Rep. Curt Weldon: "The Perils We Face"

FrontPageMagazine has published a must read speech, by Rep. Curt Weldon titled, The Perils We Face. Here are a few excerpts:

You know, in my 20 years in Congress, the one thing I’ve come to understand about our country’s history is that the success of our country’s security has really been dependent upon individual patriots. I think of people like Jay Stewart.

You might not know the name Jay Stewart. Back when Hazel O’Leary was Secretary of Energy under Clinton, Jay Stewart ran a program at the Department of Energy called “Russian Fission.” Jay’s mistake was that he came out and told the truth about Russia’s inability to control its nuclear stockpile. Hazel O’Leary and Bill Clinton’s response was to railroad Jay Stewart out of his job, to end his career, even though he had received the highest award that the Department of Energy gives to its intelligence people.

Then there's this

I think of Dr. Gordon Oehler. Buried in the bowels of the CIA, Dr. Gordon Oehler was in charge of non-proliferation. When Benjamin Netanyahu came out in 1997, Dr. Oehler told us that Israel had evidence that Russia was working with Iran on the Shahab missile system. He came over to brief Congress and made a fundamental mistake that you didn’t make during the Clinton years: he told us the truth. He said, “We have the same information that Israel has: that in fact there is cooperation between Russian engineers to allow Iran to build a missile system that will one day threaten Israel directly and will eventually threaten all of Europe and the U.S.”

Because of Gordon Oehler’s work, we introduced the Iran Missile Sanctions bill. I was a prime sponsor and had bipartisan support. In spite of Al Gore personally lobbying against the bill, we passed it in the House with 398 votes. I got called back down to the White House a second time. The vice president lobbied us for another 90 minutes, before the Senate voted and passed it with 98 votes. That was four months before Clinton vetoed the bill.

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.

Regarding some of our most sensitive technology which ended up in the hands of the Chi-Coms, there's this:

I think of Notra Trulock, a member of the Cox Committee back in 1996 and 1997, who sat for seven months behind closed doors with the CIA and the FBI, looking at all of the information about the allegations of China stealing our technology. As you all know, the Cox Commission was established because of Congress’ concern that the Chinese had been able to obtain some of our most sensitive technology. The job of the commission was to answer a simple question: was our security harmed by the transfer of American technology to China? Even though the Commission had 5-to-4 Republican/Democrat margin, the vote on our final report wasn’t 5-to-4; it wasn’t 7-to-2. It was 9-to-0 that our security had been harmed by the technology China ended up acquiring.

But it wasn’t because they stole it. It wasn’t the theft of our technology; it was the auctioning off of our technology. In fact, I produced the two charts that the commission would not agree to reproduce, because the charts documented why technology was transferred, showing the linkages between the dollars coming from China and corrupt U.S. Defense contract officials to the Clinton/Gore re-election campaign. The result was presidential waivers that allowed the most sensitive technology to end up in the hands of the Chinese.

Rep. Weldon talked about the drastic cutbacks in military spending during the Clinton years:

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.

But, besides those resource cuts and increased deployments, perhaps the real unspoken tragedy of the Clinton administration was the total lack of transparency on proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction technology. I recall it well. I must have given a hundred floor speeches. When we saw technology largely from Russia and China going to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and North Korea.

Be sure to read the speech. It'll piss you off!
__________

Rep. Weldon is author of the book, Countdown to Terror.