Frank Wolf looks back on 34 years of upstream battles

“I had a hard time passing it in my party and both parties. They thought it was sort of ridiculous to do it,” the Virginia Republican recalled.

When the commission came out with its final report in 2000, the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Wolf said the CIA and others criticized it for hyping the terrorism threat and for promoting such controversial policies as making wiretapping easier, monitoring foreign students in the United States, and using criminals and terrorists as spies.

“The CIA pooh-poohed it,” he said. “On the cover of the report was a picture of the World Trade Center on fire, basically, [a photo] from the 1993 bombings.”

After the second deadly attacks in 2001 that brought down the twin towers, the intelligence community started to implement many of the practices the commission advocated.

It’s a familiar pattern for Wolf, 75, who has spent more than three decades in Congress consistently and unapologetically fighting for causes many viewed as unpopular, impossible or unnecessary to tackle at the time.

An ardent advocate for human rights at home and abroad, Wolf fought free-trade proponents in both parties to hold China and other countries accountable for human rights abuses. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and Africa, and was an early and persistent proponent of U.S. intervention to stop the genocide in Sudan. More recently, he repeatedly bucked GOP leaders by calling for an independent panel to investigate the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Earlier this year, a year and a half after Wolf called attention to the need for such a panel, Speaker John Boehner announced the formation of a Republican-led select committee on Benghazi.

Wolf, who is retiring in January to devote time to his human rights work, spoke to the Washington Examiner about the new terrorist threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and some of the highlights of his 34-year congressional career.

Examiner: Why do you think we are back to the same level of fear that the country experienced in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks?

Wolf: My interest and involvement in this whole issue began really in 1998. I had traveled to Algeria with a staff person. You might recall that in the Algerian Civil War there were 250,000 or more people killed. I remember we went into a little village. We had a company of soldiers protecting us and the embassy was like a fortress. Everyone we talked to had had someone who was killed by the terrorists. Many of them had come out of Afghanistan and they have gone back.

From there we went into Egypt, and then when we landed, soon thereafter the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi and Tanzania took place. There was a constituent actually of mine in one bombing.

It just seemed like this was going to come. If you recall, the terrorism commission’s report came out in 1998, and there were some criticism of it by some Muslim groups and the intelligence community. Then 9/11 took place and everyone was alert. In that attack, there were a number a people from my district who died. … We then were focused like a laser beam. FBI Director Robert Mueller came on and did a good job of transitioning the FBI law enforcement agency to an agency on counterterrorism.

Examiner: Did the nation become complacent over the last 13 years?

Wolf: I think we’re slipping back again. I think the beheadings have sort of made people wake up a little. I think this, in some respects, is as serious or potentially even more so than 9/11.

Now, with the Internet … you can become a radical jihadist in your family room. So I think you have a deeper, a much more widespread potential than you actually have after 9/11.

Examiner: Tell me about your bill that is aimed at preventing foreign fighters from returning to the United States to carry out terrorist attacks.

Wolf: I put this out in March. We actually had the FBI help us draft it.

What that bill does is basically makes it a crime to go [to Syria] unless you’ve got a permit to do humanitarian work. It would then enable our security people to track these people and if you traveled to Syria and didn’t have this, you would automatically be in violation of the law so you could be apprehended immediately if you return to the United States.

Examiner: Was there something the U.S. could have done differently to prevent the rise of ISIS?

Wolf: I think there’s no guarantee. It isn’t just ISIS, though.

You have al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is not on the run. In fact, there are many people there telling us that al-Qaeda is saying, “Wow. Look at the coverage these guys are getting. They are bringing Shariah. I mean, look at that.”

I think you need an overall comprehensive strategy that includes military, special operations, and diplomacy. I think all the imams should be asked to speak out. The approach that I think was the most effective approach from an offensive standpoint was what Bush 41 and then-Secretary of State Jim Baker did. If you recall, Baker flew all over the world to put together a coalition. … Every nation out there participated except for Jordan.

Examiner: So you don’t think that what John Kerry and Obama have done to create an international coalition is akin to what Baker and Bush 41 did?

Wolf: This time around, I think you need Muslim soldiers on the ground. The Saudis have more to lose probably than anybody else because the Saudis actually moved 25,000 or 30,000 troops up to the border to combat any threat of an ISIS invasion.

Unfortunately, it appears based on public information that the Saudis and Qatar have aided and abetted [ISIS fighters] maybe because they want to get rid of [Syrian President Bashar Assad]. So now I think you need the Saudis to participate. I think you need Turkey to participate. I think you need Qatar and UAE too.

Back then, these countries knew [Baker], and they trusted him. I don’t really see that now. I do think, unfortunately, America’s credibility around the world is not to the degree that it was then.

Examiner: Do you blame the Obama administration for not nipping this in the bud earlier on? Is there something they could have done over the last five years that would have prevented the rise of ISIS?

Wolf: Well, I think if they got a status of forces agreement [in Iraq], which many people are saying they could have. We still have soldiers in Korea. If they left several thousand Americans as trainers there, I do not believe this would have happened. One, [U.S. soldiers] would have been on the ground with Iraqis. It’s less likely that the Iraqis would have run. Secondly, they would have been listening and knowing movements on the ground, and I don’t believe [ISIS] would have been able to do what they’ve done. So I think probably losing the ability to station forces there probably was the biggest mistake.

Also, I think you need to challenge the Islamic relationship, particularly their imams to speak up and say, “This is bad.” You need every mosque in the West and in the Middle East to speak out and just say, “This is wrong. This is bad. This is not appropriate.”

Examiner: I know you were one of the strongest voices calling for a select committee early on after the attack [in Benghazi]. Why do you think your leadership dragged its feet for so long on that?

Wolf: I don’t know. Maybe I’ll read a story or a book about it. Yes. I felt very strongly about it. We were in touch with a lot of the people, the families. We were getting a lot of information from people out in Northern Virginia. I have an interesting district. I have the CIA, I have a lot of people from the FBI and the State Department. So we were getting all these calls. You could just sense there was something there. I just felt that we haven’t looked at it and then when you looked at State Department’s Accountability Review Board and they never interviewed the senior leadership and everyone vanished. So we were getting many different calls.

I think Rep. Trey Gowdy is the perfect choice to chair the Select Committee on Benghazi. But why [Speaker John Boehner] did not do it earlier? I don’t know.

Examiner: What do you think about Obama’s policy toward China?

Wolf: I think it’s relatively weak.

Examiner: Why?

Wolf: There’s a story that when the Soviet ambassador returned to Washington during the 1980s, he would tell his people, “We’re not meeting with Reagan. He always raises human rights first.”

Right now, we’re not getting the human rights interest we had.

President Obama just in July did appoint Rabbi [David] Saperstein to serve as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, who is really a good appointment. The [nearly year-long] vacancy over there was incredibly wrong. We have passed a bill about a month ago to set up a special envoy to advocate for Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East, including the Baha’i and others. They haven’t appointed anybody to that position yet.

Examiner: What do you consider your biggest accomplishments over the last 30-plus years?

Wolf: I try to represent my district and serve them well. The things we’ve done on religious freedom, the creation of a Human Rights Commission, the National Commission on Terrorism, but also bringing the D.C. Metro’s Silver Line rail out to Dulles and widening I-66. When I got elected the National and Dulles airports were both owned and operated by the federal government, and they couldn’t promote it. National was falling down and Dulles was empty. Now, they’re both booming. So the transfer to the private sector worked.

I’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to serve my district. I’m a conservative Republican. I don’t think anybody is going to question that. I tried to work with people on both sides of the aisle to get things done.

So we just passed the last year, the national commission to solve the hunger problem as a bipartisan group. They came up with a solution, how do you literally solve the hunger problem without more government spending, without more food stamps? We also passed the Charles Colson prison reform commission looking into how we can reform the prison system. So there were a number of things I feel good about.