Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I just want to rise to speak on this matter. This is a critically important issue. And I worked with Mr. Thornberry on this when I chaired the terrorism subcommittee and he was the ranking member of the subcommittee that has since been renamed and that he now chairs. This is not duplicative. This is an area where, frankly, we weren't spending enough time early enough in Iraq or in Afghanistan to understand the people that we were working with and to get ourselves into a better position to turn over responsibility for security and governance in Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible. We didn't understand what we were getting into because we didn't have the social and cultural awareness. We need to gain greater understanding in those areas. And one particularly important aspect of this is as you gather the information, how do you compile it in such a way that's useful. That's what this modeling program is supposed to do. You can gather all kinds of information all over the place, but if nobody knows how to actually use that information, compile it, put it together and pick out what is most important to get the lessons learned out of that, then you're not getting the true benefit of the program, which is a big part of what this does. It uses updated technology and updated software to figure out how to find the patterns that are critical to helping us do our job. So I would simply agree with the gentleman from Texas and urge a ``no'' vote on this amendment.…”