we might realize, wow, they convicted those five in 2008 under President Bush. They could surely have gotten a lot more convictions if they had just used this same evidence. Oh, sure. Congressman Gohmert, come over here, and we will show you some of the documents. We will let you see some of the electronic versions.
You gave them to terrorists for heaven's sakes. You can't give them to me so I can look at them in my office? It is unbelievable what is going on here.
Then there is a story from Kerry Picket from Breitbart. The story starts:
Senator Dianne Feinstein--a Democrat from California, chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee--told Breitbart News on Monday that she did not know a CIA annex existed in Benghazi, Libya, before the deadly September 2012 attack--which took the lives of four Americans--on the U.S. compound happened. Feinstein could also not confirm if other Members of Congress knew about the CIA annex prior to the attack.
Senator Feinstein and I disagree on many things, but I know she wants what is best for America even though we have staunch political disagreements on how we do that and what that is. My understanding is that, with anything of that nature, it would have been required that the Super 8, as they are sometimes referred to, would be briefed--the top Republican and Democrat on the Intelligence Committee in the House and in the Senate and the Republican leader in the House and the Democratic leader in the House and the Democratic leader in the Senate and the Republican leader in the Senate. Yet Senator Feinstein said, I didn't know there was a CIA annex at the Benghazi consulate.
What else is this administration doing to help rebels, who include al Qaeda--as it did in Libya? What else is it doing that it is not following the law and briefing the people who are required to be briefed in Congress?
I heard the President, who was standing right here last night, get applause when he, in essence, says, If Congress doesn't change the law, then I will do it--and he got applause. To thinking people, when you hear somebody say, ``if Congress doesn't do what is necessary,'' which is required by the Constitution, ``I will do it,'' it sounds like I am going to chuck the Constitution and do what I think is best.
Now, I have read about those situations, of countries that had a fair and representative form of government. Ancient Greece and ancient Rome had senates that were somewhat representative. There have been types of representative governments, and you would always find that, eventually, people had that desire for one rock solid leader. They would get tired of the disagreements because, as one of the English leaders had said--
and it may have been Churchill--democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others. It isn't a pretty thing to watch, as has been said. It is like watching sausage being made. Yet when you strip away the checks and balances that the Founders put in place to keep one executive officer from just doing whatever he wanted, then you don't have a democratic Republic as we are supposed to have; you have one man making the rules or one woman making the rules. It is time America woke up and realized their constitutional rights are at severe risk, and we are at risk as a result.
I wanted to mention something else that happened here at the State of the Union. A wonderful young man got the longest, best applause of the evening here as the President recognized Cory sitting up there.
In addition to Cory--the hero that that dear man is--I could see other uniformed people. In fact, there were some uniformed people up in that section up there, one of whom was not Cory but was Alonzo. The President didn't recognize Alonzo because Alonzo was a staff sergeant at Fort Hood. With Nidal Hasan, people kept looking the other way. They kept giving him good officer evaluation reports because they didn't want to be deemed to be profiling or doing something that was considered racist when the man made clear over and over that he was going to have to take action--violent action--against his country if they tried to ship him over and order him to fight Muslims overseas.
I did not get to meet Alonzo last night. I looked up and waved a few times, but I have great respect for that man, and he deserves so much better than he has been treated. He was shot six times; and apparently, while he is lying with six bullets in him, he realizes, as the shooting continues by Major Hasan, that he is not going to be able to pass off as dead because he is sweating profusely. As he says, dead people don't sweat, so he figured he had better get out of there, as I understand, and he took off. That is when he got shot and lost one of his eyes.
This administration has prevented Alonzo from getting the benefits he deserves because of an act of war, an act of terrorism. He is not even considered at the level of the 9/11 victims. He heard, Allah akbar, and he knew it was not going to go well. Everybody who heard that radical Islamist yell before the murders began knew this was not workplace violence, that this wasn't a postal employee going postal. This was a radical Islamist who was carrying out a war against what they consider to be infidels in America. They deserve to be treated as victims of an act of war--an act against them as uniformed military--and to get the benefits coming to them. That is what should have happened.
We heard the references last night to health care, and it kind of sounded like applause started when he was talking about how they were helping to reform health care, and then it died so quickly they must have realized, ooh, I don't want to be on camera clapping for the reform of health care when people are hurting across America who have lost their insurance--people like me, who liked my insurance, but ObamaCare said your insurance policy is not good enough. So I lost it. Thank you very much. There are people in really tough shape around America who deserve better health care than what ObamaCare is doing to them.
There were so many things in the State of the Union address. He was talking about raising the minimum wage with Federal contractors with a stroke of the pen. I mean, how many other laws does the President want to pass with a stroke of the pen? It is not constitutional to make laws with one man's pen. That is not the democratic Republic we are supposed to be. There was even, it sounded like, some snickering when he said that. He didn't talk about the millions who have lost their insurance as a result of ObamaCare. If it were only about trying to ensure the 30 million people who reportedly didn't have health insurance--they had health care; they didn't have insurance--then let's direct it at those. Let's don't take millions and millions of Americans' insurance away in the process.
As far as illegal immigration, one of the newspapers in my district--
Longview--had an article, an op-ed, in which they were saying I was opposed to immigration reform. Obviously, they read left-wing blogs and don't read and talk to me and understand what I have said repeatedly.
We desperately need immigration reform in America, but every time anybody here starts talking about legal status--amnesty--the ICE agents and the ICE union representatives tell us repeatedly that more people try to rush into the United States, that more people die trying to come across the desert, that more people fall into human trafficking and a horrible life. My position has been clear for anyone who cares to see or hear, and it is supported by so many other Republicans.
Mr. President has the money; he has got the wherewithal; he has got the manpower to secure our border. As soon as it is secured, as verified by the border States, we will come to an immigration reform bill so fast that people won't be able to believe it; but until the President enforces existing law, there is no sense in talking about it and luring more people to their deaths, more people in here. Control the border. Secure it. Don't close it. We need that water continuing to flow into this pond, but secure it so we know who is coming in, and when people are here without valid visas, we need to pick them up.
{time} 1230
Nearly 40 to 50 percent of the people that are here illegally came legally and overstayed their visas. Enforce the visas.
And so when a guy has been radicalized, do your homework. Don't let Tsarnaev back in when he doesn't have a passport and there are all kinds of indications he is now a terrorist. Don't let him in. We could have done without that one.
Secure the border. We will get an immigration bill done immediately after that. But before that, there is no reason to expect the President will ever secure the border.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________
