Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, tonight we authorize the President to use all necessary and appropriate military force against any nation, organization or person responsible for the terrible attacks of September 11, or anyone who harbors such individuals. Make no mistake; it is a broad delegation of authority to make war on those who have attacked us. We do not do so lightly or without consideration for the weighty consequences of our act.
After the attacks of this week, many Americans recalled Pearl Harbor. I thought of the Battle of Britain and Hitler's indiscriminate bombings of London, Churchill's words still so powerfully resonant: "He hopes by killing so many numbers of civilians and women and children that he will terrorize and cow the people of this mighty imperial city. Little does he know the spirit of the British nation or the tough fiber of the Londoners who have been bred to value freedom above their own lives.''
So true of America. Little do these petty tyrants and murderers know the spirit of the American people or the tough fiber of the New Yorkers, our defense workers, or the civilians who spared further casualties by taking down the hijackers and their own plane over Pennsylvania.
The face of this tyrant is new and yet not so new. Like others before him, he abhors a free society and democratic institutions. He is willing to kill innocent men, women and children to further his perverse aims. There are no means too inhuman, no tactic too appalling to further his end. He thinks we are weak because we do not tell our citizens what to think, how to act, whom to worship; because we tolerate dissent. He does not realize this is our strength, and he has awoken the sleeping giant.
"What he has done,'' as Churchill has said, "is to kindle a fire in hearts here and all over the world which will glow long after all traces of the conflagrations he has caused have been removed.''
What these petty tyrants do not understand and have never understood is that for all of our rough-and-tumble public discourse, we are one people, under one President, and capable of greater single-mindedness of purpose than any repressive regime.
We will not relinquish our freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, nor sacrifice our precious right of privacy or way of life. "The price of freedom is high, and Americans have always paid it,'' President Kennedy said. We pay it still.
This is the battle of America. The enemy may be new, but the fight has always been the same. Our government, our democracy, is premised on basic human freedoms, on the right of the governed to control their own national destiny. The Civil War tested whether any Nation so conceived could long endure. We have endured. We will go on, with growing confidence that we can fight terrorism wherever we find it and strengthened by the conviction that the generation of Americans now being tested will not falter or flag.