[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 18434-18437]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gingrey). The gentleman from 
Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 40 minutes.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, enough is enough. I sat in 
my office last night and listened to Member after Member on the other 
side rail about President Bush and whether or not we could trust him in 
the Iraqi situation. I have listened to my colleagues tonight. Enough 
is enough. Mr. Speaker, this is just outrageous.
  So what I have done is I have got a whole file here, and I am going 
to remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle about their 
President for the previous 8 years, and I am going to cite articles and 
claims and I am going to cite the justification for the invasion of 
Yugoslavia as outlined by President Clinton.
  Where were these voices, where were these petitions, where were these 
outcries when President Clinton told us about the Balkans mass deaths 
to justify NATO's invasion into the Balkans? The Clinton administration 
claimed that ethnic cleansing had killed hundreds of thousands of 
people, and I will include the articles from the papers in the 
Congressional Record.
  The Clinton administration was later criticized, and I have newspaper 
articles here to back it up by the press for grossly exaggerating the 
number of victims of ethnic cleansing, the mass graves. President 
Clinton told us we would find 100,000 people that were murdered and 
that was his justification for using NATO for the only time ever to 
invade a non-NATO country in order to justify a war against Slobodan 
Milosevic where U.S. citizens, where U.S. troops, and where innocent 
Serbs were killed. That is the first example.
  And how about when President Clinton, to justify preservation of the 
outdated ABM treaty and to resist congressional pressure to deploy 
national missile defense asserted that the U.S. would not face an ICBM 
threat from rogue states for decades? In fact, in 1995 the Clinton 
administration took the unprecedented step of releasing a classified 
national intelligence estimate in an effort to sway public opinion 
because he had vetoed the defense bill. The notorious NIE-95-19 was 
widely criticized by experts, including the Clinton administration's 
own director of the CIA, Jim Woolsey, because he said that the 
President was exaggerating the facts. Just 3 years later in August of 
1998, North Korea exposed the Clinton administration lie when it tested 
an ICBM missile, the Taepo Dong-1 missile. But the Clinton 
administration used the CIA to mislead this Congress. His own CIA 
director, Jim Woolsey, on the public record said so.
  Let us talk about the agreed-upon framework. It was the Clinton 
administration that credited itself with stopping the emergence of a 
nuclear-armed North Korea when it concluded the agreed-framework with 
Pyongyang in 1994. Critics pointed out that North Korea had already 
built one or two atomic bombs and was continuing its nuclear weapons 
program, cheating on the agreed framework. Among these critics was the 
North Korea advisory group of this body and we stated in November 1999 
that North Korea was developing atomic weapons despite the agreed 
framework. And what did the administration do? They said it was not 
happening.
  Recently, North Korea exposed the Clinton administration lie when 
Pyongyang admitted that for the past several years it had been cheating 
on the agreed framework.
  How about the most famous Clinton administration distortion, the 
grand lie? On over 100 occasions, including two State of the Union 
speeches, President Clinton credited himself with making America's 
children safe from the threat of nuclear war through the Moscow 
declaration of 1994 that supposedly removed the U.S. as a target from 
the guidance systems of Russian missiles. Less than 1 month after 
detargeting was supposed to take effect, during a major Russian 
strategic forces exercise held on June 22, 1994, Russian missile 
launches simulated strikes on the U.S., but President Clinton in the 
State of the Union speech on two occasions said you can sleep well 
tonight, America, because we have reassured the children of America 
that there is no fear of an offensive missile attack from Russia 
because we have detargeted those missiles.
  High-ranking Russian officials contradicted the Clinton 
administration. In fact, Anton Surikov, a senior adviser to the Russian 
Ministry of Defense, acknowledged in a March 1995 interview, and this 
is after the State of the Union speech, when it was decided to detarget 
missiles, the decision was mostly of a political, propaganda character. 
And yet our President was at that podium telling the American people in 
two State of the Union speeches, you have nothing to worry about.
  Where were my colleagues on the other side? Were they asleep? Where 
were their petition gatherings? Where were their demands for the 
honesty of the White House? Where were their outcries for the neck of 
the President? Where was their righteous indignation that we have been 
hearing on this floor tonight from my colleagues and last night from my 
colleagues? The silence is deafening because it is all partisan 
rhetoric. It is nothing but partisan rhetoric with no basis of 
substance.
  President Clinton's former Director of CIA in testimony before 
Congress on February 12, 1998, said that the detargeting agreement was 
unverifiable, quickly reversible, and characterized as misleading.
  Mr. Speaker, that was not a Republican talking; that was Jim Woolsey, 
CIA Director under Bill Clinton, calling his own President, who 
appointed him, misleading.
  Where were the outcries from the other side? Where were the liberal 
groups across America demanding that President Clinton be held 
accountable? Where were they? All of a sudden today, this righteous 
indignation ringing out from our Democratic colleagues is sickening and 
disgusting.
  Let us talk about M-11 missiles in Pakistan. The Clinton 
administration credited itself with greatly improving relations with 
China and achieving an

[[Page 18435]]

understanding with Beijing on nonproliferation of technologies for 
missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Yet compelling evidence soon 
emerged that China was exporting M-11 missiles to Pakistan in direct 
violation of its understanding with the Clinton administration and the 
Missile Technology Control Regime.
  The Clinton administration resisted congressional pressure to impose 
sanctions on China even though that is what should have been done for 
violating its commitments because it wanted to protect the 
administration's foreign policy record and public standing in the 
polls.

                              {time}  2330

  Consequently, despite overwhelming evidence that China was exporting 
missiles to Pakistan, the Clinton administration pretended that those 
missiles did not exist.
  Mr. Speaker, in one night, in one day, I have listed five times of 
major significance that the leader of the party of the other side, 
these righteous, indignant people who have railed and whined and cried 
on the floor of this body said nothing about lies to the American 
people.
  Mr. Speaker, some would say, well, these did not involve death of 
American citizens or war, and I would remind my colleagues, the 
justification that President Clinton used to take this country into war 
in Yugoslavia was basically a bunch of false information. In fact, it 
was the USA Today in July of 1999, an article that said, ``As the 
allied forces take control in Kosovo, many of the figures used by the 
Clinton administration and NATO were greatly exaggerated. Six hundred 
thousand ethnic Albanian men were not trapped within Kosovo or buried 
in mass graves, as President Clinton told a veterans group. Instead of 
100,000 ethnic Albanian men feared murdered, officials now estimate 
about 10,000; and we think the confirmed number was 3,000.''
  Mr. Speaker, that was from USA Today in 1999.
  Let us go to the Little Rock newspapers. They did an investigative 
story on January 16, 2000, after the Clinton administration had made 
these outrageous claims of ethnic cleansing. Why did they say these 
things, Mr. Speaker? Because they wanted the Congress and they wanted 
the American people to support his war to get Milosevic out of power.
  Let us read some of the quotes from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 
January 16, 2000:
  ``Of 500 potential grave sites, 150 have been opened and, no, we have 
not found the 100,000 missing declared by President Clinton, or the 
lower but probably equally preposterous figure of 10,000 advanced by 
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and repeated by the BBC.''
  This was not the Republican Party. This was the Arkansas Democrat 
Gazette on January 16, 2000, saying that all the justification that 
Clinton used to go to war in Yugoslavia was false, it was erroneous.
  Where was the outcry by these liberal groups in this country? Where 
was the outcry by the Democrats we have seen running down to the well 
complaining that this President needs to be investigated? Where was the 
consistency of the principled position of my colleagues on the other 
side?
  Let us go on, Mr. Speaker, with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette article 
of January 16, 2000: ``We have more than 10,000 photographs of graves, 
sites and bodies, and more than 300 hours of video, and we share all 
our evidence with the war crimes tribunal. From survivors who are 
giving us testimonies, we calculate there were 6,000 Kosovo Albanians 
killed in the 3 months of the war,'' not before the war, in the 3 
months of the war which President Clinton led, ``and perhaps 2,000 
still in Serbian prisons.''
  Listen to this, Mr. Speaker. In the previous 12 months before the 
war, there were 1,000 killed. So 1,000 were killed in the previous 
months, 6,000 were killed in the immediate 3 months of the war itself 
by the bombs of the U.S., France and Germany and the other NATO 
countries.
  ``But then the figures become a little vague. The total of dead and 
missing becomes 7,000 rather than 8,000; the figure of prewar killings 
rises from 1,000 to 2,000.'' Mr. Speaker, the information leading up to 
President Clinton's decision to go to war in Yugoslavia is filled with 
gross, not just information distorted, gross distortions of fact, lies.
  Where are my colleagues? What were they saying?
  Let us go on, Mr. Speaker, to some other examples.
  Here is an article from the Washington Post, March 26, 2000. The 
headline, Was It a Mistake? We Were Suckers for the KLA was the 
headline of this article written by Christopher Layne and Benjamin 
Schwartz. Let us go through some of the claims.
  ``Clinton's assertion,'' and I am quoting here, Mr. Speaker, ``at a 
June 25, 1999, postwar news conference that the bombing was a way to 
stop, quote, deliberate, systematic efforts at genocide,'' he called it 
genocide in Kosovo. It goes on to say, ``was either disingenuous or 
ignorant. Before the start of NATO's bombing on March 24, 1999, almost 
2,000 civilians, overwhelmingly ethnic Albanians but also Serbs, had 
been killed in 15 months of bitter warfare. Up to that point, there had 
been no genocide or ethnic cleansing.'' The genocide and ethnic 
cleansing started when Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac started the war 
against Milosevic.
  I will go on, Mr. Speaker, this same article, Washington Post, March 
26, 2000:
  ``Not only did the forced removal of civilians result from the NATO 
bombing, but administration claims of mass killings, made to rally 
popular support for the war, turn out to have been exaggerated. Clinton 
defended the intervention on the grounds that the Yugoslavs had 
slaughtered tens of thousands.'' President Clinton said tens of 
thousands, Mr. Speaker. It never turned out to be true. All lies. 
Secretary of Defense William Cohen termed it a, quote, horrific 
slaughter. The numbers we now have, according to this article in the 
Post, disprove those claims. U.N. numbers and U.S. numbers and Allied 
numbers say the information provided to Congress was wrong.
  Let us go on to a story in the Contra Costa Times, March 4, 2000. 
``We became involved in Kosovo after being bombarded with exorbitant 
claims of ethnic cleansing, subsequently proven exaggerated and largely 
committed after NATO started bombing.''
  Another newspaper, Mr. Speaker. I do not remember my colleagues 
quoting from these papers. I do not remember my colleagues coming to 
the floor and demanding an investigation of Bill Clinton for distorting 
things. Not only were these distortions, they were outright, outright 
lies.
  We will go on with that Contra Costa story of March 4, 2000:
  ``As a result of false and misleading news reports, Americans were 
led to believe tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of 
ethnic Albanians were killed by the Serbs and buried in mass graves. 
Many are still under that impression.
  ``According to U.N. investigators who have been scouring the area 
since the bombing stopped, the total number of ethnic Albanians killed 
by the Serbs is closer to 2,000, far fewer than the number of civilians 
killed by NATO bombers.''
  Let me repeat that statement again, Mr. Speaker. Listen to this, 
please, quoted from the Contra Costa Times, March 4, 2000: ``According 
to U.N. investigators who scoured the area since the bombing stopped, 
the total number of ethnic Albanians killed by the Serbs is closer to 
2,000, far fewer than the total number of civilians killed by NATO 
bombers.''
  Let us go on to some additional articles, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, 
the distortions of the other side are outrageous. I did not want to get 
up and do this. But I, Mr. Speaker, was sick and tired of sitting in my 
office listening to Members parade down here, 1-hour special orders, 
talking about how they were misled. What a crock, Mr. Speaker.
  First of all, if any Member of Congress was misled by President 
Bush's State of the Union speech, then there has got to be something 
wrong with them, because the vote to give the

[[Page 18436]]

President the use of force was in October of last year. What did they 
do, read the speech 3 months before it occurred? The vote did not come 
after the President's speech. These Members on the other side who voted 
to give the President the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein voted 
in the fall of last year, 3 months before President Bush made the State 
of the Union speech here.
  Mr. Speaker, it is all partisan rhetoric, and I am sick of it. I am 
sick of it because it has no place. It has no place in this body on 
such a serious issue as our effort to fight the war on terrorism.
  We saw the same thing with the agreed-upon framework, the lies about 
how we had stopped the nuclear program, and we found out just last 
summer that the North Koreans publicly admitted that they now had a 
highly enriched uranium program, were building nuclear bombs, 
reprocessing rods and could have cared less about an agreement signed 
in 1994. Yet the Clinton administration told us all along, don't worry.
  Mr. Speaker, the North Korean advisory committee that issued a report 
to this body in 1999 had all of that documentation contained inside of 
it.
  And, Mr. Speaker, I mentioned before the President's most famous line 
in the nineties, President Clinton's most famous line, that he did two 
times from that podium, was to stand up to the American people, look in 
the camera and bite his lip and say, you know, tonight the American 
people can sleep well because their children are protected, because no 
longer are Russian missiles pointed at America's children.
  Mr. Speaker, that was a lie. It was a lie because the leader that I 
quoted from the Russian media said it, that it was purely for political 
purposes.

                              {time}  2340

  Jim Woolsey, who was Clinton's CIA Director, repeatedly said he 
wished the President would stop making those statements because there 
was no way to verify a detargeting practice. Did I hear my colleagues 
stand up and say what are they doing? Let us have an investigation of 
the President? Let us ask for an inquiry about what he is saying? Did I 
hear one Member on that side besides Jim Woolsey stand up publicly and 
say that Bill Clinton was misleading the American people? All of a 
sudden now it is election time, and they are attempting to tear George 
Bush down.
  Mr. Speaker, it is absolutely sickening. It is disgusting, and I am 
not going to let it stand. If I have to get up here every night and 
repeat this information and ask my colleagues where they were during 
the 1990s, then I will do that.
  On February 12, 1998, President Clinton's former CIA Director, Jim 
Woolsey, in testimony before Congress, strongly condemned as 
``misleading'' the President's repeated claims that missile detargeting 
had reduced the Russian nuclear threat.
  Let me read what Jim Woolsey said, Mr. Speaker. This is what Jim 
Woolsey, Bill Clinton's hand-appointed CIA Director said about the 
President: ``I wish he (President Clinton) would not continue to make 
that statement (about Russian missile detargeting) because though it 
may be technically correct . . . it is misleading . . . These missiles, 
(based upon) everything I have known about them over the years, could 
be retargeted'' in a manner of minutes or seconds. ``It is almost like 
saying . . . if I had a revolver here in my pocket and I took it out 
and pointed it at the ceiling, saying I am not targeting'' it, ``it is 
true. I would not be . . . I am pointing it at the ceiling. But if I 
lowered it,'' within a matter of seconds, ``I would be. It just takes a 
few seconds.''
  In fact, Mr. Speaker, in an article written by Michael Waller for the 
American Foreign Policy Council about this whole issue of detargeting, 
it was actually not an article but it was testimony before the House 
Committee on Armed Services, he said about President Clinton's claim: 
``This is a very serious claim. Yet technical experts say that the 
claim is impossible to make truthfully because the detargeting 
agreement is inherently impossible to verify.''
  Mr. Speaker, I could go on and on. I did the research in 1 day. I 
could have gone on and probably spent weeks and weeks getting tons of 
additional information about the misstatements, about the denial of the 
missiles that were sent to Pakistan, about the misleading information 
leading up to the war in Kosovo. Yet we never heard one peep out of the 
other body. I raise all of these facts, Mr. Speaker, only as a 
defensive response to my colleagues on the other side. They have made 
such outrageous claims, and I heard it in 5-minute speeches tonight. I 
heard it in 1-hour Special Orders last night. I heard it right before I 
spoke here tonight like somehow this is not going to go refuted and, 
Mr. Speaker, I cannot do that. George Bush had the decency and honesty 
to say that when he made the State of the Union speech from that 
podium, perhaps that information given him, even though today he 
maintains it is still factually correct, should not have been included 
in the State of the Union speech. He was honest.
  Where was the honesty of the previous President? Where was the other 
party that was down here railing about Bush and demanding a retraction? 
Where were these interest groups on the Internet demanding that we have 
accountability through petition drives? Where were they? They did not 
exist because they are a part of the Democrat machine that did not care 
what Bill Clinton said, did not care about distortions, did not care 
about out-and-out lies.
  Mr. Speaker, I cannot put this entire statement in the Record because 
it would not be acceptable. I am going to put the major thrust of it in 
the Record, and I am going to ask that the quotations that I have 
outlined be highlighted for my colleagues to read tomorrow and for the 
American people to see.
  Mr. Speaker, the vote on supporting the use of force for President 
Bush was not taken after the President's State of the Union speech. The 
vote by my colleagues, and they claim they were affected by what he 
said. I do not know how they could have been affected because that vote 
was taken last October, 3 months before President Bush spoke here; and 
what is interesting, Mr. Speaker, is the vote was not close. Colleagues 
on both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly supported giving the 
President the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Why did 
we do that? Because Saddam Hussein for 10 years had denied the demands 
of the unified world community. Everyone knew he had weapons of mass 
destruction. He used them on his own people. In a previous floor 
speech, I gave the numbers of the amount of innocent Iraqi people and 
Kurdish people that were killed. But what amazes me, Mr. Speaker, is 
this rhetoric coming from the other side.
  I heard one of my colleagues stand up and say never has a President 
used force to remove someone from office for human rights violations. 
And I remember who the speaker was, Mr. Speaker; but I am not going to 
name him tonight, but I know the gentleman and if I get pressed on it, 
I will name him and I will pull his comments out of the Congressional 
Record. Where was that gentleman, who happens to be a Democrat, when 
President Clinton justified the use of our military to remove Slobodan 
Milosevic from power because of human rights violations? Where are my 
colleagues? In fact, that is exactly what happened.
  I think the administration made some mistakes in leading up to the 
Iraqi war. I remember being on this floor, Mr. Speaker, when Secretary 
of State Colin Powell was giving us a briefing, and he was talking 
about weapons of mass destruction. I had a chance to ask him a 
question. I said, Mr. Secretary, you need to talk more about the human 
rights abuses of Saddam Hussein, which the American people can relate 
to. After all, it was Bill Clinton who justified the use of force to 
remove Milosevic from power for human rights violations, and everyone 
in the world from the U.N. to Amnesty International admits publicly 
that Saddam Hussein is far worse than Milosevic ever was. So why do you 
not

[[Page 18437]]

bring out the human rights violations of Saddam Hussein?
  Why would my colleagues on the other side think it was okay to 
support President Clinton in using military force to remove Milosevic 
from power, and, by the way, they did not go to the U.N. for that vote 
because France knew Russia would veto a U.N. resolution? How could they 
support that military action, but then question President Bush when he 
uses military action to remove the worst human rights violator since 
Adolph Hitler from power just this year? And that claim of Saddam 
Hussein's being the worst human rights violator since Adolph Hitler 
does not come from me. It comes from the U.N. Special Rappateur for 
human rights when he was comparing the human rights record of Saddam 
Hussein.
  Mr. Speaker, enough is enough. Members of the other side have whined. 
They have cried. They have screamed. They have been absolutely 
outrageously loud in saying that George Bush needs to be held 
accountable. Mr. Speaker, George Bush is accountable. The U.S. Congress 
supported the President in his actions against Saddam. Almost 50 
nations of the world supported George Bush in our actions against 
Saddam. Many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle supported 
George Bush in his actions against Saddam. And they did not do that 
because of any speech made here. They did it because of the facts. And 
for my colleagues to run around this city, for the contenders for the 
Presidency on the Democrat side to go to a national forum and declare 
that George Bush has misled the American people is garbage. It is 
poppycock. There has been no misleading. If my colleagues on the other 
side and if the nine candidates for the Presidential nomination of the 
other party want to take and look at some misleading statements, I 
invite them to get the Congressional Record from tonight.
  Look at the facts, Mr. Speaker. Look at the facts on the Balkan mass 
death claims, those hundreds of thousands of people that Bill Clinton 
said were murdered that justified our use of military action. Look at 
the President's statements about new missile threats and how the 
national intelligence estimate in 1995 was politicized, the only 
national intelligence estimate ever changed by the CIA because of the 
Rumsfeld Commission, 3 years after Bill Clinton vetoed our defense bill 
based on his misstatements; the agreed-upon framework with North Korea 
where the Clinton administration, until it left office, said that it 
was in fact successful in accomplishing the objective of eliminating 
the North Korean nuclear program. Lies and distortions. The detargeting 
agreement, President Clinton's famous statement of over 100 times. In 
fact, we used to have a contract to keep track of him.

                              {time}  2350

  It got up to 135 times, that we could count, that President Clinton's 
speeches made the same statement he made twice here from this pulpit, 
distorting the facts to the American people for his political benefit, 
or the story about the M-11 missiles not being in Pakistan, when 
everyone knew they were there. These are just a few, Mr. Speaker.
  Mr. Speaker, I will make this commitment to my colleagues. If this 
partisan rhetoric continues on the floor, I will be back here every 
night and I will refute it, and I will bring out more of the gross 
Clinton lies and distortions which that side remained silent on year 
after year after year. I challenge them to end this garbage. Enough is 
enough, Mr. Speaker.

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