Neutralizing the Iraqi Threat

NEUTRALIZING THE IRAQI THREAT -- (House of Representatives - July 20, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hensarling). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.

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Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. I thank the chairman.

I first want to take this opportunity to salute his leadership, the way that he works on the Committee on Armed Services in a bipartisan fashion to strengthen our Nation's military and to make sure our troops have what they need. Certainly your leadership is commendable.

The one point that your comments brought to mind from some in the Defense authorization bill that we recently just passed out of the Committee on Armed Services, when we were talking about intelligence, one of the other cut backs that was made in the 1990s was the overall troop level. And we are seeing the unfortunate consequences of that when we have gone from 18 Army divisions down to 10 today. And we have our troops, our brave, loyal troops that are being asked by all of us as Americans to win the war on terrorism and fighting in over 100 different countries. It is not just Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Bosnia, it is Kosovo, it is many different places. And we are by virtue of having made these cut backs, stressing our troops rather to a high degree.

The point that I am trying to make, and perhaps the gentleman would want to elaborate on this, is that in the Defense authorization bill which we passed as I recall unanimously out of the committee in the final vote, we upped the number of troops over the next 3 years by 30,000, 10,000 for each of the next 3 years, active members of the Army and 9,000 additional Marines over the next 3 years. And this is certainly a first step in addressing the fact that we have gone from 18 Army divisions to 10 divisions.

And certainly something that all of us have to look at to make sure that not only, like intelligence, but in terms of personnel that we have the troop strength that is necessary to win the war on terror, it is not just the numbers. It is ample pay. It is the appropriate level of benefits for veterans, housing allowances, all of those things that the gentleman has shown such remarkable leadership on in his tenure as a chairman to make those improvements for our troops.

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Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. As the chairman knows, I had the opportunity to visit Iraq several months ago. While there is no question what we saw there, there were six of us Members of Congress with other military personnel attached to us. We saw a war zone. There was no question about that. But we also saw the rebuilding of the country; and that is something that, unfortunately, people only see the pictures from the war zone, but they do not see the fact that the electricity is coming on, that the water is being restored, that there is adequate supplies of petroleum products in the country.

We saw a lot of traffic on the street. For instance, in northern Iraq, in Kirkuk where we were, we even saw some new construction. We were told there was plenty of food available in the country. As we flew around the country, not only in the C-130 transport planes at 18,000 feet but in Black Hawk helicopters at 150 feet, we flew over a lot of agricultural areas of the country that were starting the winter planting.

We did not have, when we were there, the opportunity to visit a school or a hospital; but certainly we have been told, as you know, about the progress in refurbishing those critical institutions for Iraqi education and health care. So these are things that show where progress is being made to this day and certainly it was when I was there in November.

The other thing I think is really important to stress, and I think you may want to add to this, Mr. Chairman, is the morale of our troops. I had the opportunity to talk to a number of New Hampshire troops at every stop that we made, as did all of the other Members of the delegation. You are right, we are asking them to do a dangerous and dirty job. It is difficult. It is life threatening. And these kids are so dedicated to their mission and that is probably the most compelling story that I came away with. And when I say "kids" that is really not right. They were young Americans. They are wonderful patriots. They are fine Americans. And they are so dedicated to restoring a sense of normalcy, a representative government in Iraq; and they felt, despite the difficulty of the job that we are asking them to do, they felt that they were making significant progress and the morale was high.
All I can say is God bless them, and I pray for their safe return. They are doing a fantastic job in very difficult circumstances.

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Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. Mr. Speaker, one of the most telling periods of time when I was there was our visit to the Abu Ghraib prison, and while that prison has gotten a certain amount of notoriety because of the abuse by our troops, a very small number of people, of Iraqi detainees, the larger story that I took away from it is what I saw in that prison.

When you walk through the execution chamber, when you go through the torture chambers, and when you see the barbaric nature of those facilities, and the fact that in this one prison, 80,000 Iraqis were first tortured and then executed, it was a life-altering experience for me and, I think, the other Members of Congress who were there to have been in that room where so many souls were so cruelly murdered.

I left, from that experience, I think, a very changed person, having seen that kind of depraved behavior and the aftermath of it; and certainly when I have come home and had the opportunity throughout New Hampshire to talk to people about that, it has been a pretty telling experience.

I had a video camera with me and took an actual picture of the execution chamber and how it worked. We were shown the grizzly details. It is a very frightening experience, and people need to know of the mass graves and the fact that Saddam Hussein started two wars; that he actually used chemical weapons against his own people, against the Iranians; that he was funding suicide bombers; that he did have a very significant weapons of mass destruction program that the United Nations was never able to account for at the end what happened to.

While there certainly have been intelligence questions, and we need to improve our intelligence as we talked about at the beginning of this hour, these are facts about what happened. Having been in that prison and having seen that execution chamber, it certainly changed the way I look at this entire situation.

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Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I will tell the gentleman about another operation that took place.

For those folks who now have given the distorted view to the world that somehow the Americans are worse than Saddam Hussein, that we have tortured people and we are the emblems of torture because they have run these pictures back to back, including the picture where a person is pretending to shock a person. In the briefings I received, they never turned on the electricity, but they have given that picture out to literally millions of viewers with the clear impression that that person is being shocked with electricity.

When I was in the hospital there at Ramstein, one of the surgeons had a disk, and on the disk was a video of Saddam Hussein's people amputating the hands of people in one of the villages because they had not done enough for the economy. They were businessmen, and the growth rate of the economy had not been high enough. So he thought he would give a little example and amputate their hands.

So for people that want to see real torture, real inhumane treatment, it is there to see, but of course, if we give that disk to the news media, I am sure that nobody will. In fact, I think those people were in the capital. I think the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) brought them over for a reception, and as I recall, there were almost no stories about those people.
There was a story or two about the young kids, the 14-year-old kids who wrote anti-Saddam graffiti on their blackboard in high school. They were promptly taken out and hanged.

Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. In that prison.

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Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire. Once again, it has been a pleasure to serve under the gentleman from California's (Mr. Hunter) leadership, to have watched the Committee on Armed Services start the process of rebuilding our Nation's military, in particular, making sure that we have given a pay increase to members of the military for the last couple of years; that we have done a better job of providing the bulletproof vests and the retrofit kits for the Humvees and that type of thing. It is a process that needs to continue.

I thank you once again for your leadership and certainly look forward to continuing to work with you.