Political Quotes

“I thank my colleagues for taking the floor on this important matter. While I serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I actually want to talk about this issue from my standpoint on the Senate Armed Services Committee. I happen to believe that one of the most valuable military assets we have as a nation is information intelligence. In that capacity, what we have under the JCPOA is the dramatic ability to learn, sadly, from tragic mistakes. After more than a decade of war in Iraq and thousands of lives lost, we know that operating in an environment where we base national security decisions on what we don't know rather than what we do know can be tragically costly. Over the weekend, there was press about a recently declassified report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff on weapons of mass destruction. It was submitted to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in September of 2002, around the time Congress and the administration were trying to decide whether to invade Iraq. The report that was given to the Secretary of Defense--and it was not widely shared with the administration or Congress at the time--confirmed that our officials at the very top levels of the intel and military community knew very little about the actual status of Iraq's WMD program.…”