Mark Smith Challenges Cong. John Tierney Former Air Force Investigator Would End One-Party Rule By Curt Lovelace October 2002 Print Edition

Mark Smith, of Burlington, believes the federal government can be more efficient and less intrusive.

Although Mark Smith's father was a conservative Democrat who had Sen. Ted Kennedy at his deathbed, Smith became an investigator for the Air Force who learned to make "fact-based decisions." He believes that the Republican message is fact-based.

"It's a proven method," he says.

Smith now runs a successful security business based in Burlington. He learned the business during his 21-year career in the Air Force. From 1983 to 1995, he worked in the Air Force Office of Investigation, working his way up to the office of Special Agent. His investigations included cases of homicides, crimes against women and children, and fraud.

He does not believe that incumbent Democrat John Tierney has provided the leadership his constituents in the 6th District need.

Mark Smith says the District has suffered because Congressman Tierney has not provided leadership during his four years in Congress.

MassNews: Why should the people replace Congressman Tierney with you? Smith: Over the past four years since John Tierney's been in office, we have lost thousands of jobs. We've lost jobs in G.E. and Lucent is practically non-existent in our district. We've lost jobs in Raytheon. Now I don't favor big business. I favor small business. But the small firms that sell to the big ones are in the thousands. These are thousands of support jobs in the community. That's what we should be fighting for, getting strength back in the defense industry, the high-tech industry and the fishing industry. Getting back to our basics so we can re-establish jobs.

That's how you stimulate an economy, through job growth. You give the companies incentives to grow. They support small businesses and provide job security for their employees. You don't tax and spend and suck the money out of a district and expect it to grow. Our district has atrophied and lost jobs and now we're in trouble. We're not going to turn around until we start stimulating the district.

MassNews: You mentioned the fishing industry. What's your plan?

Smith: John Tierney has been non-existent on the fishing industry. We have a huge fishing industry in this state and there's a reason our surrounding states care about the fishing industry here. If the fishing industry shrinks in Massachusetts, it will grow in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine. We need a strong voice for that fishing industry. We need to return the industry back to the fishing experts, and those are the fishermen. These people know what it takes to manage their own industry. Working with environmental groups, we can manage the growth of the fishing stock without killing the fishing industry. Right now, the little guys can't afford to keep their boats. We've had nobody at the federal level to speak up for the fishing industry.

MassNews: Are there other district-related issues that need to be addressed?

Smith: The plant out in Salem Harbor needs to be converted to gas. I realize that that brings a certain amount of inconvenience to some people, but Salem Harbor is totally polluted. It's time to get smart, to get away from coal burning facilities and move to natural gas. It's just the right thing to do.

MassNews: Switching to a wider focus, what's your viewpoint on the Second Amendment?

Smith: I guess it would be fair to state from the beginning that I am a licensed weapon owner. I believe a weapon needs to be in the hands of a responsible person. So anyone who has proved not to be responsible should not have that weapon. We have regulations like that. What I don't agree with is regulations that are taking weapons out of the hands of the responsible, and not addressing the issue of getting weapons out of the hands of the bad guys, who are not afraid to break the law.

Getting caught with a gun, from the bad guy's point of view is nothing compared to the crimes he's going to commit with the gun. So what do we do? We punish the good citizen who has a right to bear arms and help the bad citizen. Of course, there's the argument that a government that wants to take control of the people first takes the guns away. I agree with that. Our founding fathers fought for civil liberties. And they were smart when they did it.

MassNews: What did the founding documents say?

Smith: Those founding documents say: "You, the average Joe and Mary have ultimate control of your destiny. We will establish a government to help you, with opportunity, and safety and security. But the responsibility lies with you. That's why we're placing you in charge of the government and not the government in charge of you." I think that's just a great statement.

MassNews: How about education issues?

Smith: One is, I don't think we always have to build a new school to resolve an educational issue. I think that we need to get back to small classrooms for the teachers. I believe that if there is a student who is a bully or a troublemaker, the teachers should have the right to remove them from the class until he or she can prove that they can be productive.

MassNews: How about bilingual education?

Smith: I hire a lot of late teen, early twenties individuals, who come out of school with bilingual education and can't communicate properly. They can't communicate with me during an interview for the job. When I do get them into a job I think they can handle, they have difficulty writing. They have difficulty speaking. We aren't doing them any favors with bilingual education. I believe English through immersion is the way to go.

MassNews: What about vouchers?

Smith: I like vouchers because they provide an option. Options will automatically motivate school leaders to do a better job. That's why I believe in contract schools and charter schools. They provide options. They provide incentives to the leaders who are going to lose those children if they don't do a better job. The ultimate goal here is to get a better education for our kids, to prepare them to be productive members of our economy. Competition will accomplish that.

MassNews: What are your views on abortion?

Smith: I like to say I am pro-adoption. I don't believe that there are a lot of pro-choice people out there who want to kill babies. I believe that a lot of pro-choice people are pro-choice because they want to protect their civil liberties. And I respect that. But I love life and I don't think we should be taking life. I advocate a program in which the government is allowed to assist a young lady in not having an abortion.

MassNews: How would that work?

Smith: We can do this in a number of ways. One is that we can provide health care for the poor during the pregnancy. Two, we can give tax breaks - large tax breaks - to those who are willing to give their children to other parents. We have thousands upon thousands of willing parents in this great country of ours dying for children. They would love to have their own children. They're going overseas to adopt children, while we're killing them by the thousands. The government can put these two sides together.

MassNews: Your father was a JFK Democrat. So what makes you a Republican?

Smith: The only member of my family who is. Not only was my father a JFK Democrat, but when my father was in the hospital dying, Ted Kennedy visited him. He happened to be in the same hospital, visiting and heard about my father and came up and saw him. It was the moment that made my father's life.

MassNews: What do you mean the Republican method is a "proven" one?

Smith: A big part of my platform is cost-effective government. We don't believe the government should be in charge of us. We believe we should be in charge of government. That's a pretty sound argument. And it has been all the way from the Founding Fathers. We've always stated that. I believe government should control its spending. It shouldn't have an open checkbook with our money. That's accountability and responsibility. It's just a great message.

I'm also a Republican because of what it says on the dollar bill, "In God We Trust." I believe this country has been so great because most of us believe in a higher being. And we behave ourselves as such. We are a giving nation. We help people. We just, sometimes, need to help ourselves a little bit more.

MassNews: If you get elected to Congress, it makes sense for you to become a member of the Armed Forces or Intelligence Committee because of your background. What do you think we should be doing about Al Qaeda?

Smith: Al Qaeda needs to be wiped out. George W. Bush is doing a great job with Al Qaeda. We have learned a serious lesson. We now know that those two great oceans can't protect us forever. We need to give our intelligence networks the tools to do the job, and the charge to go in there not with just electronic measures, but with human measures to go and find out what all the bad guys are doing. Then we need to be able to get that information to the right decision-makers, and have the right decision-makers in office who can understand that information and make the correct analysis. Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, you've got to understand that if an intelligence group is briefing you on Al Qaeda and telling you it's a serious threat, you have to take that for face value, look at the evidence and decide you're not going to play party politics with this. They have to be able to say, "I'm not going to release this to CNN, because I'm a Congressman trying to be a Senator."

MassNews: That brings up the question whether Congress can be trusted with sensitive intelligence.

Smith: Yes, they can, with guidelines. We do need to restructure that system. We need to put Congressmen and women under the same kind of system as they have at the FBI and most of the military departments right now. Anybody who has access to sensitive, classified material needs to undergo a polygraph every year. It doesn't matter who you are. It's not an insult, it's just a preventive measure. You're not going to release information if you know you're going to face the box. Secondly, of course, and this is partly for selfish reasons, I guess, is that we need to put people in office who understand the information that's being presented and will treat it as something bigger than party politics.

MassNews: Why are you running for Congress at this time?

Smith: My father was a great patriot, a conservative, although he had the Democrat tag to his name. He was a staunch family man. He was supportive of the military. He joined the military, fought in the big one, WWII. So I learned all the lessons of WWII during the '60s and how we were failing by comparison. Of course he wanted me to go off to college, but with my two brothers in the service, I enlisted in the Air Force. I did a few years doing postwar disposal. Then I changed over to doing investigative work for the military. I investigated thefts and murders, at first.

MassNews: How did that prepare you for this campaign?

Smith: One case that really sticks out in my mind actually took place right here in Massachusetts. I was investigating a man who had repeatedly raped his own daughter. He was brutal to this young lady. She came to my office as a 14-year-old. She said, "I've got a story to tell you. I can't take it any more." So we launched an investigation and finally, with a good investigation and the help of God, I believe, we put her father away for 15-years of hard labor. Two years later, on a technicality which had nothing to do with the evidence, a liberal judge threw the conviction out. We gave him his money back for two years, we gave him a government job. Another two years later I got a call from Florida police asking, "Hey, did you investigate this guy?" Then they told me he got out and went to Florida and raped his two boys.

That got me to thinking. How can we continue to elect leadership who allow this to happen? It's one thing if there's a problem with the evidence-gathering or the weight of the evidence. But when the evidence stands solid and we let an individual go back and harm society, then we have a problem. In another case, I ran into NAMBLA, North American Man Boy Love Association, when I was investigating a man who raped a three month old baby. Again I started to question, "Why do we have these leaders who will allow this?"

MassNews: Is it just the crime issue that compels you to run for Congress?

Smith: No, there's more. Another lesson I learned was when I was doing counter intelligence and anti-terrorism for the military in the mid-1990s. We knew Osama bin Laden was planning to blow up the World Trade Center. We were aware of the Al Qaeda network as early as the late 80s. We knew they were planning to do something tremendously damaging in this country. We knew they had shoulder-fired rocket launchers that could take down an airplane. We suspected they were going to try to crash a plane into a building.

We knew all this, but we were blinded by bureaucracy. We could not go out and target these individuals. We couldn't get through the bureaucracy to do a good job, because we would go out and brief Congressmen and women and they only wanted to know, "How does this affect my constituency? How does it impact me?" Well, sometimes the scope has to be wider than "me." We have to worry about this country itself.

Sure, Congressmen and women should be protecting the interests of their district and fighting for money for them. But they also have an obligation to protect their constituencies, their state and the country. And that means get rid of self-interest and bring back our interest. And that, sir, is why I am running. We are bottlenecked with so many politicians out there who worry about their own little power base. It's time to get rid of those politicians and replace them with people who care about our state, our nation.

MassNews: You've shown no reluctance to criticize your opponent. What is it that John Tierney is doing, or not doing, that's detrimental to the district?

Smith: First, Tierney is a defense attorney. He was one before he got into office, he'll always be one. He specializes in getting people off. He brings a liberal viewpoint to his job. He believes a lot of the bad guys should be released back out onto the streets. I'm tough on crime. I know what it's like to put bad guys in jail, and I know the damage they can do when they get out of jail. It's time to put someone in that office who's tough on crime; to get the bad guys off the street.

For more information, check Smith's website which is found at http://www.marksmith2002.com/ or call his campaign headquarters at (781) 844-7369. His office is at 239 Western Avenue, Essex.