March 10, 2006

Astonishing Info from Rep. Curt Weldon, Congressman from Pennsylvania

In February Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania gave a speech, containing so much astonishing information, that I can't even excerpt all of it here. A few items:

In 1997, Dr. Gordon Oehler of the CIA, who was in charge of non-proliferation, told Congress that Russia was working with Iran on the Shahab missile system. Both houses of Congress then passed the Iran Missile Sanctions bill, to prevent this dangerous development. The Clinton White House vigorously opposed the bill, and after it passed, Clinton vetoed it.

As you all know, last summer, Iran paraded the Shahab-3 missile system down the streets of Tehran. It's now complete. In 1997, we could have stopped it. Gordon Oehler was that patriot who told us the truth, and for that, he lost his job.

Notra Trulock, a member of the Cox Committee in 1996 and 1997, warned that technology was being sold by U.S. companies to China, in a manner that was damaging to U.S. security.

...technology, for instance, that would allow the Chinese to merge their warheads and their missiles. Technology like machine tooling. Technology to assist in their boost-phase process for their missiles, to allow them to build longer-range missiles.

Yes, it was the Clinton administration that oversaw all that. Notra Trulock, a loyal, dedicated employee, initially received a $10,000 bonus from Bill Richardson, but when the media interest died down, they railroaded him out of his job. He lost his family and became bankrupt, because he told the truth.

Clinton pretended to have no evidence that Russia was selling WMD technology to Iraq.

I went back to Washington and wrote President Clinton a letter. He wrote me back three months later. I still have the letter: "Dear Congressman Weldon, I share your concern. If that occurred, it would be a violation of the treaty and we're using all of our resources to see if it's true. But Congressman, we had no evidence."

A month later, some of my friends in intelligence brought me a diplomatic pouch, which I still have, containing a Soviet-made accelerometer and a Soviet-made gyroscope.

I found out from my friends that we had in fact obtained 100 sets of those devices, three separate times, that had been illegally transferred from Russia to Iraq in direction violation of a treaty. We never imposed the requirements of the treaty.

Astonishing numbers on how Clinton gutted the military:

What we have to understand is that patriots like these individuals and others are the most important part of protecting our national security. I lived through the 1990s, when, for eight years, the Clinton administration cut back our defense resources. John Kennedy had 52 cents of every federal tax dollar going to the military; Clinton took us to 15 cents of the federal tax dollar going for our military in 2000. We went from 9 percent of our GNP under JFK to 2-1/2 percent of our GNP with Clinton..

Those cuts Clinton made ended up cutting back our tactical fighter squadrons, Marine Corps, and Army. That's why we're still flying Vietnam-era helicopters. That's why the B-52 bomber will be eligible for Social Security before I will. That's why our Navy today, which at one time, had 585 warships; today has 288.

During that time of Clinton cuts, we saw the largest increased deployment of our troops in recent history: 38 deployments in eight years versus 10 deployments in the previous 40 years. None of those 38 deployments were paid for in advance. Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, East Timor, Macedonia, Columbia, on and on - all had to be paid for by cutting into a decreasing defense budget. Thank goodness the Congress was Republican for six of those eight years, because we were able to increase defense spending $43 billion above what Clinton asked for. I hate to think of where we'd be today if we hadn't been able to do that in the late 1990s.

Clinton shut down key intelligence operations relevant to halting terrorism:

The Army at that time was building a prototype, down at Fort Belvoir, called the LIWA, the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center. I went down and reviewed it. They were doing more than just information dominance: they were doing massive data mining of open-source information from outside the U.S., including profiling and analysis.

I was so impressed that I called John Hamre, Deputy Secretary of Defense, who went down and he reviewed it. But then he did something that we later realized would shake Washington: he challenged them to do a profile of Chinese proliferation, and they did. That profile revealed some names that the Democrats did not want made public. I know the details of that data-mining effort because it was shut down by the Clinton White House in 1999 and 2000, for fear that it would bring back the memories of the China fiasco in 1996 and 1997.

When the data-mining operation was shut down, General Lambert was in charge of the Special Forces operation, and he saw one of the military analysts in an airport a month or so later and said, "Why did you destroy my data? That data was being used to understand where al-Qaeda cells were worldwide." Eric Kleinsmith, who has testified before my committee that he was ordered to destroy that data, said, "General, I had no choice. I was told that data had to be destroyed." The Clinton administration didn't want that data kept at Fort Belvoir because of the Chinese proliferation study that had been done in the months leading up to that revelation.

...Scott Philpot said, "Congressman, I'll stake my reputation, my career, and my family that I identified Mohammed Atta and three of the terrorists in January of 2000. We knew we had a hit of the New York cell and we knew these players were bad people. We had to transfer this information to the FBI for them to follow-up domestically, because the other four cells were overseas. We asked Lieutenant Colonel Schaffer, who had been working with the FBI on other cases to transfer the information about the Brooklyn cell. Three times, in September of 2000, on three separate occasions, Lieutenant Colonel Schaffer set up meetings with the Washington field office of the FBI."

The woman who set up those meetings, still in the FBI, one of Tony Schaffer's high school friends, will testify she knew the purpose of those meetings. In each case, at the 11th hour, those meetings were shut down by lawyers in the Clinton administration - perhaps because of Jamie Gorelick's firewall, the memo that said you couldn't share defense intelligence information, even though this was all open source. There was no reason to protect this data, and three times they were shut down.

Detail on how obstinate Clinton was in his refusal to fight terrorism:

Remember the Clinton administration was telling us, "Don't worry. There's no threat. We can cut our defense." In spite of being hit at the World Trade Center in 1993, Kobar Towers, the African embassy bombings, and the USS Cole, the Clinton administration kept telling America, "Don't worry, be happy."

It was Ray Downey who gave me the recommendation and introduced the language that created the Gilmore Commission, chaired by former Virginia Governor Gilmore, that issued three reports before 9/11 about what steps we should take - none of which were followed.

Numbers on the success of the ground zero rescue operations on 9-11:

You see, on September 11th, my friend Ray Downey, who had taken me through the Trade Center in 1993, was the chief of all rescue for New York City Fire Department. He was at Ground Zero overseeing the largest and most successful rescue in American history, pulling 70,000 people out of that complex. He and 342 other brave fire fighters from New York lost their lives, along with 2,700 brave Americans.

On Able Danger:

... in October of last year, Louis Freeh, the former FBI Director on national TV, in an answer to Tim Russert, said, "If I'd have had the Able Danger information, Tim, we could have stopped 9/11 from ever happening."

Well, last week, we had the second hearing and, for seven hours, in open and closed sessions, five Able Danger witnesses came forward. Career military officers whose careers they've attempted to ruin. Data analysts, people who understand intelligence far better than I'll ever know it, testified under oath that they identified the Brooklyn cell and four of the terrorists - that they tried to pass the information and that, in their mind, they agree with Louis Freeh that that information could have prevented 9/11.

Is it possible that the Clinton administration was so tragically negligent, and even tragically destructive, to U.S. national security?

Read the whole thing.

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