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1A) Cooperation with Indonesia Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy

TEXT OF A PROPOSED PROTOCOL AMENDING THE AGREEMENT FOR COOPERATION BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE GOVERNMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA CONCERNING PEACEFUL USES OF NUCLEAR ENERGY--PM 70 -- (Senate - March 04, 2004)

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   The PRESIDING OFFICER laid before the Senate the following message from the President of the United States, together with an accompanying report; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations:

To the Congress of the United States:

   I am pleased to transmit to the Congress, consistent with sections 123 b. and 123 d. of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2153(b), (d)) (the ``Act''), the text of a proposed Protocol Amending the Agreement for Cooperation Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Indonesia Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, signed at Washington on June 30, 1980. I also transmit my written approval, authorization, and determination concerning the Protocol, and an unclassified Nuclear Proliferation Assessment Statement (NPAS) concerning the Protocol. (Consistent with section 123 of the Act, as amended by title XII of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-277), a classified Annex to the NPAS, prepared by the Secretary of State in consultation with the Director of Central Intelligence, summarizing relevant classified information, will be submitted to the Congress separately.) The joint memorandum submitted to me by the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Energy and a letter from the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stating the views of the Commission are also enclosed.

   I am advised that the proposed Protocol has been negotiated consistent with the Act and other applicable law and that it meets all statutory requirements. This Protocol will advance the nonproliferation and other foreign policy interests of the United States.

   The Protocol amends the Agreement for Cooperation Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Indonesia Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy in two respects:

   1. It extends the Agreement, which expired by its terms on December 30, 2001, until December 30, 2031, with effect from the former date; and

   2. It updates certain provisions of the Agreement relating to the physical protection of nuclear material subject to the Agreement.

   As amended by the proposed Protocol, the Agreement will continue to meet all requirements of U.S. law.

   Indonesia is a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and has an agreement with the IAEA for the application of full-scope safeguards to its nuclear program. It was also among the early sponsors of, and is a current party to, the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. The United States and Indonesia have had a long and positive history of cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, with our earliest agreement for this purpose dating back to 1960.

   I have considered the views and recommendations of the interested agencies in reviewing the proposed Protocol and have determined that its performance will promote, and will not constitute an unreasonable risk to, the common defense and security. Accordingly, I have approved the Protocol and authorized its execution and urge that the Congress give it favorable consideration.

   This transmission shall constitute a submittal for purposes of both sections 123 b. and 123 d. of the Atomic Energy Act. My Administration is prepared to begin immediately the consultations with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House International Relations Committee consistent with section 123 b. Upon completion of the 30-day continuous session period provided for in section 123 b., the 60-day continuous session period provided for in section 123 d. shall commence.

   George W. Bush.

   THE WHITE HOUSE, March 4, 2004.

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4A) Iraq Intelligence

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I would like to start by saying I believe our colleagues who scheduled this debate today have done a great service to this body and to the American people. The topic of the United States in the world and specifically the United States in the war on terror is of great importance to the American people. They deserve to have the kind of elevated discussion we are giving this evening.

   This should not be a partisan issue. Rather, it is an issue of our national and personal security. Never in our Nation's history have we been so dependent on credible intelligence for our safety and security as we are today.

   The real test all of us will face as policymakers on behalf of the people of the United States will be how wise we are in identifying the problems we need to address and how willing we are to cast away the anchor of the status quo and initiate real reforms. In both of those efforts, one of our strongest assets will be our American intelligence.

   If we were to ask any person who has a reasonable knowledge of the capabilities of terrorists and the extent of America's vulnerability the question, what is the likelihood the United States of America will suffer another successful terrorist attack on our homeland within the next 5 years, the consensus answer is certainly going to be almost a 100 percent likelihood of a successful attack.

   That is a sad but true fact. It is a sad but true fact which is unnecessary. In part, it is unnecessary because we need to initiate the reforms within our intelligence community. Reforms we have learned from the experience of September 11, and learned again in the war against Iraq and, I suggest, we will learn again in the incidents that have led up to the events in Haiti, the lack of transforming our intelligence community to a set of agencies that can effectively understand, interpret, and then assist policymakers in making decisions that will make us more secure, those reforms have not been made.

   It is also unfortunately true there has been a lack of accountability. We have had major intelligence failures in the last 3 years. Yet, as of today, virtually no one has been held accountable for those. What signal does that send to our agency and our adversaries, that we are willing to tolerate performance that is less than acceptable, or to benefit by performance which is beyond the call of duty, and the former is not sanctioned and the latter is not recognized.

   What I think we are facing this evening is a series of deficits that will prove as significant to the future of the American people as the skyrocketing budget deficit of this administration will be to our economic future. These deficits include a deficit in judgment. The reality is in the spring of 2002, the United States and our coalition partners had the terrorist group which had perpetrated the tragedy of September 11 on the ropes in Afghanistan. But a decision was made in the early spring--a decision which military officials

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close to its implementation describe as an ending of the war on terror in Afghanistan and a substitution of a manhunt in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a redirection of American intelligence and military personnel and resources to commence the war in Iraq.

   This was more than a year before the war actually started. If you will read the front page of this past Sunday's New York Times, it talks about the fact that we are now, 2 years later, beginning to reintensify our efforts in Afghanistan, and we are returning to Afghanistan those very military and intelligence resources that were shifted to Iraq in the beginning of the spring of 2002.

   So the consequence of making a decision that our greater enemy was Saddam Hussein than the enemy which had already shown the capability, the will, and the presence in the United States to effectively strike us on September 11 has

   been to allow our greater enemy to become yet stronger.

   Al-Qaida is a powerful network today. It is a powerful network which is less hierarchical, more entrepreneurial, more diffuse, more difficult to attack--especially as al-Qaida cells form alliances with other radical Islamic groups. We missed the opportunity in the spring of 2002 to have cut off the head of this snake because we exercised unacceptably poor judgment as to which was the greater danger to the people of the United States.

   What is the report card on that decision of judgment? I quote from a statement made by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. George Tenet, on Tuesday of last week. This is what the leader of our American intelligence community said:

   ..... We have made notable strides. But do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that al-Qaida is defeated. It is not. We are still at war. This is a learning organization that remains committed to attacking the United States, its friends and allies.

   Continuing to quote from the director of the CIA:

   Successive blows to al-Qaida's central leadership has transformed the organization into a loose collection of regional networks that operate almost autonomously. These regional components have demonstrated their operational prowess in the past year.

   The sites of their attacks span the entire reach of al-Qaida--Morocco, Kenya, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia.

   And al-Qaida seeks to influence the regional networks with operational training, consultations, and money. .....

   You should not take the fact that these attacks occurred abroad to mean the threat to the United States homeland has waned. As al-Qaida and associated groups undertook these attacks overseas, detainees consistently talked about the importance the group still attaches to striking the main enemy: the United States.

   In conclusion, the Director of Central Intelligence made this chilling observation:

   The steady growth of Osama bin Laden's anti-U.S. sentiment through the wider Sunni extremist movement, and the broad dissemination of al-Qaida's destructive expertise, ensure that a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future--with or without al-Qaida in the picture.

   That is the residue of the decision to allow the snake of al-Qaida to regenerate itself because we determined that the greater enemy to the United States--the enemy which had the greater capability to threaten the people of the United States of America--was Saddam Hussein. We have paid and we will pay a significant price for that flawed judgment.

   There is also a deficit in credibility. Once the administration made the decision at least as early as the spring of 2002--and probably earlier--it used incredible information to convince the Congress and the American people to support that invasion.

   To pick one example which has been widely reported, the administration knew, or should have known, that it was using misleading information about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, about yellow cake from Niger, about the existence of tubes which could be used for centrifuges to make nuclear products, and about the connections of Saddam Hussein's regime with the tragedy of 9/11.

   On several occasions, it was a leading figure within the administration, including the Vice President of the United States, who went to the intelligence agencies, asked for further information on the specific charge relative to Saddam Hussein's status as a producer and user of weapons of mass destruction, received from the intelligence agencies a report indicating it was a fabrication, and yet the administration continued to recycle incredible misinformation.

   The administration's fondness for calling Iraq the new front in the war on terror has become a self-fulfilling proposition. There is little, if any, evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida and that terrorist networks were active in the sections of Iraq that were controlled by Saddam Hussein.

   What now? Now we have created chaos in Iraq, and in spite of the bravery and professionalism of our troops, we have seen a situation in which the terrorist organizations which did not exist in Iraq prior to the war have now become serious threats to the stability of that country and to the lives of American fighting men and women.

   This is how the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, VADM Lowell Jacoby, described the situation in Iraq when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday of last week:

   Foreign fighters who have entered Iraq since the end of the war have carried out some of the most significant attacks, including suicide bombings. Left unchecked, Iraq has the potential to serve as a training ground for the next generation of terrorists.

   There was minimal to no al-Qaida influence in Iraq before the war. Now, and this is credible, al-Qaida has found a new base of operations in Iraq. There is also a deficit of trust in the American people. This great democracy has had, as one of its fundamental values, that the people of America will serve their role as citizens only if they are fully informed about the operations of their Government. But why does this administration not want to let the people know the truth about our foreign policy and about the decisionmaking that takes place in forming that foreign policy?

   This President lacks a basic respect for the common sense of the American people and relies excessively on secrecy, not to protect the national interests but to avoid political embarrassment.

   I cochaired the House-Senate joint inquiry into the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Our joint committee produced a lengthy report, some 800 pages, which focused on, among other things, the findings relative to the support which one or more foreign governments had provided to some, if not all, of the 19 terrorists.

   The executive branch, after 7 months of examining our report, insisted on censoring the 27 pages of our report that contain the most important findings about that foreign support. It reached this level of absurdity. The Ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, responding to media speculation that it was his government mentioned in those 27

   pages, pleaded with the President and his administration that the full report be released. ``How can I defend my kingdom against attacks of treacherous nature unless I can know what is the basis of those attacks?'' It was not just the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Foreign Minister of the Kingdom flew to Washington to plead for the declassification, for the release of this information so that he could also defend the honor of the Kingdom.

   The President refused that request even before the Foreign Minister had reached the White House. Are we supposed to believe there wasn't some coordination of efforts, that there were private assurances of maintaining the status quo despite public pleas for release?

   This President has shown that he does not believe the American people have the right nor the ability to effectively utilize information which will help them to understand who to hold accountable and to participate in reforms necessary for their security.

   These are some of the deficits we have seen as a result of the events before and particularly after September 11, that we have seen in the preparation for the war in Iraq, and which we may well see repeated in the circumstances leading up to the current anarchy that grips Haiti.

   Again, I conclude by saying how pleased I am that Senator Kyl and other colleagues have given us the chance to have this discussion. We, too, have a responsibility to the American people to offer them the best security

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that the Government can provide. There is no cave, there is no spider hole that we will be able to hide in to escape that responsibility should there be another terrorist attack on our homeland and we have not utilized the information of our previous failures to make our Nation more secure.

   Let us look in the mirror. The face we see will share the responsibility for the loss of life and for the deficits I have outlined which are unacceptable in our democratic society.

   Before I conclude, I would like to say that I believe the value of this debate has indicated the value of similar debates on other issues that have wide public concern. I will soon seek unanimous consent that we schedule time for a debate of this nature on the floor of the Senate on a regular basis for the remainder of this session.

   I propose that the next issue to be discussed be our budget deficit, the inheritance of debt that we are going to leave to our people. The suggestion made recently by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board that we make tax cuts permanent while we also cut benefits for Social Security and Medicare could help in framing the choices that we will have in dealing with this budget deficit.

   The American people deserve from this, the greatest deliberative body in the world, to pay attention to their future. They deserve to know that we serve their interests with sound judgment, with credibility, and with respect for those who have given us the opportunity to serve them.

   Thank you, Mr. President.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida yields the floor. Does the Senator suggest the absence of a quorum?

   Mr. GRAHAM of Florida. 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. DAYTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

   Under the previous order, the Senator is recognized for 20 minutes.

   Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues from the other side of the aisle for giving us this opportunity to discuss the matters surrounding the Iraq war, a war in which we are still engaged, a war in which Americans are losing their lives and their limbs on an almost daily basis. I am sure my colleagues have attended funerals, as I have in my own State, of brave men who did not return from that war alive. We all know the human cost that has been involved.

   A number of us were at Walter Reed Hospital 2 weeks ago for an evening with brave men and women who have lost limbs and health, and in some cases will not ever be able to live fully normal lives because of the terrible devastation wreaked on their bodies by the war in Iraq. So what we are talking about tonight is something of enormous importance, something we should have talked about far more often in the past months and year than we have.

   I attempted back in the first months of 2003 to get this body to address some of these critical issues, questions about the information we had been provided even though we had voted previously in October of 2002 on this resolution that the President requested the majority of this body authorize, along with the House, to initiate a war at a time of his determination. But in the weeks preceding that I tried in vain, as did some of my colleagues, to ask the majority leader to bring this matter before the Senate, before the American people again. Unfortunately we were not able to. The decision was made not to create the time and the opportunity to do so.

   Better late than never. This is much later than it should have been. I look forward to this opportunity in the weeks and months ahead because, as I understood from the Senator from Arizona, who was coordinating the time the Republican caucus used before we were given a chance to reply, that whenever the questions were raised, challenges were raised about the use or the misuse of intelligence information by the President of the United States and by his administration, there would be these occasions to discuss those matters again in the future. If that is the case, then I look forward to those opportunities because those questions should be raised. They have been raised before.

   The American people have a right to know the truth, the facts about these matters. Those who have lost sons and daughters over in Iraq, those whose sons and daughters are serving there now, all of us whose lives, whose children, and grandchildren will bear the consequences of these profoundly important decisions that have affected not only the United States and our national security but the stability of the entire world have a right to know the truth.

   Let's have these debates and these considerations as frequently as possible and air these matters fully, particularly since the commissions that have been established--the most recent one, by the President himself singlehandedly--are being precluded from addressing many of these issues like the misuse, as has been alleged, of intelligence information by high intelligence officials. That commission will not be allowed to investigate those matters. It will not have the authority to subpoena documents and information, investigating those matters. We will remain in the dark as those of us on the Senate Armed Services Committee on which I serve will remain in the dark despite our requests repeatedly to have that committee investigate these matters under its jurisdiction. At one point the distinguished chairman of that committee, Senator Warner, a man for whom I have the greatest respect, one of the finest of the men and women with whom I have had the privilege of serving in this body over my 3 years, suggested on a Sunday talk show that would be the appropriate purview of the committee and that should be investigated to its determination of the facts and truth and then, from all accounts, was forcefully dissuaded from that position by higher level officials in the administration who did not want that kind of investigation.

   So if we can't get the facts because we can't get committees of the Senate to look into these matters, if we can't get the facts because the President's own hand-picked commission is going to be prevented by him from investigating and reviewing these matters, then let's use these occasions here on the Senate floor, even if we are going to be, as the

   word was used, ambushed by the Republican caucus on these matters. That was reported last week. This was going to be a big surprise last Thursday. It was reported in one of the Hill newspapers and evidently it was decided to postpone it.

   Today, after we talked, even at our caucus lunch today, the Democratic caucus lunch at 1 o'clock today, based on the information the Democratic leader received from the majority leader, we were going to finish the resolution of the bill before us and then we were going to turn to another piece of legislation. Lo and behold, we found out literally as members of the Republican caucus took the floor this afternoon that this was going to be the subject for debate.

   But so be it. If you want to ambush us on this topic, then do it as frequently as possible so we can present to the American people all the facts, facts they may not receive in any other way.

   Let's go back a minute and review the bidding on this whole matter. Let's go back to January of 2002. Mr. Karl Rove, senior adviser to the President, political strategist, was quoted as telling a Republican political gathering that the winning issue for the Republicans in November of 2002, at the midterm election, would be ``the war.'' By that at the time he meant the war against al-Qaida, against the Taliban in Afghanistan. But evidently in June of 2002, according to published reports based on an interview with the chief of staff of the White House, Andrew Card, published in the New York Times on September 7 of 2002, but referring back to a decision that was, according to Mr. Card, made in June of that year, 3 months earlier, to bring the spotlight onto this supposed immediate, desperate, urgent threat to the national security of the United States and the safety of our people by Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq, the question was asked of Mr. Card by the reporter, why, then, was there this delay until then right before and then right after

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Labor Day of 2002, a good 3 months later, to bring this matter to the attention of Congress and to the American people. Mr. Card's answer, and I quote, was, ``Well, from a marketing standpoint you don't bring out your new products in August.''

   About two sentences later he indicated also the President was on vacation in August. So, instead, we were all, I think, startled--this Senator was certainly surprised to hear from the Vice President, Vice President Cheney, at two conventions of former men and women of the armed services in the last week of August of 2002, where he spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and he announced, ``Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.''

   The President himself then elaborated on these claims time and time again. He conjured up the most serious of threats to this country. On September 26 of 2002, at the time when this body was being pressured to rush to a vote about authorizing a war in Iraq, the President, after meeting with Members of Congress on that date, said:

   The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. .....The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year.

   He continued on that day to say:

   The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. When they have fully materialized, it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.

   On October 7, just 4 days before the October 11 vote in the Senate on the war resolution, the President said:

   We know that Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy--the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.

   He continued:

   We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.

   He also elaborated on claims of Iraq's nuclear weapons program when he said on October 7 of that year:

   The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his ``nuclear mujahideen''--his holy warriors. If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly-enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.

   At that time, 4 days thereafter, the Senate voted historically and, I believe, having voted against that resolution, erroneously to authorize the war with the determination of the President--on a resolution which I believed and still believe is unconstitutional, was premature and, which has ultimately turned out to be the case, unfounded.

   These assertions continued during the fall and then into the new year. Of course, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations and stated that there were thousands of tons of these strains of botulism, of nerve gas agents, of botox, and other substances that were of such enormous quantities that they would have been easily identified by satellite surveillance or by the United Nations weapons inspectors then in Iraq, though at the time none had been found.

   The Vice President again on March 16, just before the eve of the decision by the President to invade Iraq, leveled a serious new allegation that Hussein already had nuclear weapons. He said, ``We know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons,'' and ``We believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.''

   Subsequent events, of course, have proven all of those assertions to be almost totally incorrect.

   Thank God. When United States and British forces invaded Iraq just a few days later, there were no chemical or biological or nuclear weapons used against them. None were found on the battlefield unused or in caches hidden and ready for use or even those weapons materials anywhere in Iraq, as the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, has now indicated in his public statements. He said to our Senate Armed Services Committee that he does not believe they will be found. But the more important fact, the irrefutable fact, is that they did not exist to be used against our Armed Forces. I am grateful for that. But that was the overriding premise--at least I know from a number of my colleagues on this side of the aisle--the overriding factor in their decision to support the resolution in October.

   Under the United Nations charter, under international law, the only justification legally for invading another country, for launching a preemptive attack against another country, starting war against another country, is either an actual attack itself or the imminent danger or threat of an attack against a country.

   It was certainly on that assertion by the administration repeatedly that Members of Congress were persuaded to support the resolution in October. It was that assertion that was made by the President himself and others leading up to and even in the speech the President gave to the Nation the night he authorized that invasion of forces.

   In his State of the Union Address, he made assertions that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. It was not until July 7 of 2003--almost 6 months later, or over 5 months later--that the administration acknowledged for the first time that the President should not have made that statement even though the reports were they knew conclusively as early as March. Some allegations are that they knew even prior to the time, or at the time of that statement, that that was not substantiated, or, in fact in March, a report even said it was false.

   There are other statements that have been made by former CIA intelligence officials, reports made by investigative reporters that refer to information that was available to the administration at the time these various assertions were made that were contrary to facts as they were being reported.

   The linkage to al-Qaida, between Iraq and al-Qaida, is one that I certainly can say from my own direct experience, being involved in probably two dozen top secret briefings in the fall of 2002 and early 2003 with members of the administration, that was something that was repeated, was raised in a most speculative way from other intelligence sources.

   Then it is reported in June of 2003, after all this has been underway, according to the New York Times, two high officials of al-Qaida now in U.S. custody told interrogators, told them before the war in fact, that the organization did not work with Mr. Hussein. Several intelligence officials said no evidence of cooperation had been found in Iraq.

   It caused the CIA Director, George Tenet, to state that:

   ``it was not at all clear there was any coordination or joint activities,'' a CIA source told the Washington Post.

   An article in the Baltimore Sun went on to say:

   Last fall, in a classified assessment of Iraq, the CIA said the only thing that might induce Mr. Hussein to give weapons to terrorists was an American invasion. But month after month, unconstrained by mere facts, the president trumpeted a danger that his own intelligence officials dismissed.

   Yes, there are very serious questions and a most profoundly serious matter reflecting on the veracity of the President of the United States and his officials at the highest levels. The debate should be undertaken here and the American people should have a right to all the facts but they will not get them.

   One of the most disgusting ploys tonight has been to blame President Clinton and Senate Democrats during the 1990s for the supposed curtailment of our Nation's military preparedness and its intelligence operations. Some people are masters at this kind of slander.

   In 2002, there were Republican campaign commercials that put Senator Max Cleland, a Democratic Senator from Georgia, upon the television screen next to pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, claiming that all three of them were enemies of the national security of the United States.

   Senator Cleland was a triple amputee and sat in this chair next to me during my first 2 years of the Senate, the

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most amazing demonstration of human courage I have ever heard. I could scarcely imagine a man who lost three limbs serving in the military in Vietnam, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had voted for every single dollar of President Bush's requested military increases for military spending, for homeland security, every dollar, being smeared as an enemy of this Nation along with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

   Here they go again, smearing President Clinton and even Senator JOHN KERRY. I heard President Clinton attacked by colleagues across the aisle from the day I joined the Senate Armed Services Committee in January of 2001 for supposed military weaknesses. That continued up until the military that President Clinton commanded for 8 years routed the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan 10 months later. Now he is accused of emasculating the Intelligence Agency, causing

   the failures to prevent September 11, 2001, and the failures to inform us properly about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

   Unfortunately, we cannot find out who is and who is not responsible for whatever failures occurred. We cannot find out because President Bush has blocked the 9/11 Commission access to the information that bipartisan group of distinguished Americans has been requesting for months from the administration.

   We will not get to the truth about who misused intelligence information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because the President refused to appoint an independent commission, refused to grant them subpoena powers, and refused to authorize them to investigate the use of intelligence information by himself and his administration.

   If the former administration is the one that is so culpable and if the current administration is so blameless, why wouldn't this administration want those two commissions to have access to all relevant information? Why would this administration block the 9/11 information that its cochairman, former Republican Governor of New Jersey, Thomas Kean, has requested for months on behalf of his Commission? Why won't the President allow his own handpicked Commission to assess the misinformation about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that was provided to Congress and to the American people to investigate all the questions about that colossal misrepresentation of the truth as we later discovered it to be?

   Those are critical questions that affect the future safety of our country and our citizens, whatever flaws existed before September 11, whatever errors were made after September 11, whatever mistakes, whatever lack of communication, whatever misre- porting, misunderstanding, misrepresenting, exaggerating, or improper influencing of information, whatever or wherever it occurred,

   which weakened our national security, must know what that was in order to prevent it from ever happening again.

   That imperative should transcend partisan politics. It should transcend Presidential reelections. It should transcend any consideration except for the safety of this country and of the American people.

   If my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to strengthen our national security, as I know they do--as we all do, because we are Americans first, and we are partisans after that--then I ask them to join us in insisting that the President unshackle those two commissions. Let them find the truth, the whole truth, whatever it might be, wherever it is, whoever it helps, whoever it hinders, so that we can know what we must do to ensure that the horrors of 9/11 never, ever occur again, and to ensure that the serious misinformation about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which influenced Members of this body to support a resolution to authorize the President to start a war against that country--to make sure that kind of misinformation used to justify a war to the American people never, ever happens again.

   So, yes, let's debate these matters as frequently as possible. Let's get out all of the facts. And then let's let the American people decide.

   Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

4B) Iraq Intelligence

   Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, the question of whether or not the intelligence was flawed which was used so forcefully by the administration prior to going to war as the reason for going to war is a question which is going to consume the time of this body and a number of our committees for some time to come. It is a critically important question as to whether or not the intelligence was flawed, not just in terms of the accountability--which is so important if mistakes were made, if exaggerations were undertaken in order to advance the decision to go to war--but also in terms of the future security of this Nation.

   This country went to war, we were told, because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That was the reason that was given over and over again by the administration. Whether or not there were other reasons, and there surely were, for that decision, which could be argued as a basis for the decision, the facts are that the American people were told it was the presence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction which was the basis for attacking that country.

   When a decision is made to go to war based on intelligence, it is a fateful decision. It has ramifications and impacts way beyond the current months and years. If the intelligence is as flawed as this intelligence was, we should find out why.

   Whether people are glad we went to war or are not glad we went to war, whether history will prove we should have waited until we had greater support through the United Nations in order to avoid the kind of aftermath which we have seen, or not--we don't know what history is going to show in that regard--but regardless of the arguments back and forth as to the timing of it, the way in which it was handled, the failure to galvanize the international community so we had a broad array of countries with us, including Muslim nations so we would not be there as a Western occupying power with other Western nations after the military success; whether or not there was adequate planning for the aftermath, and I think it is obvious that there was not adequate planning, but regardless of what position one takes on all of those issues, it is incumbent upon us to find out how in Heaven's name the intelligence could be so far off.

   How could we have 120 top suspect sites for the presence of weapons of mass destruction that were high-level to medium-level sites, where there was confidence that there were weapons of mass destruction either being stored or produced, and we batted zero for 120? How could we be so far off?

   How is it possible that the CIA could tell us, as they did in their assessments, that there were chemical weapons and biological weapons and that a nuclear program was being undertaken again when, in fact, that apparently is not the case? How is it possible that intelligence can be as flawed as is this intelligence?

   Again, regardless of what the arguments are on any side or any issue, I don't think any of us should be in the position of arguing that it is irrelevant to the future security of this Nation whether or not the intelligence upon

   which the decision to go to war was based is important. It is critically important.

   Does North Korea have nuclear weapons or doesn't it have nuclear weapons? Should we put some credibility in the intelligence community's assessment of that? Where is Iran along the continuum of obtaining nuclear weapons? What are their intentions? Should we put confidence in the intelligence community's assessment of that?

   Whether or not we place confidence or make decisions based upon the intelligence community's assessment is critically important. The lives of young men and women, perhaps the life of this Nation, could be dependent upon intelligence which is being assessed by the intelligence community. Life and death decisions are being made by the President of the United States based on decisions and assessments and appraisals of the intelligence community. When it is as wildly off as this intelligence community's assessments apparently were, then it seems to me we better find out for the future health of this country, not just in terms of trying to assess the accountability for past assessments.

   Something happened to the intelligence after 9/11. The pre-2002 intelligence assessments relative to nuclear programs and biological programs and chemical programs were different from the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Some of this has been set forth in the Carnegie Endowment's recent report. There are so many examples of where the intelligence shifted on these critical issues after 9/11.

   A few examples: On the reconstitution of the nuclear program after 1998, the pre-2002 intelligence assessment was that Iraq had probably not continued their research and development program relative to reconstituting a nuclear program after 1998. Yet in October 2002, the intelligence community said, yes, it has restarted its nuclear program after the United Nations left in 1998. What happened between the pre-2002 intelligence assessment and the post-9/11 assessment?

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   What about enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons? Prior to 2002, the assessment was that Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could be used to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. But after 9/11, in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, we have, yes, Iraq has imported aluminum tubes and high-strength magnets. The Department of Energy's disagreement with this conclusion was set forth, but the assessment of the intelligence community shifted after 9/11.

   Whether they attempted to purchase uranium from abroad, the same kind of shift in the intelligence assessment, there were no reports mentioning any attempts to acquire uranium prior to that 2002 assessment, but in 2002, October, suddenly the National Intelligence Assessment says Iraq has been trying to procure uranium ore and yellow cake. Again, disagreement from the Department of State, but that was the assessment of the intelligence community, and on and on. We have this kind of change that occurred in the intelligence assessments.

   What is the explanation for that? What happened? There is no evidence, as the President has mentioned; there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was part of the attack of 9/11, so what happened that caused the intelligence community to shift its assessment of chemical, biological, and nuclear programs after the 9/11 attack on us? That is something which we must find out.

   We must make a determination--hopefully someday there will be an outside commission which will make a comprehensive review of this whole matter--but, in any event, we must do the best we can through the Intelligence Committee.

   I am making an effort, the Armed Services Committee, my staff, to look into these issues, particularly as they relate to the question of how intelligence affected the operations and the planning relative to our military effort in Iraq.

   But we must make that decision. We have an obligation. This is not a partisan issue and it makes no difference to me whether this assessment is finished before the election or after the election. It must be made for the health of this Nation, as to how our intelligence community, No. 1, could be so totally wrong relative to the presence of weapons of mass destruction on Iraqi soil immediately prior to the war; and, No. 2, how and why did the intelligence community shift its assessments so significantly after 9/11 from the assessments that occurred before 9/11?

   There is another aspect of this which relates to the way in which intelligence was used or exaggerated by the policymakers. Here we have another issue--an issue which is going to be looked at by the Intelligence Committee at least as far as the use of the intelligence is concerned up to the point where the war began. There are some recent statements that I think also require explanation.

   I have tried a number of times to find out how the Vice President could have, about a month ago, made a statement relative to the vans that were found in Iraq, that those vans were part of a mobile biological weapons program. For the life of me, I do not understand how the Vice President can make that statement when Dr. Kay who has looked at the van has said that there is a consensus in the intelligence community--and I am now reading from Dr. Kay's answer to my question in the Armed Services Committee--that the consensus opinion is that those two trailers were not intended for the production of biological weapons.

   How is it that the Vice President of the United States at about the same time that statement was made before the Armed Services Committee by the chief weapons inspector--that some trailers which were found in Iraq are unrelated to a biological weapons program--would say the opposite in a very public forum? What is the basis for the Vice President's statement? I tried to find out. In fact, I wrote the Vice President the other day asking him: What is the basis for your statement?

   We should know. The American people should know when the Vice President says something as significant as that, that these particular vans which we have now gotten in our possession are, in fact, biological weapons laboratories. In fact, what the Vice President said on January 22 on NPR was:

   I would deem that--

   Here he is referring to those two vans--

   conclusive evidence that Saddam did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction.

   Again, this is so totally opposite from what our chief weapons inspector has decided and said the consensus opinion is--that surely the American public is entitled to an explanation from the Vice President.

   What is the basis for his statement of January 22 on national radio? What is the basis, Mr. Vice President, for your statement? The American public is entitled to know that. This is not some assistant secretary of some agency sitting in the bowels of the Pentagon or the bowels of some other building. This is the Vice President of the United States who is saying on national radio that we believe, in fact, that those semitrailers were part of the biological weapons program, that they were biological weapons vans. There is no explanation forthcoming, just sort of silence from the Office of the Vice President. We are entitled to more than that.

   One possibility which the CIA's Director suggested when I asked him the question was that, well, maybe the Vice President was using old information when he said that. If the Vice President of the United States is making statements of significance based on old information, first, it seems to me he ought to say so and then say, Too bad that happened, I will make sure it doesn't happen again.

   But it is also kind of discouraging, if that is true. There are daily briefings which I assume he is a part of--at least weekly briefings on these critical issues. We have a chief weapons inspector who says those vans, according to the consensus opinion, are not part of and were not part of the production of biological weapons.

   But what all this is part of is kind of what is going to be phase 2 of the Intelligence Committee's investigation which is the use of intelligence by the policymakers. Here the statements of our top leadership go beyond the intelligence in a number of ways. They are much more certain than the intelligence communities' assessments were.

   For instance, the Vice President, on August 2002, said the following:

   There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends and against our allies and against us.

   We have this additional aspect which is now being looked into by the Intelligence Committee and again by my staff on the Armed Services Committee as to how the administration could take the intelligence that was given and then turn those less certain findings into certainties.

   Our friend from Arizona, Senator Kyl, made the point earlier tonight that there is a lot of uncertainty in intelligence, and he surely is right. But wow. It sure doesn't sound that way coming from the administration prior to the war.

   Vice President Cheney told Tim Russert: We know with absolute certainty that Saddam is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.

   Secretary of State Colin Powell--and this will be my last comment--said at the U.N.: There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons.

   The list of these statements where there is no doubt and there is absolute certainty that the administration says exists about these programs goes beyond what the intelligence communities' assessments were. It is those statements of absolute certainty which, it seems to me, require an explanation as to what was the basis of those statements of absolute certainty and there being no doubt, particularly in light of the fact Senator Kyl pointed out that intelligence is, indeed, very uncertain and should be treated that way.

   I yield the floor.

4C) Iraq

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the subject of the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and to address some of the recent criticism regarding whether, given that large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have not been found, action by the United States was justified. When I have concluded, I know there are some colleagues who will want to address this same question from slightly different perspectives.

   The tragic events of September 11, 2001, demonstrated with great clarity that we can no longer afford to wait for threats to fully emerge before we deal with them. We paid a heavy price that day for our previous half-measures against those who hate us and want to destroy us.

   By definition, intelligence is imprecise, and no matter what reforms we implement in our intelligence community, the fact is, at least to some degree, it will always be uncertain. This is precisely why intelligence information is just part of a larger puzzle, as it was in the case of Iraq, that we used to determine the direction of U.S. policy.

   So given the uncertainty about weapons of mass destruction stockpiles, were our actions in Iraq justified? The answer to that question is most certainly yes. There is no doubt that the United States, the Iraqi people, and the international community are far better off today without Saddam Hussein in power.

   The inability to find weapons of mass destruction stockpiles now does not mean that Iraq did not have access to such weapons, and that under Saddam Hussein Iraq was not a grave and gathering danger. In fact, the overwhelming body of evidence, including most recently that from the Iraq

   Survey Group, indicates that his regime did, indeed, pose a threat, and that its removal will aid in our overall aid against terror.

   Some of our colleagues have charged that the President led the American people to war under false pretenses; that the case for removing Saddam Hussein's regime was supposedly based on an imminent threat posed by that regime because of its arsenals of weapons of mass destruction which now cannot be found. This assertion is categorically false, and today I intend to explain why.

   Let's briefly review how we arrived at the decision to authorize force against Iraq in October of 2002.

   Contrary to what some would have us believe, the Bush administration did not fundamentally change U.S. policy with Iraq from that of the Clinton administration. Upon entering office in January 2001, President Bush inherited from the Clinton administration a policy of regime change. I repeat, the Bush administration pursued the same Iraqi policy as the Clinton administration. That policy was based on the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act which stated:

   It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.

   This policy was unanimously approved by this Senate. This legislation and, thus, the shift in U.S. policy from containment to regime change reflected an acknowledgment that diplomatic solutions for dealing with Saddam's intransigence were being exhausted.

   Even before that shift, however, the Clinton administration was clear about the nature and capabilities of Saddam

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Hussein's regime and, moreover, believed that if left unchecked, the regime would pose a serious threat in the future.

   On February 17, 1998, as he prepared for war against Iraq, President Clinton stated the following:

   Now let's imagine the future. What if [Saddam Hussein] fails to comply and we fail to act or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he will use that arsenal. ..... In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now--a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed.

   That quote was from President Clinton's remarks in 1998 as he prepared for war against Iraq. He pointed out that the arsenal which Iraq possessed--``a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction'' were his exact words--will pose a threat because he can provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed.

   Note that he talked about weapons of mass destruction which Saddam Hussein possessed.

   I have noted no objections or caveats on these warnings by Democratic Members of the Senate.

   Later that year, not 2 months after President Clinton signed the Iraqi Liberation Act into law, he delivered an address to the Nation explaining his decision to order air strikes against Iraqi military targets. He discussed the potential long-term threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Again, I quote President Clinton:

   The hard fact is that so long as Saddam Hussein remains in power he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world. The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government, a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the right of its people.

   ..... Heavy as they are, the costs of inaction must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors; he will make war on his own people. Mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.

   Again, I note no dissent from Democratic Senators to these comments of President Clinton.

   Consider the striking similarity between these statements by President Clinton and the statements Bush administration officials made about Iraq during the leadup to Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the first statement I cited from February of 1998, President Clinton discussed the consequences of inaction in the face of continued noncompliance by Saddam Hussein, noting that inaction would lead the dictator to conclude the international community had lost its will.

   Consider the statements of President George W. Bush to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2002:

   The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. ..... The United Nations [faces] a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?

   I point out the focus of President Clinton's statements was on the totality of our knowledge about Saddam Hussein's history, his defiance of the United Nations, use of chemical weapons, aggression against his neighbors, savage treatment of his own people.

   This is what we had to gauge his intentions by. This broad focus on Saddam's past actions and known capabilities, not any particular piece of intelligence, was also what prompted many Members of this body to authorize force against Iraq in October 2002. Consider some of the statements made in 2002 by my colleagues. First I quote Senator Daschle, majority and minority leader:

   Iraq's actions pose a serious and continued threat to international peace and security. It is a threat we must address. Saddam is a proven aggressor who has time and again turned his wrath on his neighbors and on his own people. Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction, but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people .....

   Note: 2002, Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, no qualifications except he is not the only

   country to do so. No expression of doubts or caveats. As minority leader or majority leader, Senator Daschle has access to all of the intelligence that is available to anybody in this body.

   Now I quote Senator Biden, whose comments I quote not just because he is one of the more thoughtful Members of this body and ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, but also because they happen to be very close to the views I expressed on this issue. I quote Senator Biden in his colorful way of putting it:

   There is a guy named Saddam Hussein who, in the early 1990s broke international law, invaded another country, violating every rule of international law. The world, under the leadership of a President named Bush, united and expelled him from that country. Upon expulsion, he said a condition for your being able to remain in power, Saddam Hussein, is you sue for peace and you agree to the following terms of surrender ..... If the world decides it must use force for his failure to abide by the terms of surrender, then it is not preempting, it is enforcing. It is enforcing, it is finishing a war he reignited, because the only reason the war stopped is he sued for peace.

   That is exactly true. That is precisely what happened.

   Now let me quote another leader in the Senate, Senator Kerry, who said this:

   It would be naive, to the point of grave danger, not to believe that, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will provoke, misjudge, or stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world. .....

   So this was the backdrop against which we all had voted to authorize the President to act and upon which he acted. I should not say we all voted to authorize the President because there were a few who did not, but the vast majority of the House of Representatives and the Senate voted to authorize the President to take appropriate action.

   Some now are voicing second thoughts. Since our successful removal of Saddam Hussein from power, it emerges that some of the intelligence regarding the regime's weapons of mass destruction capabilities may have been wrong, because most notably large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons have yet to be found.

   I feel compelled to point out three obvious facts: One, an intelligence failure is not synonomous with a misuse of intelligence. Two, this intelligence issue does not fundamentally change the case against Saddam Hussein. Three, since Iraq itself had provided documentation to the United Nations on its production of chemical and biological agents, the question is not whether but what happened to the stockpiles.

   Let's take the first, the misuse of intelligence. The fact remains the Bush administration relied largely on the same intelligence information used by the Clinton administration during the late 1990s, the same information that was available to Senators and about which they spoke on this floor, some of which I have quoted.

   President Clinton's CIA Director was retained by President Bush. By and large, the intelligence information was also the same as that of the other allied intelligence services, with a primary source being the two U.N. inspection bodies UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, the initials of which are U-N-S-C-O-M and U-N-M-O-V-I-C, which were led by non-Americans, such as Rolf Ekeus and Richard Butler. That Saddam had weapons of mass

   destruction capabilities was widely accepted, even by those who vehemently opposed the war. As French President Jacques Chirac commented during an interview with ``Time'' Magazine in February of 2004:

   There is a problem--The probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right to be disturbed by this situation, and it's right in having decided Iraq should be disarmed.

   I would note, if he does not have any weapons of mass destruction, there is no point in talking about disarming him. The entire world community believed he possessed these weapons, among other things because he himself had said he did.

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   So given the information the international community had at the time, the conclusions about Iraq's capabilities seemed clear. As former head of the Iraqi Survey Group David Kay recently stated in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

   ..... All I can say is if you read the total body of intelligence in the last 12 to 15 years that flowed on Iraq, I quite frankly think it would be hard to come to a conclusion other than Iraq was a gathering, serious threat to the world with regard to WMD.

   I might add, that is exactly what President Bush said. That is obviously a big-picture view.

   It seems opponents of the President, in charging the administration misled the American people, preferred to point to specific intelligence. So let's take a closer look at a couple of those examples. First, that the President's reference in his State of the Union Address regarding Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium and, second, that the administration presented intelligence community information on Iraq's WMD capabilities as though it were an undeniable fact rather than qualifying it properly with caveats.

   First, there were the following 16 words in the President's State of the Union Address:

   The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

   Major newspapers, the Democratic National Committee, and some policymakers claim this is one of the top examples of the Bush administration knowingly misleading the American people and presenting false intelligence information. As the DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe stated:

   This may be the first time in recent history that a President knowingly misled the American people during a State of the Union Address. ..... this was not a mistake. It was no oversight and it was no error.

   That is a grave charge. Charges that the administration purposely included false information in the President's speech I deem despicable, an attempt to create a scandal where one does not exist. The President had every reason to believe the information in his speech was true. It had been vetted by the CIA Director and it was consistent with the judgment of the intelligence community in October 2002. The National Intelligence Estimate at that time said Iraq was ``vigorously trying to procure uranium ore'' from several African countries.

   The British government, which the President cited, included a judgment in its dossier similar to that of the intelligence community's majority judgment on this point.

   In retrospect, Director Tenet stated this phrase, though factually correct and approved in the interagency process, should not have been included in the President's speech because it was not central to the intelligence community's judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. In other words, it was just a piece of evidence, not important enough to include in a speech like the State of the Union speech, and certainly not what we relied upon for our conclusion Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. In any event, it does not suggest in any way that the President was at fault for including the information, or that he had any intention of misleading the American people. The President believed the text was sound. It was not in error. If there was an error, it was simply including a piece of information which really wasn't central to making the case, but not misleading the American people.

   Second, the President's critics argue he failed to mention caveats in the intelligence community's assessment of Iraqi capability. This criticism is highly misleading. According to the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, and I have an unclassified copy of it here, the intelligence community had ``high confidence'' in the following statements:

   Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to U.N. Resolutions.

   Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.

   Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade material.

   So the National Intelligence Estimate, prepared by the entire intelligence community, led by the CIA Director George Tenet, had high confidence, among other things, in the fact that Iraq possessed proscribed biological and chemical weapons and missiles. After the fact we found some of the missiles. We found the programs to make chemical and biological weapons. But we don't find the big stockpile of those weapons. It turns out the intelligence community's high confidence in this statement was either misplaced or we simply haven't found the material yet, or it went somewhere else. We don't know the answers to those questions.

   As to this, the only dissent came from the State Department. But even in its alternate view it said Saddam continues to want nuclear weapons and available evidence suggests Baghdad is pursuing a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapons capabilities.

   Moreover, it appears the State Department did not have significant objections to the key judgments related to chemical, biological, and missile programs.

   So it is clear, it is fair to say, we had a general opinion of Saddam's capabilities, that that is what the President addressed.

   I want to also make it clear the President and the administration never claimed Iraq posed an imminent threat, as some have said. To the contrary, administration officials said the United States and the international community needed to act before it became imminent. Indeed, President Bush challenged those who wanted to wait until the threat was imminent in his 2003 State of the Union Address, saying the following:

   Some have said that we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

   So said President Bush.

   Administration officials did use words like ``immediate'' and ``urgent'' but more to convey the importance of dealing with the threat they judged to be growing; that they did not imply or state was imminent, in other words, that the attack was about to occur. They did not say that.

   Indeed, that the threat was not yet imminent was well understood on both sides of the aisle. As Senator Daschle, whom I quoted earlier, stated in explaining his support for the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq:

   The threat posed by Saddam Hussein may not be imminent, but it is real, it is growing, and it cannot be ignored.

   I submit he was correct. One can argue, and indeed some of my colleagues have argued, administration officials were at times too certain in the way they said it, too certain in their statements using phrases like ``we know.'' But given all the information we had about Saddam's history of using and producing weapons of mass destruction, his aggressive intentions, and the intelligence community's high confidence in the key areas of assessment, it is difficult to imagine how the administration could have determined Iraq was not a threat that needed to be dealt with immediately.

   So, no, there may have been mistakes in intelligence. We have yet to find that out. But there was not a misleading--an attempt to mislead by the administration.

   The second point is the larger point, that whatever deficiencies there may have been about the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, it doesn't change the basic case against Saddam Hussein. Some of what I have quoted earlier makes that point. While it is troubling our intelligence cannot tell us where these stockpiles are, the larger case remains. The Bush administration, supported by a large coalition, pursued a responsible policy, given all of the pieces of the puzzle it had. As I said, there was Saddam's

   previously known missile capabilities and chemical and biological weapons programs; his desire to acquire a nuclear weapon; his continuing flagrant violation of numerous Security Council resolutions; his history of aggression including, I might add, shooting at American airplanes constantly in the no-fly zone while we were trying to enforce that, if you will recall; and even an attempt to assassinate former President Bush. Add to this the regime's vast human rights

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abuses which really only came to light after we were able to liberate Iraq.

   In other words, absent any statement or specific piece of intelligence, the case against Saddam Hussein was already made by Saddam Hussein himself and this was before, as I said, we found the mass graves of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

   Our colleague Senator Kerry summed it up well at the time. He said this:

   I believe the record of Saddam Hussein's ruthless, reckless breach of international values and standards of behavior is cause enough for the world community to hold him accountable by the use of force, if necessary.

   I want to quote that again:

   I believe the record of Saddam Hussein's ruthless, reckless breach of international values and standards of behavior is cause enough for the world community to hold him accountable by use of force, if necessary.

   There is no suggestion here we had to find weapons of mass destruction, or even necessarily that we had to believe those weapons existed at the time, even though, as I said, we all did, based upon the intelligence at the time, but that this gross violation of human rights was, in and of itself, a sufficient casus belli.

   Given the same causes and information, what then accounts for the differences between the actions of the Bush and Clinton administrations? Very simply, the Bush administration made a decision that, post 9/11, it was too dangerous to allow American security to rest in the hands of an international organization that, after 12 years, had failed to enforce its own resolutions demanding Iraqi compliance with the 1991 Gulf war cease-fire. It was too dangerous to allow a regime to stay in place which had demonstrated a clear intent to develop weapons of mass destruction, had ongoing ties to terrorist organizations, and whose leader made it abundantly and routinely clear the United States was his enemy.

   We needed to begin the process of changing the facts on ground in the Middle East.

   In fact, it was, in part, the very uncertainty that made dealing with Saddam Hussein an urgent matter.

   As Senator Kerry explained before his vote in favor of the authorization to use force:

   In the wake of September 11, who among us can say, with any certainty, to anybody, that those weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region? Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater--a nuclear weapon--then reinvade Kuwait, push the Kurds out, attack Israel, any number of scenarios to try to further his ambition to be the pan-Arab leader or simply to confront in the region, once again miscalculate the response, to believe he is stronger than those weapons?

   And while the administration has failed to provide any direct link between Iraq and September 11, can we afford to ignore the possibility that Saddam might accidentally, as well as purposely, allow those weapons to slide off to one group or other in a region where weapons are the currency of trade? How do we leave that to chance?

   While we have not and may not find these weapons stockpiles, the case against Saddam Hussein is not diminished. His was a threat that needed to be dealt with.

   The third and final point, the jury is still out as to what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and when. It is an intelligence failure--a lack of knowledge, not an attempt to mislead people--that we don't know the answer to that question. Presumably, some day we will find out or at least come closer to the resolution of the issue. Perhaps some day we will find some of the weapons, or maybe we will find evidence they were destroyed or removed before the war. There is no way now to know.

   But one fact is certain. What we know is that at one time Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. Saddam Hussein admitted it and the entire world believed it. What is more, that Saddam used those weapons against Iran and against the Iraqi Kurds will remain forever etched in our minds.

   I point to simply one picture among many which we can present to remind us of the fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and used them--in this case, against his own people. Who will forget the picture of this Kurdish mother with arms wrapped around baby, both dead, as a result of Saddam Hussein's perfidy--the use of his chemical weapons.

   Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

   Mr. KYL. I am happy to yield for a question.

   Mr. McCONNELL. Is it not correct that was one issue upon which everyone was in agreement prior to the Iraq war, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the British, ourselves, the United Nations, the world in its entirety? The one thing they agreed on prior to the Iraq war was the point the Senator from Arizona was just making.

   Mr. KYL. Mr. President, if we didn't agree on anything else--and there were some issues we agreed on--all of the countries mentioned, all of the intelligence services mentioned by the Senator from Kentucky, in fact agreed on that point.

   Among other things, they agreed because they read the documentation provided to the United Nations by Saddam Hussein in which he admitted he had biological and chemical weapons stockpiles. We knew he had used them. He said he had them. The question now is, What happened to them between sometime in the late 1990s, maybe right up to a week or two before the Iraqi war, and the time we were able to go in after the Iraqi war in search of them since we haven't yet found large stockpiles? We found some things. We certainly found missiles. We have found the programs to reconstitute the chemical weapons program and the biological weapons program. But what we thought we were going to find was a lot of artillery shells filled with chemical munitions and some mortars and things of that sort. We thought they were going to be used against our troops. That we haven't yet found. That is a mystery. You can say it is an intelligence failure, but as the Senator from Kentucky pointed out, nobody disagreed with the proposition that at one time he had those weapons. There is a lot of evidence to that fact.

   Mr. McCONNELL. So if there were any effort to mislead the public, an awful lot of countries were complicit in this effort, were they not?

   Mr. KYL. If there was an effort to mislead, there would

   have been a lot of countries complicit and a lot of Senators complicit. I don't believe for a minute that, in fact, any of us attempted to mislead; that Jacques Chirac attempted to mislead, that the United Nations, or President Bush attempted to mislead. We were all going forth with the same intelligence. We all reached the same conclusion.

   Maybe we don't know yet, but at some point in the last few months or years Saddam Hussein buried, sent to Syria, blew up, or otherwise got rid of those weapons. We just do not know. But about their existence at one time, there can be no doubt.

   Mr. McCONNELL. I thank my friend from Arizona.

   Mr. KYL. I thank the Senator very much. The Senator made the last point I wanted to make in this regard, and then I will conclude my remarks.

   We were briefed every day of the war at 9 o'clock in an area here in which we can receive classified briefings by the general in charge of the operation at the Pentagon and representatives of the CIA, the Defense Department, State Department, and others. Every morning they checked several boxes to remind us of the status of the open relationship.

   Before the operation started, they told us about their belief that Saddam Hussein would lob artillery shells with chemical munitions at our troops. They pointed out that they were going to make efforts to try to prevent this from happening. They called it the ``red line'' around Baghdad. When we got that close, then there would be this threat of chemical weapons fired against our troops--maybe biological.

   So before the war, they began the bombardment on the command and control systems that would send the orders out to the generals in the field. They bombed artillery sites hoping to destroy their artillery weapons. They bombed the warehouses where they thought the munitions might be stored. They dropped millions of leaflets warning that if any officer carried out an order to use these weapons against the allied forces we would hold them accountable as war crime criminals.

   As our troops got closer to that red line, they had to don the equipment

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that would protect them against these munitions. It was not easy to fight under those conditions, but we believed this attack could very well occur.

   We got to the Baghdad Airport. By that briefing, the generals were scratching their heads saying: We are not sure why, but we haven't been attacked with these artillery shells. Yet maybe it is because we destroyed the artillery units that would have fired them. Maybe they just got scared because of our leaflets or they couldn't issue the orders. We are not sure. But for some reason they didn't fire them. For several days, they continued to wonder about that.

   My point is this: At the highest levels, our troops and our leaders at the Department of Defense all believed this was a threat that could well materialize against our troops. They went to great lengths to try to protect against it. This was not a matter of somebody misleading the American people. We believed it, our troops believed it, the generals believed it, and the Defense Department believed it. And, yes, the President believed it. Nobody was trying to mislead anyone. We based a lot of our actions on this belief.

   Let me conclude my remarks by saying this: Much has been made of David Kay's acknowledgment that all of the intelligence agencies apparently were wrong about the weapons

   stockpiles. But listen to what David Kay said as he reflected on the decision to go to war:

   I think at the end of the inspection process we'll paint a picture of Iraq that was far more dangerous than even we thought it was before the war. It was a system collapsing. It was a country that had the capability in weapons of mass destruction areas and in which terrorists, likes ants to honey, were going after it.

   Kay stated on numerous occasions that Saddam Hussein was in clear material breach of Security Council Resolution 1441. The Iraq Survey Group, of which he was head, discovered hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited under the original United Nations cease-fire resolution and that should have been but were not reported under Resolution 1441.

   The group found a prison laboratory complex which may have been used in human testing of biological agents. It found ``reference strains'' of biological organisms which can be used to produce biological weapons. It found new research on agents applicable to biological weapons, including the Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever. It found continuing research on ricin and aflatoxin. It also found plants and advanced design work on new missiles with ranges well beyond what was permitted.

   Not just the words of Resolution 1441 but the entire credibility of the U.N. was at stake. The years of Iraqi violations had to come to an end. Now that awful and bloody regime has come to an end.

   In the final analysis, whatever the inaccuracies of specific pieces of intelligence, that Saddam Hussein continued to harbor intentions for the development and use of WMD remains true. The observations of David Kay, once again, showed this. He reported earlier this year that Iraq ``was in the early stages of renovating the nuclear program, building new buildings.''

   This is the regime that, as I said, David Kay called ``far more dangerous than even we thought. To wait any longer to remove it would have been a gamble not worth taking.''

   I yield to the Senator from Kentucky.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Murkowski). The Senator from Kentucky.

   Mr. McCONNELL. I thank the Senator from Arizona and appreciate so much his contribution to this important discussion about the war in Iraq and how we got into it and what people understood at the time.

   It has occurred to me there is a criminal analogy that summarizes the debate we seem to be having. So let's pose a hypothetical question to all of our fellow Senators. Say the FBI has received a credible tip that a domestic terrorist group is planning to bomb the Capitol. This group is responsible for previous deadly terrorist attacks, we know that, but has been able so far to avoid capture. When the FBI breaks down the door to the group's rural compound, they find all sorts of prohibited weapons--machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and grenade launchers. They also find detailed plans to gun down lawmakers, diagrams of the Capitol, and information on how to construct a large bomb capable of destroying the Capitol Building. But they do not find the bomb itself or any grenades or the grenade launchers. They found all of the other things, but they did not find the bombs themselves or the grenade launchers.

   Should the FBI apologize to the terrorists and offer to replace their door, even though they just caused the apprehension of the terrorists? Since they had yet to construct the bomb, should the terrorists go free? Should we fret that we acted before the bomb was ready, even though the terrorists' intent to attack the Capitol was absolutely clear?

   The answer is obviously and definitely no; we should not wait until terrorists roam our streets before responding. We should not wait until the planes have been hijacked or until the bombs have been assembled. We should not have waited until Hussein's army once again stood ready at the border. We should not have waited until the threat he posed to the United States and its allies was imminent. We should not have waited for the French to say it was OK to act to defend the free world.

   Some seem to suggest that even though we know Saddam Hussein continued to develop ballistic missiles prohibited by the U.N., our military effort was illegitimate because we have not yet found WMD warheads or the missiles. I can confidently state that Saddam's ballistic missiles were not for the Iraqi space program.

   On another note, I am fairly confident that the Iraqi people do not believe for a minute that their liberation is any less legitimate because we have yet to find stockpiles of WMD. I raise this simple analogy because the fundamental questions about our policy in Iraq are fairly basic. The crux of the matter is that Saddam Hussein posed a growing threat to the United States, to our allies, and to his own people. There is no doubt that Iraqis and Americans alike are better off now that Saddam Hussein is in prison and his evil sons have met their end.

   Now it occurs to me, we have also lost sight of the moral dimension that accompanied our liberation of Iraq. I represent in my State Fort Campbell, KY, the home of the 101st Airborne. I followed their efforts in that country very closely. This is the unit whose brave soldiers brought to justice Usay and Quday Hussein. The 101st Airborne got them. My colleagues are surely not unaware of how vile these two murderers were and how deserving they were of the tow missiles that ended their brutish lives.

   In case we have forgotten that, let me recount a little

   bit of their evil legacy. According to many reports, Usay Hussein routinely ordered his bodyguards to snatch young women off the streets so that he could rape them. He also ordered political prisoners to be dropped into tubs of acid to punish them. Usay was also in charge of Iraq's olympic committee where he oversaw the training of that country's professional athletes. Usay's training regimen included torturing and jailing athletes for poor performance. Usay would sometimes force Iraq's track stars to crawl along a strip of newly poured asphalt, and once required soccer kickers to kick a concrete ball until their feet were broken after they failed to reach the 1994 World Cup finals. This was Usay Hussein.

   Although it is difficult to think of an individual more brutal and evil than Usay Hussein, his brother, Quday, who was known by many Iraqis as ``the snake'' for his blood thirsty manner, surely comes close. Quday was responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims in the wake of the first gulf war. Maybe some of our colleagues have forgotten about the marsh Arabs who live in southern Iraq. These Iraqis used to live in the Iraqi wetlands that covered nearly 3,200 square miles. They had lived in these marshes for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years until Quday ordered them drained in a massive ethnic cleansing operation. Quday was also responsible for horrible cleansings of Hussein's prisons.

   When Hussein's prisons became overcrowded, the regime did not build more jails or let prisoners go. Instead, Quday ordered mass executions in order to reduce overcrowding. A London-based

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human rights group reports that these unlucky prisoners were sometimes put feet first into massive shredders at Quday's request.

   We do not hear much about these awful crimes anymore, so maybe some of our colleagues have forgotten, if they ever knew, about the extent of the Hussein family's brutality. I highlight their brutality in order to ask a serious question about the reality of the international system in the absence of American action. Does anybody seriously believe that had the 101st Airborne not banged down their door, Usay and Quday would have been brought to justice? Of course they would not have. Without the 101st Airborne going after them, they would not have been brought to justice. Absent U.S. leadership, I cannot imagine a situation in which the U.N. would have been able to arrange for the apprehension and trial of the Hussein family.

   Had the United States not acted in Iraq, who could say with any confidence that Usay and Quday would not this very day be raping young Iraqi girls and torturing Iraqi dissidents. Of course they would still be doing that. That is what they did.

   Had the United States not acted in Iraq, could anyone say with any confidence that Saddam would not be plotting our doom, that his sons would not be torturing the Iraqi people, and that his regime would not be preparing to rebuild the WMD infrastructure we all have agreed Hussein once had?

   In conclusion, Madam President, it is more than enough to justify the war in Iraq and the liberation of the Iraqi people.

   I yield the floor.

   Mr. KYL. Madam President, I know the majority leader wishes to speak next; and then I know the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee is here as well. I now yield to Majority Leader Frist.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

   Mr. FRIST. Madam President, I just want to share with my colleagues some recent experiences I had in meeting with Kurdish physicians not too long ago in my office, not too far from here, because it relates so dramatically to the debate and to the unfolding of many of the questions that seem to be raised today.

   I should really begin by saying in my home State of Tennessee there are a number of Kurdish residents who live, who reside particularly in the area of Nashville where I am from. I have had the opportunity to meet with them and to listen to their concerns and have had the opportunity to support a project called the Health Partnerships With Northern Iraq, which is a project that is sponsored by the Meridian International Center here in the District, with the support of the State Department. It is a fantastic program, it is a great program, the purpose of which is to train Kurdish doctors in northern Iraq to do primary care; that is, basic care. It is probably 90 percent of health care in terms of responding to individual needs of families and individuals.

   What is interesting is these doctors, for a period of time, spent a few weeks, and then months, of their training in this country in primary care, and part of that time was spent in Tennessee at East Tennessee State University.

   Last January, I met with this group of Kurdish doctors in my office, just down the hall. They came to me as a physician, as a doctor, and also as majority leader, but they came to me with very specific concerns. They shared with me that they knew the war to topple Saddam Hussein was near, and they were concerned--these are Iraqi physicians--that they would be attacked with chemical and biological weapons. Their concern, as I will share with my colleagues shortly, was based on practical experience, experiences they have firsthand knowledge of, in terms of being with people who had suffered from attacks.

   But at the time when they were in my office, they came to me because they said: We are simply unprepared to be practicing primary care in our homeland in northern Iraq. They were in a region of about 6 million individuals, which had 240 primary care centers, but they had very few supplies. They had only the very most rudimentary needs in terms of treatment. They had no personal protective equipment in terms of biological contaminants or chemical weapons. They had no ability to contain or even treat victims of a chemical or biological attack. They had little time for the intensive training they knew they would need in order to respond to such a biological or chemical attack. Yet they came to my office very specifically asking for help.

   Dr. Ali Sindi, the delegation leader, asked for basic supplies. He asked for medical supplies and some help with acquiring medical supplies, coming to the majority leader, but also coming to a physician. He asked for hydrogen peroxide. He asked for bleach. Hydrogen peroxide and bleach, as most people know today, are used to decontaminate affected areas from biological or chemical weapons. He asked for gas masks. He asked for chemical suits. He asked for antibiotics in the event there was a biological attack.

   He noted--and, again, it was a group of Kurdish physicians--he told me the Kurdish water systems are generally open to the air and, a lot of times, sitting on the rooftops of the villages there. So he, concerned about chemical and biological attacks, said: And in addition, what I need is some kind of protection for these rooftop water systems.

   Their fear--these doctors' fear, the doctors from Iraq--was not based on intelligence briefings. Their fear was based on experience. Their fear was based on reality. Their fear was based on what they had seen, and their fear was based on what they had actually treated; that is, chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction.

   As the Senator from Arizona knows, the Kurds had been attacked by chemical weapons before, most notably in the city of Halabja. There, thousands of innocent Kurds were killed with weapons of mass destruction, these chemical weapons. These doctors from that region had come to see me. They had treated victims of that particular attack. They know from that direct experience what chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, can do. These doctors believed, obviously, the Kurds were going to be attacked with chemical weapons once again. They asked from me and from our Government, through me, for that help to be prepared.

   At this juncture, I ask the Senator from Arizona, in light of these doctors' past, direct experience with weapons of mass destruction--these chemical weapons--does the Senator agree the Kurds were acting reasonably when they, with this direct experience, believed Saddam Hussein possessed and intended to use weapons of mass destruction; namely, the chemical weapons they had seen and had experience with being used before?

   Mr. KYL. Madam President, I would answer the question this way: It is easy for us, in this sort of antiseptic environment of the Senate, to talk about these matters. But I was moved by the story of these Kurdish doctors, who saw it with their own eyes. I cannot imagine how they would not believe, and why we should not think it reasonable they would believe, Saddam Hussein would do this again, that he had every intention to, every capability of doing it again.

   When I look at this picture, I think of the words of Secretary Powell when he visited Halabja and saw what occurred there and basically vowed the United States would never, ever again allow something like that to happen if he could do anything about it. It made me proud. It made me recommitted to the proposition that when we know something like that is going on, or we believe it to be the case, like these Kurdish doctors did, we have a duty to do something about it.

   I absolutely agree with the Senator.

   Mr. FRIST. I thank the Senator from Arizona.

   Again, these physicians who came to see me from Iraq had seen with their own eyes these chemical weapons having been used before. They had come--and this is just last January--to me to say: We need help to protect ourselves and our communities from the use of these biological and chemical weapons.

   Is the Senator aware many of the critics of the war to topple Saddam Hussein seem to suggest there was never cause to be concerned with Saddam Hussein? In fact, if you listen closely to the critics, they go so far as to imply there was never a threat at all.

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   Is the Senator from Arizona familiar with the details of one of the most horrendous examples of Saddam's brutality, the 1988 massacre of Kurdish civilians in the village of Halabja? Indeed, at the time, 50,000 Kurds lived in the village of Halabja, a city that is very close to the Iranian border. They had already suffered immeasurably from the 8 years of conventional war between Iraq and Iran. But for Saddam Hussein, that was not enough.

   On March 16, 1988, the Iraqi regime launched an artillery attack against Halabja, driving the residents of the city there underground. They went to these underground shelters and to the basements for protection from this overhead attack. But that is when the real, true terror began. Iraqi helicopters then came in with planes, and they came back once again, but this time with chemical weapons. The chemical weapons were all carefully documented--nerve gas, VX, mustard gas--all weapons of mass destruction, which were aimed at these buildings, these cellars, all of a sudden turning these cellars in which the Kurds were hiding into gas chambers. They fled, of course, gathering their families, exposed, running for their lives.

   Graphic evidence showed the results of Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction. The Senator from Arizona just showed that picture with the question: No weapons of mass destruction?

   It reminds me so dramatically of what one survivor relayed at the scene:

   People were dying all around. When a child could not go on, the parents, becoming hysterical with fear, abandoned him. Many children were left on the ground by the side of the road. Old people as well. They were running. Then they would stop breathing and die.

   Experts agree over 5,000 innocent citizens died as a result of the chemical weapons attack. These were weapons of mass destruction used on Halabja. Again, those physicians in my office told me these stories. Other survivors had scarring of the lungs, something called fibrosis of the lung, where the lung becomes nothing but a fibrous scar. Others were blinded permanently. The consequences of this cruelty continue to this day, and indeed these physicians continue to treat the residual effects of people in that Kurdish community. Chemicals contaminated the food and water supply. The chemicals caused cancer. The chemicals caused those respiratory diseases like fibrosis. They caused infertility and high levels of severe abnormalities in Halabja's children.

   Christine Gosden, a British professor of medical genetics, traveled to northern Iraq in 1998 to study the effects on the Kurdish population of the poison gas unleashed on them. She founded the Halabja Medical Institute and discovered the consequences of the chemical weapons attack were even more damaging than she expected. She wrote in the Washington Post:

   What I found was far worse than anything I had suspected--devastating problems occurring 10 years after the attack. These chemicals seriously affected people's eyes and respiratory and neurological systems. Many became blind. Skin disorders, which involve severe scarring are frequent, and many progress to skin cancer. An increasing number of children are dying each year of leukemias and lymphomas.

   The Halabja Medical Institute, in its research on the attacks, discovered something even more vicious. Its conclusions noted:

   While these weapons had many terrible direct effects, such as immediate death, or skin and eye burns, Iraqi government documents indicate they were used deliberately for known long-term effects, including cancers, birth defects, neurological problems, and infertility. Inexpensive in terms of death per unit cost, there is evidence that these weapons were used in different combinations by Baath forces attempting to discern their effectiveness as weapons of terror and war.

   Yes, Saddam's regime conducted experiments using chemical weapons on innocent Kurdish civilians. These are Kurdish civilians in his own country. Experimenting. The Kurdish physicians told me--it is to vivid in my mind--that in buildings like hotels with different wings, single floors, people would be herded and placed into these rooms; one wing would be to test VX gas on humans, killing them, and another wing would be mustard gas, and there would be another gas in a third wing, to see which was more effective.

   Iraqi soldiers even went so far as to return to the town after that attack in Halabja to study how efficient, how effective those chemicals weapons were, using the number of people who died as a measure of success.

   I want to ask the Senator from Arizona another question. Does the Senator from Arizona have any doubt in his mind that Saddam would continue to develop and use such weapons at the first possible opportunity?

   Mr. KYL. Madam President, I will answer in a couple of different ways. First of all, I served on the Intelligence Committee for 8 years, and I was convinced, based upon the intelligence estimates provided to us over that period of time, these weapons were possessed, they had been used, and they would likely be used again if he had the opportunity to do so, and that there were weapons programs ongoing within the country of Iraq. So I don't have any doubt, as the Senator has so eloquently pointed out here, that the Kurds, who he referred to and spoke with, were absolutely right that these kinds of attacks would occur again.

   I wondered whether I was alone in this and, of course, in looking, I found that I was not. Let me note two or three things colleagues have said. Then I will turn to Senator Hatch. But I note that in 1998, long before President Bush came to town, President Clinton had come to the same conclusion, based upon the intelligence that had been provided to him by the intelligence agencies. A couple things struck me and then I will move on. He said:

   Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them, not once but repeatedly.

   That is the point the leader made.

   Unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops ..... against civilians, firing Scud missiles at the citizens of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Iran ..... even against his own people, gassing Kurdish civilians in Northern Iraq.

   I also found it interesting that in December of 1998, in an Oval Office address, President Clinton said this, and I take just one sentence:

   I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

   That was the President of the United States responding to the intelligence he was given. I know some colleagues have said the current administration hasn't qualified the intelligence enough. They have not said we think or we judge. They said we are pretty sure. Here is President Clinton staying, ``I have no doubt today.'' That is not caveated or qualified.

   Then several members of his cabinet--I looked at what they had to say. Madeleine Albright, the distinguished Secretary of State, said:

   I think the record will show that Saddam Hussein has produced weapons of mass destruction, which he's clearly not collecting for his own personal pleasure, but in order to use. Therefore, he is qualitatively and quantitatively different from every brutal dictator that has appeared recently.

   That is her judgment.

   Secretary of Defense William Cohen talked about Secretary Albright, indicating Saddam Hussein has ``developed an arsenal of deadly chemical and biological weapons. He has used these weapons repeatedly against his own people as well as Iran.''

   We are talking about an arsenal of weapons here. Here is the former Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration talking about that. He went on to say in this particular interview, which occurred at Ohio State University:

   I have a picture which I believe CNN can show on its cameras, but here's a picture taken of an Iraqi mother and child killed by Iraqi nerve gas. This is what I would call Madonna and child Saddam Hussein-style.

   That is the picture Secretary Cohen at that time displayed on the screen. He said:

   Now, the United Nations believes that he still has very large quantities of VX.

   VX is the nerve agent which is so deadly. As Dr. Frist knows, a single drop can kill you within a couple of minutes.

   Here is Secretary Cohen and Secretary Albright referring to the United Nations believing that he still has a large quantity of this product, the point being that everybody thought he had it.

   The United Nations thought he had it, Secretary Cohen thought he had it, Secretary Albright thought he had it, and President Clinton thought he had it.

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   I found it interesting that Senator Leahy, the distinguished ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, said in 1988--and he is right on target:

   If Saddam Hussein had nothing to hide, why would he have gone to great lengths to prevent U.N. inspectors from doing their job?

   That is a question we all asked.

   There is no doubt that since 1991, Saddam Hussein has squandered his country's resources to maintain his capacity to produce and stockpile chemical and biological weapons.

   The point is, a lot of our colleagues had no doubt and they said they had no doubt.

   Senator Kerry--I will make this the last quotation--in 1998 said:

   We do know that he had them--

   Referring to WMD--

   in his inventory, and the means of delivering them. We do know that his chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons development programs were proceeding with his active support.

   The bottom line is the distinguished majority leader is absolutely correct. But not only do we have reason, not only did those Kurdish physicians have reason to believe he had these horrible weapons and would use them again, so did the leaders of our country, including the leaders of the United Nations all throughout this period of time of 1996, 1998, right on up forward.

   Unless the distinguished majority leader has anything else, I yield at this point to the distinguished chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.

   Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I ask my colleagues on the floor just to think this through. I have been watching this debate about the threat of Iraq, frankly, since the early 1990s. I have been privileged to serve in this body since 1977, which means I have been here long enough to see the evolving trends in terrorism, from the Iranian revolution to the perversion of the Islamic faith and advent of fundamentalism. I also have been here through all the stages of relations with Iraq since the rise of Saddam Hussein.

   I recall the debate prior to the first gulf war. While certainly not absolutely partisan, that debate in 1990 was the last time we had a very partisan debate on foreign policy. Through the 1990s, while I had many disputes with the Clinton administration over various aspects of foreign policy, I seemed to recall that partisanship on the question of Iraq had diminished. In fact, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 was passed in this body unanimously and in the House overwhelmingly and was signed into law by President Clinton.

   I think my colleagues would have to agree with this. I would like to ask my colleagues if they agree with the following assessment: Since the fall of 2002, the debate over Iraq policy has become more and more partisan and more and more bitter. While the authorization to use force was passed by a large majority--I believe it was 77 to 23--and with the support of many of my Democratic colleagues, including some not present today, the debate since then has been troubling to me.

   You would think that Congress could maintain our proper role of oversight without descending into partisan attacks. You would think that with our military in the midst of a historic mission and over 500 American families grieving because their loved ones paid the ultimate sacrifice, that legitimate criticism could be expressed without partisan rancor or misleading rhetoric. You would think so.

   One of the most troubling aspects of the criticism of our President and his policy was the suggestion, deceivingly made, that the threat of Saddam Hussein was not imminent. I believe these criticisms beginning last year deliberately tried to confuse the American public. The threat was not imminent, the critics said, implying the response to go to war was not required.

   Yet I have reviewed most of the President's rhetoric, and I have concluded that he made numerous honest statements that declared that after the historic attacks of September 11, we would not be defining our response by outdated measures of imminence. I went back and read a key quote from the President's State of the Union Address in 2003 in which he declared to us, the American people, and to the world:

   Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions politely, putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.

   That is what he said, and it was right then, and it is right today. So will my colleagues recall this extremely clear statement? Do they think his words were casually

   stated? Give me a break.

   I have given a lot of thought to the concept of imminence since September 11, and as we debated our response to Iraq, I recognized that the definition of ``imminence'' is necessary to support a doctrine of preemption. I wonder what our various Senators' views about this are since the definition of ``imminence'' is different in the 21st century than it was in the 19th or the 20th centuries.

   During the debate over authorization of the use of force last year, I made the following points:

   Osama bin Laden launched an attack that changed the way America sees the world. We had to recognize that the concept of imminence was not an abstract idea as we contemplated preemptive use of force. Preemption is not a new concept in international law, despite what many of the President's critics suggest. It is as old as Grotius, the founder of modern international law.

   Contrary to critics' misinformed assertions, the U.S. has never foresworn the use of preemption, not since the U.N. charter and not under either Democratic or Republican administrations.

   Preemption has always been conditioned on the idea of imminent threat. In the prenuclear era, we could see conventional armies amassing on a border and base imminence on that measure. But in the nuclear era, the idea of imminence grew quite a bit murkier.

   Was it the fueling of an enemy ICBM? Was it the glare on the rocket as it left the launch pad? Was it the warheads' return through the atmosphere? Because we raised these questions, by the way, was the reason the U.S. rejected a ``no first use'' policy during the era of strategic competition with the Soviet Union. Was that the reason we did that? You bet your life.

   Imminence becomes even murkier in an era of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. When did the threat of al-Qaida become imminent? I know when it became manifest. Not, by the way, on September 11. Osama bin Laden had struck many times before then. On September 11, the threat became catastrophic. It was well beyond manifest. It was well beyond imminent.

   Today, most people agree the threat of Bin Laden should have been considered imminent well back into the 1990s. I first started speaking of this threat in 1996, but I now believe this threat could have been considered imminent even before that.

   Do my colleagues agree we had to reconsider the definition of ``imminence'' after September 11, that the threat of terrorism forces us to redefine threats to our national security, that it would have been irresponsible for any administration entrusted with national security to avoid doing so? Does anybody disagree with that?

   Would my colleagues allow me just a few more questions which I would like to ask everybody in this body, please? I wonder if my colleagues would agree with this assessment about the threat that Iraq poses.

   I had to make, for my own conscience and to present to my constituents, my own assessment of the threat posed by Iraq. The threats Saddam Hussein posed to his own people were clear. Free Iraqis today will be undertaking the grim task of exhuming mass graves for a long time. Saddam's threat to his neighbors and our friends in the gulf and Middle East are also well established. But all of us had to determine what threat was posed to the United States.

   I feared a nexus between weapons of mass destruction and a terrorism-sponsoring state, and we feared they had weapons of mass destruction. The U.N. confirmed they had had weapons of mass destruction. They used weapons of mass destruction against their own people and threatened the use of them against others. They used them against others, as well, in the Iranian war.

   On weapons of mass destruction, we know that we have not discovered any weapons of mass destruction so far. This debate has been joined on a number of levels. I fully support the chairman of the Senate Select Committee

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on Intelligence in his determined efforts to learn about the failures of our intelligence, if there were, in fact, failures.

   We still have not even looked at the vast majority of sites in Iraq where weapons of mass destruction may still lie. I know that every intelligence community professional agrees with our need to learn from many errors because all of us know the value of accurate intelligence, while all of us recognize the limits to perfectibility.

   On another level, both in the Intelligence Committee and in the public arena, the debate has become more partisan, acrimonious and, once again, deceptive.

   Will my colleagues agree with me that the cost of making intelligence oversight partisan is not worth the devaluation of a tool that we need more than at any other time in our history?

   I would like to know if my colleagues would agree with the following conclusion about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. We faced a weapons of mass destruction gap.

   This gap was the difference between the chemical and biological stockpiles we had confirmed existed until the late 1990s and the lack of evidence regarding their status or destruction in 2002--their status, their destruction, or their removal someplace else. The gap was significant. No other Western government or intelligence government could explain it, nor could the United States verify that the gap had been closed by the cooperation of the Iraqi regime in proving the destruction of these weapons.

   This was a requirement, by the way, under international law, made to the international community, a requirement that was the result of the cessation of hostilities at the end of the first gulf war; a requirement that unmet left that war unresolved, unconcluded, and therefore without a promise of peace.

   The attempts at denial and deception by the Iraqi regime were blatant. The refusal to cooperate with the international community was obstinate. The potential threat posed by a regime violently hostile to the United States was grave. I hope my colleagues will agree that it would have been irresponsible for any administration entrusted with the national security to avoid reaching similar conclusions.

   There was the threat of terrorism. For well over a decade, Iraq was on our list of state sponsors of terrorism. Every Member in this body had ample opportunities to review the evidence supporting this claim--this verified knowledge, by the way.

   To my knowledge, no Member on either side of the aisle questioned the President's determination, or this determination.

   Now, of course, we have not proven a link to September 11, and ultimately there will likely not be a causal link. Perhaps Saddam was directly involved. Perhaps we will learn more.

   Association is not causation, as every logic professor would say. Caution in leaping to conclusions is in order. Associating with terrorist groups, as we know Saddam Hussein has done and had done, training them, giving them moral and financial support, is different than directing them. Nevertheless, his links to terrorism had been evident for a long time.

   The President has made it clear, since his first speech before the Congress days after September 11, that

   associating with terrorist groups would no longer be responded to with apathy. The previous administration did so, there is no question about that, and America's security was gravely compromised.

   Do my colleagues remember the President's speech to the Congress after September 11, 2001? Do they recall, as I do, the public's overwhelming support for what the President said that day?

   Certainly the evidence of Al-Zurqawi whose documents were captured and released a few weeks ago, as well as the reports in the press suggesting links with the Ansar-al-Islam indicated a troubling link between Iraq and al-Qaida.

   I am waiting for some of the administration's critics to suggest that these two terrorist elements were caused by our intervention in Afghanistan and that had we supported the status quo there we would not be facing the terrorists of the jihadists and Ansar-al-Islam. That would have been another very specious analysis.

   It is true that Al-Zarqawi and Ansar became more active as a result of our intervention in Afghanistan, when we deposed the Taliban and al-Qaida and fled from that country to hide in Pakistan or to get safe passage from Iran to travel to Iraq. In my estimation, if Saddam Hussein was not involved in September 11, his regime certainly became more dangerous to us as a result of our attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan.

   I hope my colleagues can imagine that this President or any President would not have had to respond similarly to the way President Bush responded to the Taliban's protection of al-Qaida after September 11, 2001. That is, of course, unless a President had judged the threat of al-Qaida imminent before that fateful day.

   Finally, I would like my colleagues to allow me a question or two on the responses we have heard from David Kay's testimonies. The response to the Kay testimonies has also been very troubling to me because the testimonies of an honest and substantive man have been subject to partisan rancor over the President's difficult decision to go to war.

   Listening to some commentators, one would think Kay's honest assessment that weapons of mass destruction will not be found, an assessment that I believe may still be premature, could be interpreted into a challenge to the sincerity of the administration's estimate of the Iraqi threat.

   As I have said, I believe we need to investigate any flaws in our intelligence that David Kay or any other serious professional exposes. Yet this is what David Kay told us. In an interview earlier this month, he said: I certainly believe that Iraq was a gathering threat. In fact, in many ways, it will probably turn out that Saddam and that regime were more dangerous than we anticipated because, in fact, it was falling apart into unbelievable depravity and corruption.

   Where is that quote among all of our liberal commentators in this country today? Where is that quote? That was one of the most important quotes he made.

   The week before, Kay told the public, in responding to a question of whether the decision to go to war was prudent: I think it was absolutely prudent. He said: I think it was

   absolutely prudent. In fact, I think at the end of the inspection process we will paint a picture of Iraq that was far more dangerous than even we thought it was before the war. It was of a system collapsing. It was a country that had the capability and weapons of mass destruction areas and in which terrorists, like ants to honey, were going after it.

   The fact is, it took guts for the President to do what he did. He was right, and history will prove him to be right.

   When I hear these testimonies of David Kay, I become concerned of yet another intelligence failure: We did not adequately assess the political degradation of the Saddam Hussein regime, the political degradation of a regime that killed 300,000-plus of its own citizens, men, women, and children, and buried them in mass graves, and helped to kill a million others in its war with Iran. We did not adequately assess the political depravity and degradation of Saddam Hussein's regime. Iraq had become a gangster state.

   It was, according to David Kay, and all the reports we are now getting from free Iraq, more dangerous than we thought. Yet some criticize the President's decision? Give me a break. They ought to be criticized. The critics know these facts as well as I do, and ignoring them is a terrible thing.

   I would just like to ask my colleagues whether the assessment by David Kay should not support the President's brave decision to address the threat of the Hussein regime by implementing a policy of regime change--a policy that had been nearly unanimously supported in our Government for 4 years?

   Was Iraq a grave and gathering threat, as the President said? I ask my colleagues, especially those who have been so critical of the President, would it have been responsible for any administration entrusted with the national security to avoid reaching similar conclusions? I think Senator Kerry was right when he said this:

   I believe the record of Saddam Hussein's ruthless, reckless breach of international

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values and standards of behavior, which is at the core of the cease-fire agreement, with no reach, no stretch, is cause enough for the world community to hold him accountable by use of force, if necessary.

   The ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, back in 2002:

   There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next 5 years. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in the development of weapons of mass destruction.

   That was said in the Congressional Record. Why the difference today? Let's go back to my friend, Senator Kerry, the Senator from Massachusetts, again. Back in 1990 he said:

   Today, we are confronted by a regional power, Iraq, which has attacked a weaker State, Kuwait. ..... The crisis is even more threatening by virtue of the fact that Iraq has developed a chemical weapons capability, and is pursuing a nuclear weapons development program. And Saddam Hussein has demonstrated a willingness to use such weapons of mass destruction in the past, whether in his war against Iran or against his own Kurdish population.

   My gosh, that was said in the Congressional Record on October 2, 1990.

   On November 9, 1990, the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts said this:

   [Saddam Hussein] cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded towards his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly, in this Nation.

   All I can say is why did he say that then, and why, as a candidate, is he saying the things he is saying today?

   The distinguished Senator from Massachusetts said:

   [W]hile we should always seek to take significant international actions on a multilateral rather than a unilateral basis whenever that is possible, if in the final analysis we face what we truly believe to be a grave threat to the well-being of our Nation or the entire world and it cannot be removed peacefully, we must have the courage to do what we believe is right and wise.

   That is in the Congressional Record on November 9, 1997.

   I think the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts deserves credit for those statements. He was warning America during the Clinton years of how terrible the Saddam Hussein regime really was. He deserves credit for that.

   On November 9, 1997, the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts was right again. He said:

   It is not possible to overstate the ominous implications for the Middle East if Saddam were to develop and successfully develop and deploy potent biological weapons. We can all imagine the consequences. Extremely small quantities of several known biological weapons have the capability to exterminate the entire populations of cities the size of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. These could be delivered by ballistic missile, but they also could be delivered by much more pedestrian means; aerosol applicators on commercial trucks easily could suffice. If Saddam were to develop and then deploy usable atomic weapons, the same holds true.

   He was warning the nation and he deserves credit for having done so then.

   On February 23, 1998, the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts said this:

   There are a set of principles here that are very large, larger in some measure than I think has been adequately conveyed, both internationally and certainly to the American people. Saddam Hussein has already used these weapons and has made it clear that he has intent to continue to try, by virtue of his duplicity and secrecy, to continue to do so. That is a threat to the stability of the Middle East. It is a threat with respect to the potential of terrorist activities on a global basis. It is a threat even to regions near but not exactly in the Middle East.

   I am hooked. Incredible. I am proud of the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts for having said that during the Clinton years. I just wish he would acknowledge that he said that during the Bush years.

   There are other distinguished Senators who knew of this threat and who made statements on what we should do back during the Clinton years, and even during the Bush years.

   It bothers me that this President has been so viciously attacked by people who know the facts and who knew them back during the Clinton years and spoke out about them during the Clinton years, who are so willing to demean this President during the years of George W. Bush as President. It never ceases to amaze me how out of tune we become when Presidential years come along. I think it happens to both sides. I really believe that. I believe there are partisans on both sides. But I have never seen it like it is today.

   It used to be that we supported whoever was President in foreign matters. We stand together. I guess this partisanship really began during the Vietnam war. But it has reached a pitch today that is unseemly.

   Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I yield to the other Senator from Utah, Mr. Bennett.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. CORNYN). The Senator from Utah.

   Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Arizona for the time and for the opportunity to address this issue. Let me make one statement at the beginning that I think needs to be made on the political rhetoric that is surrounding this issue. I am not questioning the patriotism of those who are complaining about, disagreeing with, or even attacking the President. I question their accuracy. I question their wisdom. But I am not questioning their patriotism. I think that needs to be made clear because in the debate over this war, there has been rhetoric that, in my opinion, has gone over the top.

   The former Vice President with the blood rushing to his face and the veins standing out on his neck screeched before a crowd which has been repeated on the television that the President has betrayed this country. You can disagree with George W. Bush. That is legitimate and proper and in an election year expected. But you should not accuse him of being a traitor. You should not accuse him of treason.

   I want to make it clear again that as I disagree with those who are attacking the President, I am not attacking their patriotism or their love of this country. But I do disagree with their wisdom and with their accuracy.

   In the speeches that have just been given, we have had a lot of conversation about what I would consider past history. I am not going to get into that; that is, what did we know about weapons of mass destruction? What did the inspectors know? What should we have done here? What should we have interpreted there? I will leave that to the historians themselves to sort out. A debate on those issues becomes an attempt simply to bash the President and avoid the fundamental issue.

   The fundamental issue that we have to face as Senators, as policymakers, is what do we do now? We are in Iraq whether you voted for the resolution, as Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards did and as I did, or whether you voted against it, as Senator Durbin did. Debating the wisdom of that at this point is merely an exercise in avoiding the reality of the situation with which we find ourselves faced now. What do we do now?

   The large majority of this body along with a large majority of the Members of the House of Representatives, and the unanimous vote in the Security Council of the United Nations took us to war. What do we do now?

   That is the fundamental question that we should be addressing and that we should be facing.

   Oh, say some, no, no. The fundamental question is whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction. And, since there were not, the real question is, Did the President lie?

   Well, let us look at the situation we are facing now with respect to weapons of mass destruction. The question is not are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and did the President lie? The question is, What happened to the weapons that everybody knew were in Iraq, and has the President taken proper steps to protect us from them?

   When I say the weapons that everybody knew were in Iraq, whom do I include in that? The first person to convince me there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State to President Clinton. She met with us here in the secure room of the Capitol; the room where we get top secret briefings from the highest possible level. It was in that room that Madeleine Albright sat down with the Members of the Senate and laid out the irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and justified to

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us the Clinton administration's determination that they would go to war, and they did.

   Bombing another country is an act of war, and the Clinton administration, in 1998, in response to the irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, took the United States to war. We did not invade Iraq with troops, but certainly dropping bombs in the quantity and regularity with which we dropped them in 1998 is an act of war. We did it unilaterally. We did it without consulting the United Nations. We did it without talking to the French or the Germans in the way that some of the President's critics say we must. We did it because we knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

   David Kay and his inspectors have been to Iraq, and they say they cannot find warehouses full of weapons of mass destruction, which raises the fundamental question that most people are not addressing. What happened to them? Where are they? We know he had them. We went to war to deal with them. What happened to them?

   I think there are four possible answers to that question.

   First, one that has been raised by President Clinton himself, we got them all in the bombing. President Clinton said we didn't know how many we got. We could have gotten all of them. We could have gotten none. But we did our best to try to destroy them.

   One answer to the question of why David Kay was unable to find weapons of mass destruction when he got into Iraq with his inspectors is the possibility that we got them all in the bombing and had no way of knowing that.

   No. 2, the second possibility raised by David Kay and others is that they were trucked out of the country. They went off the border to Syria or someplace else. They are still in existence. They just aren't still in Iraq. We don't know the answer to that. But that is a possibility.

   Possibility No. 3, they were destroyed by Saddam Hussein himself. Someone would ask why would he want to do that. Look at the man. Look at what he did. Look at his record. He believed that the United States would, in fact, not invade. We had bombed in the first gulf war. We had bombed in 1998. He believed we would bomb again but that we would not invade, or, if we did invade, we would not topple him. After all, we didn't topple him last time.

   Pressure from the French, pressure from the Germans, said don't go ahead with this. He could very well have believed that the international community would put enough pressure on President Bush that the United States ultimately would stop short of removing him, particularly if inspectors from the U.N. got into Iraq and discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, he could have destroyed them himself on the assumption that he would stay in power and then, as soon as the inspectors were gone, he could reconstruct his weapons program, reestablish weapons of mass destruction, and be right back where he was before we took the action in 1998. That is the third possibility.

   The fourth possibility is that they are still there. There is the possibility that we haven't been able to find them but they are still there. That is a very serious question, one that is being ignored by everybody who is debating the question of whether Bush went to the United Nations the right way, or whether he said the right things, or whether he read the right intelligence. Those questions are minor compared to the consequences of answering this question.

   Let me pose it again and go through the four possibilities and give you my answer.

   What happened to the weapons of mass destruction that everybody in the world knew he had? We destroyed them in the bombing, or they were taken over the border to someplace else, or Saddam Hussein himself destroyed them in order to fool the inspectors, or they are still there.

   My answer is I believe all four. I believe we destroyed some in the bombing. I believe some got over the border. I believe he dismantled some of his programs, and I believe there are some still to be found.

   That means, if I am right, there is work to be done to help make the world safer that is not being done while we are being distracted by an irrelevant debate that is best left to historians.

   There is possibly still a threat out there that we are not addressing because we are paying so much attention to the questions of what kind of intelligence did he read and did he have the right 16 words in the State of the Union Message. We waste our time on that when we are facing this far more serious and obvious question.

   What happened to the weapons that we knew he had? We should not rest easy until we have an answer to that question.

   Which of the four or combination of the four possibilities really applies? The real question we are facing as we look ahead to November--and make no mistake, this debate is all about looking ahead to November--is what will the United States do after the Presidential election is over?

   How will we proceed in Iraq once the determination has been made as to who will control our foreign policy for the next 4 years? That is the fundamental question the American voters need to be debating. That is the question they need to pay attention to as they make up their minds as to whom they will support in this election.

   The choice is fairly clear. We can only guess about the future, but the best indication of the future lies in the actions of the past. President Bush has made it pretty clear what the future would be with respect to Iraq if he prevails in November. President Bush has made it clear if he prevails in November, we will stay the course in Iraq. We will stay in Iraq until we have succeeded in our goal, which is to plant in Iraq a self-governing, westward-looking, open society where private property rights are respected, where the rights of individuals to vote and control their destiny are preserved, and where free market principles will prevail; an Iraq that will stand as an example to the rest of the Middle East that freedom, democracy and capitalism can indeed thrive there. President Bush is an optimist who believes those things are so fundamental in the human spirit that they can survive in an Islamic background.

   There are pessimists around who say no, the Muslims can never live in democracy. The Muslims can never live in freedom. President Bush is an optimist who says, I don't believe that--without trying to change their religion or attack their culture. I believe they will respond to freedom and the Americans will stay there until we have achieved the goal of planting freedom there.

   That is the answer to the question of what will happen in Iraq if George W. Bush wins this election. That is an easy answer to give because his past resolve and his past determination have been very clear.

   The second question, of course, is what will happen in Iraq if President Bush loses the election and we get a new steward in charge of our foreign affairs. That question is a little harder to answer because we do not have as clear a track record. On the assumption that the junior Senator from Massachusetts will become the President if President Bush loses the election, we do have the signposts indicating what he would do if he inherited the situation we now have. He said on ``Face the Nation,'' the first thing he would do is go to the United Nations and apologize. I am not quite sure for what he would apologize, but he has indicated the first thing he would do is to go to the United Nations and apologize.

   If I may quote the columnist for the New York Times, Tom Friedman, who spoke to a group in Europe. They turned to him after the weapons of mass destruction question arose and asked, Are you now prepared to apologize for your defense of Bush and your support for this war? He said something like this: Well, let me see. We have removed Saddam Hussein, one of the most brutal dictators of the world, found in the process that he had slaughtered at least 300,000 of his own people whom he had buried in mass graves. We know he is responsible for a million more deaths in the two wars he started with his neighbors over the last 12 years. We know he supported terrorism, down to the detail of paying $25,000 to anyone who would wrap himself in dynamite and blow himself up just so long as he could take another human being with him, and that he

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kept his people in absolute degradation and subjugation for 38 years. Now he is gone with his torture chambers and his secret police and his brutality, and I am supposed to apologize for that?

   I am not quite sure what Senator Kerry might say to the U.N. when he goes to apologize, but apparently what he will say, as I try to gather from the speeches he has given, is the United States should no longer act unilaterally, that we should get international support before we go forward in an event like this, and presumably he would then say to the U.N. we are where we are, the responsibility now of building the kind of Iraq George W. Bush envisioned--I give Senator Kerry the credit of assuming he is in favor of that kind of Iraq--the responsibility for building that kind of Iraq now lies with you, United Nations. We in America are going to show a little humility--that is another word he used--show a little humility on this issue and turn it over to you and let

   you take over the responsibility of producing the results we all want in Iraq.

   If that is, indeed, his program--and I assume we will find that out as the election goes forward--I make these observations. Number one, the United Nations has no force with which it can provide security to the Iraqis. There is no United Nations army. There is no United Nations police force. There are no United Nations federal marshals or any other kind of enforcement facility you might think of. The only force the United Nations can ever use is the force that would be provided to it by its member states. The United Nations can pass resolutions, the United Nations can threaten people, but the threats carry no force unless the member states of the United Nations respond to the U.N. resolutions and can go forward.

   That is the point President Bush made when he spoke to the United Nations and said to them, if you won't enforce your resolutions, we will. I don't think we need to apologize to the United Nations for enforcing their resolution 1441 that passed by a unanimous vote in the Security Council and which David Kay has now said Saddam Hussein was in complete violation of. That is something we should remember as we have this debate.

   The history is not all that comforting to me. Koffi Annan sent a group of U.N. folk into Iraq to help with the nation building and here is the series of events that occurred. The head of the U.N. mission showed up and took possession of a building where he was going to operate. The Americans showed up and put their armored vehicles around the building. He came out and said, No, that is too militaristic. You Americans are too quick to show force. We are the United Nations. We come in peace. Get rid of the armored vehicles.

   The American commander, after arguing with this fellow, said all right, and he got rid of the armored vehicles, but he spread concertina wire through the courtyard, and the U.N. head of the group came out and said, get rid of that. You are too militaristic. We are the United Nations. We are not the United States. We are not here to show military force. We are here to help build the country.

   Finally, the Americans took away the concertina wire and the next day a truck bomb drove across the courtyard, blew up the building and killed the man who had said, I don't need this kind of protection. After this, Koffi Annan said, get them out of there. We can't provide their security. We can't keep them safe.

   I welcome the United Nations involvement. I hope we get the United Nations involvement, but I don't think that track record speaks very well for the idea that the first thing we should do about dealing with the problem in Iraq is to go to the United Nations and show some humility and apologize. The number one civil right which all of us desire more than anything else and that is most essential in Iraq is the right to walk down the street without being shot,

   the right to walk out in public without being beaten over the head. To establish security is the first responsibility of civilization. Security in Iraq is being provided by the American military and its allies in the Iraqi forces.

   George W. Bush, for all of the mistakes that have been made, and all of the difficulties that have been encountered, has demonstrated America's resolve to provide this civil right to Iraqis. The United Nations has fallen short in this category.

   This is the fundamental question all of us should look at: Instead of debating whether the President looked at the right piece of intelligence, whether the committees had the right information, whether this or that or the other was looked at and was not, the real question is, where do we go from here. We are where we are, regardless of how we got here. Where do we go from here--the question the American people will decide in November.

   I close with this anecdote or comment from Bernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis probably knows more about this region than any other academic in America. He has spent more time studying it, and has written books on it. He spoke to a group of us, and he was an optimist. He agreed with President Bush that democracy could be planted in the region and we should stay the course until we do it. He made this comment. He said: Listen to the jokes. In the Middle East, the only form of expression that is not censored is the jokes. And this is the joke that is going around in Iran, right next to Iraq. Two Iranians are talking. The first Iranian is complaining about how bad the government is, how bad things are. The second Iranian says: Yeah. They go back and forth, saying: What are we going to do? Where are we going to turn? Finally, the second Iranian says: I know. What we need is an Osama bin Laden. The first Iranian says: Are you crazy? That would make things that much worse, and the second Iranian says: Nope. If we had an Osama bin Laden, then the Americans would come and save us.

   There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Middle East who are watching what we are doing in Iraq in the hope that, in the words of the joke, the Americans will ``come and save us.''

   We have set our hand to the plow to that particular assignment. We should not turn back now. We should back our President and his resolve to see this through until freedom, prosperity, and self-determination are established in Iraq, from which it will then spread, change the Middle East, and ultimately transform the world.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.

   Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Utah for an incredibly fine speech. I appreciate the remarks he gave tonight very much, and I am sure the President does, as well.

   At this time, I yield to the Senator from Georgia.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.

   Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Arizona for yielding, as well as for his leadership on this issue. He has provided strong and forceful leadership in support of the war on terrorism. It is vitally important that all of us, not just as Members of the Senate, but as Americans, support this administration and support our troops in making sure we win this war on terrorism.

   I would like to start by saying I have spent the last 3 years working on intelligence issues, first in the House and now in the Senate Intelligence Committees, and have learned some things that are very relevant to this discussion.

   First, many across the aisle supported massive cuts to the intelligence community budget throughout the 1990s. Between 1992 and 1998, in fact, the Central Intelligence Agency closed one-third of its overseas field stations, lost one-quarter of its clandestine service case officers, lost 40 percent of its recruited spies, and CIA intelligence reports declined by nearly one-half.

   The Clinton administration, supported by many Democrats in this Chamber today, decided from the outset that the end of the cold war meant we no longer needed intelligence on national security threats. The end of the cold war divide in actual fact made the world a much more complex place, with a host of new, unconventional, and asymmetric threats to our security we were not well prepared to address. Instead of dismantling our intelligence apparatus in the 1990s, recent history has proved beyond a shadow of doubt we should have been expanding and enhancing the quality of those capabilities so we could better understand and

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counter the new nature of the threat. The record will show many on our side of the aisle were making this very point throughout the 1990s.

   It is absurd to argue, as some in the other party appear to have suggested over the years, that by emasculating the CIA and our other intelligence agencies, our Nation's security would not be affected, or even would be enhanced.

   I would just add that penetrating terrorist groups and rogue states, so-called hard targets, is a difficult and dangerous business. It requires a robust overseas intelligence presence, adequate and sustained resources, a wide-ranging stable of recruited and vetted spies, strong bipartisan support from Congress and the White House, and a willingness to take calculated risks. I submit the facts of the 1990s strongly suggest we had none of these.

   In addition, it is apparent to me the intelligence community during the 1990s was skewed far too heavily in favor of technical collection of intelligence over what is the cornerstone of the business: human intelligence gathering or HUMINT, i.e., using spies to acquire information on the plans and intentions of our adversaries.

   When my House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security took a hard look at the erosion of our intelligence capabilities in the 1990s, right after 9/11, it became clear to me our human spies were almost considered to be obsolete by the Clinton administration and its appointed intelligence community leadership.

   When David Kay spoke about his experiences searching for WMD in Iraq on the ``Jim Lehrer News Hour'' last month, he said:

   We are not very good as a nation in our intelligence capability at reading the most fundamental secrets of a society, what are its capabilities, what are its intentions? We can't photograph those. You need Americans on the ground penetrating those societies and people who are speaking their languages.

   I fully agree with Dr. Kay, and would just note it takes a long time and a great deal of effort to build such human espionage capabilities. Yet our colleagues across the aisle proved in the 1990s that such capabilities, however imperfect, could be torn down quickly and with ease.

   In July of 1997, Congresswoman MAXINE WATERS, over in the House, said:

   I think the day for the CIA has come and gone.

   I cite the Congressional Record, dated July 9, 1997. In that same debate, then-Congressman David Bonior commented:

   [W]e are spending, according to the New York Times, over $30 billion on intelligence, and the cold war is what? Nine years, seven years, eight years over with?

   I cite again the Congressional Record, dated July 9, 1997. That same year, here in the Senate, the junior Senator from Massachusetts questioned: ``Why is it that our vast intelligence apparatus continues to grow .....'' now that the cold war struggle is over?

   I cite the Congressional Record, dated May 1, 1997. Two years before that, the same Senator proposed we cut the intelligence budget by $1.5 billion, not for specific programs but across the board. In 1994, that same Senator wanted to cut the intelligence budget by $1 billion and to freeze intelligence spending. That is the record.

   Now, it is going to be awfully hard for certain individuals in the other party to justify their actions on national security matters during the near decade-long period of neglect and erosion of our intelligence capabilities of which they were directly complicit. It is stunning--although not surprising--that such individuals are now seeking to rewrite their own history.

   I add that the junior Senator from Massachusetts in 1995 proposed to cut $1.5 billion from the intelligence community. That bill he introduced would have exacted cuts of $300 million in each of the fiscal years 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and again in the year 2000. The proposal was so out of line with reality that there were no cosponsors on the bill and, thank goodness, it never made it to the floor.

   I ask the question, Why is it that an atmosphere of extreme risk aversion pervaded the intelligence community during the 1990s and lasts even to the present day in some respects?

   There are two particular events that bother me. First, when I chaired the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security in 2001 and 2002, I was particularly struck by the internal CIA guidelines promulgated in 1995 by then-Director of CIA, John Deutch, that severely limited the ability of CIA case officers to meet with, develop, and recruit foreign nationals who may have been involved in dubious activities or have blood on their hands.

   We found, through extensive oversight work and dialog with CIA field officers, that these so-called Deutch guidelines had a significant chilling effect on our ability to operate against terrorist and rogue state ``hard targets.'' After all, how can one penetrate a terrorist organization or Saddam's brutal regime, for that matter, without dealing with unsavory people?

   The guidelines were, in my view, a primary cause of the risk aversion to which I refer in my question, and they actually stayed in effect through July of 2002, when we finally succeeded after many efforts to compel the DCI to repeal them.

   The second event concerns Mr. Deutch's decision during his mercifully short tenure as DCI to conduct a CIA-wide ``asset scrub,'' which applied an inflexible reporting standard to all CIA spies that, if not met, resulted in their automatic firing.

   The fact is, the spying business is a lot different than a simple calculation of profit and loss. Spies are human beings who put their lives on the line to spy for us. We have a special responsibility to them and their families. Just because a spy's access may have dried up for a time, that doesn't mean they won't prove useful later on on other issues. Moreover, since we have had many gaps in our clandestine coverage of key issues at the time of the scrub, termination of spies was done without regard to how we might otherwise cover a subject by other means. Thus, our gaps were further exacerbated.

   In my opinion, the Deutch guidelines and Deutch asset scrub are two of the major driving forces behind the risk aversion to which I referred in my question.

   Mr. President, that is a direct byproduct of those years of neglect and resource starvation during the previous administration.

   I want to first make it clear that it has been my

   experience that the stifling problem of risk aversion went from Washington to the field, and not vice versa. I know that the young, often idealistic, aggressive CIA case officers out on the front lines are not the problem.

   Risk aversion starts when elected officials, on whose support CIA depends in the face of failure as well as success, abandons the discipline. The ``end of the cold war'' and ``peace dividend'' type arguments of those in the other party during the 1990s clearly manifested themselves in the form of political abandonment of our intelligence community.

   During those years of Democratic control of Congress, Hill support for the intelligence mission was also questionable. I refer back to my previous remarks about what the junior Senator from Massachusetts and others tried to do to further reduce the intelligence community during the 1990s as a case in point.

   Moreover, the record will clearly show that during the periods of Republican control of the House and Senate, significant efforts were made to increase the top line of President Clinton's annual intelligence budget requests. Some of these Republican efforts were successful; others were not. But for the most part, we brought the previous administration along kicking and screaming.

   It should not be surprising that when the politicians turn their back on the intelligence community, politically appointed intelligence seniors start to become more reluctant to approve operations that might result in some sort of political flap because they know they won't be supported.

   When such intelligence seniors start to become overly conservative, the managers below them follow suit. After a while, bureaucratic obstacles, and other hoops through which field officers must jump before getting operations approved, start to appear. That is where you get the Deutch guidelines and the Deutch asset scrub.

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   Now we have to figure out how to undo the bureaucratic risk averse mindset that has taken a decade to spread across the intelligence community like a cancer and, like a cancer, radical treatment with often painful side effects may very well be required.

   That is what happens when national security becomes relegated to the bottom of our Nation's priorities. Fortunately, we have a President now who is anything but risk averse and who puts the long-term security interests and safety of all Americans at the top of his list of priorities.

   On the issue of terrorism and homeland security, Americans deserve strong leadership, not political games. Our President is providing the positive leadership that will ensure the safety of our citizens.

   I yield back to the Senator from Arizona.

   Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I very much appreciate those remarks coming from a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

   I now will yield to the Senator from Alabama.

   Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Arizona for his leadership on this important matter. I feel very strongly that our country is not fully aware--at least the public debate on the television and so forth have not shown a full awareness of the leadership that President Bush has given this country to help us deal with the challenges facing us.

   I thank Senator Chambliss for his comments about the intelligence-gathering functions. I wish to share some of my insights into where we are and where we can expect to be going.

   After 9/11, the President of the United States was a challenged leader. He faced difficult times. We lost 3,000 people. Some decisions had to be made. He decided that business as usual would not continue and the United States was going to have to take a leadership role against terrorism.

   About that time, former Secretary of Defense and former Secretary of Energy, James Schlesinger, who served in President Carter's Cabinet, testified before our Armed Services Committee, of which the Chair is a member. Mr. Schlesinger talked about the U.N. and its inability to make decisions and take action. He referred, quoting another writer, to the UN as being ``an institution given only to talk.''

   Well, in the last decade, before President Bush took office, during the 8 years under President Clinton's leadership, we did a lot of talking about the problems facing the world. We did a lot of talking about Iraq. We passed a resolution in this body that declared it to be the policy of the United States to effect a regime change in Iraq. President Clinton signed it but we didn't do anything. We talked but we didn't do anything.

   We now have a President who decided that we need to show some courage and leadership, and he did that. One of the first things he did, and I ask the American people to recall, was that he confronted a great country, Pakistan. Pakistan's intelligence agencies, Senator Kyl knows as a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, were collaborating with the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Everybody knew that and that there was a lot of partnership there. We now know they were participating in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. President Bush challenged them and he said: President Musharraf, you have to choose. This is very serious. Are you going to allow Pakistan to be a country associated with the Taliban and terrorism, or are you going to stand your country in the future against that kind of activity?

   To his credit, President Musharraf made a decision. It was not academic. It was not talk. It was: Mr. Musharraf, you must make a decision.

   Since that time, he has been helpful to us in many ways, at risk of his own life. His opponents have attempted to assassinate him. Would anybody suggest that had our President been weak and waffling and vacillating, that the President of Pakistan would have made that decision, would he have put his very life on the line against terrorism?

   Then he made the same challenge to Mullah Omar in Afghanistan where, as you remember, Bin Laden was training his terrorist soldiers. He said: You must reject that; you must turn against the al-Qaida; you must turn to your country; and you must choose. Mullah Omar chose. He chose to remain friends with Bin Laden and al-Qaida terrorist groups. He chose not to side with the nations who turned against terrorism.

   Mullah Omar, I suppose, is hiding in some cave somewhere in Afghanistan. His government is completely gone. Yes, Bin Laden, who was in his country, attacked and damaged our Pentagon, and killed our soldiers right out here at the Pentagon. But his pentagon no longer exists. It is rubble. And there is a new government with a new constitution in the works to preside over a new Afghanistan where women have a chance to have freedom and prosperity; when I was there I saw that the people are re-building all over that country. Houses that had been destroyed are being refurbished, and people seemed to be making real progress there. That is such a tremendous step forward for the world.

   Then the challenge was placed before Saddam Hussein. We had the U.N. try to find these weapons. We know he used these kinds of weapons. We know he was not complying with the U.N. resolutions. The U.N. found him in violation of those resolutions and voted in 1441 that he was in violation of the resolutions. We gave him every chance to renounce weapons of mass destruction, and to demonstrate that he had complied with multiple U.N resolutions. Because he lost the first gulf war he made a commitment to eliminate these kinds of weapons and to comply with U.N. resolutions, but he refused to do so. And President Bush acted.

   Saddam Hussein was dug out of a hole in the ground and is now in the Bastille where he used to put his people and kill them. But he is not going to be killed. He will be given a fair trial.

   The people of Iraq are forming a new government. Production is up. Electricity production is up. I know the chief of police there, and there are 70,000 new police officers, some of them being killed this day, but they are standing firmly for freedom in a new Iraq.

   Lo and behold, after we dug Saddam Hussein out of the ground, Muammar Qadhafi of Libya, known as one of the world's most significant terrorists in the past, renounced his terrorism and called for the United States and Great Britain--he did not talk to the U.N., but he wanted us to be involved in his renunciation of terrorism and he has allowed inspections.

   During the former administration--and I am not criticizing, but I was frustrated--when President Clinton was in office, we talked all the time about nuclear

   proliferation but accomplished little. But only recently, we had Abdul Khan, the chief nuclear scientist in Pakistan come forward. What did he say? He said he was proliferating weapons from Pakistan to North Korea to Iraq to Libya and to Iraq. That had been going on but it is not going on now because he has renounced it and told all that he had done to the world.

   Iran is now allowing the United Nations to come in and inspect their nuclear program. The nations in the East--China, Japan, and South Korea--are confronting North Korea. We are not going to keep rewarding North Korea for bad activity, as has been done in the past. We are going to insist they step up like these other nations and assume a place among the decent nations in the world, or they are not going to get any benefits from us. We are going to keep the pressure on, and that is exactly the right thing for us to do.

   These events have occurred for one reason and one reason only: We have a President of the United States who loves this country, who believes in our values. He believes in freedom. He believes in democracy. He wants to see the world be a better place. He does not want to just preside over the office of President. He wants to do something good for this world, and he is doing it.

   As a direct result of his leadership, we made extraordinary progress in just 2 years, progress not seen in decades.

   It has been tough. Our soldiers are at risk, and they are putting their lives at risk every day to effect a policy that those of us in this Senate voted for by an overwhelming vote. Some of them voted for it and then turned around and voted not to support our troops. But most of the Senators here, Republicans and Democrats, have stayed. Yes, we have had complaints, but when has there ever been a war when everything has gone perfectly smoothly?

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   I urge the Members of this body, my Senate colleagues, to look at what has occurred, to recognize that we are seeing the benefits of extraordinary and courageous leadership. When they do so, we shall hear less carping, less complaining, less whining, and less second-guessing than we have heard. We are making progress. We are going to continue to make progress. We are going to make this world a better place and safer place for the people of the United States.

   I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Talent). The Senator from Arizona.

   Mr. KYL. Mr. President, let me summarize what I think has been established during the last couple of hours. The reason we took to the floor is because there has been a lot of criticism of the President of the United States and the administration for its actions in finally deciding that enough was enough with Saddam Hussein, that his continual violation of the U.N. resolutions had to be enforced by someone, and that before there was an imminent threat posed by his dangerous regime, it was important for the United States and a coalition of other countries to take action to remove him.

   The criticism has come both from potential Democratic nominees for President, Members of this body, news organizations, and others outside the body, but we sought to try to put into perspective some of these criticisms and to point out that at the end of the day, there should be no question that President Bush did the right thing.

   The three key points were, first, that an intelligence failure is not the same thing as intelligence misuse or misleading, and if there was a failure because the intelligence agencies were wrong about the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that they thought existed and which we have not been able to find, it is not the same thing as saying that the President misled anyone or that anyone else with access to intelligence misled anyone.

   The second point was that whatever the state of intelligence, the case for removing Saddam Hussein is still very strong, a point which several of our colleagues have made repeatedly on both sides of the aisle, as well as President Clinton and other members of his administration prior to the Bush administration.

   And, third, that the question regarding the weapons of mass destruction, the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons is not a matter of whether they existed but what happened to them; that everyone who had access to the intelligence was convinced they existed.

   In fact, we know they existed at least one time because they were used against the Kurds and against the Iranians. Saddam Hussein himself, in submitting documents to the United Nations, admitted they existed. This was, I believe, either 1996 or 1998 and then again in the year 2002. So we had his admission that they existed. As Senator Bennett said a while ago, nobody knows whether they were destroyed, shipped someplace else, or whether we destroyed them, but eventually we will find out the answers to those questions.

   The fact we cannot find those weapons of mass destruction stockpiles--primarily artillery shells with chemical munitions--does not detract at all from the case against Saddam Hussein or make the case that somehow or another the American people were somehow misled by the President.

   In closing, I will quote from the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. What the current ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee had to say is: As the attacks of September 11 demonstrated, the immense destructiveness of modern technology means we can no longer afford to wait around for a smoking gun. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe after September 11 that question is increasingly outdated. It is in the nature of these weapons and the way they are targeted against civilian populations that documented capability and demonstrated intent may be the only warning we get. To insist on further evidence would put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? We cannot.

   The ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee is the junior Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Rockefeller. These were his comments on October 10, 2002. Yet today we find some saying the President contended there was an imminent threat, when he did not, and that we should not have acted unless, in fact, there was an imminent threat.

   I think Senator Rockefeller was correct, and I know he has access to all of the intelligence because, of course, he is the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee.

   Now I will read from the chairman of the Intelligence Committee: I have seen enough evidence. I do not know if I have seen all the evidence, but I have seen enough to be satisfied that there has been a continuing effort by Saddam Hussein, since the end of the gulf war, particularly since 1998, to reestablish and enhance Iraq's capacity of weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, and nuclear.

   That was the immediate past chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the senior Senator from Florida, Mr. Graham. He, too, had access to all of the intelligence.

   My point in quoting my two colleagues is that in the Senate, those of us on the Intelligence Committee had access to the same intelligence the President did, at least similar intelligence to what other countries in the world had, and all of us, including the United States, believed these things. We had the same intelligence that was given to the President.

   We were not misleading anyone. The President obviously was not misleading anyone. The fact that it turns out some of the intelligence turned out not to be totally correct is not the same thing as saying somebody misused the intelligence. I hope my colleagues on the other side do not cross that line of accusing the President of intentionally misleading the American people because to do so, in effect, would be also to accuse our own colleagues of that very same thing. I do not believe, based upon what I know of my colleagues, that that could be said of any one of them. So I hope we can get over this notion that just because not all the intelligence was correct, therefore, it must mean somebody was misleading someone else. I think we have established that is not true and that it would be very wrong to try to pursue that line of attack against President Bush simply because we happen to be in an election year.

   We will have more to say on this subject in the future, but I want my colleagues to understand that if there are charges made against the President or against this administration relating to the use of intelligence with respect to the war in Iraq, those charges will be rebutted. I appreciate very much the attention of my colleagues to this matter this evening.

4D) Iran

   Mr. ANDREWS. Mr. Speaker, I must begin by thanking the staff of the House of Representatives for enduring these long nights so we have a chance to speak our minds about the important subjects of the day. We certainly appreciate the Speaker and the staff who stay here into the wee hours.

   I also extend my appreciation to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) for the intense causes in which he believes and for his patriotism. I must say, one of the reasons I love my country so much is we have the academic freedom that decisions about what we teach and how we teach it are made by educators and teachers and not by those of us in this Chamber, and I hope that is always the case.

   Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about a challenge to the values that I just made reference to, probably the most important challenge to these values that we have faced in many generations in this country.

[Time: 20:30]

   In the 1970s a young man named Ghollam Nikbin came to the United States from Iran. He came here to study at an American university. While he was here, the fundamentalist revolution in Iran took place and in 1979 his country changed dramatically and he chose not to return to Iran. At the time he came to the United States he was a person who practiced the Islamic faith. While he was in the United States, he met an American citizen who was a member of the Mormon faith and he married this American citizen and he converted. Mr. Nikbin converted to the Mormon faith himself. That marriage subsequently ended in divorce and in 1991, Mr. Nikbin returned to his native Iran to live his life. While there, he met another woman and they decided to get married and he had a wedding. During his wedding, members of the police force in Iran raided the wedding because the men and women at the wedding were engaged in dancing. Men were dancing with women. For this hideous offense, Mr. Nikbin was publicly lashed 40 times with a whip to punish him for his transgression against the prevailing culture.

   Things grew worse for Mr. Nikbin in Iran. He was a suspicious person because he had converted to the Mormon faith and then attempted to convert back to his native Islamic faith. So in 1995 he tried to leave the country. As he was at the airport, he was intercepted by Iranian authorities who refused to let him leave the country. He

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was beaten with an electric cable and he was hung upside down by his ankles for extended periods of time. Today he is 56 years old. He has returned to the United States. His family says he was able to return to the United States because they were able to bribe the appropriate officials in Iran to get him released from the country. His crime was that he converted to a faith other than radical Islam.

   A woman named Zahara Kazemi, a woman of both Iranian and Canadian descent, a 54-year-old woman, last June 23 took an assignment. She was a photo journalist. She took an assignment to go to Iran to do her work as a photo journalist. On the 23rd of June of last year, she was taking photographs of a student demonstration outside of the Evin prison in Iran. She was apprehended by authorities for the hideous crime of taking a photograph of a demonstration. After 77 hours of interrogation in an Iranian prison, she took sick. On the 11th of July of last year, 18 days after she arrived in Iran, she died in an Iranian hospital while in the custody of the Iranian authorities. At first, their report is that she had suffered a stroke and died of natural causes. Many in our sister nation of Canada expressed outrage as to the conditions around Ms. Kazemi's death and the Canadian government was persistent and, finally, 5 days after she died, authorities of the Iranian government indicated that it was not a stroke at all, that she had died from beatings that led to a cerebral hemorrhage, a 54-year-old woman beaten to death in an Iranian prison because she dared to take photographs of a peaceful demonstration.

   What kind of monstrous spirit would give rise to these atrocities? It is a spirit we have seen before. It is the spirit, the horrible spirit, the horrible poisonous spirit that led 6 million Jews to the gas chambers during the Holocaust. It is the horrifying spirit that sees people strap C4 to their waists and walk into hotels and onto buses and near schools in the Middle East every day. It is the awful animus that led to the bombings in Riyadh, in Ankara within the last year. The victims are of all faiths, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic. They are of all races and all nationalities. What these horrific acts have in common is they are rooted in the poisonous well of an intolerant hatred of anyone who is not like those who practice that intolerant hatred.

   This poisonous attitude is contrary to everything that we are as Americans. It is against inclusion of people of other races and cultures. It is an attitude that despises the equal treatment of men and women under the law. It is an attitude that looks at other faiths not as an opportunity to learn how other people might live but as a threat to one's own twisted faith. By no means is this poisonous attitude representative of the Islamic faith. I believe the Islamic faith is a faith of peace, of humanity, of inclusion. By no means is this twisted attitude wholly representative of the Arab culture or the Arab ethnicity. I believe that the vast majority of men and women of Arab descent love peace, respect others and wish that their children would grow up in a world where others share those values. But make no mistake about it, the poisonous well from which these acts spring is an attitude that identifies everything Western, everything modern, everything progressive, everything that America loves and everything that Americans are. It is an attitude that identifies all those things as a threat to be detested, defeated and destroyed. It is an attitude that we saw in the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11 of 2001. It is an attitude that literally blew a hole in the Pentagon.

   It is an attitude that led dozens of brave Americans to their death in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

   Many of us believe that September 11, 2001, was not an isolated criminal act. It was an act of war that shocked Americans into a realization that we are in the midst of a great global struggle between those who love and tolerate diversity and those who deplore it and try to destroy it. So the reason we should care about the stories I told you about Ghollam Nikbin, Zahara Kazemi, the stories that I could have told about hundreds of Iranian students who are in Iranian prisons tonight, the reason we should care is that the hateful attitude from which the attacks on them sprung is an attitude that targets us next, an attitude that seeks to destroy us and our way of life.

   By no means is it fair or accurate to say that such an attitude is common or characteristic of the Iranian people, by no means is it fair or accurate to say that it is characteristic of the history of their nation, and by no means is it accurate to say that this hatred will mar and define the future of the people of Iran. I aspire to a future where the people of the United States and the people of Iran are partners in peace and freedom, where we celebrate each other's differences and respect each other's values. But that is not the case today.

   Mr. Speaker, I would hope that we in this House and we in this country could focus on the very grave and real threat posed to the peace that we enjoy tonight by the presence of the terrorist incubator in Iran. When we consider what our policy should be toward Iran, we should not think about September 11 of 2001 because there frankly is no evidence that I have seen that would suggest that the Iranian government was in any way a sponsor of the atrocious attacks on our country on September 11. In fact, the evidence is rather replete with examples that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization have been at odds with the radical fundamentalist Iranian leadership.

   But the question is not who allied to attack us on September 11. The issue is who wishes to attack us in the future, where the threats exist for our future. To understand why we want to prevent the next 9/11, why we want to limit the next attack on this country so it does not succeed and so we can defeat such an attack, we need to understand where the first 9/11 came from. In order for terrorists to succeed, they need personnel, they need leadership, they need financial and logistical support, and their leaders need sanctuary. Their leaders need a place where they can plan, plot and eventually execute attacks against the people of the United States of America. September 11 happened because Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization had all four of those elements to attack us. They had the personnel, the 19 twisted individuals who hated us more than they loved life to the point that they were able to turn civilian airliners into weapons of mass destruction. They had the leadership, the odious cadre of dark men who surround Osama bin Laden, who conceived of such a horrific plot. They had the finances and the logistics, passing through international financial organizations, in many cases laundered through Saudi Arabia, laundered through other institutions, many of which to this day refuse to disclose their banking records to us. The terrorists were able to gather the logistics they needed to place the hijackers in America, buy their plane tickets, acquire their training, keep their cover and let them prepare to do their horrible deeds.

   And, finally, and I think crucially, the September 11 attackers flourished in the terrorist sanctuary of Afghanistan. At the time Afghanistan was run by the Taliban regime, a group that not only tolerated the presence of al Qaeda but actively facilitated the presence of al Qaeda. I think the argument is rather clear. Without a sanctuary in Afghanistan, there would have been no place for Osama bin Laden to plot this attack. Without a place to plot this attack and gather his resources, there would not have been an opportunity to carry out the attack. Without the opportunity to carry out the attack, there certainly would not have been the carnage and pain this country felt and still feels emanating from September 11.

   What is the lesson of September 11? There are two lessons. The first is if you give terrorists sanctuary, they will exploit that sanctuary and, like a snake that is coiled in the corner, they will wait till precisely the right moment to strike. And the second lesson of September 11 is if you wait for the snake to strike, it always will. If our strategy in the face of this global struggle is to wait and see if terrorists who enjoy sanctuary will attack us, I do not think, Mr. Speaker, that is a question. I think history is conclusive on this point. If you wait for terrorists to attack you, they will. This is the context in which we must understand what is happening in Iran today and

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why it is important to the United States of America to rethink the way we approach this problem.

   Iran is a place where terrorist organizations who disrupt the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations find refuge, find weaponry, find cash. It is a place where admittedly significant al Qaeda elements are present tonight. There is an argument as to exactly what they are doing. The Iranian authorities would tell us that they are in the custody of the Iranian government. Some would suggest that the Iranian government are using these al Qaeda leaders as pawns to try to facilitate the release of terrorists held by the Israelis and other law-abiding nations of the world. But irrespective of the purpose for which the Iranian government holds al Qaeda terrorists tonight, the fact is they are present in Iran tonight.

[Time: 20:45]

   They found Iran to be a place that was a willing sanctuary for their activities. There can be no good inured to America's benefit from that sanctuary continuing.

   What do terrorists need? They need leadership. They need people who are willing to conceive of these terrible plans that spring from this awful wellspring of intolerance and hatred. They need personnel. They need to recruit young men and young women and, in some cases, children who are willing to put their own lives at stake to manifest that hatred by killing thousands of others. They need money and logistics to carry out their attack. They need weaponry, and they need sanctuary. I think it is indisputable that Iran is such a sanctuary. It is indisputable that if tonight the CIA, the National Security Agency, other U.S. intelligence operatives had information that there were terrorists at loose in Iran and they asked for the cooperation of the Iranian government, I think it is indisputable that at best, at best, we would get noninterference; at worst we would get active resistance.

   Mr. Speaker, if those same terrorists were loose in Jordan, the Jordanian government would help us. If those terrorists were loose in Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government would help us. If they were loose in Israel, the Israeli government would not need our help. They would just find them and take care of the problem. If they were loose in the countries of our European allies, I am quite confident that we would have the assistance of those allies, in South America, in the Philippines. Iran is a place where terrorists will find the medium in which their peculiar form of bacteria need to grow.

   What logistics might Iran supply to a terrorist who wants to attack the United States of America? Today for every 100 containers that enter the ports of the United States in these huge containers we see out by the ports, for every 100 of those containers that enter the United States, two of them were inspected, 98 were not. It is commonly known that one of the ways that we are at risk is that as the huge influx of trade comes and goes from our country in container ships, that the planting of a small nuclear weapon on a container ship could cause catastrophic results in this country that would dwarf the pain of September 11.

   Where might terrorists find such a nuclear bomb? Sadly, there are a number of places. One of those places is from hungry former Soviet scientists who were living relatively well under the old regime in the USSR and then found themselves driving cabs and waiting on tables and very hungry and very anxious in the years that follow. It is one of the great bipartisan failures of this country for which we all should take responsibility, myself included, that we have not been sufficiently vigilant since the waning days of the Soviet Empire in identifying, corralling, and destroying weapons of mass destruction that were held by the Soviet Union. There are too many of them in too many places. They are too cheap and too portable. We owe thanks to the great work of former Senator Nunn and present Senator Lugar for giving us the legal authority to solve this problem. We are sadly negligent in not using that legal authority to its greatest extent.

   Where else might a terrorist find a small nuclear bomb that could be transported in a container ship to the United States? Mr. Speaker, if we would have asked the Iranian government that question 2 years ago, they would have said not here; we are not in the business of trying to make nuclear bombs, not us. For years, for 23 years, since the installation of the present regime in Tehran, the official party line was that the Iranian government was not interested in the manufacture of a nuclear weapon.

   In December of 2002, that all changed. Iranian dissidents who were fortunate to escape the country began talking to intelligence leaders around the world, and they talked with specificity. They talked about centrifuges, fissile materials. They talked about the enrichment of uranium. They talked about a program of plutonium separation that could lead to the manufacture of a nuclear bomb. And enough of them talked to enough people, and enough enlightened people paid attention, that in December of 2002, while our country was fixated upon the very grave question of what to do about Saddam Hussein in Iraq, while we were grappling with many other problems in our own country, in December of 2002, the government of Iran acknowledged that reports that it was building facilities capable of producing the fissile materials that would lead to a nuclear weapon were true. The Iranian government admitted this. After 23 years of deception, the Iranian government admitted that facilities at Iraq and Natanz in Iran were, in fact, facilities which were capable of producing the fissile materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb.

   On February 21 of last year, 2003, the leader of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr. ElBaradei,

   visited Iran after extreme international pressure following the Iranian disclosure. On June 6 of 2003, Mr. ElBaradei issued a report saying that the facilities that I mentioned, in particular the Natanz facility, was an advanced uranium enrichment facility capable of performing the steps necessary and essential to the creation of a nuclear bomb. On September 12 of 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued an ultimatum to the Iranians which said by October 31 of last year, Iranians were to prove to the world that they were not working on building nuclear bombs. The clock ticked. The world was not very specific as to what we would do if the Iranians failed to provide that proof, reminiscent of how the world was similarly negligent in dealing with Saddam Hussein for 12 long years.

   Finally, on October 21 of 2003, the Iranians invited representatives of the French, German, and British governments to Tehran. They began to negotiate and they worked out a joint communique with the governments of France and Germany and the United Kingdom, which said that the Iranians would permit full inspections, they would suspend their uranium enrichment program, that they would sign international agreements that civilized nations follow with respect to the production of nuclear weapons, and that essentially they would stop trying to build a nuclear weapon. The world reacted with cautious optimism.

   The Iranians handed over files and files of documents that described what they had been doing over the course of more than 2 decades in the past. Those documents showed that the Iranians had engaged in a secretive uranium enrichment program over at least a 19-year period for which there could be no plausible explanation other than it was leading to the production of a nuclear bomb. The world was divided as to what to do about this, and the consensus on the International Atomic Energy Agency was that we should criticize the Iranians for what they had done and lied about in the past and then warn them not to do it again. Warnings like the ones we gave to the Taliban repeatedly throughout the 1990s not to cooperate with Osama bin Laden, warnings like we gave to Saddam Hussein repeatedly throughout the 1990s that he was to disengage his weapons programs and to leave his neighbors alone. Warnings.

   The warnings have not had the intended effect. Two weeks ago, the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency released on February 24 of 2004 found some curious evidence, and that is that the Iranians had agreed to stop their program of uranium enrichment, which is one path to build a nuclear bomb; but another path to build a nuclear bomb is called plutonium separation. Obviously, the

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Iranians who signed this agreement got very good legal advice because they learned how to define their way out of the problem because the Iranians did not breach apparently in the last few months their responsibility not to carry out uranium enrichment programs, but they did evidently step up a program that is involved in the separation of plutonium, yet another path to reach the same horrible result. Mr. ElBaradei said Iran is moving in the right direction with respect to this weapons program, that there is reason for optimism, that there are moderate influences beginning to influence the Iranian government. Well, can we afford to take the chance that he is wrong?

   International experts suspected for 2 decades that Iran was pursuing the development of a nuclear bomb, but they never knew for sure; and I know that the annals of intelligence estimates are filled with conclusions that the best judgment was that Iran was not marching toward the creation of a nuclear bomb. Those assessments were wrong. If this new set of assessments is wrong, we will find out to our peril what the consequences of that error are.

   Is the present leadership of Iran capable of placing a small nuclear bomb on a cargo ship in a container and floating it into the harbor of a major American city? Some would say, no, they are not capable. It would not be in their interest to do so. There would be massive retaliation against them by the United States. Others would say they are imminently capable of such atrocities. The family of Zahara Kazemi I would assume would agree with that proposition. Mr. Ghollam Nikbin I assume would agree with that proposition. Those who sit tonight in Iranian prisons and those who have been executed in Iranian prisons in recent days and weeks, if they were alive, would agree with that proposition.

   Should we wait and see? Should it be our policy to take an educated guess and find out? Many intelligence analysts took an educated guess about the Taliban in Afghanistan 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 3 years ago, and here is what their assessment was: the Taliban are terrible people. Osama bin Laden is an awful force in the world. He was behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. He was behind the attack of the USS Cole in the year 2000. He was involved in the Khobar Towers bombing. Something needs to be done. But the assessment about the Taliban's role in this was that it was ludicrous to think that the Taliban government was a threat to the United States.

[Time: 21:00]

   It is certainly not an imminent threat to the United States. A government that could barely manage its own affairs, a government that was not a threat to its own neighbors militarily, was certainly not a threat to the United States of America.

   There would have been those who would stand on this floor 3 years ago and argue passionately that for us to aggressively pursue a policy of regime change in Afghanistan would be a gross overreaction. Why should we worry about a regime as weak as that one? On September 11, 2001, we got our answer. Regimes that harbor terrorists, regimes that have the capability of arming terrorists with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, regimes that finance and facilitate terrorism, are a threat to the people of the United States of America. These regimes should not be negotiated with, they should not be heeded, they should not be abided. They should be replaced.

   Which American tonight would not agree that we would have prospered from regime change in Afghanistan 3 years ago? There is lots of dispute tonight as to whether we are prospering from regime change in Baghdad tonight. I certainly think we are. I think it is one of the reasons that Mu'ammar Qadhafi voluntarily surrendered his nuclear weapons, so he will not wind up living in a spider hole at the end of this year.

   I think it is one of the reasons that President Assad in Syria for the first time in his tenure as president is furtively working behind the scenes to open negotiations with the Israelis, so that maybe some day he will expel Hamas and Hizbollah from his countries. I think it is one of the reasons why the Saudi Arabians, after years of culpability in terrorism, years of a ``deal with the devil'' in which they looked the other way when terrorists operated within their country, are now more actively cooperating in the crackdown on those terrorists. And I think it is one of the reasons why the Iranians in December of 2002, on the verge of the United States action against Iraq, decided to come clean about 23 years of lying about the development of a nuclear weapon.

   Regime change in Iran should be the policy of the United States of America; not negotiation, not cooperation, regime change. Regime change does not mean military action. Military action is the final step. Military action is the last, and, if necessary, essential step, if necessary, to regime change.

   Far more effective to the pursuit of this goal are the diplomatic, economic and moral assets of the United States of America. I am not calling for the use of military force against Iran; I am calling for the concerted, coordinated use of this country's diplomatic, economic force to achieve a regime change in Tehran. I believe it is not only in the interests of human rights, of persecuted citizens of that country, it is in the interests of the national security of the United States of America.

   What does regime change mean in Iran? Who is the regime? The answer to this question is not self-evident. Iran is a schizophrenic state. On the surface, it is conducting what appears to be a parliamentary government with what appear to be reasonably free elections with what appears to be something resembling democracy.

   These appearances are lethally deceptive. The President of Iran got 77 percent of the vote in the popular election, but I think realistically he has zero percent of the power in that country. Instead, a council of elders, 12 men, 12, have effective control over the military, over the economic institutions of that country, over the meaningful ebb and flow of life in Iran. Even though those 12 have such control, they are wary, they are reluctant to even let the appearance of that control stray too far.

   In the last month or so in Iran there were elections scheduled for the national legislative body of that country, and most outside analysts saw those elections as a struggle between the so-called more moderate liberalizing forces of the country and the more conservative cultural forces of that country. 3,600 candidates of the moderate persuasion were removed from the ballot by the council of elders. Twelve people, none of whom were elected, each of whom was appointed through the religious oligarchy of Iran, 12 people used their power to remove 3,600 people from the ballot. 1,000 or so were restored after huge public protests.

   But I believe that the only conclusion one can draw from this is that the feeble images of democracy in Iran are only a deceptive image, and not a meaningful reality for that country.

   These are foreboding and difficult thoughts, but there is great reason to be optimistic that the regime change that would benefit America is very much on the minds of young men and women, and older men and women, who live under the oppressive yoke of the medieval government of Iran.

   So many Iranian Americans are engaged in conversations with their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers back home. Iranian Americans make a magnificent contribution to this country every day, in our hospitals, in our universities, in our corporations, in our governments, in our military, and these loyal and patriotic Americans, who have had a taste of freedom, a taste of what it means to be respected for your religious differences and not reviled, they have spread the word of this intoxicating freedom to their loved ones back in Iran.

   Even though Iran is a place where you can be whipped for dancing at a wedding, even though it is a place where you can be beaten to death in prison for taking a photograph of a peaceful demonstration, it is a place where the rulers still cannot stop the flow of technology. The Internet, the fax machine, the cellular phone, these are the most powerful weapons against tyranny in the history of mankind. And even in a place like Iran, the leaders cannot make themselves impervious to the rush of truth that comes into their country in greater torrents with each passing day.

   I think that people in Iran are looking for a signal from the United States of America. They are not looking for weakness or ambiguity or vacillation.

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   We are students of our own history, and we know that at the time the colonies rebelled against the British, there were many naysayers in America. There were many who said that this was a foolish experiment; that it was reckless for people to pledge their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honor to try to do something better. It was suicidal, it was crazy.

   Some were active opponents of the revolution. Others, and these others may have been more dangerous, sat on the fence. They were not sure what signal they should send. They were not sure whether they were ready to fight for their freedom or not.

   The United States has sent a powerful signal I think to the world by saying that we are willing to take on, with our allies, the difficult work of introducing that sacred gift of freedom to the people of Iraq. We should not be ambiguous in offering that same gift to the people of Iran.

   We should not, we should not, be engaged in any overt military acts, unless intelligence would warrant action to the contrary, specific intelligence. I repeat, I am not calling for a policy of military engagement against the Iranian government. But I am absolutely calling for an expression as clear as a bell that the freedom that we enjoy here, the freedom that we aspire to see the people of Iraq enjoy, is the freedom that we wish to see the people of Iran enjoy, and we will not be fooled or deceived by the false front of a faux democratic government. We will not relent in our opposition to that government's effort to build a nuclear bomb. We will not back down in the face of any international criticism as to the purity and import of this evil.

   It would be horribly wrong and horribly prejudicial to leave anyone with the impression that any significant portion of the 1 billion Muslims in this world are dedicated to the eradication of us and our way of life. They are not. It would be horribly wrong and horribly false to leave anyone with the impression that people of the Arab culture and descent or the Persian culture and descent are dedicated to the destruction of our way of life. They are most emphatically not.

   I believe that the vast majority of people of the Islamic faith, of the Arab and Persian ethnicities, wish to live in freedom and to celebrate diversity and to join the future, rather than wallowing in the past.

   But it is irrefutable that there is a force present in the world, a small but malignant force present in the world, that wishes to do us grave harm, that wishes to destroy our way of life and destroy the chance to spread our way of life to those in all corners of the world who would wish to enjoy it, and that force calls itself radical Islam.

   It is a perversion of the Islamic faith. It is a hijacking of that faith of peace. But it is what those who practice this poisonous attitude call themselves. And where they find sanctuary and where they find money and where they find weaponry and where they find personnel and where they find leadership, these are the places that will incubate the next September 11.

   There are really two views about terrorism in America, and they are not liberal and conservative, or Republican and Democrat, or military and diplomatic. The two views are these:

   Some people view terrorism as a series of essentially unrelated crimes; horrible crimes, but crimes that spring from independent criminals. With the exception of the link between the USS Cole bombing and the first World Trade Center and the second one, all of which can be attributed to al Qaeda, proponents of this view would argue that we need to react to each one of these isolated incidents by prosecuting those who committed the offense, shoring up our defenses so it cannot happen again.

   The other view of terrorism, which I hold and I believe that history teaches us is the correct view, is that these are not a series of isolated incidents; that we are engaged in a struggle between those who would destroy our way of life and those who would stand by us and protect our way of life.

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   The most horrific example of that struggle was the one that he experienced in September of 2001. Shame on us if we do not learn from that example. If we draw the lesson that September 11 was about one terrorist organization operating out of one country that on one occasion was able to succeed in a massive terrorist attack against this country, we are misreading history to our great peril.

   If instead we understand what happened then differently, if instead we say that the lesson that we learn is that when you give terrorists leadership and personnel and money and weaponry and sanctuary, they will attack. It is not in our interest to make lists of countries that we want to attack. It diminishes our strength. It lessens our standing in the world, and we should not do it. But it is most emphatically in our interest to categorize and understand where the next sanctuary might be.

   Everyone in this Chamber wishes that he or she had the foresight to know that Afghanistan was such a sanctuary 3 years ago. We could have avoided a calamity of unspeakable proportions in this country. The issue tonight, Mr. Speaker, is where is the next sanctuary.

   I believe that the heroic actions accomplished by American troops and allied troops in Iraq has gone a long way toward removing Iraq as such a sanctuary. I am certain that the heroic efforts of our troops in Afghanistan have essentially removed Afghanistan as such a potential sanctuary.

   Tonight our attention should very much be focused on Iran as such a sanctuary. It is a state that is capable of imprisoning and beating innocent people for dancing and taking photographs. It is a state that for 23 years lied about its development of nuclear bombs. It is a state that is either trying to put a good-faith effort forward to stop its weapons program or trying to put the best face on an effort that really is not taking place as the weapons program continues.

   The lesson of September 11 is do not take chances on estimates. Act and make sure others cannot act against you.

   I believe that this country should engage in three steps immediately. First, we should unambiguously announce that the policy of the United States of America is to encourage regime change in Iran, by which I mean the Council of Elders that runs the country; and by which I mean the replacement of that Council of Elders with a truly representative group of people chosen by the Iranian people.

   The second thing we should do is fully enforce the Iran Sanctions Act passed by this Congress a few years ago. We should inventory every trade, aid, economic and regulatory tool at our disposal and use those tools. We should broadcast freedom into Iran more aggressively. We should break down the information barriers and tell young Iranians that we will be on their side if they rise up and fight for freedom. We should encourage the patriotic, law abiding citizens of this country who are of Iranian descent to become actively engaged in encouraging their brothers and sisters in their native land to make the regime change that will benefit them and us.

   The third step is that we should seek international cooperation on every level for this effort. It will not be easy. There will be those who will say this is yet another American overreaction, that this is a further policy of American unilateralism. We should never be unilateral. We should always seek the cooperation of allies.

   We should also understand the attacks that are launched by terrorists will be unilateral. They will have one target. They will start with the Israelis. They always do. But they will eventually get to the United States of America. We should ask for and actively seek the cooperation of our European and Asian friends in meeting these efforts. Frankly, the actions of the International Atomic Energy Agency have been very helpful in this regard. We should continue those efforts, but we should not make the mistake of assuming that their security risk here is the same as our security risk.

   When there is a demonstration sponsored by the medieval elements in a country like Iran, it is not the German flag that they burn. They do not shout death to Germany. They do not destroy likenesses of the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. They burn the American flag. They smash likenesses of the American Capitol, and they clearly let us know that we are the ones who are in their sights. So be it.

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   If we understand that we are the targets, then we must understand we have a special responsibility to act. I believe that this is a program for peace. I think the best way to achieve peace is to show those who would disrupt peace that you will not tolerate it. It is peace through strength, and after we have been lied to for 23 years about the creation of a nuclear bomb, a nuclear bomb which could be floated into the harbors of this country and used as a weapon of awful destruction against the people of America, after we have seen the torture against innocent people that takes place in Iran every day and is taking place tonight, I think the stakes are clear. If we are true to our conviction of peace through strength, we will make regime change the policy of the United States of America. Not through violence, not through attack, not through aggression, not through war. We should always reserve the right to act in our defense. But we should always understand that the best way to project our power is through our freedom, our economic might, our diplomatic credibility which sadly needs to be rebuilt in many ways.

   It is my objective as a Member of the United States Congress that I will never again have another day like September 12, 2001, when I came to this building not sure whether it was safe to be in, after a sleepless night, and asked myself what I had failed to do to prevent the mayhem that had occurred in my country the day before. I asked myself whether any of the $3 trillion of the taxpayers' money I had voted to spend on intelligence and defense of this country had done us any good the previous day. I never want to live another September 12. I never again want to have to think what we could have done to learn the lessons of terrorism and stop another terrorist attack.

   If we take decisive action and, among other things, if we pursue the policy of regime change in Iran, I believe that the likelihood of having another September 12, 2001, will diminish; and more importantly, the likelihood of a catastrophic repeat of September 11, 2001, using a nuclear weapon will diminish greatly.

   We owe our country nothing less. We owe the decent people of Iran nothing less; and we owe it to our sense of history to get this very important job done.

   Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Mr. Paul Bauer of my staff who was very instrumental in getting the research done for this effort. And, again, I would like to thank the staff of the House of Representatives for being with us so I would have this opportunity to speak.

4E) David Kay and Weapons of Mass Destruction

(Mr. STEARNS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)

   Mr. STEARNS. Mr. Speaker, Dr. David Kay, former Iraqi weapons inspector, gave an interview on the Today Show on January 27. Let me quote from what he said:

   ``Iraq was a country that had the capabilities in weapons of mass destruction areas and in which terrorists, like ants to honey, were going after it. We found that the Iraqi government, particularly Saddam Hussein and his senior leadership, had an intention to continue to pursue their WMD activities; that they, in fact, had a large number of weapons of mass destruction program-related activities.''

   Some in this body must have a hearing problem. To say that the President and the administration have misled the American people in building the case for the war with Iraq is wrong. Dr. Kay, like many others, is confident that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and the ability to produce weapons of mass destruction . In fact, Saddam Hussein even used these weapons of mass destruction on his own people.

   I hope the American voters see through the false charges against the President of the United States

4F) Gaddafi Delivers Historic 90 Minute Speech

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 5 minutes.

   Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, a group of seven Members of Congress just finished leaving the airplane at Andrews Air Force Base from a 3-day trip to Libya, the second trip that I have led there in 30 days. This trip is one that will go down in history as one of the most historic events that was documented in that country that has been a problem for us over the past 30 years.

   Mr. Speaker, I was asked by the chairman of the People's Congress of Libya to give a speech at the opening session 2 days ago, which I did. Senator Biden is giving a speech there today. Along with my speech and speeches from the French, the Egyptians, the head of the European Parliament, Colonel Gaddafi rose to the podium and spoke for 90 minutes. He gave what will go down in history, I am convinced, as a speech that will equal the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the event that had Boris Yeltsin standing alongside the tank outside of the Moscow White House proclaiming that communism was dead because in this 90-minute speech Gaddafi , who has been someone that we have not had any type of relationship with, whose country has admitted to completing the bombing of Pan Am 103, Gaddafi , in front of the 600 people assembled in the auditorium and 100 nations that were in attendance, renounced the actions of Libya over the past 25 years.

   He admitted to his people that they had been involved in funding terrorist organizations from the IRA in Ireland to the PLA, to the Sandinistas, to other terrorist groups around the world. He admitted that they were involved in crimes, and they had done things for other groups. He rose to the occasion to tell his people that he had come to the conclusion it was time for Libya to abandon these people who no longer were needing of the support of

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the Libyan people, and whom the Libyan people only suffered from, becoming isolated from the rest of the world.

   He spoke of the United States and the Pan Am 103 bombing. He said it is a part of history that they want to put behind them after I had said in my speech that we were happy that the Libyans had admitted to that bombing and being responsible for it. We told them that we would never forgive nor forget the actions of their country, but here was Moammar Gaddafi changing not for the international community, but in front of his own people saying it was time for Libya to renounce weapons of mass destruction, and calling for complete and total transparency, calling for other terrorist nations to abandon their weapons of mass destruction, telling them that it is no longer a valid position for countries to take, to encourage and support terrorism throughout the world.

   Then he said about the United States, the United States does not want to bomb Libya. We are not Libya's enemies. If we wanted to take over their country, we would have done that 27 years ago when they asked us to get out of the military bases we had in their country. He said to his people, America did not fight, they simply left our country as our friends. He said it was only in recent times that we have become an enemy, and he said no longer will Libya be an enemy of the United States; Libya wants to return, to become a friend, they want to attempt as much as possible to join the family of nations and join those multi-national groups in Europe and around the world. They want to become a part of arms control regimes. He even agreed, as I met with the Gaddafi Foundation, that they should look to rejoin efforts like the Vienna Conference that oversees the Helsinki final act guaranteeing basic human rights for all citizens. We talked about human rights, and the fact that Libya was now on a course to set out for their people an effort to clean up the human rights records of the Nation.

   Mr. Speaker, this speech was not to the world community. The external media was not invited. It was broadcast live throughout Libya. Every television in Libya had this proceeding on for 90 minutes in front of 600 delegates, 100 nations and 7 Members of Congress. Moammar Gaddafi issued the message to the people of the world that Libya had changed dramatically and completely, that Libya was ready now to begin a new chapter.

   He was very thankful that our delegation was there because he said it showed the Libyan people that America was ready to respond. Senator Biden's speech today will reinforce that. I congratulate my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who traveled to Libya. We will be putting a complete report into every Member's office before the end of this week.

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