[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 16 (Wednesday, February 3, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H526-H527]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   ENHANCED INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. You know, Mr. Speaker, today we had a hearing 
before the International Relations Committee and one of the subjects 
that was brought up was enhanced interrogation techniques. And 
waterboarding was brought up. One of my colleagues said, Boy, that's 
torture. That's why we shouldn't be using that.
  Now Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who personally cut the head off of Daniel 
Pearl, personally killed him, and he was personally involved in the 9/
11 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans, he was waterboarded. Before he 
was waterboarded, he said--and I want to read from a CIA memo. It said, 
``In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to 
obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including Khalid 
Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, without using enhanced techniques.'' 
Both of them had expressed their belief that the United States 
population was weak and lacked resilience and would be unable to do 
what was necessary for preventing terrorists from succeeding in their 
goals.
  Indeed, before the CIA used enhanced techniques in its interrogation, 
he said, when asked about future attacks, simply, ``Soon you will 
know.'' Soon after he was subjected to the waterboarding, he became 
cooperative, and as a result we were able to stop an attack that was 
going to take place in Los Angeles where a plane was going to fly into 
a building.
  Now we have said time and again that we don't believe in torture. And 
I don't believe in torture. But the definition of torture is in the eye 
of the beholder. They say waterboarding is terrible, and it's torture. 
But do you know--and I don't think many of my colleagues know this--
that the Survival, Evasion, Rescue, and Escape training for our 
military personnel--and that's the Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, and 
pilots that fly in the military--they go through enhanced techniques 
like this, and they go through

[[Page H527]]

waterboarding. They have for 30 years. Now maybe they're stopping it 
now, but they, for 30 years, since Vietnam, went through waterboarding 
as a training technique. Nobody called it torture then, and we 
certainly weren't talking about a terrorist who cut somebody's head off 
and helped design the attack on the World Trade Center that killed over 
3,000 people.
  CIA Director General Michael B. Hayden said on Fox News Sunday last 
weekend that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made 
us, the United States of America, safer. It really did work. And the 
thing that bothers me, instead of using enhanced interrogation 
techniques to go after these terrorists to find out what's going on, 
we're instead bringing them from Guantanamo to New York City. Well, 
they've stopped that now because it's going to cost $250 million, at 
least, and the mayor of the city said he doesn't want that to go on. 
But we were going to bring these terrorists that killed all these 
Americans and did all these horrible things like cutting off people's 
heads and hanging them from bridges in Fallujah, and we were going to 
bring them to New York. And we're providing them with legal help. We're 
providing them with guidance.
  And this guy that flew into Detroit and tried to blow up an airplane 
with 230-some people on it, we gave him his Miranda rights. Then, after 
that, we went over to his home country and brought his mother and 
father back so they could talk to him to convince him to talk to the 
American intelligence people. Is that the way you conduct intelligence 
gathering--giving them Miranda rights, bringing them to the United 
States after they've done these horrible things to Americans? They're 
terrorists.
  We are in a war against terrorism and within bounds we should use 
every enhanced technique we can come up with to elicit information from 
these terrorists before they kill Americans. We should be going after 
them with everything we have instead of providing legal defense for 
them. They are not Americans. They're terrorists who want to destroy 
the United States of America. And we as Americans need to realize that 
and do whatever is necessary, including using enhanced interrogation 
techniques like waterboarding, which we've done with the military--our 
military--in order to save this country and protect it from terrorism.

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