[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17908-17909]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




PERHAPS PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR WILL ANSWER CONGRESS' QUESTIONS ABOUT 
                          INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, Thursday will be a very historic day. 
Prime Minister Tony Blair of England will be scheduled to appear in 
this room before a joint session to make a speech and perhaps receive 
the Congressional Gold Medal. I understand it is not ready yet so he 
probably will not get it just now.
  It was also in this very same room that President Bush said in his 
State of the Union speech that ``the British government has learned 
that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium 
from Africa.'' It turns out that information Mr. Bush had was already 
understood to be bogus. Our CIA had already told the British that. Yet 
the President included that fact in his State of the Union message. 
Apparently, the British indicated they had other information in 
addition to the crude forgeries indicating that Iraq was trying to buy 
uranium from Niger.
  This has put President Bush in an awkward position. As people in the 
administration seek to blame one another and now the British and now 
the French and now the Italians, why and how did this happen?
  Mr. Speaker, we have an historic opportunity. In Parliament, the 
Prime Minister faces MPs and responds directly to their questions. If 
we had the British system, we could go to Mr. Bush directly to solve 
this conundrum instead of relying on Ari Fleischer. Perhaps Mr. Blair 
will be kind enough to allow us the privilege that British

[[Page 17909]]

MPs enjoy and we can ask him what happened. I really want to know. 
Don't my colleagues?
  When we debated the award for Mr. Blair for the Congressional Gold 
Medal, I objected. I said it was either too early or too late. Either 
it should have been done when we did not know what was going on, or now 
that we have got some real questions, it is too late to give it to him. 
We have got to solve the question of what happened.
  I feel even more strongly now that we ought not to proceed in the 
absence of answers to our questions. It appears that Mr. Blair may have 
misled our President or at least our President's speechwriters about 
whether good information existed indicating that Iraq was in the 
process of buying the components of nuclear weapons.
  This is not a small thing. Perhaps Mr. Blair was responsible for the 
administration's discredited claim that one of the September 11 
hijackers met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Perhaps Mr. Blair was 
the source of the administration's discredited claim that Iraq was 
buying special aluminum tubes for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. 
These and many more statements made by Mr. Powell, Mr. Rumsfeld, Dr. 
Rice, Mr. Fleischer and even the President have been found to be 
incorrect.
  We have not been told why our officials made so many misstatements 
about Iraq prior to going to war. If our leaders were led astray by the 
Prime Minister, we surely should not honor them with the Congressional 
Gold Medal. Of course, we certainly ought not to subcontract our 
decisions on war and peace to a foreign country's intelligence 
apparatus. How much we may like Mr. Blair means nothing. We ought to 
trust our own people.
  So maybe the problem is with ourselves. For example, why do we spend 
$30 billion on intelligence and yet no one is capable of fact-checking 
a State of the Union speech? Why have we sacrificed the lives of more 
than 200 young Americans? We have been told they would protect our 
country from immediate danger posed by Saddam's barrels of nerve gas 
and biological toxins and nuclear weapons and al Qaeda and all the 
rest, but the information was weak, bad and apparently manipulated.
  I think the people of Iraq are better off than they were before the 
United States took out the Saddam Hussein regime, but I am not sure 
that these Americans who died there were supposed to die to improve the 
lives of Iraqis. I think they were ready to die to protect their own 
country, the United States of America, from weapons of mass destruction 
that threaten our shores and our people.
  I am sure that the young people from Britain who have died were 
similarly protecting their own country.
  Perhaps Mr. Blair will answer our questions when he comes to the 
Chamber on Thursday. Perhaps as Head of State Mr. Blair will take 
personal responsibility for the errors that pervaded the intelligence 
he repeatedly cited and not let people who work for him take the blame. 
Perhaps Mr. Blair will set an example for our own President to follow. 
That would be worth a Congressional Gold Medal.

                          ____________________