[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 88 (Monday, June 4, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6972-S6973]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          MEMORIAL DAY RECESS

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I attended, as Senator Ensign and I do every 
Memorial Day, a service at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial 
Cemetery, which is located in Boulder City, NV. I am struck by two 
conversations I had.
  One was with a World War II veteran by the name of Ken Brown. 
Basically, he has lost his hearing. He was a machine gunner on a 
destroyer. As you know, Mr. President, the noise on one of those ships 
was deafening, and he certainly was deafened in the process. But he 
told me--and this is the first time he has ever expressed anything 
other than total support for what President Bush has been doing as 
relates to the military--he told me in no uncertain terms that we 
Democrats were headed in the right direction; we had to stop what was 
going on in Iraq.
  Then, a wonderful woman came up to visit with me. She visited me a 
year and a month ago here in my office. Her boy had been killed in 
Iraq. A year ago, I traveled with her and her husband after the 
ceremony in Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City out of the auditorium and 
out to one of the graves. There are 22,000 graves in that new cemetery 
in Boulder City. It is very new. There are 22,000 graves. One of those 
graves is her son, John Lukac, who was killed in Iraq. She is as sad 
today as she was a year ago. She asked me with tears in her eyes if 
there is some way I can get her to Iraq. She wants to go where her son 
was killed. We said: No, we don't want you to go to Iraq; you shouldn't 
go there. She is a wonderful woman, a wonderful mother. This is a 
wonderful family. Her husband is so gracious and nice.
  I am grateful beyond words for the sacrifices of the men and women in 
uniform from Nevada and around the Nation who have done so much for our 
country and are serving in the military. We focus on those who have 
been injured and killed, and those are the people who have given a 
tremendous sacrifice. But there are other people who serve, and 
sometimes in not so glamorous positions, but it is as a result of their 
service that we are able to conduct military warfare as we need to. In 
this work period, we will continue to do everything we can to honor the 
sacrifices of these men and women with a responsible end to the Iraq 
war.
  During the work period, I had a chance to visit with many Nevadans. 
No. 1 on their minds is the war, and No. 2 is the high gas prices. We 
are better now in Nevada. Gas prices keep going up. We are no longer 
No. 3 in the Nation. I guess that is some distinction. We have dropped 
down to 11 or somewhere in that area. And, of course, immigration 
reform is on everyone's mind. I assured them that these issues--the 
Iraq war, the situation with the gas prices and, of course, 
immigration--are on our radar screen. We are going to be working on 
those issues this work period.
  On the first day of the 110th Congress, Democrats, because we won the 
majority, were able to introduce the first 10 bills, the first 10 
priorities as we saw them. Last Friday, we concluded a 7-week work 
period, and we have taken action on 7 of these 10 priorities.
  We passed the toughest ethics and lobbying reform in our Nation's 
history. We will soon go to conference with the House on that bill.
  We passed a 10-year overdue minimum wage that the President has 
signed.
  We attempted to give Medicare the power to negotiate lower drug 
prices. We were prevented from doing so because of a Republican 
filibuster.
  We passed the recommendations of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission after 
almost 3 years of them being set aside. We expect to complete the 
conference on that legislation within the next couple of weeks and send 
it to the President.
  Stem cell research, giving hope to millions of Americans, was again 
passed in this body, and we expect to send it to the President after 
conferencing with the House, which we expect to do in the next couple 
of weeks, and we think in the Senate we are going to send a veto-proof 
bill to him.
  In addition, we were able to pass what was not one of the top 10 
priorities but something we have been trying to do for 3 years; that 
is, disaster relief for the struggling farmers and ranchers in this 
country.
  We were able to send to the President something he signed dealing 
with giving the victims of Katrina the relief they deserve since the 
actual hurricane struck. The President has gone there lots of times but 
refused to cooperate with us in sending the money.
  We were able to send a downpayment on SCHIP, which is helping to fund 
health care for children.
  And, of course, we were able to send $1 billion in homeland security. 
We fought with the President for years. I have to say, his people 
fought us to the very end. We were forced to take some of that money 
off homeland security. But with $1 billion, we can at least go forward 
and do a better job of checking cargo containers coming into this 
country. We can do a better job of checking for nuclear weapons coming 
into this country, dirty bombs. We will do a better job of taking a 
look at what is happening with our rail safety.
  So we are comfortable that we have done some good things. We passed a 
balanced budget that restores fiscal discipline and puts the middle 
class first--cutting their taxes while increasing investment in 
education, veterans care, and children's health care.
  We began debate on the complex, crucial issue of immigration reform, 
which I spoke about a short time ago. This week, we are going to 
complete that legislation and hopefully bring to final passage a 
comprehensive bill that will strengthen our border security and bring 
12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows and help our 
economy move strongly.
  In the days ahead, we will work to improve the bill to protect and 
strengthen family ties while improving the structure of the temporary 
worker program.

[[Page S6973]]

  Following immigration, we will turn our attention to the 3 remaining 
bills from the original 10: an energy bill that will take crucial steps 
toward weaning our country of our addiction to foreign oil; we are 
going to reauthorize the Higher Education Act which will address 
skyrocketing costs of college; and a Defense authorization bill to make 
critical investments to address troop readiness problems in the 
military, and that debate will be led by the Presiding Officer.
  Readiness will be led by the distinguished junior Senator from 
Virginia, someone who has experience in battle and more than just 
words. We look forward to following the distinguished Senator from 
Virginia in making sure our troops are ready, their rotations are 
right, they are trained right, and that they are not going back, as 
happened in Nevada 2 weeks ago when someone was going back for a fourth 
tour of duty and acknowledged to his family he was tired and knew he 
wouldn't come back. He had survived too many explosions to go back for 
another tour of duty and survive another explosion, and he was right. 
He is now dead.
  We will also reconfigure our national security strategy to better 
meet the threats and challenges we face today that the President, we 
believe, is overlooking.
  We have made great progress this year, especially when we have put 
our partisan differences aside to work toward common goals. But for all 
the good that has come in the shadow of President Bush's catastrophic 
Iraq war, we need to do so much more. Ending the war will continue to 
be our No. 1 priority every single day as the year continues.
  The month of May 2007 was the third deadliest month in the war. It 
was close to being the deadliest, but they didn't break that record, 
thank goodness. But May was the third deadliest month in the entire 51 
months of this war. June is off to a horrifying start. Sixteen 
Americans have been killed in the first 3 days of the month.
  The President's troop escalation is now complete. Yet a New York 
Times article this morning reports that security goals are far, far, 
far short of the military's hopes, with just about one-third of 
Baghdad's neighborhoods in some semblance of order.
  In the midst of this growing chaos, the Senate Intelligence Committee 
released a new bipartisan report just before the Memorial Day deadline. 
My good friend and colleague, Chairman Jay Rockefeller, working with 
the vice chair of the committee, Kit Bond--and the Intelligence 
Committee has become a nonpartisan committee, as it was set up to do--
they worked on a bipartisan basis, and the information they came up 
with is long overdue. Previously, there was not cooperation between the 
majority and the minority. The chairman of the committee basically 
stonewalled everything the committee was trying to get done, and that 
is the reason we shut the Senate down. But that information has now 
come forward, and my colleague, Senator Rockefeller, deserves enormous 
credit for putting together this crucially important report.
  It further brings to light the administration's decision to go to war 
in Iraq regardless of the facts and warnings issued by the Intelligence 
Committee. The Intelligence Committee foretold much of the chaos we now 
face. They told the President, among other things, the following: that 
installing democracy would be a long, difficult, and probably turbulent 
challenge in Iraq, and that was an understatement; No. 2, that al-Qaida 
would try to take advantage of U.S. attention on postwar Iraq to 
reestablish its presence in Afghanistan, and they have done that; that 
Iraq was a deeply divided society that likely would engage in violent 
conflict unless an occupying power prevented it, and we have not 
prevented it; that the U.S. occupation of Iraq would result in a surge 
of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups, and that 
has proven to be true; that Iraq's neighbors would jockey for influence 
in Iraq, including fomenting strife among Iraq's sectarian groups, and 
that is true; that some elements in the Iranian Government could decide 
to try to counter aggressively the U.S. presence in Iraq or challenge 
U.S. goals, and they have done that; and, finally, that our action in 
Iraq would not cause other regional states to abandon their WMD 
programs or their desire to develop such programs, and that also has 
proven to be true.
  Clearly, the intelligence community got it right, and their warnings 
were not issued in a vacuum. Perhaps the most striking finding of the 
report is that all the key administration players were made aware of 
these warnings--Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Hadley, Scooter 
Libby, all key Bush officials at the National Security Council, the 
State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Vice President 
were all on the distribution list.
  The Bush administration cannot hide behind ignorance. Whether out of 
hubris or incompetence, the President and his men willfully ignored the 
experts and sent our troops to battle unprepared for the consequences.
  Some might say, what is past is past. If the President's prewar 
failure was a one-time event, we could maybe forget about it, even 
though that would be hard. But if President Bush's prewar failure was a 
one-time event, we could leave it to the historians to study and judge 
the tragedy of his incompetence. But even today, after almost 3,500 
American deaths and more than 20,000 wounded, the President continues 
to cherry-pick facts in order to paint a rosy but very misleading 
picture of Iraq.
  After tens of thousands of injuries to our troops, the President 
continues to ignore the advice of experts. After nearly $500 billion of 
America's treasure has been spent in Iraq--some say it is approaching 
$1 trillion, but a vast amount of our treasury--he is still dreaming 
his way through this epic tragedy. The country's eyes are wide open, 
and it is time for the President to wake up.
  I understand some Americans are frustrated that we here in Congress 
have not been able to move more quickly to end the war. Many who voted 
for change in November anticipated dramatic and immediate results in 
January. They did get some dramatic changes. This is what we have given 
them: more than 75 hearings on Iraq, the Walter Reed scandal brought to 
light and steps taken to make it right, a supplemental bill sent to the 
President that set a firm policy to responsibly end the war--only a 
small step but a step, a second supplemental that set benchmarks and 
voided the President's blank check--the first was vetoed, this was not.
  Our resolve has never been stronger. With a razor-thin majority--and, 
remember, it is a razor-thin majority--an obstinate President, and a 
Republican minority that continues to bow to his will, we are 
nonetheless making real progress. However, under the Senate's rules and 
our Constitution, there is only so far a determined majority can go, 
especially with our 49-50 disadvantage, which is due to Senator 
Johnson's illness. We can only end this war if the President changes 
course, or more Republicans join with us to force him to do so.
  When we take up the Defense authorization bill, we will not just work 
to correct the President's neglect of troop readiness and protection, 
we will give our Republican colleagues another opportunity to join us 
and bring a responsible end to this war. We will fight for that every 
day this year, as long as the President and a few allies left here in 
Congress continue to defy the reality the rest of us see clearly.
  We owe it to the men and women serving overseas and serving at home, 
to families who await the return of those overseas, and all Americans 
who want the Iraq tragedy to finally end.

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