Mr. HOEFFEL. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the House with a number of my colleagues who will be joining me later, notably the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) and the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie), to talk about Iraq.
Mr. Speaker, we have had a great military victory in Iraq. Our young men and women performed with great courage and great effectiveness. We are all very proud of our military and the fact that the threat of the Saddam Hussein regime is no longer present to threaten regional and world peace. But we have two questions that we believe need to be addressed: First, is our military mission complete in Iraq? Secondly, having won the military victory, are we winning the peace?
Regarding the military mission, I would suggest to the House that our mission is not complete without a full accounting of the weapons of mass destruction. There is no question that the primary purpose for invading Iraq put forward by the administration last year and accepted by a majority of the Members of Congress, myself included, was for the purpose of disarming Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. There is no question that Hussein had such weapons in the past. The international United Nations inspectors were finding them in the mid and late 1990s. Hussein used weapons of mass destruction, notably chemical weapons, against his own citizens with devastating and brutal effects. No one has dreamt up or made up the motion that Hussein had in the past weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he did. But we cannot find them now. We do not know where they are. Perhaps they are buried in the desert and we will find them next week. I hope that is the case. Perhaps he gave them to some other group or some other country. Perhaps he destroyed them. We do not know what happened, but many of us in the House believe that we must have a full accounting of what happened to the weapons of mass destruction before our military mission is complete, for two basic reasons. First off, we need to know where they are. If they are not in Iraq and have been given or taken someplace else, we need to secure them, to dismantle them. We need to know who has the custody of them.
If they are in Iraq, we have to find them. We have to make sure that the coalition forces gain custody of those weapons of mass destruction and not another group that might use them for evil purposes. If these weapons have been destroyed, all for the better; but we need to know why our intelligence did not know that fact. We frankly need to know what happened to them so that we could be sure that the world has been rid of that particular group of weapons of mass destruction and that, if they do exist, they are in safe custody.
The second reason that we need a full accounting of the weapons of mass destruction is to determine what has happened regarding our intelligence and the political use of that intelligence by the Bush administration in the arguments to support war in Iraq. There is no question that the Bush administration and the leading senior advisors to the President stated with complete certainty in the fall of 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was developing more weapons of mass destruction, and posed an imminent threat to the region and, in fact, to the world. In private briefings and in public statements, the President of the United States and his senior advisors assured Members of Congress and the American people that the weapons of mass destruction existed, that they were being developed in even greater numbers, and that they posed an imminent threat. And many of us, myself included, based our vote in favor of military action against Iraq for the primary purpose of disarming Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. Now we cannot find them.
More troubling, now stories are appearing in the press and intelligence analysts are stepping forward, only on the record if they have retired, off the record if they still are at work for the United States, saying, in fact, they were not giving such certain advice to the White House in the fall of 2002, that they were saying we cannot be sure what kinds of weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had in the fall of 2002.
On September 26, 2002, the President made a speech in the Rose Garden stating with great certainty that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and was developing additional chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and yet at the same time it now has become public. The Defense Intelligence Agency in September, 2002, was circulating a report through the White House in the highest levels of the administration saying ``there was no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein currently had weapons of mass destruction or was developing more weapons of mass destruction.'' There was some evidence, but no credible evidence that that was a certainty. And that lack of certainty did not make its way into the public and private arguments made by the administration. So many of us feel that the Bush administration has a growing credibility gap regarding the weapons of mass destruction.
Why does this matter? It matters greatly for the President's new doctrine of preemption, of the preemptive use of military power to stop an enemy. I do believe in an age of terror when we are dealing with adversaries that do not always come from another country who do not always have a capital city to defend or a homeland to defend when we are dealing with terrorists who are not only faceless but stateless that it may be necessary to take preemptive military action if we are faced with an imminent threat to this country. But that presupposes that we have accurate intelligence. It is one thing to respond to an attack against us. That is the way America has always gone to war once we have been attacked, and it is easy, of course, in the traditional sense of warfare to see an armada massing in the bay or an army building on our borders to know that an attack is imminent.
In an age of terror, we will not always have that warning; so preemptive action may be wise and necessary in the future, but we must have accurate intelligence. We must be able to depend upon that intelligence. We must be able to depend upon the intelligence analysts bringing the information forward in a timely fashion, giving their best advice to the President and the White House, and then we have to depend upon the President and the White House using that information appropriately and wisely, using it to inform Congress and the American people, not to mislead Congress and the American people.
We do not know at this point what exactly happened regarding our intelligence. We do not know whether it was misused by anyone intentionally or unintentionally. We do not know whether the White House heard what it wanted to hear in these intelligence briefings. We do not know whether the intelligence briefings told the White House what the briefers thought the White House wanted to hear, nor do we know whether Congress was told what people only wanted us to know or perhaps what they thought they wanted us to know.
But these questions have to be answered because it goes to the very root of our democratic system, our checks and balances, the proper relationship between the executive and the legislative branches and whether or not we can have faith in the accuracy of our national intelligence agencies and in the proper use of that intelligence.
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http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r108:H23JN3-0065:
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