I was in the Capitol for some reason. I’m not sure if it was a vote or a meeting, and I returned to my office in the Cannon building, and as I came in my office manager came rushing over and said, “We’d better turn the TV on. A plane just went into the twin tower in New York.”
And as he turned the TV on, they were talking about the first plane that had gone in, and right there in front of our eyes, the second plane went in. And I can remember we just looked at each other and said, “This isn’t an accident. This isn’t a usual occurrence. This is something planned.”
And so with that, we started to watch it, try to gather more information, and learned that, of course, there was another plane on the way, and speculation as to where that was headed, possibly for the Capitol. So, Capitol Security started to tell offices to vacate. They weren’t sure where it was headed; they wanted to get people as far away from the Capitol as they could. They instructed all the offices to clear out.
In those days, of course, nobody had cell phones. In fact, they didn’t even have email capacity. We had beepers, and that was about it. Everybody vacated the offices and went to a place near the power plant they thought was significantly far away from the Capitol buildings and tried to await further word by going to a phone, if we could get one that worked.
The problem was a lot of the phones were clogged. Everybody was trying to call everybody, and people couldn’t get a call in or a call out. I sent my staff home and instructed them to just to be as safe as they could be. Then, I located other Members of Congress and tried to get down to the Capitol Police building, where we thought there’d be more information and better communication systems so we could find out what was going on, and a great number of us gathered there and tried to get what information we could.
I sent my staff home and instructed them to just to be as safe as they could be. Then, I located other Members of Congress and tried to get down to the Capitol Police building, where we thought there’d be more information and better communication systems so we could find out what was going on.
We were never sure, for some time, how many other planes were out there, and where they were headed. That was part of the lack of information: are these the only planes that are unaccounted for? Are there others out there? Where are they going? And who’s involved?
I never heard the plane that hit the Pentagon. I think we found out after it hit. But depending where we were, some of us could see the smoke eventually.
I don’t think people were afraid at that stage. I think originally, they were obviously shocked and uncertain as to what was going on, but the next day, I don’t think people were afraid as much as they were resolved, that something had to be done and we had to find out more and we had to do what was right.
The evening before, Members of Congress had gathered on the Capitol steps in trying to show some strength and some unity on that basis that, whatever was happening, we were going to deal with it and confront it. By the next day people were just eager to get more information and to find out what it is that we could and should be doing.
People were sort of soaking in the information. The administration was sending over people to brief Members of Congress, first the House, then the Senate, and sometimes in joint sessions. And people were trying to learn more about what was going on.
We were getting a great deal of our information from the television, unfortunately, as much as we were from the briefings. A lot of the briefings had classified information and I was not yet on the Intelligence Committee at that time.
Members of Congress began trying to ask questions and identifying just who did it, and why they did it, and how extensive this organization was, and how many people were in it. And what we were getting back from the administration was that they had identified who it was: Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, stemming from Afghanistan. To us, it seemed to be a rather small group of people when you measure it against armies or unified countries that are coming after somebody, and some of us started wondering why we were putting this on a war footing for such a small target, and wouldn’t it be smarter if we treated this as a terrorism crime?
To us, it seemed to be a rather small group of people when you measure it against armies or unified countries that are coming after somebody, and some of us started wondering why we were putting this on a war footing for such a small target, and wouldn’t it be smarter if we treated this as a terrorism crime?
These things developed at a fairly rapid succession of information. And of course, then the president at that time decided he was going to make a broad statement against the war on terror, and there was some disagreement about that as many of us knew that terror isn’t a thing you can go to battle against, or that you can go to war against. And we were anxious that this not be spread into something that it wasn’t.
We wanted to try to contain it to focus whatever our response was and have it be important and significant and correct and not just start firing away and see what happened.
At the start, what it was sold as was we were going into Afghanistan once the Afghan government, the Taliban at that time, would not cooperate with us in disgorging Al-Qaeda or assisting us in going in and getting a fine-tuned operation against them, and they wouldn’t be cooperative on that basis. The discussion then became, “Well, what are we going to do about running out Al-Qaeda,” because they are the ones that were deemed responsible by our intelligence agencies. We had reason to believe the intelligence was correct. So, the debate then became, “What are we going to do?” And, and most people said, “Well, we have to go in and we have to get the Al-Qaeda contingency.”
It was never about taking over Afghanistan. It was never about creating another government in Afghanistan. It was about getting Al-Qaeda. And General Franks and the others had them cornered and we voted for the resolution.
At the time I thought it was too broad. I wouldn’t go along with the unanimous consent provision. They wanted to bring it up at the House late at night and just have it go through unanimous consent with the language as broad as it is. I believe, having worked with my chief of staff at the time and other members of my staff, that we needed to narrow this. We needed to narrow it in scope of time, in geography and in focus of who was the target. And so, we had serious conversations.
At the time I thought it was too broad. I wouldn’t go along with the unanimous consent provision… We needed to narrow it in scope of time, in geography and in focus of who was the target.
I started to agitate a bit about trying to amend the authorization that was going to be presented on the floor. Both Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Democratic Minority Leader Dick Gephardt were not happy. I remember visits to the office. “Who’s this young guy?” — I was in my fourth year — “Who’s this guy that’s putting a stick in the spokes?”
But to me, it was nothing about not thinking that we should respond. It was about: we had the time here. You know, a couple of hours or a day even is not going make a difference. But the bottom line is, you better do this right.
It was a horrific event. We’d just been attacked, and there was a rush to respond, there were radio and TV stations pressuring us to act, and there was a lot of public support for it.
So my office staff and I were working on tying up our concerns when Dick Gephardt came in in the middle of the night and offered to let me bring my amendment to the floor for a vote. Among other things, my amendment would have required the administration to brief Congress every two months on the status of the war. It got clobbered. Only Barbara Lee of California was in support.
And then we voted on the war powers. So, we (or at least many of us) voted with the intention and with the trust that it would be a precision strike to get Al-Qaeda, and get out.
And that was the beginning of a lot of troubles and the beginning when the scope of this authorization for the use of military force kept being expanded. The president and vice president and others decided to stay in Afghanistan, to expand the operation to punish the Taliban and change the regime, and to try to do many more things than was originally presented. And at the same time the administration, with the support of too many in Congress, made the huge, huge mistake of deciding they were going to take the opportunity to go into Iraq. And that opened an entirely different set of factors that we’re paying the price for to this day.
