[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 144 (Thursday, November 3, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H9562-H9566]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 MOTION TO GO TO CONFERENCE ON H.R. 2528, MILITARY QUALITY OF LIFE AND 
               VETERANS AFFAIRS APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2006

  Mr. WALSH. Madam Speaker, pursuant to clause 1 of rule XXII and by 
direction of the Committee on Appropriations, I move to take from the 
Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 2528) making appropriations for military 
quality of life functions of the Department of Defense, military 
construction, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and related agencies 
for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2006, and for other purposes, 
with Senate amendments thereto, disagree to the Senate amendments, and 
agree to the conference asked by the Senate.
  The Clerk read the title of the bill.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion offered by the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Walsh).
  The motion was agreed to.
  A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.


                 Motion To Instruct Offered by Mr. Obey

  Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.
  The Clerk read as follows:
       Mr. Obey moves that the managers on the part of the House 
     at the conference on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses 
     on the Senate amendments to the bill, H.R. 2528, be 
     instructed to insist on the House level to support force 
     protection activities in Iraq.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 7(b) of rule XXII, the 
gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) and the gentleman from New York 
(Mr. Walsh) each will control 30 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin.
  Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 9 minutes.
  Madam Speaker, let me say that this motion to instruct is, I think, 
fairly straightforward and simple, although the context in which it is 
offered is certainly not.
  What this motion attempts to do is simply insist that the $50 million 
contained in the House bill, but not contained in the Senate bill, for 
the purpose of retrofitting existing facilities and constructing 
special overhead cover devices to protect soldiers in bases throughout 
Iraq, is maintained.

                              {time}  1045

  That overhead cover system would provide protection from artillery, 
rocket-propelled grenades and missile attack up to and including 122 
millimeter rockets. That is virtually exactly what this does.
  But let me, in the context of offering this proposal, make a few 
observations. Even if this motion is adopted, and I would certainly 
expect that it would be, I think that we still must face the fact that 
our troops will not be adequately protected, nor will American citizens 
abroad be adequately protected so long as our Government is still 
taking actions which discredit this Nation and this Congress is 
continuing to neglect its oversight responsibilities with respect to 
those actions.
  Let me give three examples. In 2003, it came to the Nation's 
attention that the Secretary of Defense had established an operation 
known as the Office of Special Programs, the primary purpose of which 
was to vet intelligence and advise Pentagon leadership and the White 
House on plans for invading Iraq. That office was staffed by a select 
group handpicked by then Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and 
Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
  It was charged with developing the rationale for invading Iraq, and 
it was created out of a frustration on the part of the Vice President 
and the Secretary of Defense and their allies within the 
administration, their frustration that the normal intelligence 
operations in our Government were not being ``sufficiently forward 
leaning,'' as the Secretary of Defense put it, in finding weapons of 
mass destruction and in building a case for going to war in Iraq.
  The problem is that that office was established to provide 
information outside of the normal channels, and it was even designed to 
go around the Department of Defense's own intelligence operation unit.
  The problem with that Office of Special Programs is that it relied on 
so-called intelligence from like-minded true believers, primarily Ahmad 
Chalabi and his allies in Iraq.
  At the time, we asked that the Surveys and Investigations staff of 
the Appropriations Committee look into this matter and determine what 
the facts were surrounding the creation of this operation. We obtained 
some support from the majority party but not sufficient support under 
the rules of the House in order to allow that surveys and investigation 
study to proceed, and so it never took place.

[[Page H9563]]

  Second, earlier this year, the committee became aware of intelligence 
actions that the Department of Defense was taking, actions of an under-
the-table nature, which a number of us felt were highly inappropriate 
and highly dangerous, classified activities which cannot be discussed 
in public.
  We tried to offer language to assure that in the future such actions 
would not be undertaken without proper notification to the Congress and 
to this committee. The fact is that when I offered language to try to 
do that, I received a phone call from Andy Card, the President's Staff 
Chief, and in that phone call he told me that if I would withdraw that 
language he would assure me that this matter would be worked out to the 
satisfaction of both the executive and legislative branches.
  In fact, while we have made some small progress in reaching an 
understanding on this matter, there are still two very important issues 
that have not been resolved, that the administration has not agreed to, 
and they are key issues, including whether or not this Congress will be 
informed of those activities in a timely fashion so that the 
information provided to the Congress is, in fact, meaningful.
  We are still being stonewalled on that matter, and the Congress 
still, in my view, has not lived up to its oversight responsibilities 
on that matter.
  Now, yesterday, we see in the Washington Post a story which says CIA 
holds terror suspects in secret prisons. It notes that close to $100 
million evidently was spent to establish these secret compounds at 
which detainees were evidently subjected to torture-related activities, 
including water-boarding, and yet we are told that not a single member 
of the Appropriations Committee and not a single member of the staff 
have been told by the CIA that that had been going on.
  This committee has an obligation to protect the power of the purse. 
In my view, until we take action on this matter, we stand vulnerable to 
the justifiable charge that Congress is ignoring its responsibilities 
to protect taxpayers' money and to protect the reputation of the United 
States internationally; And when we do that, we put at risk the very 
troops that we are trying to protect through this motion this morning.
  Madam Speaker, I would hope that this language would be supported by 
the majority. But I would also hope that this Congress understands that 
even if it is, we are failing our fundamental responsibility to the 
American taxpayer if we do not exercise considerably more vigorously 
than we have up to date our responsibilities to see to it that matters 
related to Iraq are being handled in a manner which makes certain that 
the Congress knows what is going on, and gives the Congress an 
opportunity to try to make certain that what is going on is consistent 
with American values.
  That certainly is not the case when we see these kinds of horrific 
headlines in the paper, and I would associate myself with the remarks 
contained in the editorial in the Washington Post this morning.
  Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record at this point the editorial 
which makes clear that Congress has not in any way, shape or form lived 
up to its responsibilities, and, in my view, they have enabled the 
administration to continue to cover up its activities with respect to 
Iraq, its activities with respect to manipulating intelligence, its 
activities with respect to allowing agencies to engage in conduct not 
at all consistent with American values or American interests.

                [From the Washington Post, Nov. 3, 2005]

                        Rebellion Against Abuse

       Last month a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay military base 
     excused himself from a conversation with his lawyer and 
     stepped into a cell, where he slashed his arm and hung 
     himself. This desperate attempted suicide by a detainee held 
     for four years without charge, trial or any clear prospect of 
     release was not isolated. At least 131 Guantanamo inmates 
     began a hunger strike on Aug. 8 to protest their indefinite 
     confinement, and more than two dozen are being kept alive 
     only by force-feeding. No wonder Defense Secretary Donald H. 
     Rumsfeld has denied permission to U.N. human rights 
     investigators to meet with detainees at Guantanamo: Their 
     accounts would surely add to the discredit the United States 
     has earned for its lawless treatment of foreign prisoners.
       Guantanamo, however, is not the worst problem. As The 
     Post's Dana Priest reported yesterday, the CIA maintains its 
     own network of secret prisons, into which 100 or more 
     terrorist suspects have ``disappeared'' as if they were 
     victims of a Third World dictatorship. Some of the 30 most 
     important prisoners are being held in secret facilities in 
     Eastern European countries--which should shame democratic 
     governments that only recently dismantled Soviet-era secret 
     police apparatuses. Held in dark underground cells, the 
     prisoners have no legal rights, no visitors from outside the 
     CIA and no checks on their treatment, even by the 
     International Red Cross. President Bush has authorized 
     interrogators to subject these men to ``cruel, inhuman and 
     degrading'' treatment that is illegal in the United States 
     and that is banned by a treaty ratified by the Senate. The 
     governments that allow the CIA prisons on their territory 
     violate this international law, if not their own laws.
       This shameful situation is the direct result of Mr. Bush's 
     decision in February 2002 to set aside the Geneva Conventions 
     as well as standing U.S. regulations for the handling of 
     detainees. Under the Geneva Conventions, al Qaeda militants 
     could have been denied prisoner-of-war status and held 
     indefinitely; they could have been interrogated and tried, 
     either in U.S. courts or under the military system of 
     justice. At the same time they would have been protected by 
     Geneva from torture and other cruel treatment. Had Mr. Bush 
     followed that course, the abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay 
     and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the severe damage they have 
     caused to the United States, could have been averted. Key 
     authors of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, such as Khalid Sheikh 
     Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, could have been put on trial, 
     with their crimes exposed to the world.
       Instead, not a single al Qaeda leader has been prosecuted 
     in the past four years. The Pentagon's system of hearings on 
     the status of Guantanamo detainees, introduced only after a 
     unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court, has no way of 
     resolving the long-term status of most detainees. The CIA has 
     no long-term plan for its secret prisoners, whom one agency 
     official described as ``a horrible burden.''
       For some time a revolt against this disastrous policy has 
     been gathering steam inside the administration and in the 
     Senate; it is led by senators such as John McCain (R-Ariz.) 
     and by the same military officers and State Department 
     officials who opposed Mr. Bush's decision to disregard the 
     Geneva accords. Their opponents are a small group of civilian 
     political appointees circled around Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice 
     President Cheney. According to a report in the New York 
     Times, the military professionals want to restore Geneva's 
     protections against cruel treatment to the Pentagon's 
     official doctrine for handling detainees. Mr. McCain is 
     seeking to ban ``cruel, inhuman and degrading'' treatment for 
     all detainees held by the United States, including those in 
     the CIA's secret prisons.
       There is no more important issue before the country or 
     Congress. Yet the advocates of decency and common sense seem 
     to have meager support from the Democratic Party. Senate 
     Democrats staged a legislative stunt on Tuesday intended to 
     reopen--once again--the debate on prewar intelligence about 
     Iraq. They have taken no such dramatic stand against the 
     CIA's abuses of foreign prisoners; on a conference committee 
     considering Mr. McCain's amendment, Democratic support has 
     been faltering. While Democrats grandstand about a war debate 
     that took place three years ago; the Bush administration's 
     champions of torture are quietly working to preserve policies 
     whose reversal ought to be an urgent priority.

  Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. WALSH. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Madam Speaker, addressing the substance of this motion, the House 
included $50 million in the military quality of life bill for overhead 
cover systems to support force protection in Iraq. This money provides 
additional construction funds for protecting soldiers from indirect 
fire attacks, such as mortars and rockets.
  This funding, along with funding that was included in the 
supplemental bill passed earlier this year for the same purpose, 
provides the amount the Department of Defense says is needed for these 
activities.
  Unfortunately, the other body did not see fit to include these funds. 
We still believe additional money is necessary, and we will go into 
conference supporting the House position.
  Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from 
New Jersey (Mr. Holt).
  Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to support my colleague from Wisconsin 
in his effort to shed some light on a large array of questions that are 
before us.
  This cover-up theme of the cover-up Congress is so pervasive, and it 
is not just in this body, it seems to be in the other body. The other 
body in fact recently took some rather extreme parliamentary measures 
to force the issue, and some called it a gimmick. But it seemed to be 
the only way to break

[[Page H9564]]

through this cover-up, to get answers to questions that we have in our 
oversight role in the U.S. Congress, to provide a balance of power, to 
be able to serve the American people as we need to do.
  I, for example, have introduced resolutions requesting information 
about the disclosure of identities of covert agents; and eight times in 
eight votes here in the House of Representatives those resolutions have 
been turned down in various committees. Eight times in eight separate 
votes in various committees, these efforts to get the information that 
we need in order to exert the oversight, to protect the men and women 
that we have asked to do dangerous jobs around the world.
  Of course, some things clearly have to be kept quiet for the sake of 
the safety and effectiveness of our troops overseas and so forth. But 
Congress has a very important oversight role under the Constitution; 
and in order to exert that role, we need information.
  I applaud the gentleman for doing all that he does to try to break 
through this cover-up theme.
  Mr. WALSH. Mr. Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Waxman), the ranking member on the Government Reform 
Committee.
  Mr. WAXMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the 
time.
  Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, one of the most important jobs for 
Congress is not just to pass laws but to see how the laws are working. 
We need to do oversight and to have investigations. The Constitution 
envisioned we would do this when they had us as a separate branch, and 
this is a way to provide the checks and balances that our Government 
was supposed to have in order to avoid the concentration of power in 
any one branch of Government.
  We have an executive branch that wants to act as secretly as 
possible. They do not want openness. They do not want transparency. 
They do not even want to hear alternative points of view.
  I believe that the President of the United States surrounds himself 
with people who tell him exactly what he wants to hear, and the 
Republicans who run the Congress are abetting that. They are helping 
him avoid getting a full discussion of the issues when Congress does 
not pursue oversight and investigations.
  Now there are many things that this Congress has failed to do. They 
have failed to look at the manipulation of intelligence by the 
President and others working for him in the prelude to the war. We have 
not had any hearings on that.
  They have failed to look at the issues of how we are spending the 
taxpayers' money on some of these contracts in Iraq, for Katrina and 
others. They really are not doing the diligent job that needs to be 
done.

                              {time}  1100

  The Congress of the United States has even refused to look at and 
find out why we were not given information from the executive branch 
about the costs of the Medicaid prescription drug bill. A civil service 
actuary in the administration was prohibited from giving Congress that 
information. You would think that Democrats and Republicans would be 
outraged. Yet the Republicans who run the Congress refuse to hold 
hearings on this.
  Oversight is very important, and it stands today in stark contrast to 
the way they are behaving with the way the Republicans handled 
oversight when President Clinton was in power. There was not an 
accusation too small for them to ignore. They ran and called hearings. 
They issued subpoenas. They brought people into a private room to take 
depositions. The Congress of the United States held more days, I 
believe it was over a week of public hearings, on whether President 
Clinton misused his Christmas card list for political purpose. Yet we 
cannot get them to hold a hearing on the manipulation of intelligence 
to get us into a war.
  I think that when a Congress does not do its oversight, in effect 
what they are doing is covering things up. They are not letting the 
American people know what its government is doing. This is not the 
government of the Republican Party. This is not the government of 
President Clinton. It is a government that belongs to the people of the 
United States, and our democracy cannot work if there is no 
accountability and transparency.
  We have never heard of anyone in this administration fired for doing 
a poor job. In fact, if they do a poor enough job, they get elevated. 
They even get a Medal of Freedom award. No one was fired, no one was 
held accountable for the failure to have accurate intelligence before 
we went into the war. No one has been fired for anything that is been 
done improperly by this administration. It is as if it did not happen.
  I think the Republicans believe if you do not have oversight, no one 
knows about the problem; therefore, the problem never existed. Well, I 
think it is wrong. We have a responsibility and it is time that we 
speak out loudly and clearly to insist that the Congress of the United 
States live up to that responsibility.
  Mr. Speaker, I support the motion of the gentleman.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes.
  Mr. Speaker, a moment ago I cited the Washington Post editorial which 
appeared in the paper today. I would like to read just a portion of 
that editorial. The editorial reads as follows:
  ``As The Post's Dana Priest reported yesterday, the CIA maintains its 
own network of secret prisons into which 100 or more terrorist suspects 
have `disappeared' as if they were victims of a Third World 
dictatorship.''
  When I see references to the disappeared, my mind goes back to 
President Pinochet in Chile and the ``Disappeared'' under his regime. 
And I wonder whether or not many Americans and many Members of this 
Congress are comfortable with our White House being tossed into the 
same terminology, into the same basket as the outrageous conduct of the 
Chilean Government a number of years ago.
  The editorial goes on to say that under the policies of the CIA with 
respect to these institutions ``prisoners have no legal rights, no 
visitors from outside the CIA, and no checks on their treatment, even 
by the International Red Cross. . . . President Bush has authorized 
interrogators to subject these men to `cruel, inhumane and degrading' 
treatment that is illegal in the United States and that is banned by a 
treaty ratified by the Senate. The governments that allow the CIA 
prisons on their territory violate this international law, if not their 
own laws.''
  It then goes on to point out that despite all of this, ``not a single 
al Qaeda leader has been prosecuted in the last 4 years.'' It then goes 
on to say ``the CIA has no long-term plans for its secret prisoners 
whom one agency official described as `a horrible burden.' ''
  Then it notes that a congressional rebellion against this kind of 
activity is being led in the Senate by Senator McCain and that his main 
opponents are ``a small group of civilian political appointees circled 
around Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney.''
  The editorial then goes on to say, ``According to a report in the New 
York Times, the military professionals want to restore Geneva's 
protections against cruel treatment to the Pentagon official doctrine 
for handling detainees. Mr. McCain is seeking to ban cruel, inhumane 
and degrading treatment for all detainees held by the United States, 
including those in the CIA secret prisons.''
  So I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that in addition to passing this 
motion today, this House needs to stand as one; every single Member of 
this House ought to be willing to support the retention of the McCain 
amendment on the defense appropriations bill. And I would hope that we 
would see this House finally face up to its obligations on that score.
  Mr. WALSH. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from 
Missouri (Mr. Skelton), the distinguished ranking member of the Armed 
Services Committee.
  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for yielding. I rise in 
support of the motion.
  Mr. Speaker, I left the Armed Services Committee hearing a moment ago 
and I heard Command Sergeant Major Citola in a very eloquent discussion 
of the troops in Iraq say that we are a Nation of laws. It was 
heartening to hear that. Then the report from The Washington Post to 
which the gentleman from Wisconsin refers is a dagger in that thought.

[[Page H9565]]

  Our men and women in uniform are serving with tremendous distinction 
around the world in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Korea, 
Germany, and many other places; and they deserve the best protection 
and support we can give them.
  We in Congress are tasked with ensuring these troops and our veterans 
have all they need. They deserve the very best. Part of our job comes 
in providing them with the best equipment, training, and benefits. 
Another part is providing oversight of the policies of the 
administration. One of the questions that I had earlier was when the 
Armed Services Committee did not adopt a subcommittee on oversight or 
investigations.
  Hearken back to the days when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, David Jones, raised the issue that the Joint Chiefs of Staff is 
not working well and that there is a lack of jointness within our 
military. It was the committee on investigations under the gentleman 
from Alabama, Bill Nichols, that worked for some 4 years and came up 
with the landmark law that we now call Goldwater-Nichols. That was 
oversight.
  By oversight, we must ensure that our military forces are employed 
appropriately; when there are problems, that they are investigated 
fairly and properly, as they were in Chairman Nichols' work.
  I have supported calls for more vigorous investigations of the 
failure in prewar intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and for a 
likely post-war situation in Iraq. I have also supported a Truman-like 
commission to look at contracting problems in Iraq. Unfortunately, 
those efforts have not been undertaken; and they, sadly, fell on deaf 
ears.
  In my own Armed Services Committee there have been many efforts that 
have been undertaken in a bipartisan manner. This is good. A noble 
example is our joint effort to ensure that more up-armored Humvees and 
other force protection equipment reached the field despite the failure 
to plan adequately for their needs. That is a very positive step we 
did. Yet even in our committee, we need to do better when it comes to 
oversight in key areas of our policy relating to Iraq and the war on 
terror. Notably, I feel there must be additional policy and additional 
oversight of our treatment of detainees in theaters around the world.
  The question I have, Mr. Speaker, in regard to the article to which 
the gentleman from Wisconsin refers, was there any connection between 
what the allegations are by the CIA and the Department of Defense or 
anyone therein. That, I think, is a matter of oversight and one that we 
need to at least have a briefing or a hearing thereon.
  Increased oversight will allow us both to understand the systematic 
causes of these cases of abuse, the right solutions to be enacted into 
law. That is our job. The Constitution charges the Congress with 
raising and maintaining the military; and you cannot raise and maintain 
unless you oversight, unless you understand the problems that we can 
cure by law. That is our job. And I think we could do a much, much 
better job.
  Mr. WALSH. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.
  Mr. Speaker, in keeping with the spirit of this motion to instruct, 
the purpose of which is to protect American troops, I want to simply 
say that no matter how hard we try, we are going to have a difficult 
time doing that unless we change some unpleasant facts on the ground in 
Iraq. When more than 80 percent of Iraqis tell pollsters that they want 
America to leave their country, when almost one-half of Iraqis respond 
to pollsters by saying that they believe that terrorist attacks on U.S. 
troop are justified, we have a serious problem.
  In my view, we are not going to be able to turn that around until we 
make clear that our policies are consistent with our interests and our 
professed values. We need to get to the bottom of how we got into Iraq 
and how we are conducting this operation in Iraq now. We need to get to 
the bottom of that. We need to determine who is responsible for some of 
the stories that we have seen in the papers the past few days; and if 
we do not do that, we are going to continue to invite the kind of 
negative opinion around the world that is plaguing our ability to 
succeed in Iraq. I would hope that this House would recognize that 
responsibility.
  Mr. WALSH. Mr. Speaker, as I stated at the outset, we believe that 
the House position to provide an additional $50 million in the Military 
Quality of Life Subcommittee appropriations bill to provide additional 
overhead cover system is essential. And we would go into the conference 
hoping that the Senate would see the wisdom of what the House has done 
and retain the House position.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                              {time}  1115

  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the 
distinguished minority leader (Ms. Pelosi).
  Ms. PELOSI. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman for 
yielding and for his leadership on this issue.
  I am pleased to join the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) in 
saluting our troops. Wherever they are serving, at home or abroad, we 
owe them a deep debt of gratitude for their courage, for their 
patriotism, for the sacrifices they are willing to make for our 
country. We are very, very proud of them, and when they come home, we 
want to honor their service by giving them what they need as veterans, 
and those needs will be large.
  Mr. Speaker, I strongly support the motion to instruct offered by the 
gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey). We must provide those we send in 
to fight in Iraq with everything they need to serve, to keep them safe 
and so that they can return as safe as possible.
  It is tragic that more than 2\1/2\ years after the invasion of Iraq, 
that long a time, we are still encountering such appalling needs in the 
area of force protection. History will not treat kindly those who 
embarked on a war of choice without making sure that our troops were 
properly equipped. Not enough body armor, not enough jammers for 
protection against explosive devices, not enough armored vehicles, not 
enough overhead cover systems, the list goes on and on.
  Once again, Congress must deal with the consequences of the Bush 
administration's bad planning. We have had to do it before in the 
appropriations bills, and we are doing it here today with the gentleman 
from Wisconsin's motion to instruct.
  Congress has a responsibility to find out why so many things about 
Iraq have gone so terribly wrong. This Republican cover-up Congress has 
never lived up to the oversight responsibility to ask the questions.
  One of the essential elements of the force protection, for example, 
is good intelligence. Our Nation spends billions of dollars each year 
on intelligence programs and activities, and when they do not produce 
timely and reliable intelligence, we make the American people less 
safe, and Congress has a duty to find out why.
  The intelligence used as the justification for the administration's 
decision to go into war in Iraq was wrong. That Iraq possessed weapons 
of mass destruction, that was wrong. I said at the time that the 
intelligence did not support the threat that the administration was 
describing, but, nonetheless, the intelligence that they were using was 
wrong.
  Given the enormous consequences of that decision, more than 2,000 
American soldiers have been killed; more than 15,000 wounded, many of 
them permanently; more than a quarter of a trillion dollars spent; and 
enormous damage done to the reputation of the United States in the eyes 
of the world. The cost of lives and limbs and taxpayer dollars and 
reputation is enormous.
  Congress has an obligation to identify and correct the problems that 
led to the production of false intelligence. Our troops are at risk 
until that is done; and yet, as we address other force protection 
issues, there is no sense of urgency to undertake a thorough review of 
what went wrong with the intelligence. Neither the issue of the quality 
of the intelligence nor the equally important issue of whether 
intelligence was politicized have been investigated by this Congress.
  That is why shortly I will offer the House a chance to do more for 
force protection than provide the $50 million in this motion to 
instruct, as important as that money is.

[[Page H9566]]

  Democrats have continually asked for investigation of pre-war 
intelligence, and those requests have been repeatedly denied. The same 
is true for requests to investigate the other matters related to the 
war in Iraq: The prison abuse scandals, the no-bid Halliburton 
reconstruction contracts, the misuse of classified information to 
discredit administration critics.
  Each of these matters has national security implications that need to 
be examined, particularly on the issue of going to war and the conduct 
of war. Congress has an obligation to make sure that decisions were 
made properly and that these decisions are based on truth and trust.
  Until the Congress examines fully issues like whether intelligence 
was politicized, we have failed in a fundamental way to protect our 
troops and maintain a level of trust with the American people.
  I urge the House to support both the Obey motion to instruct and my 
subsequent resolution on Iraq.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gingrey). Without objection, the 
previous question is ordered on the motion to instruct.
  There was no objection.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion to instruct 
offered by the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey).
  The motion was agreed to.

                          ____________________