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Newt Gingrich on Homeland SecurityFormer Republican Representative (GA-6) and Speaker of the House |
A: The key distinction for the American people to recognize is the difference between national security requirements and criminal law requirements. I think it's desperately important that we preserve your right to be innocent until proven guilty, if it's a matter of criminal law. But if you're trying to find somebody who may have a nuclear weapon that they are trying to bring into an American city, I think you want to use every tool that you can possibly use to gather the intelligence. The Patriot Act has clearly been a key part of that.
Q: So you wouldn't change the Patriot Act?
A: No, I would not change it. I'm not aware of any specific change it needs. And I'd look at strengthening it, because I think the dangers are literally that great. You start thinking about one nuclear weapon in one American city and the scale of loss of life and you ask yourself, what should the president be capable of doing to stop that?
SANTORUM: We should be establishing relationships in Pakistan with allies of ours, folks like Pres. Musharraf, so we could work to make sure that that coup could be overturned and make sure those nuclear weapon do not fall in those hands. But working with allies at that point is the last thing we want to do. We want to work in that country to make sure the problem is defused.
GINGRICH: I think people need to understand how real this is. This world is in danger of becoming dramatically more dangerous in the not-too-distant future. People talk about an Iranian weapon? There may be well over 100 nuclear weapons in Pakistan. And the example you used is not too far-fetched to worry about.
SANTORUM: We created DHS because there was a complete mess in the internal [workings] in protecting our country. We had all sorts of agencies that had conflicting authority; we put together a plan to try to make sure that there was better coordination.
GINGRICH: I helped develop the model for homeland security. It hasn't been executed well. The fact is, we have enemies who want to use weapons against us that will lead to disasters on an enormous scale. And the original goal was to that DHS could help us withstand up to three nuclear events in one morning. There are people out there who want to kill us. And if they have an ability to sneak in weapons of mass destruction, they're going to use them. We need to overhaul and reform the department, but we need some capacity to respond to massive events.
Gingrich: The exploding debt crisis is because of exploding politician spending in Washington, not because of national security.
Santorum: The first priority of the federal government is to keep America safe. I would not cut defense--freeze it; cut waste; and then plow savings back into Defense.
Johnson: The debt is the greatest threat to national security we face today. Besides, we do not need 60,000 to 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to protect ourselves. Nor do we need nation-building.
Gingrich: We spend less on defense today as percentage of GDP than at any time since Pearl Harbor.
Santorum: The first priority of the federal government is to keep America safe. I would not cut defense--freeze it; cut waste; and then plow savings back into Defense.
Gingrich: Controlling the border and defending America are job #1 under the Constitution.
All these lawyers would undoubtedly deny having sympathy for al Qaeda, but the actions of some of them went far beyond simply challenging a detention policy they thought was unjust. In Aug. 2009, they provided photographs of CIA officers to their clients in an attempt to identify those officers who had interrogated them when they were captured overseas. The lawyers were apparently unconcerned by the potential threat to our CIA officers from being identified by name to al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists.
The secular socialists, however, want to give out enemies the same constitutional protections we afford our own citizens, effectively placing the right of terrorists ahead of the lives of Americans. With the Left in charge, when a foreign terrorist tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit, he was read his Miranda rights (which, as a foreign enemy combatant, he was not actually entitled to have). Taxpayers were forces to pay for the terrorist's lawyer, who most likely advised his client not to answer questions except as leverage to get a plea bargain.
We live in a world where there are weapons capable of ending civilization as we know it. And we need to be prepared in a very militant and aggressive way to defend America from having a catastrophic disaster of the first order.
And the greatest danger for us in meeting this threat is the weakness of our intelligence services. We do not have any significant intelligence on the enemy�s plans, networks, & troop strength.
Second, we must contain powers that could threaten us, including China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, & Pakistan--all of which have weapons of mass destruction.
The greatest threat of rogue dictatorships, like Iran or North Korea, is that they will sell weapons of mass destruction. While North Korea--with nuclear, chemical, & biological weapons--is a big threat to South Korea & Japan, it is a very distant threat to the US. But an Iran or a North Korea willing to sell nuclear and biological weapons to terrorists is very dangerous to America.
But I didn't think it was good government to keep signing up for these ridiculous expenditures. Most ridiculous of all, I came to think, was the development of the B-2 stealth bomber. At anywhere from $1 billion to $2 billion per plane, it seemed a colossal misuse of taxpayer monies.
And we weren't talking about just one B-2. Initially, there was to be a squadron of 132 of these bombers, a number that was whittled down to 75 and eventually to 20, although that figure remained open for discussion.
At one point, Dick Cheney made a deal with me to freeze the number of planes o order at 20, in exchange for my agreeing to back down in my fight, which Newt Gingrich and company could then take as my grudging support. We even shook hands on it, and yet a year or so later Cheney was out there thumping for 40.
A: 1) You would empower General Petraeus. You�d pass the supplemental immediately. You�d give him the money. 2) You would encourage the Iraqis to triple the size of their regular army. 3) You would encourage the development of a military tribunal system to lock people up the way Abraham Lincoln would�ve done it. 4) You would establish a nationwide ID card with biometrics so you can actually track everybody in the country. 5) You would make sure that the State Department actually staffed the embassy with people in favor of winning the war and you actually had your fully equipped intelligence and economic development teams. 6) Bring enormous pressure to bear on Iran to cut off everything [assisting with the Iraqi insurgency]. So, we ought to do what it takes to win, not tolerate legislating defeat.
Biological threats for which we have no rapid diagnostic tests & no drug treatments are so great that we should consider the preparation of a biological defensive system the highest priority in the American national security system and the most important job facing the new DHS.
Over the years, I've heard Newt Gingrich say many times that he wishes he had volunteered. Whatever his feelings were in the middle of the 1960s--and if he was like most young men in his age group they changed more than once--Gingrich never was at risk of being inducted. The accusations of draft-dodging by his political foes ring hollow. And comparisons with Bill Clinton, who was consumed by finding the least politically damaging way to avoid service, are an exercise in apples and oranges.
Amid the coverage of the comments, it was next to impossible to find a news story on the effects of extended field duty on female combatants. And it was impossible not to hear Rep. Pat Schroeder lampooning him by suggesting that no men she knew had a desire to hunt giraffes.
"Occasionally you get taken grotesquely out of context, but that's fine," Gingrich said. "It is part of the process of getting the message out."
Gingrich developed the "cheap hawk solution": the nuclear age required a quick-response, mobile military; and such a force could be as effective as the Navy, with its expensive aircraft carriers, and the Army, with its huge, heavily armed divisions.
Gingrich allied himself with the analysts who were developing the fast-attack tenets of maneuver warfare called the AirLand Battle Doctrine. The "cheap hawk solution" became an arrow in the Republican quiver, as it staved off Democratic attempts to cut the Pentagon budget. "Don't try to reform the current system," he said of Pentagon procurement in early 1995. "It is hopeless. It is impossible." The Speaker views many current Pentagon policies as part of the antiquated industrial age.
[As part of the Contract with America, within 100 days we pledge to bring to the House Floor the following bill]:
The National Security Restoration Act:
No US troops under UN command, and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world.