[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 58 (Tuesday, April 21, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4481-S4498]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 NOMINATION OF CHRISTOPHER R. HILL TO BE AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ--Continued

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I trust we are not in a quorum call.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. We are not.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business and that Senator Brownback be recognized following my 
presentation.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Dorgan are printed in today's Record under 
``Morning Business.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I rise to speak on the Chris Hill 
nomination to be Ambassador to Iraq. I am opposed to that nomination. A 
number of issues have been raised on this nomination I want to talk 
about to try to put some factual setting associated with that.
  First, though, I wish to have printed in the Record at the end of my 
statement a Jerusalem Post online edition article dated yesterday that 
I read extensively from in my first presentation regarding the 65th 
anniversary of the escape from Auschwitz. I ask unanimous consent to 
have that article printed in the Record at the end of my statement.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. BROWNBACK. I want to note for my colleagues, I read extensively 
from this article and did not cite that during my initial presentation. 
I want to make sure they know this came from that reporter and that we 
were putting that in.
  Second, there has been a lot of discussion here about: OK, we have to 
get this person confirmed. We have to get him out, and it is a terrible 
shame it has not taken place to date.

[[Page S4482]]

  I agree we need an ambassador to Iraq. There is no question about 
that. I appreciate my colleagues' concern about getting an ambassador 
to Iraq. I would note, there is one who does not have the controversy 
this one has who was offered the post initially, who accepted it, and 
then somehow this was mysteriously withdrawn. So there was a person we 
could have gone forward with, who had accepted it, and for some reason 
it was pulled back.
  Yesterday, CNN was talking to General Zinni, retired General Zinni, 
and I wish to quote from this report from yesterday.

       Zinni told CNN Monday he hasn't been given any explanation 
     about why the offer he got in January for the post--

  This is U.S. Ambassador to Iraq--

     which he accepted was abruptly taken back. Zinni confirmed in 
     an e-mail that he was asked to take the job by Secretary of 
     State Hillary Clinton, and even congratulated by Vice 
     President Joe Biden, but then the offer was revoked and 
     extended to Hill, a development Zinni says he heard on the 
     news. Zinni is a retired four-star Marine general and former 
     head of Central Command. Like President Barack Obama, he was 
     an early critic of the Iraqi war.

  He would seem like a likely--logical, actually--pick for our 
Ambassador to Iraq, putting forward somebody whom I could have seen 
supporting. He is knowledgeable of the region and not with a history of 
deception toward this body or of problems dealing with human rights 
issues.
  To my colleagues who put forward: We have to get this done, it is a 
terrible tragedy you are holding this up, well, why didn't you nominate 
somebody such as Retired General Zinni, or why did you pick him and 
then pull him back? That might be a more interesting note to find out. 
It would be interesting to me, anyway and, I would hope, to a number of 
other people.
  The reason I have trouble with this nominee is because of this 
nominee's past performance, lack of concern on human rights, and then 
we are giving him this great, huge assignment for the United States, 
and I don't agree with that.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this be printed in the 
Record at the end of my statement as well.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 2.)
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
  There has also been a charge that Ambassador Hill simply didn't raise 
the human rights issues because the Bush administration wouldn't let 
him do this and that you needed to look up the ladder, not at 
Ambassador Hill on this. I can tell my colleagues from my personal 
conversations with President Bush, he was deeply concerned about human 
rights. He loathed Kim Jong-Il because of the human rights issues more 
than any other. Those were his statements. I personally had two direct 
conversations at length with the President about this.
  The idea that somehow Chris Hill couldn't do this because the 
President and his apparatus wouldn't agree to it raises some major 
questions about that charge because it certainly wasn't the President 
who was saying anything such as that. I think that one is patently 
false on its face.
  There is also this unfortunate history that Chris Hill has of 
diminishing and playing down human rights issues. There are human 
rights issues in Iraq as well, and there are going to be as we go 
forward in that region. To have somebody who consistently has played 
these down, ignored them, papered them over, that raises real questions 
to me.
  To support that, I wish to put forward as well some thoughts from 
others of my colleagues who are concerned about human rights. I have 
cited my own discussion with him. I have cited previously, but I think 
this bears putting forward to my colleagues again, Jay Lefkowitz was 
our North Korean Human Rights Special Envoy, who was appointed pursuant 
to the North Korean Human Rights Act that this body passed and the 
President signed, and Jay Lefkowitz wrote to me:

       At no point during my tenure as special envoy for human 
     rights in North Korea, either before or after July 31, 2008, 
     did Chris Hill or anyone acting on his behalf invite me to 
     participate in any six party talks; any, none, not at all. 
     Jay.

  This is after Chris Hill had stated in open testimony before the 
Senate Armed Services Committee, when I was asking him:

       Will you state that the special envoy will be invited to 
     all future negotiating sessions with North Korea?

  Ambassador Hill responds:

       I would be happy to invite him to all future negotiating 
     sessions with North Korea.

  This is on the Record. This is Jay Lefkowitz' statement afterward.
  I ask unanimous consent that both of those be printed in the Record 
after my statement.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibits 3 and 4.)
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, a number of my colleagues will know 
Congressman Frank Wolf from the House side as a wonderful human rights 
advocate and has been for a number of years. He is deeply concerned 
about human rights issues overall. He has worked these issues for a 
long period of time. He is a fabulous man on these topics. He wrote 
Ambassador Hill on February 5, 2009, this to Ambassador Hill on his 
nomination to go into Iraq:

       While I do not question your qualifications as a diplomat, 
     I must be frank in telling you that I was often disappointed 
     in your approach to diplomacy with North Korea; specifically, 
     your marginalization and oftentimes seeming utter neglect of 
     human rights.
       In a Washington Post piece Michael Gerson described your 
     shaping of America's North Korea policy in this way--

  Now, Michael Gerson was on the inside of the Bush White House and 
cites to Ambassador Hill as shaping United States-North Korea policy, 
and Michael Gerson writes this:

       Hill has been a tireless advocate of preemptive diplomatic 
     concessions--

  preemptive diplomatic concessions--

     and the exclusion of human rights issues from reports and 
     negotiations.

  That is the end of the quote from Gerson.

       It is difficult to know how much the policy you were 
     pursuing simply reflected the President and the Secretary's 
     aims or whether you were in fact the chief architect and 
     advocate of this approach. Regardless, while Iraq and North 
     Korea are obviously two very different countries, it gives me 
     pause as I consider the human rights challenges confronting 
     Iraq's ethno-religious minorities who are increasingly under 
     siege.

  This is taking place in Iraq today. We have all these human rights 
abuses that are boiling in Iraq today, and now we want to send a guy 
who has a highly questionable record on human rights in his last 
assignment.
  Frank Wolf goes on:

       More than 500,000 Christians, or roughly 50 percent, have 
     fled Iraq since 2003. Even though Christians make up only 3 
     percent of the country's population, according to the U.N. 
     High Commission for Refugees, they comprise nearly half of 
     all refugees leaving Iraq. As Iraq has continued to 
     stabilize, these minority populations, including the aging 
     Christian community--some of whom still speak Aramaic--is 
     dwindling and increasingly vulnerable to marginalization and 
     increasing attacks, of the sort we witnessed in Mosul this 
     past fall.

  This is from Congressman Frank Wolf.
  We have a history of bad human rights in dealing with North Korea and 
we have a bubbling problem, a current problem in Iraq, and we send 
Chris Hill who has had big difficulty in dealing with it.
  I ask unanimous consent to have this printed in the Record at the end 
of my statement.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 5.)
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Finally, in this tranche, there was a letter sent--
this is on January 28 of 2005 and it was to the Permanent 
Representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the 
U.N., our contact point with North Korea diplomatically. It was 
addressed to Ambassador Pak. It states:

       This letter is to inform you and your government of the 
     distress with which the undersigned Members of the 
     Illinois Congressional Delegation received the finding 
     from the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office on 
     December 14, 2004 that South Korean citizen and U.S. 
     permanent resident Reverend Kim Dong-Shik had been 
     abducted by agents of your government in northeast China 
     in January of 2000 and taken forcibly into North Korea. 
     Your government regrettably has, by its own admission, 
     been involved in the abduction of a number of Japanese 
     citizens as well as an even greater number of South Korean 
     citizens.
       Reverend Kim Dong-Shik, as you may be aware, is the spouse 
     of Mrs. Young Hwa Kim

[[Page S4483]]

     of Chicago, Illinois, and is the parent of U.S. citizens, one 
     of whom is currently residing in Skokie, Illinois. Citizens 
     from a Korean-American church in the Chicago area have also 
     raised this matter as an issue of grave concern and requested 
     congressional assistance in ascertaining the facts behind the 
     disappearance and current whereabouts of Reverend Kim. In 
     pursuant of these issues, Mrs. Kim and a delegation from 
     Illinois will be visiting Capitol Hill in the near future.
       The successful resolution of this case, therefore, is of 
     critical importance to us--

  This is the Illinois delegation--

     both because of the constituent interest involved as well as 
     because it is a case involving the most fundamental of human 
     rights. Reverend Kim, in his selfless efforts to assist 
     refugees escaping in an underground network to third 
     countries, brings to mind two great heroes held in high 
     esteem in the United States. The first is Ms. Harriet Tubman, 
     who established an underground railroad allowing for the 
     escape from slavery of those held in bondage before President 
     Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation, the second is 
     the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who, during the dark 
     days of the world conflict against fascism in the Second 
     World War, rescued Jewish refugees trapped in Hungary. We 
     view Reverend Kim Dong-Shik as also being a hero who assisted 
     with the escape of the powerless and forgotten.
       We, therefore, wish to inform the Government of the 
     Democratic People's Republic of Korea that we will not 
     support the removal of your government from the State 
     Department's list of State sponsors of terrorism until such 
     time, among other reasons, as a full accounting is provided 
     to the Kim family regarding the fate of Reverend Kim Dong-
     Shik following his abduction into North Korea five years ago.

  This is signed by U.S. Senators Richard J. Durbin and Barack Obama. 
They signed this letter to our permanent representative, the permanent 
representative of North Korea to the U.N. on January 28 of 2005.
  Well, those sanctions are now lifted. The guy who pushed for the 
lifting of them is now being pushed to be the Ambassador to Iraq, and 
Rev. Kim Dong-Shik--it is still not known where he is. He is still 
somewhere abducted, hopefully alive--we don't know--in North Korea.
  I ask unanimous consent that this letter be printed in the Record at 
the end of my statement.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 6.)
  Mr. BROWNBACK. When people say this is being held up and it is 
irresponsible and you shouldn't do this, I am just quoting a number of 
Members of Congress. I am just quoting the President. I am just 
pointing to a human rights situation that our Ambassador to Iraq will 
go into, and saying, isn't this reason enough to go with somebody such 
as General Zinni instead of Ambassador Hill in this situation?
  Also, we haven't been able to get information from the State 
Department. I had asked for the instructions they had given to 
Ambassador Hill. He had stated in committee testimony here that at one 
point in time he called it ``inaudible'' in the negotiations, and in 
that ``inaudible'' he made a change. We wanted to find out what State 
Department instructions were to him, or what they were to him on human 
rights issues, and that hasn't been received by my office. We haven't 
been able to get those back.
  A number of my colleagues don't remember, or they don't cite to the 
period of time that Ambassador Hill was working on the Korean desk, but 
they do cite to what he did in Bosnia and say, OK, he was a successful 
diplomat, he did this; North Korea is tough, we are going to ignore 
that; and now let's put him in Iraq. Well, there are some real 
questionable records of what he did in the situation in the Balkans and 
in Bosnia. Here I have an article, dated March 22, of this year. I 
think it is very interesting and quite troubling. This is about one of 
the people who is charged with war crimes and his dealings with 
Ambassador Hill. I am going to quote from this article and enter it 
into the Record.

       Every time Radovan Karadzic, the onetime Bosnian Serb 
     leader, appears in court on war crimes charges, he has 
     hammered on one recurring claim: a senior American official 
     pledged that he would never be standing there being charged 
     with war crimes.
       The official, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special envoy on 
     Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration, has 
     repeatedly denied promising Mr. Karadzic immunity from 
     prosecution in exchange for abandoning power after the 
     Bosnian war.
       But the rumor persists, and different versions that 
     recently emerged that line up with Mr. Karadzic's assertion, 
     including a new historical study published by Purdue 
     University in Indiana.
       Charles W. Ingrao, the study's co-editor, said that three 
     senior State Department officials, one of them retired, and 
     several other people with knowledge of Mr. Holbrooke's 
     activities, told him that Mr. Holbrooke assured Mr. Karadzic 
     in July 1996 that he would not be pursued by the 
     international war crimes tribunal in The Hague if he left 
     politics.
       Mr. Karadzic had already been charged by the tribunal with 
     genocide and other crimes against civilians.

  Now, you say, OK, that is charging Mr. Holbrooke, but let's see what 
the report writers go on to say about this.

       The Purdue University study, ``Confronting the Yugoslav 
     Controversies: A Scholars' Initiative'', instructed his 
     principal assistant, Christopher Hill, to draft the 
     memorandum to be signed by Karadzic, committing him to give 
     up power--

  in exchange for not being charged with war crimes.
  The author of the study said Mr. Holbrooke used Slobodan Milosevic, 
the then Serbian leader, and other Serbian officials as intermediaries 
to convey the promise of immunity and to reach the deal with Mr. 
Karadzic. ``The agreement almost came to grief when Holbrooke 
vigorously refused Karadzic's demand, and Hill's appeal, that he affix 
his signature to it,'' the study says, citing unidentified State 
Department sources.
  Chris Hill's name again.
  The study, the product of 8 years of research by historians, jurists, 
and social scientists from all sides of the conflict, was an effort to 
reconcile disparate views of the wars that tore the former Yugoslavia 
apart in the 1990s, Mr. Ingrao said.
  The former official said Mr. Karadzic wanted written assurance that 
he would not be pursued for war crimes and refused to sign without 
them.
  ``Holbrooke told the Serbs, `You can give him my word he won't be 
pursued,' but Holbrooke refused to sign anything,'' the official said. 
Mr. Holbrooke could make that promise because he knew that American and 
other western militaries in Bosnia were not then making arrests, the 
official said.
  Neither Mr. Hill nor Mr. Goldberg responded to requests for 
interviews for this article.
  Here is another insertion of Mr. Hill on a huge problem with human 
rights. This one in the Yugoslav, the Balkans theater. There it is 
again--North Korea, the Balkans, and we have a brewing situation taking 
place in Iraq, and we are going to send him there.
  I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record at 
the end of my statement.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 7.)
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I am doing that so my colleagues and 
others who study this can look at the factual studies we have in 
examining what is taking place here.
  A number of my colleagues say the North Korean situation is not 
relevant to the debate we are in today. I don't know why it is not. 
When we run for office, people go look at our backgrounds and say what 
did they do in their past job to see if we ought to elect them for this 
one. People don't kind of walk into the Senate. There is an examination 
process that the public goes through. I don't know why we would not 
want to examine somebody to see their track record.
  Some have suggested that the human rights issue kind of popped up in 
North Korea, and that we learned at the last minute, so that Chris Hill 
had to deal with this at a quick point so he should have had set it 
aside to get the full deal.
  This is a February 4, 2004 article on washingtonpost.com. This is 
written by Anne Apolebaum. The title is ``Auschwitz Under Our Noses.''
  As I stated, it is Holocaust Remembrance Day today. This article 
talks about North Korea and what is taking place there in 2004. So this 
didn't just pop up. There had been a documentary put forward by the BBC 
describing the atrocities in North Korea. I will read one section that 
is incredible. It says this:

       Look, for example, at the international reaction to a 
     documentary, aired last Sunday night on the BBC. It described 
     atrocities committed in the concentration camps of 
     contemporary North Korea, where, it was alleged, chemical 
     weapons are tested on prisoners. Central to the film was the 
     testimony of Kwon Hyuk, a former administrator at a North 
     Korean camp.


[[Page S4484]]


  This is what the administrator said:

       I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas 
     and dying in the gas chamber.

  He witnessed that.
  He said:

       The parents, son, and a daughter. The parents were vomiting 
     and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save 
     the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.

  The article goes on:

       The documentary also included testimony from a former 
     prisoner, who says she saw 50 women die after being 
     deliberately fed poison. And it included documents smuggled 
     out of the country that seemed to sentence a prisoner to a 
     camp ``for the purpose of human experimentation.''

  The author writes this at the end, and this is the whole point of 
this:

       Later--in 10 years, or in 60--it will surely turn out that 
     quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. 
     It will turn out that information collected by various human 
     rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists, 
     and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture 
     of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were 
     things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean 
     government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. 
     Government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have 
     applied.
       Historians in Asia, Europe, and here will finger various 
     institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify 
     their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how 
     it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas 
     chambers but failed to act.

  That is what I am asking. My goodness. This has been going on, and I 
tried to push Chris Hill about it for years and nothing happened, and I 
got an agreement in open testimony in a hearing, and nothing happened 
after that. But now let's move him to Iraq and give him that account.
  I ask unanimous consent this article be printed in the Record after 
my statement.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 8.)
  Mr. KERRY. Will the Senator yield for a procedural question?
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Yes.
  Mr. KERRY. I ask my colleague, if he has a moment, to see whether we 
can set a time for the vote with respect to this issue.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. If I may respond through the Chair, I have contacted 
colleagues. We are still confirming at what time they can speak. 
Several colleagues want to speak. We are working on that right now.
  Mr. KERRY. Does the Senator have a sense of when we could try to come 
to some arrangement? A lot of Senators on both sides of the aisle are 
trying to arrange schedules, and the majority leader is trying to deal 
with the question of the legislative schedule. If we can get a sense of 
that--I know the Senator is trying to get at it. I think if we could 
pin this down, that would be helpful. If he could give me a sense of 
how many Senators, when, and if we will lock in their times and then 
lock in a vote.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. I am contacting colleagues now. We don't have that 
officially tied down yet so that I can respond at this time. I 
appreciate my colleague from Massachusetts saying that, as I 
understand, there will be a hearing on North Korean--not necessarily on 
the atrocities, although I hope it will be covered, but also on 
possible sanctions on North Korea. I appreciate that is being worked on 
to address some of these concerns. I will be raising, as well--while my 
colleague is here--that we not put in a supplemental bill support for 
the North Korean regime that is beyond humanitarian aid, particularly 
as these things are surfacing now. I realize that is not the Senator's 
committee, but I want to make my colleagues, who know the situation 
well, aware of these points that I will be raising.
  Mr. KERRY. Let me say that every one of us shares the outrage at the 
type of government and the way in which the people of North Korea are 
oppressed. I commend the Senator from Kansas for calling the country's 
attention and the world's attention and the Senate's at this moment to 
it. We will have a hearing on May 6. It will be a comprehensive hearing 
on North Korea. It will involve all of the issues with respect to North 
Korea. We welcome that. That is an appropriate role for us.
  But it is also appropriate for us to try to get this nominee a time 
certain. He would like to leave for Iraq tomorrow. So we wish, if we 
can, to have a sense of the timing on the vote. If we can get an 
agreement here, maybe I could--how many Senators are planning to speak 
on the Senator's side of the aisle?

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, we have three who are lined up to 
speak. There are Senators McCain and Kyl, who have scheduling issues 
later in the day. That is what I am trying to get firmed up. I am not 
trying to delay my colleagues.
  Mr. KERRY. I understood that Senator McCain was going to try to speak 
at 3:30, which is about 35 minutes from now. We are prepared not to 
have any further speakers on our side.
  I will propound a request. I ask unanimous consent that we allow the 
Senator from Kansas to control the time, but for, say, 10 minutes 
between now and the hour of 5 o'clock, and that the vote be at 5 
o'clock. I ask for an order to that effect.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I have to object at this time. I simply 
don't know when Senator Kyl can speak, and he desires to speak. Until I 
can determine that, I cannot agree for others of my colleagues.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. KERRY. I respect that, but I also know how the Senate works; I 
have 26 years here. I will come back. I have a meeting going on now, 
but I will be back in about 20 minutes. I hope we can find Senator Kyl 
between now and then, pin down the time for him, and get an agreement. 
I think it is important for the Senate to get its business done. Is 
that agreeable to the Senator from Kansas?
  Mr. BROWNBACK. If we can locate him and if there are not others.
  Mr. KERRY. If we cannot contact a member of the Senate who is in the 
leadership--surely we can find one of the leaders of the Senate in 20 
minutes.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. I have said what I know.
  Mr. KERRY. I will be back at a quarter after, and I hope we can 
propound an agreement at that time. I thank the Senator for the 
interruption.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I want to speak about another issue, 
because this caught a lot of what is involved here. This is a 2004 
article called ``An Auschwitz in Korea.'' I had hoped my colleague 
could stay and hear this, but he has to leave.
  This is to the point raised by a number of people that this was kind 
of quick and the problem with human rights was not known as an issue in 
North Korea, and that we don't know about it. Chris Hill steps in and 
he has to make the call that we are not going to pursue human rights, 
but we are going to go completely after the nuclear issue.
  This article is by Jeff Jacoby from the Boston Globe. He puts it so 
well, because it is to the point we have here. He writes this:

       Does ``never again'' simply mean ``never again will Germans 
     kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945?''

  Is that what ``never again'' means? Obviously, that is not the case. 
We are not going to let this sort of thing happen again on Holocaust 
Remembrance Day.
  That brings us to North Korea. In 2004, this author writes this. This 
was in the press:

       It is not exactly news that the Communist regime of Kim 
     Jong Il has sent millions of North Koreans to early graves. 
     Estimates back to 1998 were that as many as 800,000 people 
     were dying in North Korea each year from starvation and 
     malnutrition caused by Kim's ruthless and irrational 
     policies. World Vision, a Christian relief organization, 
     calculated that 1 million to 2 million North Koreans had been 
     killed by ``a full-scale famine'' largely of Pyongyang's 
     creation.

  They created the famine and people die off who don't support the 
regime. We have heard about that system before, and some of the purges 
that took place in the Soviet Union.
  The article also says:

       Nor is it breaking news that North Korea operates a vicious 
     prison gulag--``not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao 
     and Stalin in the last century,'' as NBC News reported more 
     than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are 
     held in these slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of 
     others have perished in them over the years. Some of the 
     camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their 
     prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can 
     be of any age: North Korea's longstanding policy is to 
     imprison not only those accused of such ``crimes'' as 
     practicing Christianity [one of

[[Page S4485]]

     the major crimes] or complaining about North Korean life, but 
     their entire families, including grandparents and 
     grandchildren. The policy there is if one member of the 
     family complains, 3 generations are taken. This is the way 
     they then operate these prison camps.

  I want to show a picture of one of the prison camps that looks 
organized along the lines that Auschwitz was organized. This is taken 
by Google Earth. They are organized like the Auschwitz ones. The 
difference here is that they group you by families, so they have taken 
three generations when one is opposed. They organize this and it is a 
death camp. Kwon Hyuk was quoted, saying:

       I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas 
     and dying in the gas chamber.

  The article says:

       The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean 
     intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, 
     the country's largest concentration camp.

  We have a picture of camp 22. I will show you what he is talking 
about here. It is the largest camp. The testimony was heard on a 
television documentary that aired on BBC, which I mentioned.
  Here we have a situation--this writer is writing--of ``Gas chambers. 
Poisoned food. Torture. The murder of whole families. Massive death 
tolls. How much more do we need to know about North Korea's crimes 
before we act to stop them? How many more victims will be fed into the 
gas chambers before we cry out, `never again!' ''--and we mean it?''
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
this article titled ``An Auschwitz in Korea.''
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                    [From boston.com, Feb. 8, 2004]

                         An Auschwitz in Korea

                            (By Jeff Jacoby)

       TWO WORDS--``never again''--sum up the most important 
     lesson that civilized men and women were supposed to have 
     learned from the 20th century. It is forbidden to keep 
     silent, forbidden to look the other way, when tyrants embark 
     on genocide and slaughter--if Auschwitz and Kolyma and the 
     Cambodian killing fields taught us nothing else, they taught 
     us that.
       Or so, at any rate, we like to tell ourselves. As Samantha 
     Power discovered upon returning to the United States after 
     two years as a war correspondent in Bosnia, the lesson of 
     ``never again'' is invoked far more often than it is applied.
       ``Everywhere I went,'' Power recalled in a speech at 
     Swarthmore College in 2002, ``I heard `never again.' Steven 
     Spielberg's `Schindler's List' had been a smash hit. The 
     Holocaust Museum had opened on the Mall in Washington. 
     College seminars were taught on the `lessons' of the singular 
     crime of the 20th century. But why, I wondered, had nobody 
     applied those lessons to the atrocities of the 1990s: the 
     systematic murder of 200,000 Bosnian civilians in Europe 
     between 1992 and 1995 and the extermination of some 800,000 
     Rwandan Tutsi in 1994.
       ``Did `never again' simply mean `never again will Germans 
     kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945?' ''
       Power went on to write ``A Problem From Hell,'' her 
     Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America's failure to 
     intervene in the genocides of the 20th century. The book was 
     hugely and deservedly praised. It made clear, as no book had 
     before, how much Americans knew about some of the most 
     horrific massacres of the last century even as they were 
     happening, and how little we did to stop them--or even, in 
     most cases, condemn them.
       Which brings us to North Korea.
       It is not exactly news that the communist regime of Kim 
     Jong II has sent millions of North Koreans to early graves. 
     Estimates back in 1998 were that as many as 800,000 people 
     were dying in North Korea each year from starvation and 
     malnutrition caused by Kim's ruthless and irrational 
     policies. World Vision, a Christian relief organization, 
     calculated that 1 million to 2 million North Koreans had been 
     killed by ``a full-scale famine'' largely of Pyongyang's 
     creation.
       Nor is it breaking news that North Korea operates a vicious 
     prison gulag--``not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao 
     and Stalin in the last century,'' as NBC News reported more 
     than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are 
     held in these slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of 
     others have perished in them over the years. Some of the 
     camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their 
     prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can 
     be of any age: North Korea's longstanding policy is to 
     imprison not only those accused of such ``crimes'' as 
     practicing Christianity or complaining about North Korean 
     life, but their entire families, including grandparents and 
     grandchildren.
       And, of course, it is widely known that Kim is openly 
     pursuing nuclear weapons, has fired missiles capable of 
     reaching Japan, and controls one of the largest military 
     forces on earth.
       All of this is hideous enough, and more than sufficient 
     reason for making Kim's ouster--and his prosecution for 
     crimes against humanity--an explicit goal of the United 
     States. But now comes something new.
       ``I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating 
     gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a 
     daughter.'' The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean 
     intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, 
     the country's largest concentration camp. His testimony was 
     heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the 
     BBC. ``The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very 
     last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-
     mouth breathing.''
       Like other communist officials, Kwon was not bothered by 
     what he saw. ``I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a 
     death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad 
     things that were happening to North Korea were their fault. . 
     . . Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I 
     only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy 
     or pity for them at all.''
       Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean 
     camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for 
     biochemical weapons.
       ``An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female 
     prisoners,'' she testified. ``One of the guards handed me a 
     basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to 
     give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. 
     . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate 
     the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and 
     screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, 
     they were dead.''
       Gas chambers. Poisoned food. Torture. The murder of whole 
     families. Massive death tolls. How much more do we need to 
     know about North Korea's crimes before we act to stop them? 
     How many more victims will be fed into the gas chambers 
     before we cry out ``never again!''--and mean it?

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, this is Camp 22. You can see it 
outlined, the size and scale. We have some other camp pictures that 
show this. I want to make sure everybody knows that on Holocaust 
Remembrance Day we have pictures of this going on. This is not some 
secret information. This is on Google Earth. Look it up yourself.
  This picture is of outside the camp, the westbound coal train from 
Camp 22 where they do coal mining, slave labor where people go in, but 
nobody comes out. They are worked to death, starved to death.
  There are a couple books on this point--``The Aquariums of 
Pyongyang'' was written by a survivor and ``Eyes of Tailless Animals'' 
was written by Soon Ok Lee. Those are a couple books people can look 
at.
  This is another picture from Google Earth. These are people in the 
concentration camp, this shows outside the fence. About 200,000 people 
we believe are in concentration camps in North Korea. Here is another 
picture, one of a concentration camp. I urge my colleagues to get a 
briefing on this situation so they can look at the high resolution 
information we have access to, not just Google Earth. Google Earth is 
useful for this setting.
  Here is another concentration camp. Here is the execution site in 
this particular camp. These have all been run by refugees who have been 
able to make their way out and now give the information of here is what 
took place in various places. Here are the coal mine entrances marked 
No. 1; prisoner housing, No. 2; the execution site, No. 3; No. 4 is a 
rifle range. I don't know if they use individuals as target practice.
  This picture shows the location of various prison camps of the gulag 
that is in North Korea that we chose to ignore in our six-party talks. 
These are the selected North Korean prison camp locations, where they 
are around the country. We know what is taking place in that country. I 
raise all of these points to point out that we cannot continue to allow 
this to take place.
  I want to raise one final issue. My colleagues have been very 
generous to allow me to put this forward. I have to do this on this 
day, Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we are about to confirm an 
ambassador who looked past all of this while he was there.
  We will soon consider the supplemental appropriations bill. That will 
be coming up shortly before this body. Last year, this body inserted 
into the supplemental appropriations bill a waiver to waive the Glenn 
amendment sanctions against North Korea. The Glenn amendment sanctions 
do not provide for a Presidential waiver. The Congress has to 
affirmatively act to waive Glenn amendment sanctions. The Congress did, 
and that allowed us to send--as the Soviet Union used to send to the 
North Koreans only we are sending it now. I ask my colleagues not to 
put in this year's supplemental Glenn amendment waivers and not to put 
in this year's supplemental funding for North Korea beyond humanitarian

[[Page S4486]]

assistance. Yes to humanitarian assistance because people are starving 
to death, but no to fuel, oil aid, no to other aid because they tested 
missiles in defiance of us and the United Nations. They are being 
investigated now for sending nuclear material to Iran. They have 
captured two American journalists and still have them there. They have 
unaccounted for other people they have captured. They have this 
incredible human rights gulag system that is tragic and taking place 
right now. They are forcing people to walk into China, many of whom are 
women who walk into China to get food and are taken for human 
trafficking and as concubines.
  Let's not continue a regime that is a disaster, that is a horrific 
situation, and we are allowing this to happen.
  Let's not do that in the supplemental. Let's not approve Chris Hill 
moving on after two big problems on human rights.
  I urge my colleagues to vote against this nominee and to not give 
further funds and aid and waiving sanctions on North Korea.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

                               Exhibit 1

                [From the Jerusalem Post, Apr. 20, 2009]

                   The Teenager Who Exposed Auschwitz

                           (By Rafael Medoff)

       This month marks the 65th anniversary of a daring escape 
     from Auschwitz, by a teenager who then revealed the truth 
     about the death camp--only to be ignored by the Allied 
     leadership.
       In March 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and began 
     preparing to deport that country's Jews--numbering 
     approximately 750,0000--to Auschwitz. A 19-year-old prisoner 
     named Rudolf Vrba, together with fellow-inmate Alfred 
     Wetzler, decided to do something that almost nobody had ever 
     done before: escape from Auschwitz. They were determined to 
     alert the world about the doom that Hungarian Jews would soon 
     face.
       On April 7, Vrba and Wetzler slipped away from their slave 
     labor battalion and hid in a hollowed-out woodpile near the 
     edge of the camp. On the advice of Soviet prisoners of war, 
     the fugitives sprinkled the area with tobacco and gasoline, 
     which confused the German dogs that were used to search for 
     them.
       On their second day in the woodpile, Vrba and Wetzler heard 
     Allied warplanes overhead. ``They came closer and closer--
     then bombs began to crunch not far away,'' Vrba later 
     recalled in his searing memoir I Cannot Forgive. ``Our pulses 
     quickened. Were they going to bomb the camp? Was the secret 
     out? . . . Was this the end of Auschwitz?''
       THE ALLIED PLANES were actually bombing German oil 
     factories in and around the Auschwitz complex. The idea of 
     bombing the death camp had not yet been proposed to the 
     Allied leadership, and details such as the location of the 
     gas chambers and crematoria were not yet known to the Allied 
     war command. But that was about to change.
       On April 10, in the dead of night, Vrba and Wetzler emerged 
     from the woodpile and began an 11-day, 80-mile trek to 
     Slovakia. There they met with Jewish leaders and dictated a 
     30-page report that came to be known as the ``Auschwitz 
     Protocols.'' It included details of the mass-murder process, 
     maps pinpointing the gas chambers and crematoria and warnings 
     of the impending slaughter of Hungary's Jews.
       ``One million Hungarian [Jews] are going to die,'' Vrba 
     told them. ``Auschwitz is ready for them. But if you tell 
     them now, they will rebel. They will never go to the ovens.''
       A COPY of the report was given to Rudolf Kastner, a 
     Budapest Jewish leader. Instead of publicizing the 
     information, Kastner negotiated a deal that involved bribing 
     the Germans to permit a train with 1,684 of his relatives, 
     friends and Hungarian Jewish leaders to leave the country. 
     Kastner's action became the centerpiece of a controversial 
     trial in Israel after the war.
       Another copy of Vrba's Auschwitz Protocols was given to 
     Rabbi Michoel Dov Weissmandl, a rescue activist in 
     Bratislava, who then wrote the first known appeal for the use 
     of Allied air power to disrupt the mass murder. Weissmandl's 
     plea to the Allies to bomb the railroad lines between Hungary 
     and Auschwitz reached the Roosevelt administration in June.
       Assistant secretary of war John McCloy responded that the 
     request was ``impracticable'' because it would require 
     ``diversion of considerable air support essential to the 
     success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations.'' 
     He also claimed the War Department's position was based on 
     ``a study'' of the issue. But no evidence of such a study has 
     ever been found by researchers. In reality, McCloy's position 
     was based on the War Department's standing policy that no 
     military resources should be allocated for ``rescuing victims 
     of enemy oppression.''
       VRBA'S REPORT convinced the Jewish Agency leadership in 
     Palestine to change its position on bombing. Agency leaders 
     initially opposed bombing Auschwitz because they believed it 
     was a labor camp, not a death camp. But after receiving the 
     Auschwitz Protocols in June, agency officials lobbied 
     British, American and Soviet officials to bomb the camp or 
     the railways leading to it. Their requests were rebuffed.
       Most important, a condensed version of the Auschwitz 
     Protocols reached the U.S. government's War Refugee Board in 
     June. It helped galvanize the board to mobilize international 
     pressure on Hungary to halt the deportations to Auschwitz. 
     Although that effort came too late for the more than 400,000 
     Hungarian Jews who had been shipped to their doom, it did 
     spare the 200,000-plus who were still alive in Budapest.
       The full version of the Vrba report was actually held up in 
     Switzerland for three months by U.S. diplomats who regarded 
     it as low priority. And when the report finally reached 
     Washington in October, the Office of War Information opposed 
     distributing it; OWI director Elmer Davis claimed the report 
     was actually part of a Nazi conspiracy to ``create contempt 
     for the [Jewish] inmates'' by showing that the Jews were not 
     resisting their killers.
       Fortunately, Davis and his cockamamie theories were too 
     late to blunt the impact of the Auschwitz Protocols. The 
     Hungarian deportations had been stopped, and Rudolf Vrba and 
     Alfred Wetzler had played a significant role in bringing that 
     about.

                               Exhibit 2

            Preference for Hill Over Zinni Remains a Mystery

                             (By Dana Bash)

       Washington (CNN)--Chris Hill is slowly overcoming GOP 
     opposition that has delayed his nomination as U.S. ambassador 
     to Iraq, but it's still unclear why the Obama administration 
     revoked the offer they gave to someone else first--General 
     Anthony Zinni.
       Zinni told CNN Monday he hasn't been given any explanation 
     about why the offer he got in January for the post, which he 
     accepted, was abruptly taken back.
       Zinni confirmed in an e-mail that he was asked to take the 
     job by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and even 
     congratulated by Vice President Joe Biden. But then, the 
     offer was revoked and extended to Hill--a development Zinni 
     says he heard on the news.
       Zinni is a retired four-star Marine general and former head 
     of Central Command. Like President Barack Obama, he was an 
     early critic of the Iraq war.
       Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told CNN he would 
     have wholeheartedly supported Zinni for position because of 
     his knowledge of the region. Graham, along with Sens. John 
     McCain, R-Arizona, and Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, have led the 
     opposition to Hill, citing his ``controversial legacy'' as 
     point man in the six-nation talks aimed at dismantling North 
     Korea's nuclear program and his lack of experience in the 
     Middle East.
       Graham, however, voted Monday to move Hill's nomination 
     forward, while McCain did not vote. Brownback voted against 
     Hill.
       A State Department spokesman had no comment on Zinni.
       A senior Democratic congressional source, who would not be 
     quoted speaking about private deliberations, called the 
     decision to nominate Hill over Zinni one of the ``great 
     mysteries'' of the early days of the Obama administration.

                               Exhibit 3


                                                  U.S. Senate,

                                   Washington, DC, March 25, 2009.
     Mr. Jay P. Lefkowitz, P.C.,
     Kirkland & Ellis LLP, Citigroup Center, New York, NY.
       Dear Jay: Christopher Hill testified today before the 
     Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In response to a question 
     by Senator Lugar, he failed to specifically address whether 
     he invited you to participate in the Six Party Talks to 
     address North Korean human rights. As you recall, in his 
     testimony before the Senate Armed Service Committee on July 
     31, 2008, he promised to invite you to participate in all 
     future negotiation sessions, without qualifying the nature of 
     those sessions.
       Based on my knowledge of the situation, I believe he 
     violated his commitment. Can you please respond to me as to 
     whether or not Christopher Hill or anyone acting on his 
     behalf invited you to the Six Party Talks subsequent to July 
     31, 2008?
       I look forward to your swift reply, and appreciate your 
     cooperation in this matter.
           Sincerely,
                                                    Sam Brownback,
     United States Senator.
                                  ____

       Dear Senator Brownback: At no point during my tenure as 
     Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, either before 
     or after July 31, 2008, did Chris Hill or anyone acting on 
     his behalf invite me to participate in any Six Party Talks.
     Jay.
                                  ____


                               Exhibit 4

       Senator Brownback. I want to, because my time will be 
     narrow here: will you state that the Special Envoy will be 
     invited to all future negotiating sessions with North Korea?
       Ambassador Hill. I would be happy to invite him to all 
     future negotiating sessions with North Korea.
       Senator Brownback. Thank you.
       Mr. Ambassador, you noted this earlier, that there are 
     political gulags and concentration camps in North Korea. Will 
     you state that any prospect of normalization with North Korea 
     is contingent upon the regime shutting down the political 
     gulags and concentration camps?
       Ambassador Hill. I can say to you, Senator, that we will 
     definitely raise these issues as an element of the 
     normalization process. I'm not in a position at my level to 
     state to you today what the specific conditions of 
     normalization were, but they will be raised as part of that 
     and clearly, we will be looking for more satisfactory answers 
     on this.
       Senator Brownback. Mr. Ambassador, the Illinois delegation 
     in total in a letter dated

[[Page S4487]]

     in 2005--noted the abduction of Reverend Kim Dong Shik, who's 
     a U.S. citizen, and his wife is an Illinois resident, 
     children U.S. citizens. I'm going to enter this letter in the 
     record. It's from the Illinois delegation. They have said 
     they would not support any normalization with North Korea 
     until his abduction is dealt with.
       [The information referred to follows:]

                               Exhibit 5


                                     House of Representatives,

                                 Washington, DC, February 5, 2009.
     Mr. Christopher R. Hill,
     Assistant Secretary, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific 
         Affairs, Washington DC.
       Dear Mr. Hill: I write in light of your nomination to serve 
     in the critical position of U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
       While I do not question your qualifications as a diplomat, 
     I must be frank in telling you that I was often disappointed 
     in your approach to diplomacy with North Korea--specifically 
     your marginalization and often times seemingly utter neglect 
     of human rights. In a Washington Post piece, Michael Gerson 
     described your shaping of America's North Korea policy in 
     this way, ``Hill has been a tireless advocate of preemptive 
     diplomatic concessions and the exclusion of human rights 
     issues from reports and negotiations.'' It is difficult to 
     know how much the policy you pursued simply reflected the 
     president and the secretary's aims or whether you were in 
     fact the chief architect and advocate of this approach. 
     Regardless, while Iraq and North Korea are obviously two very 
     different countries, it gives me pause as I consider the 
     human rights challenges confronting Iraq's ethno-religious 
     minorities who are increasingly under siege.
       More than 500,000 Christians, or roughly 50 percent, have 
     fled Iraq since 2003. Even though Christians make up only 3 
     percent of the country's population, according to the UN High 
     Commission for Refugees, they comprise nearly half of all 
     refugees leaving Iraq. As Iraq has continued to stabilize, 
     these minority populations, including the ancient Christian 
     community--some of whom still speak Aramaic, the language of 
     Jesus--is dwindling and increasingly vulnerable to 
     marginalization and targeted attacks, of the sort we 
     witnessed in Mosul this past fall.
       I have already requested that Secretary Clinton facilitate 
     the development of a comprehensive policy to address the 
     plight of these struggling minority communities, and, 
     consistent with the recommendations of the U.S. Commission on 
     International Religious Freedom, that she appoint a special 
     envoy for human rights in Iraq to our Embassy in Baghdad, 
     reporting directly to her.
       Similarly, should you be confirmed, I urge that these 
     communities, which are foundational to a modern pluralistic 
     Iraq, not be neglected on your watch. Before departing for 
     Baghdad, it is critical that you meet with a coalition of 
     NGOs, consisting in part of members of the Iraqi diaspora, so 
     that they might brief you on the unique challenges 
     confronting these ancient faith communities and make 
     additional concrete policy recommendations for their 
     protection.
       Best wishes.
           Sincerely,
                                                    Frank R. Wolf,
                                               Member of Congress.

                               Exhibit 6

         House of Representatives, Committee on International 
           Relations,
                                 Washington, DC, January 28, 2005.
     His Excellency Pak Gil Yon,
     Ambassador, Permanent Representative of the Democratic 
         People's Republic of Korea to the United Nations, New 
         York, NY.
       Dear Ambassador Pak: This letter is to inform you and your 
     government of the distress with which the undersigned Members 
     of the Illinois Congressional Delegation received the finding 
     from the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office on 
     December 14, 2004 that South Korean citizen and U.S. 
     permanent resident Reverend Kim Dong-Shik had been abducted 
     by agents of your government in northeast China in January 
     2000 and taken forcibly into North Korea. Your government, 
     regrettably, has, by its own admission, been involved in the 
     abductions of a number of Japanese citizens, as well as an 
     even greater number of South Korean citizens.
       Reverend Kim Dong-Shilc, as you may be aware, is the spouse 
     of Mrs. Young Hwa Kim of Chicago, Illinois, and is the parent 
     of U.S. citizens, one of whom is currently residing in 
     Skokie, Illinois. Citizens from a Korean-American church in 
     the Chicago area have also raised this matter as an issue of 
     grave concern and have requested Congressional assistance in 
     ascertaining the facts behind the disappearance and current 
     whereabouts of Reverend Kim. In pursuit of these issues, Mrs. 
     Kim and a delegation from Illinois will be visiting Capitol 
     Hill in the near future.
       The successful resolution of this case, therefore, is of 
     critical importance to us, both because of the constituent 
     interests involved as well as because it is a case involving 
     the most fundamental of human rights. Reverend Kim, in his 
     selfless efforts to assist refugees escaping in an 
     underground network to third countries, brings to mind two 
     great heroes held in high esteem in the United States. The 
     first is Ms. Harriet Tubman, who established an underground 
     railroad allowing for the escape from slavery of those held 
     in bondage before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation 
     Proclamation; the second is the Swedish diplomat Raoul 
     Wallenberg who, during the dark days of the world conflict 
     against fascism in the Second World War, rescued Jewish 
     refugees trapped in Hungary. We view Reverend Kim Dong-Shik 
     as also being a hero who assisted with the escape of the 
     powerless and forgotten.
       We, therefore, wish to inform the Government of the 
     Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) that we will NOT 
     support the removal of your government from the State 
     Department list of State Sponsors of Terrorism until such 
     time, among other reasons, as a full accounting is provided 
     to the Kim family regarding the fate of the Reverend Kim 
     Dong-Shik following his abduction into North Korea five years 
     ago.
           Sincerely,
         J. Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of 
           Representatives; Henry J. Hyde, Chairman; Richard J. 
           Durbin, U.S. Senator; Barack Obama, U.S. Senator; Lane 
           Evans, Member of Congress; Jerry F. Costello, Member of 
           Congress; Luis V. Gutierrez, Member of Congress; Donald 
           A. Manzullo, Member of Congress; Bobby L. Rush, Member 
           of Congress; Jesse L. Jackson, Member of Congress.
         Ray LaHood, Member of Congress; Jerry Weller, Member of 
           Congress; Danny Davis, Member of Congress; John 
           Shimkus, Member of Congress; Judy Biggert, Member of 
           Congress; Jan D. Schakowsky, Member of Congress; 
           Timothy Johnson, Member of Congress; Rahm Emanuel, 
           Member of Congress; Melissa L. Bean, Member of 
           Congress; Daniel Lipinski, Member of Congress.

                               Exhibit 7

              Study Backs Bosnian Serb's Claim of Immunity

                          (By Marlise Simons)

       Paris--Every time Radovan Karadzic, the onetime Bosnian 
     Serb leader, appears in court on war crimes charges, he has 
     hammered on one recurring claim: a senior American official 
     pledged that he would never be standing there.
       The official, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special envoy on 
     Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration, has 
     repeatedly denied promising Mr. Karadzic immunity from 
     prosecution in exchange for abandoning power after the 
     Bosnian war.
       But the rumor persists, and different versions have 
     recently emerged that line up with Mr. Karadzic's assertion, 
     including a new historical study of the Yugoslav wars 
     published by Purdue University in Indiana.
       Charles W. Ingrao, the study's co-editor, said that three 
     senior State Department officials, one of them retired, and 
     several other people with knowledge of Mr. Holbrooke's 
     activities told him that Mr. Holbrooke assured Mr. Karadzic 
     in July 1996 that he would not be pursued by the 
     international war crimes tribunal in The Hague if he left 
     politics.
       Mr. Karadzic had already been charged by the tribunal with 
     genocide and other crimes against civilians.
       Two of the sources cited anonymously in the new study, a 
     former senior State Department official who spent almost a 
     decade in the Balkans and another American who was involved 
     with international peacekeeping there in the 1990s, provided 
     additional details in interviews with The New York Times, 
     speaking on condition that they not be further identified.
       The former State Department official said he was told of 
     the offer by people who were close to Mr. Holbrooke's team at 
     the time. The other source said that Mr. Holbrooke personally 
     and emphatically told him about the deal on two occasions.
       While the two men agreed, as one of them put it, that 
     ``Holbrooke did the right thing and got the job done,'' the 
     recurring story of the deal has dogged Mr. Holbrooke.
       Last summer, after more than a decade on the run, Mr. 
     Karadzic was found living disguised in Belgrade, Serbia's 
     capital. He was arrested and sent to the International 
     Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague for 
     his trial, which is expected to start this year.
       Asked for comment for this article, Mr. Holbrooke repeated 
     his denial in a written statement. ``No one in the U.S. 
     government ever promised anything, nor made a deal of any 
     sort with Karadzic,'' he said, noting that Mr. Karadzic 
     stepped down in the summer of 1996 under intense American 
     pressure.
       ``The agreement almost came to grief when Holbrooke 
     vigorously refused Karadzic's demand, and Hill's appeal, that 
     he affix his signature to it,'' the study says, citing 
     unidentified State Department sources.
       The study, the product of eight years of research by 
     historians, jurists and social scientists from all sides of 
     the conflict, was an effort to reconcile disparate views of 
     the wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, 
     Mr. Ingrao said.
       Neither Mr. Hill nor Mr. Goldberg responded to requests for 
     interviews for this article.
       In an interview, the former State Department official, who 
     had access to confidential reports and to members of the 
     Holbrooke team, said that during that evening in 1996,

[[Page S4488]]

     Mr. Milosevic and other Serbian officials were on the phone 
     with Mr. Karadzic, who was in Pale, Bosnia.
       The former official said that Mr. Karadzic wanted written 
     assurances that he would not be pursued for war crimes and 
     refused to sign without them.
       ``Holbrooke told the Serbs, `You can give him my word he 
     won't be pursued,' but Holbrooke refused to sign anything,'' 
     the official said. Mr. Holbrooke could make that promise 
     because he knew that American and other Western militaries in 
     Bosnia were not then making arrests, the official said.
       There were some 60,000 American and NATO troops in Bosnia, 
     but the soldiers had no orders to arrest indicted Bosnians, 
     for fear of inciting local rebellion.
       In the brief statement Mr. Karadzic eventually signed, he 
     agreed to withdraw ``from all political activities'' and to 
     step down from office. It carried the signatures of Mr. 
     Milosevic and four other Serbian leaders acting as witnesses 
     and guarantors. It did not include any Americans' names and 
     made no mention of immunity.
       The American who was involved in peacekeeping insisted in 
     an interview that Mr. Holbrooke himself told him that he had 
     made a deal with Mr. Karadzic to get him to leave politics. 
     He recalled meeting Mr. Holbrooke in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on the 
     eve of Bosnian elections in November 2000, just after Mr. 
     Milosevic had finally been ousted from power in Serbia.
       Mr. Holbrooke was worried about the outcome of the Bosnian 
     vote because he knew that Mr. Karadzic was still secretly 
     running his nationalist political party and picking 
     candidates, including mayors and police chiefs who had run 
     prison camps and organized massacres.
       ``Holbrooke was angry; he was ranting,'' the American 
     recalled. He quoted Mr. Holbrooke as saying: ``That son of a 
     bitch Karadzic. I made a deal with him that if he'd pull out 
     of politics, we wouldn't go after him. He's broken that deal 
     and now we're going to get him.''
       Mr. Karadzic's party won those elections in the Bosnian 
     Serb republic. Shortly afterward, he disappeared from public 
     view.
       ``In subsequent meetings, as a private citizen, I 
     repeatedly urged officials in both the Clinton and Bush 
     administrations to capture Karadzic,'' Mr. Holbrooke said. 
     ``I am glad he has finally been brought to justice, even 
     though he uses his public platform to disseminate these 
     fabrications.''
       Mr. Holbrooke declined to accept further questions and did 
     not address the specifics of the new accounts.
       Mr. Karadzic, by insisting that he is exempt from legal 
     proceedings, has now forced the war crimes tribunal to deal 
     with his allegations, illustrating the difficulty of both 
     administering international justice and conducting diplomacy.
       In December, tribunal judges ruled that even if a deal had 
     been made, it would have no bearing on a trial. They said no 
     immunity agreement would be valid before an international 
     tribunal in a case of genocide, war crimes or crimes against 
     humanity. Mr. Karadzic is charged with all three.
       But Mr. Karadzic has appealed and filed motions demanding 
     that prosecutors disclose every scrap of confidential 
     evidence about negotiations with Mr. Holbrooke. He has asked 
     his lawyers to seek meetings with American diplomats.
       His demands have led the court to write to the United 
     States government for clarification.
       Peter Robinson, a lawyer for Mr. Karadzic, said that he had 
     received a promise from Washington that he could interview 
     Philip S. Goldberg, who was on the Holbrooke team meeting in 
     Belgrade the night the resignation was negotiated.
       ``Goldberg took the notes at that meeting,'' Mr. Robinson 
     said. ``The U.S. government has agreed to search for the 
     notes and provide them if they find them.''
       A State Department spokesman said that the government was 
     cooperating with the tribunal, but would provide no further 
     details.
       Mr. Holbrooke, who brokered the peace agreement that ended 
     the Bosnian war in 1995, returned to Belgrade in 1996 to 
     press Mr. Karadzic to resign as president of the Bosnian Serb 
     republic. Mr. Holbrooke's memoirs recount a night of fierce 
     negotiation on July 18, 1996, but make no mention of any 
     pledge of immunity.
       The Purdue University study, ``Confronting the Yugoslav 
     Controversies: A Scholars' Initiative,'' says that Mr. 
     Holbrooke ``instructed his principal assistant, Christopher 
     Hill, to draft the memorandum to be signed by Karadzic,'' 
     committing him to give up power.
       Mr. Ingrao said Mr. Holbrooke used Slobodan Milosevic, then 
     the Serbian leader, and other Serbian officials as 
     intermediaries to convey the promise of immunity and to reach 
     the deal with Mr. Karadzic.

                               Exhibit 8

                [From washingtonpost.com, Feb. 4, 2004]

                       Auschwitz Under Our Noses

                          (By Anne Applebaum)

       Nearly 60 years ago last week, Auschwitz was liberated. On 
     Jan. 27, 1945, four Russian soldiers rode into the camp. They 
     seemed ``wonderfully concrete and real,'' remembered Primo 
     Levi, one of the prisoners, ``perched on their enormous 
     horses, between the gray of the snow and the gray of the 
     sky.'' But they did not smile, nor did they greet the 
     starving men and women. Levi thought he knew why: They felt 
     ``the shame that a just man experiences at another man's 
     crime, the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist.''
       Nowadays, it seems impossible to understand why so few 
     people, at the time of the Auschwitz liberation, even knew 
     that the camp existed. It seems even harder to explain why 
     those who did know did nothing. In recent years a plethora of 
     respectable institutions--the Vatican, the U.S. government, 
     the international Jewish community, the Allied commanders--
     have all been accused of ``allowing'' the Holocaust to occur, 
     through ignorance or ill will or fear, or simply because 
     there were other priorities, such as fighting the war.
       We shake our heads self-righteously, certain that if we'd 
     been there, liberation would have come earlier--all the while 
     failing to see that the present is no different. Quite a lot 
     has changed in 60 years, but the ways in which information 
     about crimes against humanity can simultaneously be ``known'' 
     and not known hasn't changed at all. Nor have other interests 
     and other priorities ceased to distract people from the 
     feelings of shame and guilt they would certainly feel, if 
     only they focused on them.
       Look, for example, at the international reaction to a 
     documentary, aired last Sunday night on the BBC. It described 
     atrocities committed in the concentration camps of 
     contemporary North Korea, where, it was alleged, chemical 
     weapons are tested on prisoners. Central to the film was the 
     testimony of Kwon Hyuk, a former administrator at a North 
     Korean camp. ``I witnessed a whole family being tested on 
     suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,'' he said. 
     ``The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting 
     and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save 
     the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'' The documentary 
     also included testimony from a former prisoner, who says she 
     saw 50 women die after being deliberately fed poison. And it 
     included documents smuggled out of the country that seemed to 
     sentence a prisoner to a camp ``for the purpose of human 
     experimentation.''
       But the documentary was only a piece of journalism. Do we 
     really know that it is true? We don't. It was aired on the 
     BBC, after all, an organization whose journalistic standards 
     have recently been questioned. It was based on witness 
     testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. All kinds of 
     people might have had an interest in making the film more 
     sensational, including journalists (good for their careers) 
     or North Korean defectors (good for their cause).
       The veracity of the information has been further undermined 
     by the absence of official confirmation. The South Korean 
     government, which believes that appeasement of the North will 
     lead to reunification, has already voiced skepticism about 
     the claims: ``We will need to investigate,'' a spokesman 
     said. The U.S. government has other business on the Korean 
     Peninsula too. On Monday Secretary of State Colin L. Powell 
     told a group of Post journalists that he feels optimistic 
     about the prospect of a new round of nuclear talks between 
     North Korea and its neighbors. He didn't mention the gas 
     chambers, even whether he's heard about them.
       In the days since the documentary aired, few other news 
     organizations have picked up the story either. There are 
     other priorities: the president's budget, ricin in the Senate 
     office building, David Kay's testimony, a murder of a high 
     school student, Super Tuesday, Janet Jackson. With the 
     possible exception of the last, these are all genuinely 
     important subjects. They are issues people care deeply about. 
     North Korea is far away and, quite frankly, it doesn't seem 
     there's a lot we can do about it.
       Later--in 10 years, or in 60--it will surely turn out that 
     quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. 
     It will turn out that information collected by various human 
     rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and 
     spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of 
     an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things 
     that could have been done, approaches the South Korean 
     government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. 
     government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have 
     applied.
       Historians in Asia, Europe and here will finger various 
     institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify 
     their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how 
     it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas 
     chambers but failed to act.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of Colorado). The Senator from South 
Carolina.
  Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Kansas for 
making such a powerful, persuasive case for human rights and freedom in 
North Korea and around the world. I wish to change subjects slightly 
for a few minutes and talk about some experiences over the last couple 
of weeks.


                           Stop The Spending

  Last Wednesday, tens of thousands of Americans celebrated tax day by 
speaking out against the direction of this Federal Government. I 
attended three tea parties in South Carolina. What struck me the most 
was how nonpartisan these events were. These were families, couples 
with children, not

[[Page S4489]]

necessarily Republicans or Democrats, but both were there. They did not 
care about parties or candidates. They cared about their kids and the 
debt we are saddling them with, with almost everything we do in 
Washington. They cited with their signs and their voices that every 
American today has a $35,000 share in our national debt. That is just 
today, not counting what we have added. And it does not count the 
unfunded costs of Social Security and Medicare that we borrowed from 
our future.
  The way we are spending up here, the per capita debt in our country 
will soon exceed the per capita income. We are not just bankrupting our 
country, we are bankrupting generations of Americans not even born yet.
  This is a moral issue. Every dollar spent represents another freedom 
seized, another constitutional principle ignored, another opportunity 
squandered. The American people are tired of politicians--Republicans 
and Democrats--borrowing and spending money on programs we do not need, 
programs they know will not work.
  The message of the tea parties is clear: Stop growing Government and 
spending all our money, all our kids' money, all our grandkids' money.
  But will we get the message? We keep hearing that we are in the 
middle of an economic crisis, but we are in the middle of a political 
crisis. We hear a lot about corporate greed, but that pales in 
comparison to the political greed of elected officials who continue to 
make promises that we cannot pay for and borrowing the money to do it.
  A poll conducted last week suggests that while a majority of American 
people have a favorable view of these tea parties, only 13 percent of 
the political class does. It is the same pattern over and over again on 
the stimulus, on earmarks, on socialized and rationed health care, on 
the proposed tax on electricity and energy. Americans disagree with 
Washington on these socialistic experiments, and our leaders act as if 
it is the American people who are the ones who are out of touch.
  Indeed, no sooner had the protesters gone home than they learned that 
their preference for freedom, limited Government, and local control 
marked them as potential terrorist threats, according to a report by 
the Department of Homeland Security.
  Americans have been misled and lied to by elected officials who 
promise the world while stealing our future. And they have had enough. 
Tea parties are only the beginning. Americans have come to understand 
that many of our problems are caused by more Government and that they 
can only be solved by more freedom.
  Think of the things that are categorized as crises today--a crisis in 
education, a crisis in health care, a crisis in energy, our 
transportation infrastructure, banking and finance, the auto industry. 
But who has been running these services for the last several decades? 
Who has been running our education system? It has not been the free 
market. It has not been the free people. It has been Government, with 
the price we are paying expanding faster than any other service. We 
spend more per capita than any other country in the world, yet 
consistently we lose ground to other industrialized nations. We do not 
need more Federal control, we need more freedom in education, more 
choices, more competition, more technology, the kinds of things that 
Government and union control cannot provide in our education. It may be 
a crisis, but it is not one caused by freedom, it is one caused by 
politicians.
  What about health care? We talk about the number of uninsured 
Americans, but have we given freedom a chance? The rules and laws we 
pass here make it virtually impossible for individuals to own and keep 
their own insurance policy. There are ways we can solve this problem, 
there are ways we can get every American insured without spending one 
additional dime of tax dollars. But instead, the movement in Washington 
is toward Government health care, socialized medicine, and we have made 
a downpayment in our recent budget in that direction.
  We have an energy crisis, but who has held back this country from 
exploring and developing our own energy reserves? It has not been the 
free markets or the free people; it has been this Government. And under 
the name of environmental protection, we have actually made the 
environment worse by blocking nuclear energy, blocking natural gas 
development, and not moving where other countries have toward cleaner 
energy sources that are within our reach.
  What about our transportation infrastructure? Who has been running 
that? Increasingly, the Federal Government takes more and more gas tax 
dollars and instead of giving them back to States for their priorities, 
we earmark it in every different direction. The last Secretary of 
Transportation basically said we cannot have a transportation program 
because it is all politically directed. That is political greed. That 
is not a fault of freedom.
  What about banking and finance? The Government was going to help our 
financial system, so they made loans, not just to those too big to 
fail. If you talk to local bankers, the Federal Government essentially 
forced these banks to take this money, and now they will not let them 
give it back. And they are now talking about converting these loans 
into common stock so the Federal Government owns the banks. That is not 
freedom. That is not the America we know. That is nationalization, that 
is socialization of a country.
  Freedom has not failed in the financial markets. It has been this 
Government, our oversight, and the Government intermediaries of Fannie 
Mae and Freddie Mac that essentially packaged and brokered all of these 
so-called toxic assets.
  Freedom has not failed. Has freedom failed in our auto industry? Of 
course not. The Government and the labor unions have been running the 
American auto companies for years. Management has very little 
discretion. If you look at other auto companies that are free of 
Government control, free of the barnacles of unionization, we see these 
companies succeeding in the United States. You cannot bail them out 
with more money; you have to bail them out with freedom.
  Over the work period, I had a chance to visit Europe and the Middle 
East. I had a chance to welcome the new Prime Minister, Benjamin 
Netanyahu, back to office. It was interesting to hear him talk. He is 
concerned about the direction of our country moving toward a more 
socialist direction, while he realized the opportunities in Israel were 
to move away from socialization to more free markets, more land reform 
that allowed more property ownership, exactly the opposite of where we 
see us going. He realized that in order to have a prosperous Israel and 
a strong military and a bright future, he needed to move his country 
more toward freedom.
  I heard the same thing in Brussels from a lot of our European allies, 
startled at the level of spending and debt the United States has taken 
on, concerned that we have the ability to pay it back, concerned that 
our commitment to the military is falling off, concerned that America 
will not be there as promised as part of a NATO partner sometime in the 
future.
  But it was concern about our abandonment of free market principles, 
free trade, the things that can make the world safe and prosperous, 
that the United States seemed to be pulling back from those principles.
  I just wanted to share a few thoughts today because as we talk about 
more Government and more spending in almost every area of our lives, 
and we continue to blame our problems on freedom and capitalism--the 
people who work hard and take personal responsibility--it seems we have 
it backwards from what actually made America great and exceptional and 
unique and prosperous and good.
  I keep hearing our economic problems were caused by the free market. 
But what free market? What have I talked about that has had a chance to 
work as a free market? If you look at those areas where the Government 
has not yet reached its tentacles in to regulate to the point of 
paralysis, look at our telecommunication system, which we are talking 
about in committee as to how we can regulate it. The incredible 
explosion of innovation and choice and competition--the cell phones, 
the BlackBerrys, the fantastic ways we have to communicate all over the 
world--could never have been created by a government system. It was 
created by free people and free markets, and that can work in every 
area, as it has before in America.

[[Page S4490]]

  Let's not blame this financial crisis and the housing problems on 
freedom and free markets. The Government itself, through its public-
private partnership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was the broker of 
these deals--the middle man of toxic assets. No private company would 
take the kind of risks that were taken unless they could first get 
cheap money, which the Federal Reserve provided, and then have a basic 
government guarantee for these loans that they were making and 
packaging. The Government is in the middle of this crisis. It is 
political greed. It is not the fault of freedom.
  This Congress and this Federal Government are really at a crossroads, 
and the American people are standing there with these tea parties 
telling us: Don't give up on freedom. Government does not work. 
Socialism does not work. There is no example in history where it has. 
Yet we contemplate every day another step closer to more Government 
control. I am thankful the American people are standing up. They are 
alarmed at what we are doing. It has nothing to do with politics. It 
has nothing to do with a political party. It has everything to do with 
what makes this country great and good. But we have abandoned it in 
Congress, and this crossroads at which we stand is the crossroads 
between freedom and socialism.
  Some folks say you shouldn't use that term, ``socialism.'' But, 
folks, when the Government basically controls or owns most aspects of 
economic production, which is where we are headed today, we are talking 
about socialism, and socialism that is to the left of where many 
European countries are. We can stop it, but we have to stop it starting 
today, and that is why these tea parties are so important. I hope they 
will shake up a few people here in both parties. I hope they will send 
a message that this Government is for the people, and of the people, 
and by the people. If we don't get it right, if we don't listen to 
them, these people can take it back, and I am thankful they are willing 
to stand up and express their voices. And I am very sorry anyone in 
this administration or this Government would categorize them as a 
threat in any way just because they are willing to speak out against 
what they know is wrong in Washington.
  I encourage my colleagues, as we think about one spending program 
after another, one Government takeover after another, that we not give 
up on freedom and that we listen to the American people.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield back.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I came to speak in support of the 
nomination of Christopher Hill to be the Ambassador to Iraq, but I have 
heard my distinguished colleague from South Carolina speak, and I feel 
compelled to say a few things in response.
  It is easy to rail against the Government when you are part of it. It 
is easy to rail against the Government. But when we have a national 
disaster, whether it be September 11 or hurricanes or floods or 
tornadoes, it is only the National Government that can come and help 
our fellow citizens. It is only the National Government that can come 
at the end of the day and create a common defense. It is only the 
National Government that very often can stop us from economic collapse.
  Now, I am for the free market as much as anyone else, but there is a 
difference between a free market and a free-for-all market. What we saw 
over the last 8 years is regulators, who were supposed to act as the 
cops on the beat, ultimately allowing the private sector, particularly 
those who are regulated industries, to regulate themselves. The 
consequence of that is we have excess that now each and every American 
is paying for. Yet there are those who want to rail against that.
  There are those who also rail about spending. I am with them. But the 
time to have railed against that was in the last years that saw the 
debt and the deficit dramatically grow. If President Obama did 
absolutely nothing--nothing--he would have inherited a $1.3 trillion 
deficit. So I think we need some intellectual honesty in this Chamber 
as we have our debates.
  Mr. President, I want to now talk about the President's nomination of 
Christopher Hill to serve as our next Ambassador to Iraq. I support 
that. It should be clear to all of us that the position of the 
Ambassador to Iraq is one of the most critical ambassadorial selections 
that President Obama will make. We are at the beginning of a period of 
transition in our relationship with Iraq. We are now working under a 
Status of Forces Agreement. Our troops are winding down their combat 
role and many will withdraw by June 30 of this year.
  In his speech to the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune at the end of 
February, President Obama made his policy clear: by the 31st day of 
August of the year 2010, in accordance with the Status of Forces 
Agreement, the combat mission of U.S. troops in Iraq will come to an 
end. But even though the end of our combat mission in Iraq may now be 
in sight, we cannot forget that today we still have more than 140,000 
U.S. troops there, and we have over 1,000 U.S. civilian employees from 
the Department of State, from USAID, and many other departments and 
agencies who have been assigned to work at the Embassy in Baghdad under 
the authority of our Chief of Mission.
  We all look forward to the day when our combat mission in Iraq is 
ended, our troops are returned home, and the Iraqis enjoy relative 
peace and security under the full protection of their own security 
forces. But that day has not yet come. We are at the beginning, not the 
end, of the transition in our role in Iraq. It is a time of uncertainty 
and risk, and that is why it is so urgent that the Ambassador's 
position be filled without delay.
  We hear the military counterparts constantly saying--General 
Odierno--where is my civilian counterpart? Where is the Ambassador?
  Now, I certainly respect the decision of any colleague to closely 
scrutinize any of the President's appointments. This is a keystone 
position at a critical juncture in our relationship with Iraq, and we 
need to ensure the person leading our Embassy in Baghdad is and has in 
full measure the background, skills, and pragmatism needed. I have 
scrutinized Ambassador Hill's qualifications and his testimony, both 
before the Foreign Relations Committee, of which I am a member, and in 
responding to questions for the record, and I am convinced that in 
nominating Ambassador Hill, President Obama has chosen exactly the 
right person to lead our Embassy in Baghdad at this point in time. I 
urge my colleagues to confirm his nomination without delay.
  During his 32-year career in the Foreign Service, Ambassador Hill has 
developed a well-earned reputation as a diplomatic trouble-shooter by 
taking on a series of difficult assignments, including serving as an 
ambassador in the Balkans, Special Envoy to Kosovo, Ambassador to 
Poland and South Korea, and most recently as Special Envoy to the six-
party talks involving North Korea's nuclear program. He was one of the 
State Department's top negotiators during the 1995 Dayton talks that 
ended the war in Bosnia. He has never balked from taking on the most 
difficult assignments and has a long list of honors and awards which 
stand as evidence of his accomplishments.
  Now, one of the concerns raised by my colleague earlier was about 
Ambassador Hill's experience, or lack of experience, in the Middle 
East. It should be noted that our three prior ambassadors in Baghdad--
Ryan Crocker, Zalmay Khalizad, and John Negroponte--the persons who 
know best the experience needed to do the job--do not share this 
concern. They have expressed their support for Ambassador Hill's 
confirmation.
  I am confident the experience Ambassador Hill has gained in other 
areas can be readily applied to the challenges he will face in Iraq. 
Ambassador Hill's experience in coordinating the multilateral 
negotiations on North Korea's nuclear program will serve him well when 
he seeks the support of Iraq's neighbors on nuclear issues. That 
experience will also serve him well in working with Iraq's numerous 
political factions. Ambassador Hill's experience in the Balkans has 
prepared him to deal with sectarianism, border disputes, human rights, 
refugees, developmental assistance, and postconflict normalization of 
relations, all of which will be major issues in his portfolio in 
Baghdad.
  Mr. President, I share the concerns expressed by my colleague about 
North

[[Page S4491]]

Korea's human rights record, and I agree completely with Ambassador 
Hill's own assessment of that record of North Korea when he said it is 
abysmal. But as others have noted, Ambassador Hill's mission with 
regard to North Korea was set by his superiors in the Bush 
administration, not by him. The primary objective was to push the North 
Koreans to end their nuclear weapons program and their nuclear 
proliferation activities. That was his mission, directed by the Bush 
administration. That is the mission he undertook to accomplish.
  I appreciate Ambassador Hill's continued willingness to take on these 
tough assignments. He is the right person to lead our Embassy in 
Baghdad at this time, and I urge his nomination be confirmed without 
delay.
  Finally, I too often hear on the other side of the aisle a very 
familiar refrain lately. It is no--no to just about everything we are 
trying to do here. President Obama was elected with overwhelming 
support to try to move this country in a different direction, and what 
we hear consistently on the other side of the aisle--using the 
procedural mechanisms of the filibuster in this institution--is no and 
no and no. Then, while they hold up nominees, such as yesterday's 
nominees for Assistant Attorneys General--incredibly important to the 
Attorney General for law and order in this country--when we finally get 
to the vote, we see overwhelming bipartisan votes.
  We have delayed it an inordinate amount of time instead of having 
those people work for the security of the country, instead of being 
able to move this agenda forward, instead of having more time for the 
Senate to meet some of the Nation's critical challenges.
  It is time to get over the noes and start saying yes to some of the 
critical issues we need. The first yes should be today, with Ambassador 
Hill. That will move our foreign policy agenda ahead in one of the most 
critical parts of the world today.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Jersey for a 
very precise and important set of arguments about why we ought to 
proceed forward, and I appreciate his taking time to come to the Senate 
floor to do that.
  Momentarily, it is my hope we will be able to propound a unanimous 
consent agreement. We are just waiting, I hope, for the word to come 
back from Senator Kyl shortly. I hope that can come very quickly so 
there could be a vote around 5:15 on this nomination.
  Let me just say a couple of words about a few of the things that have 
been said. Obviously, we hope to be able to divide up the remaining 
time between us and then conclude the debate, but part of what the 
Senator from Kansas has said, both this morning and this afternoon, is 
that the human rights envoy, then Jay Lefkowitz of the State 
Department, was not invited to take part in the six-party talks per an 
exchange that Senator Brownback had with Chris Hill--with Ambassador 
Hill--before the Armed Services Committee.
  Ambassador Hill has addressed this issue, I have addressed this issue 
on a number of occasions, and we have really laid this out. The full 
text of his remarks has been submitted for the Record. In a nutshell, 
let me just state one last time for the record exactly what happened.
  As Ambassador Hill made clear at the time, his promise to Senator 
Brownback applied to the future negotiating sessions, except those 
specifically dealing with nuclear disarmament where the Human Rights 
Assistant Secretary had no portfolio whatsoever. To make it clear, the 
Senator from Kansas somehow believes that no matter what, Special Envoy 
Lefkowitz should have been invited to that, but that was not a decision 
that was up to Ambassador Hill. Let's be clear about this. That was not 
Ambassador Hill's decision to make.
  The New York Times on January of 2008 reported that the decision 
about who would attend the six-party talks and what issues would be 
discussed was made by Secretary Rice and the President. Here are the 
words of Secretary Rice speaking about Human Rights Envoy Jay Lefkowitz 
as quoted by the New York Times on January 23, 2008. ``He,'' Lefkowitz, 
``doesn't work on the six-party talks.'' This is Secretary of State 
Rice talking, rebuking her own Assistant Secretary.

       He doesn't work on the six-party talks. He doesn't know 
     what's going on in the six-party talks and he certainly has 
     no say in what American policy will be in the six-party 
     talks.

  That is exactly what Secretary Rice said. So the Senator may have a 
quarrel but it is not with Ambassador Hill. Secretary Rice was very 
explicit in that rebuke. Quoting Secretary Rice, again from the New 
York Times, this is what she said:

       I know where the President stands, and I know where I 
     stand, and those are the people who speak for American 
     policy.

  That is the level of the rebuke you are talking about here. It is 
almost unprecedented, frankly. And here the Senator is, trying to carry 
water for this rebuked Assistant Secretary who was inappropriately 
asserting himself at that time. But regardless of whether you think he 
should have been there or should not have been there, it was not 
Ambassador Hill's decision to make. He took daily instructions from the 
President and from the Secretary of State, from the State Department. 
That is what a good diplomat and negotiator at important talks like 
that does and that is exactly what he did.
  I ask unanimous consent the full text of the article in the New York 
Times be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Jan. 23, 2008]

      Rice Rebukes Bush Envoy Who Criticized Policy on North Korea

                           (By Helene Cooper)

       Washington.--Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a rare 
     public rebuke, has upbraided a White House envoy who 
     criticized United States diplomacy toward North Korea that is 
     aimed at coaxing the North Koreans to give up their nuclear 
     weapons.
       Ms. Rice said the official, Jay Lefkowitz, President Bush's 
     special envoy on North Korean human rights, was not speaking 
     for the administration when he told an audience at the 
     American Enterprise Institute last week that the United 
     States ``should consider a new approach to North Korea'' 
     because the current approach was unlikely to resolve the 
     issue before the end of Mr. Bush's term in a year.
       Speaking to reporters aboard her flight to Berlin on 
     Monday, Ms. Rice sharply disagreed, and said Mr. Lefkowitz 
     should stick to human rights and leave the talks over the 
     North's nuclear policy to her, Mr. Bush and the other nations 
     involved: Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.
       ``He's the human rights envoy,'' Ms. Rice said. ``That's 
     what he knows. That's what he does. He doesn't work on the 
     six-party talks. He doesn't know what's going on in the six-
     party talks and he certainly has no say in what American 
     policy will be in the six-party talks.''
       Mr. Lefkowitz, reached at his office in New York, said he 
     and Ms. Rice spoke on Friday about the disagreement, and he 
     described their conversation as ``very amicable, substantive 
     and useful.''
       ``I'm going to have a great deal more to say about 
     elevating the issue of human rights in North Korea, which is 
     clearly a priority for the president and Congress,'' he said.
       The dispute comes at a time when nuclear talks have 
     stalled, with North Korea missing a year-end deadline to 
     disclose all of its nuclear programs. A debate within the 
     administration has fractured along familiar lines, with hard-
     line national security hawks in Vice President Dick Cheney's 
     office and at the White House arguing for a more 
     confrontational approach with the North.
       On the other side, Mr. Bush's lead North Korea nuclear 
     negotiator, Christopher R. Hill, backed by Ms. Rice, has 
     argued that the United States should continue a more 
     restrained approach, one that was widely credited with 
     bringing about an agreement last year intended to eventually 
     lead to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
       Ms. Rice said that Mr. Bush had ``spoken as to what our 
     policy is in the six-party talks.''
       ``I know where the president stands,'' she added, ``and I 
     know where I stand, and those are the people who speak for 
     American policy.''

  Mr. KERRY. The second thing alleged here is somehow Ambassador Hill 
failed to implement the North Korean Human Rights Act. That is not 
accurate. Facts are facts. Facts, as has been said many times, are 
stubborn things. Consistent with the Human Rights Act, Ambassador Hill 
secured the admission of the first North Korean refugees into the 
United States in 2006. He worked to ensure the safe passage to South 
Korea of asylum seekers from the North who had been detained in other 
east Asian

[[Page S4492]]

countries. He backed increased funding of radio broadcasting by Radio 
Free Asia. During Ambassador Hill's tenure as Assistant Secretary of 
State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, the State Department approved 
the expenditure of $2 million of our taxpayer funds to sponsor the 
Seoul Summit on North Korean Human Rights in South Korea, in December 
of 2005. Ambassador Hill met regularly with North Korean refugees and 
defectors who made it out of North Korea.
  The record simply doesn't substantiate the notion that Chris Hill was 
inattentive to human rights. In the morning debate, the Senator from 
Kansas showed a dramatic picture of starving North Korean children. 
Noting that today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, Senator Brownback said 
we should not be indifferent to the suffering of North Korean people 
and we must not consider human rights inside North Korea to be a low 
priority. We all agree with the Senator. Of course we should not allow 
it to be a low priority.
  He noted that unnamed ``U.S. diplomats'' had opposed decisive action 
to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz during World War II and 
said the current situation with north Korea is ``eerily familiar.''
  All of us should listen carefully to what the Senator has said about 
North Korea and its oppression. None of us should forget the lessons of 
the Holocaust. We have an obligation to respond to great humanitarian 
crises, whether they are caused by nature or by man.
  But to show a picture of starving North Korean children in the debate 
on Ambassador Hill's qualifications and to imply somehow that he is 
indifferent to their plight does a good public servant an enormous 
disservice--particularly one whose record is what I have described, who 
time and again has fought for the implementation of the Human Rights 
Act and who has taken personal risks on occasion to enforce human 
rights.
  The date of the photograph that was there was not in fact declared, 
but I believe it was during the great Republic of North Korea's famine 
in 1996 and 1997. If that is true, that is 10 years before Ambassador 
Chris Hill began his duties as the lead envoy in the six-party talks. 
So, again, to create some sense of linkage or nexus here is 
inappropriate.
  In any case, the bottom line is this. No one is going to deny that 
North Korea is a country on the brink of famine and failure. It is a 
failed place. None of us should be idle in the face of this basic 
threat to the health of the North Korean people and to the security of 
the peninsula and of the region. It is deplorable that North Korea has 
recently expelled food aid workers. I hope they are going to reverse 
that decision. We are going to listen carefully to testimony before our 
committee on May 6. We will have a comprehensive view on what is 
happening in North Korea and what the possibilities are for our policy. 
But let me emphasize: Chris Hill never ignored that situation. He 
worked with skill and persistence to secure direct access for five U.S. 
NGOs, including Christian groups, to provide aid to millions of North 
Koreans, including hungry children exactly like the kids who were 
depicted in the photograph on the floor this morning.
  Thanks to the work of Ambassador Hill, Korean-speaking U.S. aid 
workers in 2008-2009 were able to travel to remote parts of North Korea 
never before reached by U.S. aid workers. That is an extraordinary 
success for which Ambassador Hill ought to be congratulated. They were 
able to establish five field offices in rural areas where they had 
never been before. That is a success. They were able to conduct 
unannounced visits to schools, hospitals, and orphanages. That is an 
accountability we never had before. That is a success. They were able 
to provide 100,000 tons of food aid to help people feed literally 
millions of North Korean children. That is a success.
  This was the first U.S. food aid to North Korea delivered by U.S. 
NGOs since the year 2000 and this was delivered in the most intrusive, 
comprehensive monitoring system ever permitted by North Korea. 
Ambassador Hill deserves praise for his efforts on this issue, not the 
criticism that was implied on the floor of the Senate.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 5:15 p.m. today all 
postcloture time be yielded back and the Senate proceed to vote on the 
confirmation of the nomination of Christopher Hill to be Ambassador to 
Iraq, that the time until then be equally divided and controlled 
between myself and Senator Brownback or designees of each of us, and 
that the 10 minutes immediately prior to the vote be equally divided 
and controlled between myself and Senator Brownback; further, that the 
time controlled by the Republicans, of that time, Senator Kyl control 
15 minutes, Senator McCain control 20 minutes, and that upon 
confirmation, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, no 
further motions be in order, the President be immediately notified of 
the Senate's action and the Senate then resume legislative session.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair and thank my colleague.
  I yield the floor, according to the unanimous consent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas is recognized.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I agreed to this unanimous consent 
request to try to move this somewhat forward. I do believe this has 
been a healthy debate. It has been a good thing for us to discuss what 
took place in North Korea. It has been a good thing for us to discuss 
human rights. Anytime we can do that I think it is a good thing for us 
to discuss that setting, moving into Iraq and the human rights concerns 
there.
  I do want to address a few things the Senator from Massachusetts 
raised. One is on the North Korean Human Rights Act. I was the author 
of that bill. I know that bill. I worked to get that bill through. I 
pushed hard to get it through. One of the provisions in that bill was 
$20 million authorized under the North Korean Human Rights Act for use 
of the North Korean Human Rights Act and to resettle refugees from 
North Korea in the United States and for a number of other issues. The 
administration has not requested a single dime under that 
authorization. It didn't ask for a single appropriation. So the idea 
that we have implemented the North Korean Human Rights Act when no 
money was requested underneath that, I guess I am impressed that could 
take place. I hope the Government can do that well in many other areas, 
where they do not ask for any money and then they fully comply with an 
act.
  I do not think the act was fully complied with. I stated that 
specifically here on the Record, the places I do not believe it was 
complied with.
  We are digging up right now how many people have been resettled in 
the United States under this North Korea Human Rights Act. It is a very 
small number--in the dozens at most. There is a lot of hesitation, 
hiccups taking place. The State Department is not pushing or working 
with this. A number of these refugees could have been resettled here by 
communities in the United States. This is actually one piece that could 
have been done very cheaply because the Korean-American community here 
would have resettled them, in many cases, without cost to the Federal 
Government. Very few were received or brought to the United States.
  The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee is a very 
distinguished Senator from Massachusetts with a lot of foreign policy 
experience. I admire all of that. I don't think he has worked quite as 
much on the Korean issue, certainly not as much as some other Members 
of this body and myself have worked on it. To say that this was a 
successful negotiation I think does not stand the overall, just view of 
this from the public's view, let alone from a diplomatic viewpoint.
  When you look at this--you say it was a successful negotiation 
Ambassador Hill conducted with North Korea and the six-party talks. 
When you look at what North Korea has done since then and try to call 
it that, I don't think the Japanese would call this a successful 
negotiation that a missile was fired over their country, one that could 
reach the western United States. I don't think the Japanese would call 
it a successful negotiation that the abductees that were taken from 
Japan by the North Korean leadership and never accounted for were not 
accounted for during the negotiation.

[[Page S4493]]

This was the top issue. I had the Japanese Embassy contacting my 
office, complaining about the six-party talks and not being included on 
their top issues.
  Why are they having to go through me? Because they can't go through 
Chris Hill. What kind of diplomat is that, when he has trouble with one 
of your main allies on a very specific item and issue that you can at 
least keep them tuned in and coming along with the overall issue?
  China is one of the members of the six-party talks and China has been 
one of the lead problems with us dealing with North Korea. Yet we do 
not even push the Chinese on North Korea or North Korean human rights. 
We don't demand that the U.N. Human Rights Commission, or Commission on 
Human Rights, be allowed into China to determine are these North Korean 
refugees who are coming into China, are they economic migrants, are 
they refugees? We don't even push the Chinese to allow the U.N. in to 
look and see what the status is here. We do not push them at the six-
party talks or the U.N. There is a complete failure of this.
  I have had some refugees, a few who made it out of North Korea into 
the United States, a few more who made it into China--it is hard to get 
out of China and into the country--I have had a couple into my office, 
interviewing them, and they talked about the horrible conditions in 
China for North Korean refugees. Several hundred thousand, probably, 
are there, stateless, not protected. The women are generally captured 
and sold as concubines in China--captured like wild animals. This is 
their fate. We do not push the U.N. Human Rights Commission, don't push 
the Chinese to allow these individuals in, even though the Chinese have 
signed the declaration on this. We don't get that done. That is not a 
success taking place.
  North Koreans recently abducted two Americans on the North Korea-
China border. That has taken place. We don't object to that. They are 
developing part of the Syrian nuclear reactor. We don't get any 
information on that. We get incomplete information. We waive the 
terrorism list. We get nothing out of this deal. That is called a 
successful negotiation. I wonder what we will call successful 
negotiations in Iraq, then, if that is what we are calling a successful 
negotiation with the North Koreans in the six-party talks. I wonder 
what we will call successful human rights being determined in Iraq when 
we see the human rights record of what is taking place in North Korea. 
I wonder how that is going to be viewed.

  For all of those reasons, I think this has been a healthy debate for 
us to have had. I hope when the supplemental comes up, we as a body do 
not waive again the Glenn sanctions on North Korea. That will come up 
in front of this body. It is an annual waiver that will have to take 
place. I hope we as a body do not fund North Korea beyond humanitarian 
assistance. That will come up in the supplemental. I want to lay those 
markers down for my colleagues. I hope people are watching for this, 
that we do not reward the North Koreans, that we do not become their 
supporter like the Soviets were, and we do not continue this practice, 
much of which Chris Hill negotiated.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kaufman). The Senator from Virginia is 
recognized.
  Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I would like to add my voice in support of 
the nominee, Chris Hill, whom I have had the pleasure of working with 
extensively in his current assignment, both in my role as a member of 
the Armed Services Committee and also of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee.
  I think he is a uniquely qualified individual. He has a long history 
of success. If anything, in the current debate, I believe he is perhaps 
being victimized by the fact that he is a loyal diplomat and was 
carrying out, with great expertise, the charges that had been given to 
him as someone who has a career in that area.
  The numbers are pretty clear. He is going to get at least 70 votes. I 
believe it is time for us to end this debate and have the vote and get 
Chris Hill on his way. I respect the Senator from Kansas. I respect his 
concerns. He has been a great champion in terms of human rights. I 
would just suggest that this is not the place to continue this sort of 
discussion when the situation in Iraq is filled with unknowns, as it 
is, and our need of getting someone who has these types of 
qualifications over there to do this job.
  The Chris Hill nomination is no more place to have this debate than 
it was when the nomination of the current Ambassador to South Korea was 
also held up for similar reasons. The points have been made. I think 
all of us understand them, and we need to get on with this nomination.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I rise today in opposition to the 
confirmation of Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill as U.S. Ambassador 
to Iraq. I do not often come to the floor and object to nominees of the 
President of the United States. I believe elections have consequences, 
and that gives a President of the United States the benefit of the 
doubt and, even more, as far as the selection of the team he assembles 
in order to do the best job possible. So it is on a rare occasion that 
I object to a nominee of the President. But for too long and too deeply 
the United States of America has been involved in Iraq. There is a 
fragile situation there. We have recently seen an uptick in violence 
and attacks by extremist elements within Iraq. Now is not the time to 
send a person who I believe is not only unqualified on the face of it 
but also, in my view, has not conducted himself in the most admirable 
fashion in his previous work.
  Today, we find ourselves in a situation few could have foreseen just 
a few years ago. In late 2006, the situation in Iraq was deteriorating 
at an alarming rate. The Government was mired in internal strife and 
deadlock, sectarian violence crippled the lives of everyday Iraqis, and 
the outlook for the country's future was increasingly bleak. Yet in the 
face of seemingly unsurmountable challenges, a drastic change in 
strategy was introduced. GEN David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker 
launched and executed a civil-military counterinsurgency plan for Iraq 
that turned the tide of violence in a timeframe and to a degree that 
surprised even the optimists. The result has been a decrease in 
violence to the lowest levels since 2003 and real hope about the future 
of the country in which we have expended so much precious American 
blood and treasure. Yet as our commanders have repeatedly warned, these 
gains, though real, are fragile. The recent uptick in violence 
demonstrates anew that there remain elements within Iraq who wish to 
continue the violence and use their power to disrupt the transition to 
a more stable, democratic, and tolerant society. There also remain a 
number of difficult political and economic issues that lay ahead, 
including the distribution of oil revenues, the resettlement of 
refugees and internally displaced Iraqis, and ongoing tensions between 
Arabs and Kurds.
  Ambassador Ryan Crocker was able to tackle these and other issues 
with great skill and expertise, ensuring unprecedented cooperation 
between the military, the Embassy, and their counterparts in the Iraqi 
Government. Ambassador Crocker's remarkable tenure was a byproduct of 
his lengthy career in the Middle East, not simply incidental to his 
long record of experience in the region. He had served two tours in 
Baghdad previously, including in the Coalition Provisional Authority, 
and he also served as Ambassador to several neighboring countries, 
including Lebanon, Kuwait, and Syria. His longstanding relationships 
with the region's leaders, his deep understanding of the complexities 
of Arab and Iraqi culture, and his ability to speak fluent Arabic were 
instrumental to his success.
  Now, as we reduce the number of combat forces in Iraq, our national 
interests there will depend to an increasing degree on the skill of our 
diplomacy. I believe Ambassador Crocker's successor should possess many 
of the same traits he demonstrated, including experience in the region, 
an understanding of its players and dynamics, and relevant language 
skills. While Ambassador Hill has developed regional expertise, it is 
not in the Middle East. He has served as Ambassador in Europe and Asia, 
and speaks, admirably, three European languages but does not speak 
Arabic. He has not had the opportunity to work with leaders in Iraq or 
in the region. In fact, he has

[[Page S4494]]

never been to Iraq. He has limited experience at best in working with 
the military in the areas of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.
  The next U.S. Ambassador to Iraq will take over at a critical time in 
history of our involvement there. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is the 
world's largest and, along with our Embassy in Kabul, one of the two 
most important. The next Ambassador will play a vital role in 
consolidating our hard-won gains and ensuring that the country does not 
backslide into violence and turmoil. Given the enormity of our stakes 
in Iraq, I do not believe it is appropriate to select as our next 
Ambassador someone who will require on-the-job training in Iraqi 
affairs and in Middle East issues.
  This may well be, I am afraid, the case with Mr. Hill.
  There are a number of well-qualified individuals both within the 
Foreign Service and without it who would make excellent U.S. 
Ambassadors to Iraq. I do not believe Mr. Hill is among this number.
  Our next Ambassador must hit the ground running and quickly work with 
the ground commander, Iraqi leaders, and others to confront the still 
great challenges that will present themselves over the next several 
years. We have made many mistakes in Iraq over a number of years, and 
they have cost us dearly. We have seen individuals take charge of U.S. 
efforts there without the background and experience necessary to 
succeed. I do not want us to repeat this mistake.
  In addition to my concerns about Ambassador Hill's lack of Middle 
East experience, I also have questions arising from his tenure as U.S. 
Envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program. His 
legacy in those talks was controversial, as evidenced by complaints 
that other members of the interagency process were cut out of crucial 
policy deliberations. In a cable reported in the Washington Post, 
Thomas Schieffer, then-U.S. Ambassador to Japan, warned of irreparable 
harm to our relations with Tokyo resulting from an agreement that did 
not adequately address Japanese interests, including the issue of 
abductions. Ambassador Schieffer added that he could not play a role in 
remedying this state of affairs because Ambassador Hill had cut him out 
of the flow of information on North Korea.
  Members of the Senate, including my colleague from Kansas, have 
asserted that Ambassador Hill broke a commitment made before a 
congressional committee to include North Korean Special Envoy for Human 
Rights Jay Lefkowitz to all future negotiating sessions with North 
Korea. I am aware that Ambassador Hill has asserted that he did not, in 
fact, break such a commitment, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. 
Lefkowitz was not included in these subsequent negotiating sessions.
  Given the key role the Congress and non-State Department agencies 
play in our Iraq policy, however, I believe it is crucial that the next 
Ambassador to Iraq begin with a surplus of trust and good will with 
both. Ambassador Hill, I am afraid, starts with a deficit.
  Ambassador Hill testified on October 25, 2007, before the House 
Foreign Affairs Subcommittee that ``clearly we cannot be reaching a 
nuclear agreement with North Korea if at the same time they are 
proliferating. It is not acceptable.'' Yet, just months later, 
Ambassador Hill reached an agreement with Pyongyang despite its alleged 
nuclear proliferation to Syria, and reports have emerged of Iranian-
North Korean cooperation in missile technology.
  In recent weeks alone, North Korea has tested a ballistic missile in 
violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions, expelled 
inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, removed seals 
on equipment, and turned off surveillance cameras at the Yongbyon 
nuclear plant and announced that it is withdrawing from the six-party 
talks.
  While Mr. Hill did not bear sole responsibility for the content of 
U.S. policy toward North Korea, nor for the outcomes I have just 
described, it is nevertheless inescapable that he has played the key 
U.S. role in the formulation of policy toward Pyongyang for the past 
several years. To the eyes of most objective observers, those policies 
have failed.
  Finally, I am troubled at comments and characterizations that 
appeared in a recent book by New York Times reporter David Sanger. In a 
statement to associates, for example, Ambassador Hill is quoted--and it 
is a direct quote--as saying of members of the administration--the 
administration which he supposedly served--``these [expletive] don't 
know how to negotiate. Everything is Appomattox. It's just `Come out 
with your hands up.' It's not even really Appomattox, because at the 
end of Appomattox they let the Confederates keep their horses.'' This 
is perhaps the most colorful but not the only reference along these 
lines. Mr. Sanger quotes Ambassador Hill as saying that his 
instructions ``showed a complete lack of understanding about how the 
world works,'' and the book, along with other accounts, cites numerous 
examples of Mr. Hill going beyond his instructions as authorized by the 
Department of State.
  I know loyalty is a rare commodity in this town, and I do not expect 
a lot of it. I have seen a lot of situations where people seek to 
burnish their own images and their own reputations. I guess in some 
ways this is kind of a classic example, this quote of Ambassador 
Hill's, talking about the people he works for: ``These [expletive] 
don't know how to negotiate.'' And he says--and it is a direct quote 
again--that his instructions ``showed a complete lack of understanding 
about how the world works.'' I wonder if Mr. Hill really felt this 
strongly, as these quotes indicate in Mr. Sanger's book, that he might 
have felt motivated for the good of the country to speak out publicly 
to remonstrate that ``These [expletive] don't know how to negotiate.'' 
Instead, many times we see people more interested in how a New York 
Times reporter describes them than they are in serving the people who 
appoint them to the positions of responsibility.
  In response to a lengthy set of questions I submitted to Ambassador 
Hill, he wrote that fulfilling the oath taken by a Foreign Service 
officer ``means respecting the chain of command and remaining loyal to 
my leadership.'' In this, I agree with Mr. Hill. Mr. Hill, if those 
quotes are accurate--and I have no reason to believe they are not--
obviously did not feel so at the time.
  But, most importantly, the stakes in Iraq today could hardly be 
higher. We have been at this war for 6 long and difficult years. We 
made many mistakes. We paid an enormous price for the gains we see in 
that country today. And I must say, in all candor, we have seen another 
Ambassador to Iraq who went there without experience, and things did 
not turn out so well.
  There are qualified individuals who are serving this Nation in and 
out of the Foreign Service.
  It well known that Marine General Zinni was offered the job, at least 
by some members of the administration, and then somehow that offer 
disappeared. The fact is, we have sacrificed a lot. We owe it to the 
brave men and women who have sacrificed so much to ensure that the 
remarkable progress they have achieved translates into long-term 
stability as our combat troops begin leaving the country. After meeting 
with Ambassador Hill and examining his record, the concerns I raised 
following his nomination last month remain. For this reason, I must 
oppose his nomination as the next U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to Ambassador 
Christopher Hill's nomination to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to 
Iraq. As Senator Brownback and I stated in a letter to Secretary of 
State Clinton regarding Ambassador Hill's nomination:

       Our role as United States Senators is not to choose the 
     President's envoys. However, in the exercise of the Senate's 
     constitutionally mandated role of advising and consenting to 
     nominations, we are required to judge the qualifications by 
     ambassadorial candidates on several levels, not least their 
     past record of dealing with our own branch of government.


[[Page S4495]]


  I do not believe Ambassador Hill has the requisite experience to be 
our Ambassador to Iraq at this critical time in that young democracy's 
history. Beyond that, serious allegations have been made by members of 
the press as well as Members of this body that call into question Mr. 
Hill's ability to follow orders and his willingness to be forthcoming 
and truthful with the Senate itself. I believe these allegations merit 
much more rigorous review.
  Many of my colleagues believe that Iraq is at a critical and fragile 
juncture and that now is no time to delay the installation of our 
Ambassador to that country, and to them I say I could not agree more. 
However, I would also say to them it is even more critical that we send 
an Ambassador who has the proper experience for the tough task ahead of 
him. We should be sending someone who understands the complex and 
unique historical, cultural, and tribal intricacies of those with whom 
he will be interacting and negotiating. We should be sending someone 
who speaks their language, literally. We should be sending someone who, 
over their distinguished career at the State Department, has at least 
had one assignment to the Middle East. Ambassador Hill has had none. At 
no time during his 32 years has he had an assignment there, nor does he 
speak Arabic. Surely, the State Department has at least one 
distinguished diplomat who has career experience in the Middle East.
  Some of my colleagues argue that Ambassador Hill's experience in 
Kosovo and Bosnia give him crucial experience solving complex problems 
of ethnic civil wars. After 6 years of, I would hope, lessons learned, 
I am sure my colleagues would agree with me that we should not approach 
the cultural and ethnic nuances in Iraq with a same-thing-only-
different diplomacy. I certainly hope the Obama administration is not 
taking a one-size-fits-all approach to the world.
  Iraq's history is not that of Kosovo or Bosnia. Its cultural and 
ethnic makeup is completely unique. We need someone who understands 
Iraq's history, culture, and, yes, language. That is why the choice of 
Ambassador Ryan Crocker was so inspired--a diplomat who, over his 
career at the State Department, had been assigned to Iran, Qatar, 
Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan--all before he took on 
his assignment as Ambassador to Iraq. In addition, he spoke Persian and 
Arabic.
  Much of our recent success in Iraq is because of Ambassador Crocker's 
lifetime of knowledge and understanding of Iraq and its neighbors' 
cultural and ethnic history. While I don't expect a carbon copy of 
Ambassador Crocker, I do assert again that surely the State Department 
has to have at least one distinguished diplomat with relevant 
experience in the Middle East. If it doesn't--if its bench for Iraq is 
one diplomat deep--we need to find out what is going on over at the 
State Department.
  Moreover, I worry what signal it sends--when coupled with the recent 
campaign rhetoric--of our commitment to sustain the hard-fought gains 
of the surge by sending an ambassador to Iraq with no experience in the 
region. What message does that send to Iraqi leaders who are nervous 
that the U.S. commitment to finish what we started has ended?
  In addition to his lack of Middle East experience, recent press 
reports about Ambassador Hill's conduct as head of the U.S. delegation 
of the six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue raise serious 
doubts about his fitness to serve in such a sensitive position as 
Ambassador to Iraq.
  Twice, Ambassador Hill allegedly disobeyed orders from the President 
and Secretary Rice not to engage in any bilateral meetings with the 
North Koreans. According to Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard:

       On July 9, 2005, [Secretary of State] Rice had given 
     approval for a trilateral meeting with the Chinese and the 
     North Koreans in an effort to get the North Koreans to return 
     to the six-party talks on their nuclear program. . . . The 
     Chinese didn't show up, as they had promised. Hill 
     nonetheless met alone with the North Koreans and gave them an 
     important propaganda victory.

  We cannot afford to have diplomats exceeding their authority and 
engaging in freelance diplomacy when they see fit and in direct 
opposition to the wishes of the President and the Secretary of State.
  That is why Senator Brownback and I wrote to Secretary Clinton and 
asked her to provide us with all relevant cables and correspondence 
regarding Ambassador Hill's instruction for these two meetings so that 
we can establish the facts. These matters could have been cleared up by 
now if the State Department had responded to the letter that Senator 
Brownback and I sent. It has not chosen to do so. We have no response.
  Finally, Senator Brownback raised questions about Ambassador Hill's 
truthfulness to the Senate. The Senator spoke to this matter.
  The position of U.S. Ambassador to Iraq is among the most sensitive 
missions we have in the world at this time. It is critical that 
ambassadors follow the letter and spirit of the orders given by the 
President and the Secretary of State. It is equally important that 
anytime an ambassador gives assurances to the Senate that something 
will be carried out, or certain actions will not be engaged in, that 
those assurances be rock solid.
  Mr. President, for the reasons I have articulated--and I associate 
myself with the remarks of Senators Brownback and McCain--I regret that 
I cannot support Christopher Hill's nomination to replace Ambassador 
Crocker as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island is recognized.
  Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise to express my strong support for 
Christopher R. Hill to be the next Ambassador to Iraq. I have had the 
privilege of working with Ambassador Hill and I know him. He is a Rhode 
Islander. He was born in Little Compton, where he resides. He brought 
his fine skills and talents to public service many years ago. He has 
distinguished himself in that service over many years. He is being 
posted to one of the most critical areas of the world.
  Mr. President, you and I just returned from Iraq. One of the comments 
we heard from General Odierno and from our diplomatic personnel was the 
need to rapidly confirm Ambassador Hill. They have every confidence in 
him. They believe he cannot only do the job but do it extremely well. I 
think their support is much more compelling than the opposition I have 
heard on the Senate floor today.
  We understand, as they do, the real step forward in Iraq is building 
its governmental capacity and dealing with very explicit problems, one 
of which--and the Presiding Officer and I have both spoken on this 
today--is the tension between the Kurds and Arabs around Kirkuk, with 
respect to oil. Our Ambassador has to hit the ground running and deal 
with a very difficult set of issues. Chris Hill is prepared to do that.
  Together with General Odierno, they will form a team that will 
continue the progress that has been made over the last several months.
  Ambassador Hill, as I mentioned, is from Rhode Island. He earned his 
B.A. from Bowdoin College and a masters from the Naval War College, 
also in Rhode Island. He is extremely well qualified for this position, 
with a lifetime of diplomatic service and facing challenges in many 
different arenas, and facing them with distinction. He has particular 
skills in bridging gaps and bringing people together, which will be 
critical.
  Ambassador Hill entered the Foreign Service in 1977. In the 1980s, he 
served in various positions within the State Department in Washington. 
He was an economic officer in the Embassies in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; 
Warsaw, Poland; and Seoul, Korea.
  Beginning in 1991, he spent 2 years as the Deputy Chief of Mission at 
the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania. From 1994 to 1996, he was the 
Director of the Office of South Central European Affairs.
  Then, in 1996, he was named the Ambassador of Macedonia during a 
period when the United States was actively engaged in multilateral 
efforts to prevent the spread of ethnic conflict in Macedonia, bolster 
Macedonian independence and state viability, and manage bilateral 
disputes between Macedonia and Greece. He worked with our American 
military forces during that period.
  The first time I met with him I was with the commander of the First 
Infantry Division of the U.S. Army who was on the ground. So the 
Ambassador is someone who has already been in a situation in which 
ethnic tension, bilateral relationships between regional

[[Page S4496]]

powers, and Army military stabilization operations were underway. I 
think that experience will make him extremely prepared for and equipped 
to accomplish the mission he has been assigned in Baghdad.
  Ambassador Hill was also part of a team that was assembled by 
Ambassador Holbrooke that negotiated the Bosnian peace settlement. He 
fought to ensure that protections were included for those who had been 
made refugees by the war. In one instance, he personally intervened at 
the Stenkovac refugee camp to prevent a rioting mob from beating an 
ethnic Roma family to death.
  I think he has a sensitivity to ethnic and sectarian tension, not 
gleaned from textbooks but from personal involvement and engagement in 
these situations.
  In 2004, he returned to Seoul, Korea, this time as the Ambassador. 
There he partnered with Korean authorities and the commander of the 
U.S. Forces Korea, General Leon LePorte, another Rhode Islander, to 
develop and implement the most significant realignment of our military 
posture in the region since the Korean war. I think it was an effort 
that today is bearing fruit in terms of the ability of U.S. forces in 
Korea to continue their mission with a smaller footprint, and indeed to 
be able to support operations around the globe as units from Korea are 
being sent into the combat zone in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  Most recently, after his experience as Ambassador to Seoul, he served 
as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and 
also as head of--as somebody mentioned--the six-party talks, which 
attempted to get the North Koreans to move away from their path of 
nuclear progress they had been making. He worked hard to dismantle 
their main nuclear facility and provide a full accounting for their 
plutonium.
  Ambassador Hill also engaged in issues of human rights. It has been 
pointed out that not all of the efforts have been completely 
successful. But what he was doing was carrying out the policy of the 
beneficiary administration. He was carrying out the instructions of the 
Secretary of State and the President of the United States. I think he 
did that with fidelity to his responsibilities to his superiors and 
also a keen commitment to improving a situation that had become very 
dire indeed.
  Ambassador Hill has received numerous awards, including the Secretary 
of State's Distinguished Service Award, the Francis Shattuck Security 
and Peace Award, the Robert C. Frasure Memorial Award for Peace 
Negotiations, and the Secretary of Defense Medal of Meritorious 
Civilian Service.
  Ambassador Hill, with his talent, his character, and his commitment 
to the Nation, has also been recognized because he has been endorsed 
for this position by the last three Ambassadors to Iraq, including Ryan 
Crocker, Zalmay Khalilzad, and John Negroponte. These gentlemen did an 
extraordinarily good job for us there. I am particularly singling out 
Ryan Crocker--someone whose commitment was not just in terms of his 
professional skill but his physical skill--risking his life numerous 
times, working day and night, 7 days a week, and doing it with 
distinction and grace. That is remarkable.
  Again, no one is going to be another Ryan Crocker. I think it is 
extraordinarily significant that Ryan Crocker, who probably knows that 
job as well as anybody, would endorse Christopher Hill to take the job. 
He would not do it just as a courtesy to a fellow State Department 
officer. He did it because I believe he understands that Ambassador 
Hill not only can do the job but will do it.
  I also say the same thing about the commitment and sincerity and 
support of Zalmay Khalilzad and John Negroponte. Furthermore, I think 
both General Petraeus and General Odierno have indicated that not only 
is he someone with whom they can work, they want to be able to work 
with him quickly. They want him on the ground. Iraq is at a pivotal 
juncture in the history of that country and its relationship with the 
United States. The intelligence and commitment and experience of the 
Ambassador to Iraq is critical. Ambassador Hill has an abundance of the 
necessary skills. He has proven again and again he can bring a possible 
situation to a workable solution. He is the right man for the job. I 
urge my colleagues to support his nomination.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I strongly support the nomination of 
Christopher Hill, one of America's most distinguished and accomplished 
career diplomats, to serve as Ambassador to Iraq.
  Our Bagdad Embassy is, obviously, a post of critical importance to 
United States interests. Our Armed Servicemembers and diplomats serving 
in Iraq need and deserve an ambassador without further delay. President 
Obama has set forth a sound strategy for ending our combat role in Iraq 
and allowing the Iraqi Government to take full responsibility for that 
Nation's affairs. We will be extremely fortunate to have an ambassador 
of Christopher Hill's skills, stature, and experience, to oversee this 
important new phase in our relations with Iraq.
  Ambassador Hill's career in the Foreign Service spans more than three 
decades. He has extraordinary expertise and experience in the fields of 
national security, peacebuilding, and postconflict reconstruction. He 
is exactly the right person to have in this critical post at this 
pivotal time in Iraq.
  While serving in the former Yugoslavia from 1996 to 1999, Ambassador 
Hill was at the center of negotiations for the Bosnia peace settlement, 
serving as deputy to chief negotiator Richard Holbrooke. He fought to 
ensure the protection of those who had been made refugees by the war. 
In one instance, he personally intervened at the Stenkovac refugee camp 
to prevent a rioting mob from beating to death an ethnic Roma family.
  As America's first Ambassador to Macedonia, he worked with local 
authorities to quell ethno-religious violence and build institutions of 
democratic governance and civil society.
  As Ambassador to South Korea, Hill strengthened a key bilateral 
alliance, partnering with Korean authorities and the commander of U.S. 
Forces in Korea to develop and implement the most significant 
realignment of our military posture in the region since the Korean war.
  Most recently, as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and 
Pacific Affairs, Ambassador Hill led extremely complex negotiations to 
counter North Korea's nuclear ambitions, working with a diverse and 
powerful group of countries, including China, South Korea, Japan, and 
Russia.
  Ambassador Hill has a master's degree from the Naval War College, and 
has extensive experience working with our U.S. military on 
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Ambassador Hill has worked with 
some of the best military commanders of this generation, addressing 
some of our Nation's toughest challenges GEN Eric Shinseki in the 
Balkans, GEN Leon LaPorte in Korea, ADM Tim Keating of Pacific Command, 
to name just a few.
  Ambassador Hill's nomination has been endorsed enthusiastically by 
our last three Ambassadors to Iraq: Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Ambassador 
Zalmay Khalilzad, and Ambassador John D. Negroponte. We need his 
experience and seasoned judgment during this crucial time of transition 
in Iraq. Ambassador Hill's nomination has been vetted through the 
normal process. It is now time for the Senate to vote on his 
confirmation, and allow Ambassador Hill to get to work on the 
significant challenges ahead.
  Mr. BUNNING. Mr. President, I rise today to give my remarks on the 
nomination of Christopher Hill to be United States Ambassador to Iraq. 
Unfortunately, I cannot support this nomination. There are two 
principal reasons for my opposition. The first is his inexperience in 
the Middle East and with the type of challenges provided by Iraq. The 
second is his actions and behavior during negotiations with North 
Korea.
  It is generally accepted that career diplomats will serve in many 
very different parts of the globe. However, the position of Ambassador 
to Iraq is arguably the most important diplomatic post in the world to 
the United States. To see an example of just the type of person suited 
to this job one only need to look to the most recent U.S. Ambassador to 
Iraq: Ryan Crocker. Mr. Crocker previously served as Ambassador to 
Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and

[[Page S4497]]

Lebanon. He had served in Iraq previously and was Deputy Assistant 
Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. He is also fluent in 
Arabic.
  Ambassador Hill has none of these credentials. He has spent nearly 
his entire career concentrating on European affairs, until recently 
shifting to the Far East to concentrate on issues regarding the Korean 
peninsula. He has no prior postings or assignments that would give him 
experience with the Middle East nor that would give him any knowledge 
of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts there. As the United States begins to 
draw down the military presence in Iraq, the efforts of our diplomats 
there will become even more important. We need a more experienced head 
of these efforts than we have been given in Christopher Hill.
  Within Ambassador Hill's experience to date, I have severe concerns 
in the manner in which he conducted himself as chief U.S. negotiator in 
the disarmament talks with North Korea. Not only do I find his actions 
unprofessional but question his negotiating tactics and the concessions 
he made. Records show he engaged in evasive and unprofessional 
activities, including sidelining key officials at the State Department 
and breaking commitments made before congressional committees.
  Ambassador Hill also made significant concessions to North Korea 
during his disarmament talks that I believe were diplomatically unsound 
and imprudent. I firmly believe they put the United States at a 
disadvantage in our efforts to move forward with this rogue Communist 
regime. Removing North Korea from our list of state sponsors of 
terrorism along with lifting our sanctions in return for a mere ``good 
faith'' declaration of their nuclear weapons program was unsound and 
irresponsible. True to form, North Korea, through a symbolic process of 
smoke and mirrors, only partially disclosed their weapons program 
giving the United States access to information that was already known 
throughout the international community. North Korea's recent decision 
to abandon the six party talks and restart their nuclear weapons 
program only highlights our failed diplomacy and Ambassador Hill's 
shortcomings.
  As we move forward with one of the most diplomatically sensitive 
missions in American history I do not believe that we can afford to 
make any mistakes. While Ambassador Hill has a distinguished career of 
diplomatic service, I do not believe that he is the right nominee for 
this position. Thus, I respectfully oppose his nomination.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, there is a previous agreement that the 
final 10 minutes be equally divided, 5 minutes on either side, and I 
rise to use that 5 minutes in opposition.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, we are soon to vote on the issue of 
whether Chris Hill should be the next ambassador to Iraq, and I want to 
make a few comments about that in closing.
  I think there has been a good, full discussion, and I think it has 
been a good discussion. I misspoke at one point in time, in talking 
about Auschwitz and Poland. It wasn't a Polish concentration camp. It 
was in Poland, but it was run by the Nazis. I wanted to make sure I am 
clear on that to individuals.
  Also, I wish to add Senator Hutchison to the North Korean Sanctions 
Act for the Record.
  Today marks the Holocaust Remembrance Day, as cited earlier on the 
floor. The Holocaust Museum's theme this year is: ``Never again: What 
You Do Matters.'' I think what Chris Hill did matters in this case.
  I want to read one section of the statement from the Holocaust Museum 
and what they put forward about what you do matters. They stated:

       Remembrance obligates us not only to memorialize those who 
     were killed but also to reflect on what could have been done 
     to save them. Those who survived tell us that as many faced 
     their horrific deaths, their last words were ``Remember us. 
     Tell our story.'' Survivors promised that they would, and 
     that never again would the world stand silent or look the 
     other way.

  Well, I can't stand silent and look the other way in North Korea. And 
I think ``never again'' ought to mean that. The deeds of Ambassador 
Hill in North Korea--no progress on human rights, a terrible deal, 
failed diplomacy--and I can go through what has happened in the last 2 
weeks. To reiterate, North Korea has launched a multistage ballistic 
missile over Japan, kidnapped two of our citizens, pulled out of the 
six-party talks, kicked out international nuclear inspectors and 
American monitors, restarted its nuclear facilities, and according to 
at least one news source is now under investigation for shipping 
enriched uranium to Iran.
  It was a terrible deal. In all this debate we have had about Chris 
Hill, not one colleague has defended the deal Chris Hill got with the 
North Koreans on its merits. Nobody has defended the deal he has gotten 
on the merits. They just said: Well, it is tough to negotiate. Yes, it 
is tough to negotiate, but on the merits, this was a terrible deal. And 
the irony is that the only thing dismantled in the six-party talks was 
our strategic deterrence and our moral authority. That was the only 
thing that was dismantled. Convening a six-party dialogue is not 
success in and of itself, especially when the result is so abhorrent.
  We will have a chance to talk about this again shortly. It is going 
to be coming up in a supplemental. As a reminder here in the Chamber, 
then-Senator Obama said:

       Sanctions are a critical part of our leverage to pressure 
     North Korea to act. They should only be lifted based on North 
     Korean performance. If the North Koreans do not meet their 
     obligations, we should move quickly to reimpose sanctions 
     that have been waived and consider new restrictions going 
     forward.

  In the supplemental fight, there will be a discussion to give North 
Koreans more heavy fuel oil. I ask my colleagues not to put that in the 
bill. There will be a sanctions waiver discussion in the supplemental. 
I ask my colleagues not to waive sanctions on North Korea in the 
supplemental fight, and I ask instead that we reimpose the sanctions 
that then-Senator and Presidential candidate, now President Barack 
Obama called for in June of 2008. That seems to me to be an appropriate 
route for us to take as we look at this full set of problems we have 
and the discussion that we have had to date.
  I ask my colleagues again to consider the qualifications of 
Ambassador Hill, the problems that have come under his watch, and the 
North Korean talks, and not confirm him to be our ambassador for Iraq 
in a situation where he has produced such terrible results and on a 
Holocaust Remembrance Day when we say: Never again.
  I further ask my colleagues that if you do confirm him, if he is 
confirmed today, that we actually do remember that what we do matters 
and what we say matters and that we not go forward here at this point 
in time and say: Fine, we are going to go ahead and waive the 
sanctions. This was part of the Hill strategy toward North Korea; we 
are going to go ahead and waive these and we are going to let it happen 
anyway.
  Mr. President, I realize I have used my time, and I do appreciate 
that my colleagues have let us have a full debate on this.
  I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, we have given Senators now a chance to air 
these grievances and raise questions and engage in a pretty full debate 
on the nomination of Chris Hill. I appreciate the issues my colleague 
has raised. I know he is deeply concerned about these, and has been one 
of the leaders in the Senate on the subject of human rights. We all 
respect that and we are determined in the course of our hearings and in 
the course of the work of the committee to keep that issue front and 
center, not just with respect to North Korea but with every country 
where those issues exist.
  I do think it is unfair to suggest that Ambassador Chris Hill has 
done anything less than meet the standards we would expect with respect 
to his stewardship, both with the six-party talks as well as in the 
rest of his career, and I have talked about that a great deal.

[[Page S4498]]

We have heard the arguments and now is the time to vote. We need an 
ambassador in Iraq. We need this ambassador in Iraq.
  This should not be a controversial nomination. Ambassador Hill is a 
proven expert negotiator. He is a problem solver and one of the best 
diplomats we have in the corps. As has been discussed, he has a great 
deal of experience with the skills that matter the most for the 
resolution of the remaining issues in Iraq, and he has been 
particularly involved in ethnic and sectarian conflicts not unlike 
those he will face when he gets over there. He has worked on multiparty 
international negotiations, and he is going to have to bring every 
skill he has learned in the fullness of his career to this task.
  Particularly, I want to say we join Senator Brownback in expressing 
the full concern of every Member of the Senate that we give meaning to 
the words ``never again.'' That is a solemn responsibility. It is a 
solemn responsibility particularly on this Holocaust Remembrance Day.
  But it is also clear from the record, from Secretary Rice's own 
words, that the decision to leave the Special Envoy for Human Rights 
out of these negotiations was not made by Chris Hill and we should not, 
in our votes today, hold that decision of his superiors against Chris 
Hill. It was a decision which Secretary Rice has spoken to publicly and 
I think we have addressed the major concern that was raised by the 
Senator from Kansas.
  We have also shown the fullness of Chris Hill's own record on human 
rights and I think that record speaks for itself.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired.
  Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair and look forward to this vote. I hope it 
will be an overwhelming vote in favor of our ambassador to Iraq.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the cloture 
motion with respect to the motion to proceed to S. 386 be withdrawn, 
and that on Wednesday, following a period of morning business, the 
Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 28, S. 386.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. REID. There will be no further rollcall votes today, of course 
after the Hill vote. Tomorrow we will consider financial fraud 
legislation. I encourage those Members who have indicated to the 
managers interest in offering amendments or coming to speak on the 
bill, that they do that. I have spoken to the Republican leader today. 
He said he believes there are a number of amendments--not long in 
number--that the Republicans wish to offer. We solicit those 
amendments. There could be several amendments from this side also. It 
would be good if we could get to legislating on this tomorrow.
  I also say I think it set a good tone. We should not have to file 
cloture on every motion to proceed. I appreciate very much the 
Republicans not necessitating that wasteful vote. This bill has been on 
the calendar and available since March 5. No one has to be concerned 
about not having seen this financial fraud legislation.
  Members who have amendments should be ready to go forward with them 
tomorrow morning.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is, Will the Senate advise and 
consent to the nomination of Christopher R. Hill, of Rhode Island, a 
Career Member of the Senior Foreign Service, Class of Career Minister, 
to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States 
of America to the Republic of Iraq?
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. 
Kennedy) and the Senator from West Virginia (Mr. Rockefeller) are 
necessarily absent.
  Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Kansas (Mr. Roberts).
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber 
desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 73, nays 23, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 159 Ex.]

                                YEAS--73

     Akaka
     Alexander
     Barrasso
     Baucus
     Bayh
     Begich
     Bennet
     Bingaman
     Boxer
     Brown
     Burris
     Byrd
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Chambliss
     Cochran
     Collins
     Conrad
     Corker
     Dodd
     Dorgan
     Durbin
     Enzi
     Feingold
     Feinstein
     Gillibrand
     Gregg
     Hagan
     Harkin
     Hutchison
     Inouye
     Isakson
     Johanns
     Johnson
     Kaufman
     Kerry
     Klobuchar
     Kohl
     Landrieu
     Lautenberg
     Leahy
     Levin
     Lieberman
     Lincoln
     Lugar
     Martinez
     McCaskill
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Mikulski
     Murkowski
     Murray
     Nelson (NE)
     Nelson (FL)
     Pryor
     Reed
     Reid
     Sanders
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Snowe
     Specter
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Udall (CO)
     Udall (NM)
     Voinovich
     Warner
     Webb
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                                NAYS--23

     Bennett
     Bond
     Brownback
     Bunning
     Burr
     Coburn
     Cornyn
     Crapo
     DeMint
     Ensign
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hatch
     Inhofe
     Kyl
     McCain
     McConnell
     Risch
     Sessions
     Shelby
     Thune
     Vitter
     Wicker

                             NOT VOTING--3

     Kennedy
     Roberts
     Rockefeller
  The nomination was confirmed.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the motion to 
reconsider is considered made and laid upon the table. The President 
will be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

                          ____________________