Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota joins Secure Freedom Radio

With the extreme importance of passing the National Defense Authorization Act in Congress, Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota and his insider information on the Senate’s Armed Service Committee couldn’t be timelier.

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FRANK GAFFNEY: Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. I am delighted to have with us for the first time a freshman member of the United States’ Senate, formerly a Governor of the state of South Dakota, now representing it in the upper house of Congress. He is Senator Mike Rounds, he serves, among other things, on the Senate Armed Services Committee including its important Air, Land, Sea Power and Readiness Subcommittees, and he was present for a very important hearing, I think perhaps the largest number of cabinet officers and a four star thrown into the mix, in my memory. Senator, good to have you with us sir, thank for joining us, thank you for your service to our country and welcome again to Secure Freedom Radio.

Senator Mike Rounds: Thank you very much Frank, I appreciate the opportunity to visit with you.

FG: Well, you have been quite critical, properly so it seems to me, of this ‘ObamaBomb’ deal. Did the various cabinet officers, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary, General Martin Dempsey – the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, change your mind yesterday?

MR: Well, you know as we’ve talked to people, we’ve said ‘look, they started out with a 159-page proposal, but along with that they were supposed to be able to deliver to us some of the classified information’. Some of the classified information is being made available to us, but there are several secret documents, which according to secretary Kerry, he has not even seen, and yet these are part of this arrangement with Iran. Unfortunately, at this point I think we are going down the wrong path, I’m not seeing anything in this process that’s suggesting that we should allow it to continue. The problem is with congress, we have a president who is going to do what he wants to do regardless basically of what we suggest. The discussions that we had yesterday, in particular with General Dempsey, was very clear in terms of the way that he approached this. He gave advice during this process; in fact just a week before this deal was announced, he made it very clear that he did not think that the ability to pick up arms and ICBMs was appropriate. You know we should keep these away from the Iranians, and yet just within a week after that, our man in charge, our top man at the pentagon, I suspected then has to justify by saying ‘well he takes a pragmatic approach to his answers here, and he gave his best advice and then he has to live with what the leaders in our country have to say. He’s being a good soldier, but he’s also telling us exactly what he thinks’. In my opinion, he made it very clear that this was not the advice that our military gave the negotiators in this process with Iran.

FG: Well I wanted to drill down on that for just a moment, Senator Mike Rounds, a life time ago I worked on the professional staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and was involved in a number of hearing on arms control agreements and have been following them closely ever since. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced something quite like this, where there is so much on the line in terms of the national security, and the military’s involvement seems to have been at best sort of tangential, peripheral, if not in fact non-existent. What do you make of that and how should your colleagues evaluate such a deal that has been accomplished in such a fashion?

MR: Let me put it this way. The goal in these negotiations were to make sure Iran would never become a nuclear power, or have access to a nuclear bomb. Now what we end up with here is within a ten-year period of time we have not only released, or authorized, that the arms embargo that we’ve have against them will be lifted. Second of all after a period of eight years, they have permission now to pick up intercontinental ballistic missiles, and finally at the end of a ten-year period of time, there appears to be very little that stands in the way of them obtaining a nuclear weapon. So what this really amounted to was not following through on what was really told, which was to eliminated Iran from having a nuclear weapon. This is simply a slow and steady march towards not only allowing them the resources, with the release of easily 60 billions dollars in frozen assets now for use in whatever they want to do, including terrorist activity; but also most certainly we’ve given them the path, and they are very patient, but now they have won the ability to legally pick up arms once again and obtain ICBMs. I don’t think we necessary won in those negotiations, and me as a member of the United States Senate I’m going to make my vote very clear. But here’s the problem. For the next year and a half, our country will have the same man leading our country. The president will do what he wants to do. So, even if we override his veto, he will still move forward with whatever political activities he can, or political agreements that he can, with the Iranian government, and with those individuals, which most of us feel are a leading, if not the leading, sponsor of state terrorism in the world today. Let me just put this in perspective. During my questioning yesterday, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told me he wouldn’t rule out that in ten years that Iran could progress to an intercontinental ballistic missile. When you get that kind of a remark from your Secretary of Defense, that tells you what this is going to really end up with. It’s not good for America, it’s not good for the world.

FG: Yeah, Senator, just a couple of things quickly. One, it’s my understanding that it may be far faster in fact that the Iranians are able to get access to advance conventional weapons and ballistic missiles. We’ve had before this agreement was signed, estimates that they would get a ICBM range missile within this year, 2015, and as you say, the money that is being made available, and 60 billion dollars is the most conservative estimate I’ve heard, I’ve heard up to 600 or 700 billion when you throw in oil sales and gas and their investment opportunities. You’ve singled out, and I think really did a marvelous job extracting from the man who is to be the next Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Paul Selva of the Air Force, testimony about his expectations that a fair slug of that money may wind up being used by the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world today, for more of that. Talk about that if you would.

MR: One of the opportunities we have in this particular committee is to visit with and to listen to individuals that President Obama is nominating for different Pentagon positions. In this case, General Paul Selva is the President’s nominee to the top Pentagon position, and he told me in a hearing a couple weeks ago that Iran is still the leading sponsor of terror, and sanctions relief could still be used for Iran to sponsor terrorism. And let me clarify the remarks that I’m making here. When I talk about 60 billion dollars, or more, I’m using a conservative estimate of what would be the net amounts available just from sanctions relief, not including any additional resources that they can get from selling oil on the open market. Which, by the way the President thinks its just fine for Iran to sell their oil on the open market, but we haven’t heard him come out and publically say the United States should be able to sell our oil on the open market.

FG: (laughing) Just one of the many double standards that he applies, and what it might do to keep down price of oil so as to minimize the impact, the windfall, as you say. Senator, there’s so much more to talk about and I hope we’ll have a chance to do so as this story continues to unfold on the ObamaBomb deal, but let me turn to one other thing that you get to do in that Armed Services Committee, and that is act on the annual authorization bill for the national defense, the Pentagon funding and so on. This is a year in which you are trying for reasons we’ve discussed, among others, to ensure there are additional resources available to the Pentagon. The President says he’s going to veto that National Defense Authorization Act. Where do things stand, and where do you think they’ll go from here?

MR: Good question, as to what the President will actually do, we don’t know. What we can do though is the best that we can to get the resources marshaled to help our young men and women that are on the front lines. So what we’ve tried to do, without busting budgets, we’ve tried to give them the same number of dollars that the President said he thought that they needed, but we did it using a funding mechanism that’s bound within the Budget Control Act, its called Overseas Contingency Operations Funds, and we’ve put an additional I think about another 38 billion dollars into the Overseas Contingency Operations Funds. What it really does, is if we have emergencies overseas, if were going to be overseas, and you know with everything going on in the world right now we don’t know how much were going to spend overseas, but that money is being reserved for the purpose of military use. There’s limits on what we can use it for. The military would love to be able to have some of those limits relaxed, and put them back in the long term planning and things that they could count on being in the base budget. We agree with them on that, the problem is that if we put money into the ongoing military budget, we are required under the budget control act, to then increase non defense discretionary spending, that’s not a necessary thing to do right now. Rather than doubling the amount, and impacting our budget, we said ‘look the military is where we need the money right now’. So we put that money in there, it’s the best that we can do, and what were going to do with the consolidation or the consideration, the comprises that you’ll find between the House and Senate versions, will be what congress says is the way we should spend the money for military activities over the next year. The President may very well disagree, but that’s his prerogative. In the meantime we’re going to do the best to provide the best tools we can to the men and women that are on the front lines.

FG: Well as you know, from your service among other things on the Readiness Subcommittee, Senator Mike Rounds, this is urgently needed and we appreciate tremendously what you are doing to try, within the constrains of sequestration, to provide for the common defense, and we urge you to keep it up.

MR: You know Frank, there’s something there that people don’t understand. If we actually go back, and actually do the appropriations process, sequestration does become effective. But we have to do the appropriations process. We’ve actually passed twelve appropriations bills out of committee in the Senate. They are waiting to be held on the floor, but Democrats have told us they won’t let us discuss the appropriations bills. It takes 60 votes to get on the bill just to talk about how we can amend it. And Senator McConnell, our leader, has made it very clear an open amendment process is what we want to do. So everybody has a chance to participate in this process. Democrats have killed the first opportunity we’ve had, which was on the appropriations bill for defense. This bill, which is normally bipartisan in nature, they wouldn’t give us the 60 votes to get on the bill so we could look at amendments for it. That’s not the way we ought to be doing business.

FG: It’s the irregular order that has made the Senate dysfunctional for years, and it’s a tragedy and I’m afraid it’s going to adversely affect our military. Senator Mike Rounds, again from South Dakota, thank you very much for taking the time with us today and for you leadership in so many of these areas. We look forward to talking with you again very soon.