I have had national security background, 10 years on the Intelligence Committee, the last two years as chair.
Gen. Tommy Franks told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq – a war more than a year away.
I consider my voice to be a centrist moderate voice among the nine Democratic candidates.
A significant number of pages and sentences that the administration wants to keep in a classified status have already been released publicly, some of it by public statements of the leadership of the CIA and the FBI.
This president has been reluctant to hold anybody accountable. No one was held accountable after September the 11th. Nobody’s been held accountable after the clear flaws in intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq.
During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.
The president, clearly as a result of the war and the afterglow of the war, is in a time of great attention.
We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.
We ought to recognize that we have an offensive responsibility to take the war to the terrorists where they are. That responsibility has waned in the last year as military and intelligence resources were withdrawn from Afghanistan and Pakistan to be used in Iraq.
The White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda.
Its fundamentally unfair to have so much of the tax relief go to so few. And it is a 10-year tax plan rather than one, as mine, focused on the next two years, which in my opinion is the critical time to jumpstart the economy.
I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth.
We need to make a greater investment in human intelligence.
The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.
We need to have a strong defense focused on areas that are in the greatest vulnerability. I have been very concerned about America’s 361 seaports as a point in which terrorist activities and materials could be brought into the country.