JOHN LINDER: “I have been a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for 6 years, and I am very proud and privileged…”

“I have been a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for 6 years, and I am very proud and privileged to serve on that committee and have served on the committee when 9/11 occurred and obviously since that time. I want to just state for the record the things that we have done as a Congress and also what the administration has done long before a 9/11 Commission was ever created and long before a 9/11 Commission put out a report. We created a homeland security agency that put together 22 agencies at a cost of $40 billion. These agencies are now working together, communicating and cooperating together. We created a TSA agency for every major airport in this country to screen passengers and screen bags at a cost of about $5.2 billion. We gave the airline industry $4.6 billion to secure cockpits and to make sure that the airline industry was able to survive after 9/11.”