South Carolina’s fourth district Congressman Bob Inglis has just returned from a Middle East trip in which –he says–the need to bolster missile defense became a clear objective for him.Inglis, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, is against $1.4 billion in Missile Defense Agency cuts…planned Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Inglis says that he was on the Gaza Strip when he got news of the missile launch by North Korea.

He says, “The great concern I have is that this is no time to go wobbly on missile defense and it’s really short-sighted, I believe, for the administration to be cutting missile defense when it’s obvious that this would provide fiscal and technological stimulus.”

The congressman says he is concerned that the move will hurt relations with countries like the Czech republic, cooperate with the U-S on missile shield defense.

“We coaxed them out on the limb, and now the Obama Administration has chopped off the limb,” Inglis says.

Inglis, who also serves on the Science Committee says he has confidence that missile defense technology would work. That has been at issue since the Reagan administration.

During the course of the trip, Inglis joined Democrat Steve Lynch of Massachusetts in a bipartisan mission to Syria, Israel (including Gaza), Morocco and India. The main focus of that leg of the trip, he says was to determine “how do we work with the central bankers, for example, in India and the officials in Morrocco to try to coax Syria into working with us—and of course, Israel is very happy to work with us— to try to interdict this terrorist financing and cut them off from the money is what the goal is.”

Inglis and Lynch met with Syrian President Bashar Assad for over an hour.

He came away with, “just trying to wrap my head around Syria’s fear of Israel. Something that would have never entered my head but for sitting there in Syria, with the president of Syria. Which shows the complexity of the situation. Somehow you gotta get them to have both sides, to stand down some way.”

Inglis says that Syrian and Israeli leaders say they are afraid of each other, something he says is hard to fathom.

In India, both congressmen visited four sites of terrrorist attacks …to thank India for their support of U-S anti-terrorist efforts.

The House has passed the Federal Reform Act and now waits to see if it passes the Senate. South Carolina Congressman Henry E. Brown Jr. is on the Veteran Affairs’ subcommittee and was pleased to see the bill passed. He says the bill will help survivors of retired military personel. The concern is that the current Survivors Benefit Plan is unfair to the survivor of military
retirees that pass away because due to service related illness or injury. Brown explains how the current plan works. “A retired veteran dies of a service-connected medical condition, the surviving spouse forfeits dollar-for-dollar from his or her SBP (Survivors Benefit Plan) the amount he of she receives from the DIC (Dependency and Indemnity Compensation) from the VA (Veteran’s Affairs),” said Brown.

“And what the government does, I guess to think that maybe that’s fair, the government then returns to the survivor the proportionate amount of the SBP premiums that the service member has paid over the years without interest and subject to taxation.”

The bill is intended to reduce the burden placed on survivors of military retirees. Brown says the current system is illogical. “If your spouse passed away and you were looking for an insurance policy and they could not give it to you if you received another insurance policy,” he said. “We felt like this was an inequity and so we’re trying to do some things to bring equity back to those retired spouses. There is only about 60,000 left that are impacted by this problem.”

Brown says this bill is a small step towards his ultimate goal if relieving survivors of what has become known as the ‘widow’s tax’.