quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from michigan.

mr. levin: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent that further proceedings under the quorum call be dispensed with. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. levin: mr. president, the bill that we are about to vote on is a good bill. it's the product of a -- an extensive bipartisan, bicameral agreement between the armed services committees of the senate and the house of representatives. we have passed a defense bill every year for the last 51 years. this bill deserves to be the 52nd, because like our previous bills, it does the right thing for our troops, their families and our nation's security. it passed the house with a vote of 350-69, and it deserves an equally strong bipartisan vote in the senate tonight. now, yesterday, i praised the members of our committee, and i also noted the amazing work of our staff, and i'm not going to repeat that. this bill is not a christmas gift to our troops and their families, authorizing funding

for our troops, supporting our troops and their families is what we owe them. it's the least we can do, for they are the gift, they are the gift to this country, to this nation, and to all of its people. i would now ask unanimous consent, mr. president, that the balance of my statement describing some of the many important provisions of this bill be included in the record at this point. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. levin: i yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

mr. reid: mr. president? the presiding officer: the majority leader. mr. reid: i ask unanimous consent the call of the quorum be terminated. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. reid: has all time expired? the presiding officer: it has. mr. reid: i ask unanimous consent to withdraw the motion to concur with the amendment. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection. the motion is withdrawn. the question is on the motion to concur. is there a sufficient second? there appears to be. the clerk will call the roll.

vote: vote:

vote: vote:

the presiding officer: are there any senators in the chamber wishing to vote or change their vote? if not, the yeas are 84, the nays are 15. the motion to concur in house amendment to senate amendment h.r. 3304 is agreed to. is this objection? without objection. the clerk will report the motion to invoke cloture. the clerk: cloture motion: we, the undersigned senators, in accordance with the provisions of rule 22 of the standing rules of the senate, do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination of alejandro mayorkas of the district of columbia to be deputy secretary of homeland security, signed by 18 senators. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the mandatory quorum call under rule 22 is waived. the question is, is it the sense of the senate that debate on the

nomination of alejandro mayorkas of the district of columbia to be deputy secretary of homeland security shall be brought to a close? the yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule. the clerk will call the roll. vote: vote:

the presiding officer: are there any senators in the chamber wishing to vote or change their vote? if not, the ayes are 5, the nays are 45. the motion is agreed to. cloture having been invoked, the senate will proceed to executive session and the clerk will report the mo nomination. the clerk: department of homeland security, alejandro nicholas mayorkas of the district of columbia to be deputy secretary. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate will be in a period of morning business for debate only with senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each. the majority leader. mr. reid: move to lay that on the table. the presiding officer: without objection.

' the presiding officer: the senator from arkansas. mr. pryor: mr. president, i understand that we are not in a quorum call. so i ask unanimous consent that the senate proceed to the immediate consideration of h. con. res. 71, which was received from the house. the presiding officer: the clerk will report.

the clerk: h. con. res. 71, providing for corrections to the enrollment of the bill h.r. 3304. the presiding officer: is there objection to proceeding to the measure? without objection, the senate will proceed. mr. pryor: i ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. pryor: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent the senate proceed to the immediate consideration of h.r. 2319, which is at the desk. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: h.r. 2319, an act to clarify certain provisions of the native american veterans members -- mobilmembers -- mobit act. the presiding officer: is there objection to proceeding to the measure? without objection, the senate

will proceed. mr. pryor: i ask the motion be read three times and passed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid on on thelon thetable with no interven or debate. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. pryor: i ask unanimous consent the indian affairs committee be discharged from further consideration of h.r. 623 and the senate proceed to its immediate consideration. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: h.r. 623, an act to provide for the conveyance of certain property located in anchorage, alaska, from the united states to the alaskan native tribal health co consort. the presiding officer: is there objection to proceeding to the measure? without objection, the committee is discharged and the senate will proceed. mr. pryor: i further ask that the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate. the presiding officer: without objection.

mr. pryor: i ask unanimous consent the energy committee be discharged from further consideration of h.r. 767 and the senate proceed to its consideration. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: h.r. 767, an act to amend the energy policy act of 2005 to modify the pilot project offices of the federal permit streamlining pilot project. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection, the committee is discharged and the senate will proceed to the measure. mr. pryor: i ask unanimous consent the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. pryor: i ask unanimous consent that the judiciary committee be discharged from further consideration ofes of s4 and the senate proceed to its consideration. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: s. 1614, a bill to

require certificates of citizenship and other federal documents to reflect name and date of birth determinations made by a state court and for other purposes. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection, the committee is discharged and the senate will proceed to the measure. mr. pryor: i ask unanimous consent the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. pryor: mr. president, i understand that there are two bills at the desk and i ask for their first reading en bloc. the presiding officer: the clerk will read the titles of the bills for the first time. the clerk: s. 1859, a bill to amend the internal revenue code of 1986 to extend certain expiring provisions and for other purposes. s. 1881, a bill to expand sanctions imposed with respect

to iran and to impose additional sanctions with respect to iran and for other purposes. mr. pryor: mr. president, i now ask for a second reading en bloc and i object to my own request en bloc. the presiding officer: objection having been heard, the bills will be read for a second time on the next legislative day. mr. pryor: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent that the appointment at the desk appear separately in the record as if made by the chair. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. pryor: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent that when the senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:00 a.m. on friday, december 20, 2013. that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the journal of proceedings be approved to date and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day and that following any leader remarks, the senate resume executive session under

the previous order. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. pryor: there will be six roll call votes at approximately 10:15 a.m. tomorrow. if there is no further business to come before the senate, i ask that it adjourn under the previous order. the presiding officer: the senate stands adjourned until 9:00 a.m. tomorrow.

[inaudible conversations] >> all right, welcome, everyone, to today's panel own private gulf donors and extremist rebels

in syria. i direct the brookings project on u.s. relations with the islamic world. i'll be moderating today's panel. to the left is elizabeth dickinson, a gulf correspondent becaused, author of the new brookings paper: playing with fire: why rebels risk igniting conflict at home," and to her left is kris tin, an assistant professor forever comparative and regional studies at the american universities school of international service. she's also a nonresident fellow, senior fellow, at the atlantic council career center. to her leaf, tom keeting, a formal managing director for jpmorgan and scholar of terror threat financing. beth, i want to start with you. when i began to look at this issue back in 2012, i didn't start looking at foreign

financing for extremist groups in syria. i was mainly focused on the groups in syria, particularly one of the larger groups, and they are one of the more vocal groups op line. they put a lot of material out on facebook and on twitter, and i noticed several times they would give very public shoutouts to individuals in the gulf, and thanking them for money and material they were sending to the group in syria. i was looking around trying to find more information. there was not a lot in the press. you had to follow this stuff in arabic on social media. yours was the only article i found, and this was back, i think, in early 2013, one of the first mention of this fund jpmorgan raising going on in the gulf, and for that reason, that's why mark lynch and i collaborated to send you over to

kuwait to do honest to god field work to see what the funding networks are like. how did the kuwaiti fund raising network for syria first get on the radar, and why did you pursue it? >> well, i think we had a similar experience. watching through the social media surrounding the syria conflict, you could see, occasionally, particularly beginning in the summer of 2012, a lot of mentions of kuwait, and there was no clear connection or no one put the pieces together. i started hearing this more and more and decided that, you know, someone who would be in kuwait, it's worth following up. it took the first six months to piece together social networks, and as you said in early 2013, we were really, really able to definitively say kuwait emerged as defunding hub for the syria rebels. we had a particularly striking

first, and it gave my the insight to the mentality of how this began. the first time i sat down with the donors himself, i was, of course, firm he was not going to admit to me what he was doing. i concocted a strategy to extract information from him, and i had the interview set, you know, the questions to ask, you'll be broad softball, you know, i hear you're interested in syria. he said, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, come here, i'll show you op the iphone, scrolls through, and, oh, yeah, last week i was giving these arms that you see in this picture to these guys. yeah, you know, he's -- so this is the attitude that you very quickly up cover when you dig into the networks. these are individuals who really believe in what they are doing, and they have really gone all in in supporting opposition groups. >> why did the funding and the

fund raising get started in kuwait, and then other gulf countries, but particularly in kuwait, why did they get started? >> well, this is a really important story. you know, we've been able to now, establish what's going on, go backwards in time and see how it did begin. like the syria uprising itself, the involvement began out of a hope that something could happen in syria, and so beginning in the summer 2011, long before it was militarized at all, a lot living in kuwait and elsewhere in the gulf where there's a large syria diaspora, they began raising funds to send back into syria. at some point, the syria donors in kuwait began to communicate with one another and form a group of people who would go around, pool their none and pool their efforts. at some point, a decision made to reach out to the kuwaitis who had access to far larger amounts

of money, far more important businessmen in kuwait. they had a network of people who had been giving to the causes in the past, and so they tapped into that network, and this fusion of syria expatriate involvement started the movement forward into funding the rebels on the large scale. >> and that was 2012? >> yeah, this began in, actually, in the fall of 2011 #, so very early. at some point during the meetings, a decision was made to begin partitioning the money between humanitarian relief and arms -- lethal aid, if we can say, and at this point, something very critical happened, and that decision was that donors themselves said we want an armed uprising, and the way that one syrian described it, they said to him, you know, we want to shorten the duration of your suffering. to do that, we have to have

armed groups. i'm certainly not trying to suggest that the syria conflict is armed because of the kuwait, but i think it was a significant factor in forming early brigades they brought grumes together and armed them in a very particular way. >> and what's the ideological flavor of the people doing the fund raising? is it a mix of secularists and ultraconservatives? >> we've seen an interesting wave in the ideology of the people involved, so at the beginning, syria was the cause that invigorated people across the spectrum. you saw donors, you know, from the sort of secular, maybe mild islamists to thal sighs involvedded. this is the popularity of the funding gaining and gaining. as the conflict itself was complicated, there was a huge drop off in sort of the public's

support, the broad base, and it really wiggles down to just the true believer types of sort of real extremes of the spectrum that were very interested in an ideological, sectarian agenda for the conflict. >> and why was it kuwait in particular that emerged at the hub for the fund raising? >> they are the perfect storm of conditions among countries in the gulf. the first and very obvious way kuwait is very different from the rest of the gulf is it's sort of -- it's thee most democratic country in the gulf which is something very beautiful. you go to kuwait and talk about politics in a way you can't in saudi arabia or in the uae. political parties, political groups are legal, freedom of association, all sorts of political activity that we would recognize ngos, all legal in a way it's not in the gulf. that's the initial condition. the second component of that was a very, very weak counter

terrorism financing law passed in 2002 that failed to criminalize counterit -- counter terrorist financing. the most extreme case, caught sending a thousand dollars to al-qaeda, the kuwait government had no tools in the tool box to go after that person. given that, kuwait really emerged assort of a place in the gulf war where people knew that this could happen in an easy way. i think something that i have grown to understand more as i become more, you know, deeper involved in researching this is that the networks sort of existed in kuwait that exist in kuwait for the financing on syria have likely shifted for a decade or longer before syria. we now have access to those because a lot of the people have children to broadcast fund raising on social media in a public way that allows us to literally map out the social

networks of the groups, but it's very clear that these guys have been operating for a very long time. i'll give you a very brief example. in the early days of the conflict, one of the reasons that particular syria told me he approached a donor was he had a reputation of being a very effective jihadi funder and knew the man was involved # in the past and the reputation was widely known among a particular ideological circle. >> i know this when i look on twitter and follow hash tags of the funding that a lot of the people responding to the pleas for funding are not necessarily in kuwait. they are from the surrounding gulf countries. why is it the case that a lot of gulf say from qatar or saudi arabia find it more convenient or necessary to send money to the bundlers in kuwait rather

than the local fundraisers? >> yeah, well, for all the reasons that i mentioned, you know, kuwait is just a place where you can operate and sort of not get caught. ..

>> i remember it was $300,000 for one night. and that is the huge amount of money. and what scared me more is that i asked him, whether the money go? and he said he had no idea.

and to answer your question, how much is being raised? well, this is the guess work. and people are hiding their transactions and one of the main reasons for that is fear of the syrian regime, who is thought to have very good contacts. and we are moving in very strange ways to be a part of these contacts. based on a number of individual offends that i know have taken place, i would estimate that it is hundreds of millions of dollars. >> there is a "washington post" article, saying that you had talked to a washington intel

official. and that you had quoted the same kind of figured. so can you give us a sense for how the mechanics of how the money is raised. if someone going door to door, are they asking for donations? our folks writing a check to some anonymous address? and how is the money actually being gathered? >> way that i like to think about it the solicitation is public but it's oftentimes very private and very close and sometimes in person or managed in a specifically controlled way. for the way that it solicited is something that is similar to what we would like recognizes a good ngo campaign. let's say you want to support someone in that it something that costs you a great deal of money. so the earmarks are very effective way of to give people a clear idea of what exactly they are going for and what

their donations are. and another great example is an 800-dollar rpg. so this would be like something that is on posters, signage, twitter accounts, it's very well known, hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million followers are following this. there are signs posted physically in kuwait. go to some of the neighborhoods that are known to be sympathetic and they will have huge banners that they come to this part of bets. it has happened in a number of ways. and they would say this is the bank information and i know there would be a screen shot right there with the account

information and the routing number and the amount of currencies that were accepted. and it's gotten less so. they will use -- instead of doing that, they will say that this is -- here is an instant message account. and you can help hold an event and you can put a box in the middle. but if it's overseas, you are afraid to make a bank donation, and it is just, it won't happen. so this is increasingly frequent as people are becoming nervous.

>> does it get repurposed or is it and what do you feel about this >> a lot of the advertising uses all of the forms of what is considered part of this. so it is for the orphans and widows and to feed the hungry and to help gr. and it's separate these things is very difficult. i spoke with one don't we spend a lot of time in hospitals. but he does that specifically working with one particular

brigade. and to answer your question, it is very much intertwined and these are some of the most competent and extremely effective charities. these registered charities are not what i'm talking about and it's an important distinction because kuwait is the single largest humanitarian donor and i

want to make sure that this is not something that is part of this. but otherwise i don't know of any crossover. >> the flavor of this current fundraising for the private donor seems to be very much the ultraconservative sunnis. so was there ever a time in 2012 where you had -- where you have the more moderate elements of the kuwaiti society that were raising money in kuwait to send more modern elements in syria? >> absolutely, and at the peak of the funding in 2012, it was a broad base of people. what has been alarming to watch over the last year as i have followed this is that those people who were involved in the modern elements have backed away partly because they are disillusioned. because they haven't been able to sort of effect a change, but

also because they are scared of what is happening in terms of the more extreme elements. and they are very nervous about these elements targeting them and this is mirrored to what is happening where you have fighting between the more extreme and more rebel forces. and this is happening in the donor community as well were a lot of the donors are going to be targeted or isolated socially. >> okay, you talked about how the money is gathered in kuwait. how is this move into syria? i get the sense that it is not quite as simple as making a wire transfer. >> yes, this is a harder thing to talk about her that we have clues as to how it's happening. some of it is probably moving to

through exchange houses. so the place that you would go to change your dollars into kuwait currency. you can actually make a deposit and then clear that deposit in syria and this is one way to do it. and it will be partitioned into lots of different accounts. so you would have maybe 100 recipients. there are increasing amounts of cash, particularly through turkey. for some time, the money can no longer go directly to kuwait or syria, it stops in turkey where it can go over the border. in the final way that we think it's moving is through traditional moneylenders that are very common across the globe. these are basically -- i hope my colleague can give you a means of this, or no cash actually

crosses a border physically. so basically i run up a tab of how much i have sent to syria and he will run a sub and then based on transfers back and forth, they will equal out. if there is a lack of this but that is the basic system. >> i want to talk about the fact that this has had on the insurgency in syria. but it seems to me having watched the conflict began in a much more -- it has become so much more sectarian. in one of the things that seem to be driving that is the perception that the world had abandoned the sunni and muslim

community to the winds of this regime and that this fueled a lot of the activism to raise this money. would you agree with that? and also, what effect has that had on the insurgency? >> i agree with that completely. i think one of the main motivations and motivating causes for what you hear is that syria, everyone has abandoned you, but kuwait will not. so these sorts of things -- these appeals to the forgotten of the conflict. but they have also exacerbated in other ways as well. and i will give you one specific example where feuding between two main donors may have contributed to the fracturing of the rebels on the ground. between two men outside of syria, one of them was a kuwaiti donor. and the other was a cleric in

syria. two clerics, they had a high-profile argument on twitter over who should join the military council. the city's western backed groups that the official opposition was trying to create in 2012. they said no way, no way are we working with the west. this is not -- this is not something that we want to do. and the sunni clerics said yes, we should do this community is a good thing. so they have this very high-profile clash. but what they had is that the rebel but graves, the two men can work together because they're donors basically said no, we are not working with that guy. so this is a huge split between us. and so they have sort of a dispute between the two of them and it was largely in part because of this feud that the

donors themselves had. and there is a large degree of adaptation and that is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. it's kind of like if this guy wants me to act a certain way it's like, okay, i will do it. we will make this video, fine. but i think that, as you mentioned, as the conflict has gotten so much more difficult. some of the ideologies have taken hold and they have begun to stick. and it is so hard to grapple with what is happening to my community if i can reach out and have this exclamation that it's this divine fight that i'm fighting. it makes it easier to sort of settle. and and of course, going along with that there has been an active ideological propagation

from kuwait into syria in the lot of the brigades have specific units that were intended to sort of codify their particular beliefs. >> it is also the case that the money can be quite attractive. because there is not a lot of strings attached. the money is just being delivered in suitcases or in garbage bags and -- particularly when the same kind of money is not coming from other allies of the syrian opposition. >> right, it's the only thing in town. for a very long time this was the only way to get funding. and, you know, there are lots of rumors and we know that this is

happening with private donors. from everything that i know, it's been on and off situation. but the private donors have not stopped and we need consistency. so these guys have been absolutely elemental in building those groups. >> your paper that you wrote is very much about the sunni fundraisers in kuwait. primarily because they are the most public about it. but the shia citizens are also raising money as well. and i know it wasn't the subject of your paper. but i'm wondering if you caught a glimpse in what your thoughts are about that? >> yes, this is something that needs to be further investigated. and it's not just the sunnis, i

could never find us and the evidence. but on this last trip i did find evidence and i do believe that it could be a significant amount of money. basically the shia community in kuwait is fairly small. and i don't want to say that it is particularly insular, but it's an extremely strong community and i believe the way of the fund-raising is probably happening on the side of this, it is much more private. personal connections, one businessman will call and say we need to do this to support this or that. to support our brothers in syria. and so we are sort of talking about how it's quieter. but a number of the most prominent businessman in kuwait who are shiites, they have significant foreign investment in syria. so they have the personal and

business stakes with the maintenance of the status quo. which goes a long way to blame some of the cash flows that i believe are moving. and this funding, what i have so far captain to, i want to stress that this is equally secretary and the nature and i don't think that either side is an angel here. both sides are employing rhetoric that is truly despicable and is really demeaning to other people that live in their own country. >> yes, that is the final question i would like to ask you. what risk is there to the gulf societies of allowing this kind of sectarian activism, even though it is being aimed abroad. >> i think it's a great risk. i think it would be very naïve

to think that something that is happening so close to home, the people are so actively involved in, that it really can be kept out of the borders of kuwait. but i do think that there is a good intention between the communities and people that i will speak to will say that we are so scared of what is going on. we are scared of retribution. and they are going to come and attack us. and it's very strange to hear about in kuwait and the very messy society, certainly like every society is. so i do think they have been exacerbated by people's

involvement. >> kristin, can you give us a sense of the political and social context for this and why is it happening now? is it different than the kind of sectarian activism that you might have seen in the '90s or the two thousands? >> sure, i would like to say that i really enjoyed reading all of this work and the support was so exceptional. a lot of the things we will be doing is amplifying things because she covered a lot of ground and one thing i think is worth this is that kuwait has served as a center for fund-raising and that has been there for a long time. quaid is really rich and not only that it's rich, but a it's been rich for a long time but of

course, in addition to being really wealthy, kuwait also has a long history of activism in the political space to do that. way back to the 1930s, they were the first to have an elected parliament and later with the state achieving independence and to put forth a constitution that allowed them that allows them to have an impact. in all of that means that there is a lot of space as well. and this includes a lot of the longtime. >> and this includes syrian opposition, especially early

kuwait. and i mean, i was really impressed when i was in kuwait in the late 1990s and early two thousands, just the pervasiveness of collecting money at that time. any store that you run into would have part of this one collecting money. but i will never forget seeing this one in the society having a huge this huge sign written in blood across the top of this reading chechnya. so they were collecting money and not only have they had this and also this experience in afghanistan and this is part of

the cause. and this is not just the main presence. i know the names of the problem once and the charities and they are not the ones that are getting the money. but they are not in this thing. and we basically have individuals that arose and this

includes individuals to reach out to others than enough to maintain. it's not actually coming from a big institution. >> so how would this might complicate the government's efforts to weigh in this

fund-raising? >> sometimes they would come to quaid and he would have this long flow of people and ideas flowing across the golf and again, because it was more open and provided this place of refuge. in kuwait has this and many other things even beyond. and we have these movements that would be pro-monarchy related to

movements like that. then we have oppositional movements. and those that are trying to fuse some of these ideas of democracies. all of these elements are present. and you also have a lot of movements amongst some of the more tribal areas and we are putting pressure right there. and these are not people that i would run across. and they are speaking about this

when there are much more active movements and the international issues are part of this and we are working on the sectarian issues, looking at her on these kinds of things. >> i think they title that plane that this kind of sectarian activism risks stirring this up. >> i think it started before this was ha