[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 37 (Tuesday, April 9, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2377-S2379]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MOVING ON THE ENERGY BILL
Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I want to take a moment to discuss
where we are on the energy bill and how I see us moving forward. As I
think the record will note, prior to the recess I filed an amendment on
sanctions against Iraq. The specific justification for that was my
belief that, at a time when we are seeing the situation in the Mideast
erupt, we find ourselves in a position where we are importing over
800,000 barrels a day from Iraq, a country where we are enforcing a no-
fly zone, putting the lives of our men and women at risk. At the same
time as we are importing this oil, we put it in our aircraft and use it
to enforce the no-fly zone. As a consequence, in Iraq, Saddam Hussein
generates a cashflow that allows him to keep his Republican Guard well
paid and obviously contributes to Iraq's capability of developing
weapons of mass destruction.
The purpose of the amendment is to initiate a sanction against Iraq
until such time as we can satisfy ourselves that the U.N. inspectors
have evaluated whether, indeed, Saddam is using his oil money to
develop weapons of mass destruction. I may bring that up today. I have
previously received from the majority leader a commitment that he would
allow an up-or-down vote on that particular subject at a point in time.
I think this may be an opportune time.
The rationale for that is obvious. We find ourselves in a position
now where Iraq has indicated it probably will initiate a curtailment of
oil exports from that country for a 30-day period. We can only ponder
the results of that, as to what it will mean to the consumers in the
United States as we see ourselves continuing to be dependent on foreign
sources of oil.
I want to take a moment here to discuss where we are in the energy
bill and my commitment to see us move forward on it. As you know, we
have had a number of successful amendments. I think we have developed a
stronger bill. I think it is appropriate to give a rundown on the
current situation in the Mideast before I discuss that, and how that
has increased the importance of moving an energy bill off the floor.
There is virtually no way to explain the situation in the Mideast. I
will not go into the details, other than to highlight the effects it
will have on the United States.
While we were on our Easter recess, clearly the tinderbox in the
Mideast exploded. In 2 weeks, we have seen 5 suicide bombers; we have
seen some 29 Israelis killed, 100 wounded. The same is true on the
other side, the Palestinians. Israelis rolled into Yasser Arafat's
headquarters in the Palestine settlement when Prime Minister Sharon
declared, ``Israel is at war.''
What did that do to the price of oil? It jumped, first $3 a barrel on
Monday, March 25, closed at $24.53; trading at $28, and it is going up
over $30. The Iraqis are calling on the Arab States to use oil as a
weapon--oil as a weapon,
[[Page S2378]]
Mr. President. Quoting from a statement issued by the ruling Iraqi
Baath Party:
If the oil weapon is not used in the battle to defend our
nations and safeguard our lives and dignity against American
and Zionist aggression, it is meaningless.
Now Saddam announces a 30-day embargo against U.S. consumption--
basically a 30-day reduction of his output.
New reports emerge that Saddam Hussein had planned to ram a suicide
tanker into a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf. That came out of a
Christian Science Monitor story, which I ask unanimous consent to have
printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Christian Science Monitor]
Ex-Smuggler Describes Iraqi Plot To Blow Up U.S. Warship
(By Scott Peterson)
Iraq planned clandestine attacks against American warships
in the Persian Gulf in early 2001, according to an operative
of Iranian nationality who says he was given the assignment
by ranking members of Saddam Hussein's inner circle.
The alleged plan involved loading at least one trade ship
with half a ton of explosives, and sailing under an Iranian
flag to disguise Iraq's role, using a crew of suicide bombers
to blow up a U.S. ship in the Gulf.
The operative, who says he smuggled weapons for Iraq
through Iran for Al Qaeda during the late 1990s, says he was
told that $16 million had already been set aside for the
assignment--the first of ``nine new operations'' he says the
Iraqis wanted him to carry out, which were to include
missions in Kuwait.
The first plot, remarkably similar to the attack on the USS
Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, was never carried out. The status of
the other nine operations remains unclear.
The smuggler, Mohamed Mansour Shahab, now in the custody of
Kurdish opponents of Mr. Hussein in northern Iraq, says he
was first told of the role he was to play in the plan in
February 2000--one month after an apparently unrelated
attempt in Yemen to target a U.S. destroyer, the USS The
Sullivans, failed when the bombers' boat, overloaded with
explosives, sank. Suicide bombers later succeeded in striking
the USS Cole in Yemen, leaving 17 U.S. sailors dead and a
gaping 40-by-40 foot hole in the side of the warship.
terror's footprints
If this Iranian smuggler is telling the truth, it would
represent the first information in nearly a decade directly
linking Baghdad to terrorist plans. No evidence has surfaced
to date that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks or the
bombing of the Cole. But President George W. Bush has
declared Iraq part of an ``axis of evil,'' and makes no
secret of his determination to end the rule of Saddam Hussein
as part of his ``war on terrorism.''
The last publicly known terrorism involvement by Baghdad
was a failed assassination plot against Bush's father, former
President George H. W. Bush, during a visit to Kuwait in
1993. The elder Bush orchestrated the 1991 Gulf War against
Iraq.
``The Iraqis may have been waging war against the U.S. for
10 years without us even knowing about it,'' says Magnus
Ranstorp, at the Center for the Study of Terrorism and
Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
``Iraq may have fought, using terrorism as the ultimate fifth
column, to counter U.S. sanctions and bombing. Plausible
deniability is something Iraq . . . would want to ensure,
putting layer upon layer to hide their role.''
Part of the justification for any future U.S. strike
against Iraq may be the kind of information provided by the
young-faced, nervous Iranian smuggler, now held in the U.S.-
protected Kurdish ``safe haven'' of northern Iraq.
Mr. Shahab spoke last weekend in an intelligence complex
run by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two
rival armed Kurdish factions that control northern Iraq. He
did not appear coerced to speak, and bore no physical signs
that he had been mistreated since his arrest on May 16, 2000.
Still, shaking nervously and swallowing repeatedly, he at
first refused to answer questions, saying that he was
concerned about his family's safety in Iran. Two days later--
after learning that part of his smuggling history and role in
several killings had already been made public in the New
Yorker magazine--he agreed to describe information that he
had previously withheld, about Iraq's plan to target U.S.
warships.
``If this information is true, it would be in the interest
of the U.S., and of all the world, for the U.S. to be here to
find out,'' says a senior Kurdish security officer involved
in the case. Kurdish investigators were initially skeptical
of some parts of Shahab's story. But the investigators say
they later independently confirmed precise descriptions of
the senior Iraqi officials Shahab says he met, by cross-
examining a veteran Iraqi intelligence officer in their
custody, and checking other sources.
Wearing a pale-green military jacket, dark-blue sweat pants
and worn plastic sandals, Shahab softly recounts how he
smuggled arms and explosives for Al Qaeda and the Iraqis. He
at times flashes a boyish smile--the same disarming grin he
uses in images on a roll of film he was carrying when
arrested. Shahab also claims to be an assassin. The photos--
shown to the Monitor--show Shahab killing an unidentified man
with a knife. He grins at the camera as he holds up the
victim's severed ear.
During a two-and-a-half-hour interview, Shahab describes
the origin of the plot to blow up U.S. warships, while his
hands work nervously. He received an urgent phone call early
in 2000, from a longtime Afghan contact named Othman, who
told him to go to a meeting in Iraq. In February 2000, Shahab
says he was taken to the village of Ouija, the birthplace of
Saddam Hussein near Hussein's clan base at Tikrit, in north
central Iraq.
At the meeting, he says, were two influential Iraqis,
fellow clansmen of Saddam Hussein: Ali Hassan al-Majid--Mr.
Hussein's powerful cousin and former defense minister--and
Luai Khairallah, a cousin and friend of Hussein's notoriously
brutal son Uday. Mr. al-Majid is known among Iraqi Kurds as
``Chemical Ali,'' for his key role in the genocidal gassing
and destruction of villages in northern Iraq that killed more
than 100,000 Kurds in 1987 and 1988.
The Iraqis said they considered Shahab to be Arab, and not
Persian, and could trust him because he was from Ahvaz, a
river city in southwest Iran rich with smugglers and close to
the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Kuwait. It is known as
``Arabistan'' because of the number of Arabs living there.
nine missions
Al-Majid and Mr. Khairallah spoke of the nine operations:
We've allocated $16 million already for you,'' Shahab
remembers them telling him. ``We start with the first one: We
need you to buy boats, pack them with 500 kilograms of
explosives each, and explode U.S. ships in Kuwait and the
Gulf.''
The plan was ``long term,'' Shahab says, and meant to be
carried out a year or so later, in early 2001, after he had
carried out another mission to take refrigerator motors to
the Taliban. Each motor had a container attached holding an
apparently important liquid unknown to Shahab. He says he
doesn't know if all nine operations mentioned were similar to
the boat plan, or completely different. Some were to take
place in Kuwait.
The attack against a U.S. vessel, Shahab recounts al-Majid
and Khairallah explaining, was to be ``a kind of revenge
because [the Americans] were killing Iraqis, and women and
children were dying ``because of stringent UN sanctions,
which the U.S. backed most strongly. ``They said: `This is
the Arab Gulf, not the American Gulf,' '' Shahab recalls,
referring to the large U.S. naval presence in the area.
The Iraqis knew that Shahab, with his legitimate Iranian
passport and wealth of smuggler contacts, would have little
trouble purchasing the common 400-ton wooden trading boats.
He would have raised few eyebrows sailing under an Iranian
flag--the only ships in the area, since UN sanctions prohibit
such Iraqi trade.
Shahab was to rent or buy a date farm along the water at
Qasba, on the marshy Shatt al-Arab waterway that narrowly
divides Iraq and Iran, just a few hundred yards from the
Iraqi port city of Fao. Using a powerful small smuggling
boat, he says he would have been able to reach Kuwaiti waters
from Qasba in just 10 minutes.
Iraqi agents were to provide the explosives and suicides
squad; Shahab was to handle the boats and the regular crew.
``The group that worked with me would sail the ship, and not
know about the explosives,'' Shahab says. ``When we crossed
out of Iranian waters, we were to kill the crew, hand over
the ship to the suicide bombers, and then leave by a
smuggler's way.''
The job, Shahab said, ``was easy for me, I could start at
any time.'' Shahab said the Iraqis told him they ``had a lot
of suicide bombers in Baghdad'' ready to take part in such an
operation.
But the plans were never finalized for Shahab, and after
delivering the refrigerator motors to the Taliban, he was
arrested in northern Iraq in May 2000, with his roll of film,
as he tried to avoid Iranian military exercises going on
along the border to the south. Though carrying a false
Kurdish identy card, his accent gave him away at the last PUK
checkpoint.
Iraqi experts say that such a plot is plausible, since
Saddam Hussein's multiple intelligence services are
sophisticated and smart.
``Anything is possible,'' says Sean Boyne, an Ireland-based
Iraq specialist, who writes regularly for Jane's Intelligence
Review in London. ``Certainly Saddam has gone to great
trouble to shoot down [U.S. and British] aircraft''
patrolling no-fly zones in northern and south Iraq, Mr. Boyne
says. ``He has invested heavily in his antiaircraft system.
He is eager to have a crack at the Americans.''
That impulse may also help explain the presence of a
training camp at Salman Pak, a former biological-weapons
facility south of Baghdad. It includes a mock-up Boeing 707
fuselage, which Western intelligence agencies believe has
been used for several years to train Islamic militants from
across the region in the art of hijacking. A senior Iraqi
officer who defected told The New York Times last November
that the regime was increasingly getting into the terrorism
business. ``We were training these people to attack
installations important to the United States,'' an unnamed
lieutenant general said. ``The Gulf War never ended for
Saddam
[[Page S2379]]
Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were
repeatedly told this.''
Still, the political situation Saddam Hussein finds himself
in today--in light of the example of decisive U.S. military
action in Afghanistan--may not be as conducive to a strike at
the U.S. as it was when Shahab says he first heard of the
plan to blow up a U.S. warship. In recent months, Boyne
notes,
Iraq has engaged in a region-wide charm offensive to
portray itself as a victim, and to build Arab and European
support against any U.S. attack. Baghdad is even pursuing
warmer ties with Kuwait (at the Arab League summit last week)
and with Iran, in an attempt to gain mileage from Iran's
anger at being listed as part of Washington's ``axis of
evil.''
While the Bush administration focuses on Iraq's apparent
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction--in the absence of UN
weapons inspectors, who were kicked out in 1998--clues to
Iraq's true role may lie in the credibility of the 29-year-
old smuggler from Ahvaz.
Why is he talking now? ``Afghanistan is finished, so now I
feel free to speak,'' says Shahab, who was given the name
Mohamed Jawad by accomplices in Afghanistan. Asked if he
fears the wrath of senior members of the regime in Baghdad,
who still hold power, Shahab replies: ``I lost everything.
For many years I worked with assassinations and killing--it
doesn't make a difference to me.''
Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, yesterday major oil producers in
Venezuela went on strike. Between Venezuela and Iraq, nearly 30 percent
of our oil imports are at risk. And that is nearly 12 million barrels
today.
We also learned that Saddam Hussein has indicated a payment to the
families of the Palestinian suicide bombers of roughly $25,000.
Previously it was around $10,000. That is a terrible incentive for
terrorism. One has to wonder where he gets the cash. But you don't have
to wonder very long because of the $4-plus billion that the United
States paid Saddam Hussein last year for oil.
The Senate needs to remember that Saddam is much more than just a
member of the axis of evil. He is an energy partner of the United
States.
We now understand that Iraq, Libya, and Iran have called for an OPEC
oil embargo--an event that could cripple the world economy.
With each passing hour, the Mideast grows more unstable, and the
future grows more uncertain. With each passing day, the United States
grows more dependent on foreign sources of energy.
What does tomorrow hold? More chaos and more bloodshed. The United
States has a role and an obligation to help lead the region to peace. I
applaud the President for sending Secretary Powell to personally
supervise these efforts. But now more than ever we should turn our
attention to here at home. We need to look at the realities of how we
are going to meet our energy needs with or without the Mideast.
Given the choice, will we choose to keep us dependent on foreign oil
or will we choose solutions found here at home to lessen our dependence
on imported oil, solutions within our borders free from the chaos and
uncertainty in the Mideast?
I go back to 1995. If the Senate passed an amendment in the omnibus
bill that would have allowed the opening of ANWR, where would we be
today? We would be in production. We would be generating at least a
million barrels more from domestic sources, eliminating at least a
million barrels from imports. Unfortunately, our former President
vetoed that bill.
The energy bill before us is one on which we spent nearly 3 weeks.
There is some criticism for the delay, but I remind my colleagues that
we are taking on an extremely difficult and divisive issue and dealing
with it on the floor of the Senate as opposed to the committee process.
Since the debate started on this issue, we have disposed of 49
amendments--21 offered by Republicans and 28 by Democrats. Working with
my good friend, Senator Bingaman, I think we have moved in a
responsible manner.
That total, I might add, does not include the two amendments dealing
with judicial nominees, or several amendments that have been dealt with
off the floor. We have dealt with extremely difficult amendments,
including CAFE, and specifically whether Congress should decide on new
vehicle standards or leave that decision to experts; whether Congress
should impose a renewable portfolio standard on some electric producers
or leave the decision on appropriate standards to the States; whether
the Federal Government should continue the liability protection on
nuclear powerplants--that is the Price-Anderson amendment--the issue of
reliability, and how best to ensure reliability on our electricity
grid; ethanol; and whether to create a reasonable fuel requirement.
But there are still significant issues left to decide. We need to
close out the issues dealing with electricity. We need to reach some
agreement on the climate change provision in the bill. Of course, we
must address the tax provisions for renewable conservation, alternative
fuel efficiency and production. We must decide how best to increase our
domestic production of energy sources since there are no real
production provisions in the Daschle substitute.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator has used 10 minutes.
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