[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 144 (Thursday, November 3, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H9611-H9612]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             CAMPAIGN TO MINIMIZE LIES THAT LED TO IRAQ WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to support the minority leader's 
attempt to get oversight. She stood here today and asked in a 
resolution, which was not voted on by the House, was not allowed to be 
discussed by the House, that the Republican leadership conduct 
oversight of an executive branch controlled by the same party which is 
in contradiction to the established rules of standing committees and 
the congressional precedent.
  It is time for this House to begin an investigation of the executive 
branch.

[[Page H9612]]

Why is that? Well, there is a massive propaganda campaign beginning 
today, if you look in the Wall Street Journal and some of the other 
newspapers, to minimize the lies that led us into war. They are now 
saying, ``Well, everybody does it. Clinton did it. We did it. It 
doesn't make any difference how we got into war. It was the right thing 
to do. The fact that we got there is all that matters.'' That is what 
the defense is going to be.
  It is very clear that the office of the Vice President of the United 
States has emerged as the source of this national policy. Never mind, I 
am not talking about the intelligence on striods that proved that 
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It is now clear by his own 
admission that the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United 
States was willing to out the CIA agent whose husband had been sent by 
the Vice President's office, had been sent out to find out and had come 
back with a report that debunked the whole Niger yellow cake forgeries.
  Mr. Speaker, the Italian parliament is meeting even at this time on 
the issue of how those forgeries occurred. There is nobody interested 
around here. You would think it was nothing. But the Italian parliament 
is worried about how their secret service got involved in these 
forgeries.
  But really more worrisome than the forgeries and all of what went on 
there is the continuing influence of the Vice President's office to set 
policy. I will include in the record an article in the November 2 Slate 
magazine called Superiority Complex that is talking about what has gone 
on in the Vice President's office. This is another issue, but 
connected.
  Today we found out in the newspapers that we have secret prisons. We 
do not know where they are. Some people speculate they are in Poland, 
some say they are in Romania. We know we have Guantanamo. We have bases 
in other places. And we are unclear about how those people are to be 
treated.
  It was so unclear that the draft regulation was drawn up in the 
Department of Defense. Some people in the Department of Defense did not 
agree with it, so they let the Vice President's office know, and the 
next thing we know, they sort of say, why do you not hold up on that, 
and it never happened. The draft regulation never came out. It was to 
set a clear standard of how detainees should be treated, how prisoners 
of war should be treated, or whatever.
  The people who did that were Mr. Addington, who is now the Vice 
President's Chief of Staff, and Mr. Libby. They set about to veto the 
whole idea.
  Why is the Vice President's office making these decisions? Where is 
the White House? Where is the Oval Office? Where is the President? 
Well, he is missing in action.
  If you look in the last year and a half on that whole issue, the 
President said that these people would be treated humanely and, to the 
extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner 
consistent with the principles of the Geneva agreement.
  He could not just say ``the Geneva Convention holds. We will treat 
them according to that.'' He gave weasel-words here, so he really has 
been no use at all. Basically, what this White House has done is kept 
that whole issue open to debate.
  Now, you ask yourself, why do we care about how we treat prisoners? 
Very simply, and the article says, ``The military cares about the 
Geneva protections because of the correlation that American 
intelligence officers increasingly see between Muslim anger at the 
United States and human rights abuses in Guantanamo.''
  We are putting our own soldiers at risk by allowing this White House 
to keep this vague. We need some oversight.
  Mr. Speaker, I include the Slate magazine article for the Record.

                [From the New York Times, Nov. 2, 2005.]

                          Superiority Complex

                            (By Tim Naftali)

       Today's revelations in the New York Times about the Bush 
     administration's internal debate over how to treat foreign 
     detainees highlight the unprecedented role that Vice 
     President Dick Cheney and his staff are playing in setting 
     national security policy. In the Constitution, the vice 
     president is the Nation's understudy. He is not supposed to 
     be in the chain of command. Cheney knows this better than 
     most: In 1989, when he was George H.W. Bush's secretary of 
     defense, Cheney slapped down Vice President Dan Quayle for 
     calling a meeting of the National Security Council about a 
     coup attempt in the Philippines while the president was out 
     of the country.
       Yet now the Office of the Vice President is dictating the 
     rules by which the U.S. military interrogates and detains 
     terrorist suspects. This is being done subtly. All the Office 
     of the Vice President has to do is informally convey its 
     opposition to complying with international law in this area, 
     and any such effort is thwarted.
       This is what happened to an attempt by some officials in 
     the Department of Defense, along with the lawyers of all the 
     armed services, to write a new directive on the treatment of 
     detainees. Since the Bush administration began sending 
     foreigners captured abroad to Guantanamo Bay in winter 2001, 
     its refusal to afford them all the protections guaranteed by 
     the Geneva Conventions has been, to say the least, 
     internationally contentious. Now the military and some 
     Pentagon officials are increasingly aware that this refusal 
     is making American troops vulnerable abroad by potentially 
     provoking other countries to respond in kind. The current 
     policy has also created confusion in the armed services among 
     interrogators who were originally trained to follow Geneva 
     and now don't know which standard to apply. The goal of the 
     drafters of the new directive was to set clear standards that 
     are consistent with international law and with the military's 
     rules since 1949.
       The draft directive drew upon the language from Common 
     Article Three of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, implying 
     that the United States recognized the role of international 
     law in governing how it treated detainees. Not everyone in 
     the Pentagon was happy with this. Stephen Cambone, the 
     undersecretary of defense for intelligence policy, and 
     William J. Haynes, DOD's general counsel, apparently let the 
     vice president's office know what was happening. In 
     September, David S. Addington, who was then Cheney's general 
     counsel, and former Cheney aide I. Lewis Libby did their best 
     to veto the initiative.
       Cheney and Addington (and Libby) believe that there should 
     be no limit on the president's right to authorize 
     interrogations of terrorist suspects. The Office of the Vice 
     President is contemptuous of the British and our other 
     European allies, who have been reluctant to turn over 
     suspects to the United States because of what they see as 
     Washington's lawless approach.
       What does the Oval Office think about adopting a Geneva-
     friendly detainee policy? So far, there is no evidence that 
     President George W. Bush has weighed in directly since 
     February 2002 on applying Geneva's protections to the 
     detainees. At that point, he said that al-Qaida and Taliban 
     fighters would not have prisoner-of-war status but would 
     nonetheless be treated ``humanely and, to the extent 
     appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a 
     manner consistent with the principles'' of the Geneva 
     Conventions. The ambiguity of Bush's 2002 statement--was he 
     saying that the Geneva Conventions did not trump military 
     necessity?--has encouraged advocates of a Geneva-based policy 
     to argue that he intended to set a floor rather than a 
     ceiling for the treatment of detainees.
       And what about Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who is in the 
     military chain of command? The reporting is still vague thus 
     far on his opinion about the standards for detainees. Matthew 
     Waxman, Rumsfeld's deputy assistant secretary of defense, was 
     a champion of incorporating Common Article Three into the new 
     interrogation directive. But Rumsfeld himself reportedly said 
     nothing, even after the vice president's office shot down the 
     draft directive. Rumsfeld and Cheney go way back; Cheney 
     worked for Rumsfeld in the Nixon administration. Whatever 
     else Rumsfeld's silence means, by ceding this area to Cheney, 
     the defense secretary signals to the armed services that he 
     doesn't much care that their lawyers want to bring U.S. 
     policy in line with the Geneva Conventions.
       The military cares about Geneva's protections because of 
     the correlation that American intelligence officers 
     increasingly see between Muslim anger at the United States 
     for human rights abuses in Guantanamo and elsewhere and the 
     virulence of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. In its 
     secret brief in a case involving the ACLU's request for the 
     disclosure of additional photographs of the abuses that took 
     place at Abu Ghraib, the government acknowledged as much.
       Ordinarily presidents assign their vice presidents some 
     projects, usually with consultation, of course. Yet once 
     Cheney focuses on a policy, he dominates it.
       So long as his views prevail in how the Bush administration 
     treats foreign detainees, the military's push to safeguard 
     American troops by respecting Geneva will be stymied.

     

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