Date: 2002-07-24
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Chairman. I move to strike the requisite number of words. I appreciate the chants of my colleagues. but I think you do disservice to the families when we discuss this when you suggest that somehow we should vote without a discussion of the Roemer proposal. I cannot think of anything more important to the American people with the loss that they suffered. that all of us suffered on 9/11. than an effort to determine what happened. an effort to determine what happened by. as Ranking Member PELOSI said. fresh eyes. To simply have the same community looking at itself to make those determinations is insufficient. The Roemer proposal is not new. radical or mysterious because the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has commissioned many independent studies. The gentleman suggested if you have the Roemer proposal. then everything has to be public. No. we would have classified annexes just like you have a classified annex in the report that the gentlewoman from California . and others put out the other day. The suggestion is that it is not perfect. Gee. it has been on the table for 4 months and I have not seen anybody reach across and say. this is what we "could do. this would be better. we will help you. we could get a waiver because this would be an improvement. Maybe you do not see that as your burden. But those are all institutional arguments for not doing this and they are the arguments of great institutions in decline because great institutions in decline become more and more insular. They refuse to listen to the outside. They refuse to seek outside knowledge. The suggestion was that this would be one more report that Congress would ignore. Maybe this report would tell us that Congress failed in its duty to the American people by ignoring HartRudman. Maybe there was negligence in this body by not addressing HartRudman. because apparently it indicated a lot of things that we should. have been paying attention to in the intelligence community but we were not. Think of when NASA lost the space shuttle and the argumerit was. in and out of NASA. how this was going to be done and what had to be done to correct it and get the fleet back up and get it flying and return to our missions. all laudable goals. But think of the moment when the member of the independent commission. Dr. Feynman. took the Oring and put it into the ice water. Think of that moment and what that meant to the American people about what was wrong with the shuttle program and assumptions that were made about temperature and launches and weather conditions. all of which could be justified but turned out to be catastrophically wrong. When other great systems. complicated systems and sophisticated systems suffer catastrophic failures. in the business world they generally turn immediately to outside experts. When we suffered the catastrophic failure of the oil rigs in the North Sea. we immediately turned to outside experts. The Alaska pipeline. The catastrophic fire in the London subway. You say. well. that is not 9/11. But when they turned to outside experts. they found everyday practices that every day put peoples lives at risk in the subway. I think it was a Georgia company that did the studies. experts in catastrophic failures. Why? Because over time they had built up practices that were at odds with the safe passage of people in the subway and -it had to be redesigned. What is the other reason this is important? There are a number of them. One. an obligation to the families as has been mentioned by so many already. There is also another obligation to the American people. The American people have a lot at stake. They have a lot.on the table with the outcome of this study. What do they have on the table? They have their freedoms. because there has been much suggestion that this is simply a failure of laws. new laws that need to be enacted or old laws. and that is simply the failure. H5436 cc That may be the case. But we do not know that yet. Yet people are being asked to given up their freedoms. people are being asked to let their neighbors spy on them. people are being asked to have their freedom of travel changed. all of which appears necessary to me. But we do not know that. because we do not know the threat assessment versus those freedoms and the failures of the system prior to that. But somehow we cannot do this. Somehow we are told that if we have an independent review. that would be catastrophic for this system. because all of the arguments are interesting. they just do not go to the point of whether or not we are going to participate.