Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), along with a panel of foreign policy and communications experts, spoke at the Heritage Foundation about creating a new organization to facilitate international communication and diplomacy. (more…)
Rep. Mac Thornberry discusses America’s inability to find Osama bin Laden despite our nation’s communication capabilities. He calls for the creation of a non-partisan private organization to facilitate communication within and between governments (1:30).
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) says that after September 11th he realized that the U.S. would not be able to capture and kill every terrorist, but rather that we stood the risk of creating more terrorists than we removed from the battlefield. He also says that while there was an ideological component to our opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, since then our “us versus them” perception has greatly receded, to our detriment. (:57)
House Armed Services Committee subcommittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Threats ranking member, Mac Thornberry (R-TX) says that efforts at security legislation are being punished by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who, he says, is using the Colombia Free Trade Agreement as “political leverage.” (0:38)
House Armed Services Committee subcommittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Threats ranking member, Mac Thornberry (R-TX) argues that his committee can not fully do its job to fight terrorism if other security measures like FISA or authorizing interrogation techniques are not addressed in the House. (0:57)
The House Armed Services Committee began the long and tedious process of marking up the Defense Authorization bill for fiscal 2009. The markup is expected to go on throughout the day. The Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO), in his opening statement expressed his position that the war in Afghanistan should be the primary focus of the American military efforts in the Middle East. This runs somewhat contrary to statements made by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates when he spoke at the Heritage Foundation in Colorado Springs yesterday, “The risk of overextending the Army is real. But I believe the risk is far greater — to that institution, as well as to our country — if we were to fail in Iraq. That is the war we are in. That is the war we must win.”
Skelton also said that the bill offered a pay increase for the military, a greater commitment to fighting weapons of mass destruction, and reforms for the contracting structure within the U.S. Army. He said that the bill addresses the command and control issues that have arisen in Afghanistan and the combined NATO operations there. Ranking Member Dunking Hunter (R-CA) emphasizes future combat systems funding and the need to increase the size of the Army.
The first subcommittee to present their markup and amendments was the Terrorism and Unconventional Threats and Capabilities. The subcommittee chairman Adam Smith (D-WA) said that they have authorized $185 million beyond the president’s budget for special operations capabilities. The ranking member of the subcommittee, Mac Thorberry made the most political statement saying that fighting terrorism goes beyond the Armed Services Committee and that the failure to pass FISA in the House and the limits currently being extracted on intelligence officials’ interrogation techniques increase, “Our potential vulnerability to new threats…” He spoke out against Nancy Pelosi saying that “no good deed goes unpunished” as she uses Iraq war funding and the Colombia Free Trade Agreement as leverage against President Bush.
