Jerry Nadler: “3 years after 9/11, the number of terrorist incidents is going up. The number of recruits for these terrorist groups are…”

“3 years after 9/11, the number of terrorist incidents is going up. The number of recruits for these terrorist groups are increasing far faster than we can kill or decapitate them. They have morphed and decentralized so even if we capture the people around bin Laden, or even bin Laden, it will not matter as much as if we had done it 2.5 years ago because new leaders have arisen. To finish, and this is the Director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace talking about securing all of the nuclear materials in the next 4 years, ``What we should be doing is implementing a very aggressive program to go out and secure and eliminate all potential source of nuclear weapons and materials that terrorists might obtain, whether in the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Iran, or more than 40 countries that run research reactors.'' Would this be expensive? Yes. But we could do it annually for the price of 1 month of operations in Iraq, 3- to $4 billion a year for 4 years would do the trick, and yet President Bush has tried to cut this funding repeatedly. What I find baffling is why the White House has insisted on attacking the most peripheral elements of the WMD threat, like Iraq, while ignoring, largely ignoring, the central threat, nuclear proliferation.”