Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in adjournment until 12 noon, Monday, June 9; I further ask that following the prayer and the pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate then begin a period of morning business until the hour of 1 p.m. with the time equally divided between the two leaders or their designees; provided that at 1 p.m. the Senate resume consideration of S. 14, the Energy bill.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to this matter be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 161, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 122, S. Res. 116.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate immediately proceed to executive session to consider the following nomination on today's Executive Calendar, Calendar No. 203. I further ask unanimous consent that the nomination be confirmed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then return to legislative session.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I would make a comment before I proceed to the next consent request. With respect to Mr. Chertoff, I became well acquainted with Mr. Chertoff when he served as counsel to the special committee created by Senate resolution to investigate the Whitewater matter. I found him competent, direct, thorough, well prepared, and a delightful human being. I probably will not get into the debate, the amount of time being limited, but I want the record to show how highly I esteem him and how enthusiastically I will vote to confirm him for the circuit court position to which he has been nominated.

Mr. BENNETT. As in executive session, I ask unanimous consent that at 5:15 on Monday, June 9, the Senate proceed to executive session for the consideration of Calendar No. 201, the nomination of Michael Chertoff to be U.S. circuit judge for the Third Circuit; provided further that there then be 30 minutes for debate equally divided in the usual form prior to a vote on the confirmation of the nomination, with no intervening action or debate. I further ask consent that following the vote, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I am going to take two literary allusions and put them together as the background for the points I wish to make. The first one is a novel that has become a worldwide classic called ``1984,'' written by George Orwell. You may recall that in this particular novel, George Orwell describes a terrifying future. And the principal character in his novel, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth. His job at the Ministry of Truth is to go back over old newspapers and clip out things that contradict the current party line and send those down the memory hole; in other words, destroy them, so that if someone comes along and tries to determine whether there is any past support for the present position, the past has been scrubbed to the point where everything there agrees with the present position. Anything that was said previously that disagrees with the present position of Big Brother, the figure that controls the world in the novel, has been sent down the memory hole. It has been destroyed. Keep that in mind as I take another literary allusion. This is an exact quote from Ben Bradlee, formerly editor of the Washington Post and one of the great journalists of our time who said: Journalism is the first rough draft of history. I cite those two because I want to put them together in the debate that has occurred on the floor and even more so that is going on out in the world of the media--the debate about whether we had proper justification for going into Iraq. We are being told over and over again that the world was lied to, the American people were lied to, the Congress was lied to because we were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And since we haven't found any, that means we were deceived at the very beginning when the justification was given to us by the Bush administration to move ahead with respect to the operation in Iraq. I submit to you, those who make that argument have tried to reconstruct their own memory holes. They have tried to take past information and scrub it from the record and pretend it was never there. In other words, to go back to Ben Bradlee's comment that ``journalism is the first rough draft of history,'' they are prepared, even this quickly after the journalists have reported what was said, to try to change the first draft of history and create, virtually overnight, a new history that never existed. Well, my memory hole has not been used. I have not scrubbed from my memory a series of statements and comments that have been made prior to Iraq. And I intend to go through those comments here tonight to make it clear that those who claim that the President misled the Congress, the people, and the rest of the world with respect to his reasons for going into Iraq are, in fact, trying to rewrite history. The record is very clear. It is very firm. And unless Winston Smith is suddenly somehow materialized to change history, the record stands in firm denunciation of those who are now attacking the President on this issue. Let's go back to the question of weapons of mass destruction. I remember going to S-407 in this building, the room on the fourth floor where we go to receive confidential, highly classified briefings from administration officials. I remember sitting there and listening to Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State, outline for us in detail the reasons we had to attack Iraq. President Clinton, who appointed her Secretary of State, was even more pointed in his public statements of the fact that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In the President's phrase, ``Saddam Hussein will surely use them.'' We needed, according to the President and the Secretary of State, to move ahead militarily in Iraq. I remember walking out of that meeting in S-407 convinced that the bombs would start falling within days. As it turned out, the administration changed its mind and moved away from that particular decision. They backed off. But they never backed off their statement that weapons of mass destruction were there, that weapons of mass destruction would be used, and that Saddam Hussein could not be trusted long term with weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Gore--however much he has attacked this administration and its positions--has nonetheless stated on the record his firm belief that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I think it is clear that if President Bush were involved in some kind of sleight of hand to pretend that weapons were there when they were not, and create some sort of conspiracy among the members of his administration to peddle this false notion, former Vice President Gore would not be part of that conspiracy. As Vice President, he saw the intelligence briefings. He was in a position to evaluate how accurate they were, and Vice President Gore has said publicly on the record, speaking of Saddam Hussein on September 23: We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country. One of the men in Iraq who worked with Saddam Hussein in creating those weapons had a piece in the Wall Street Journal where he made this statement: ``Inspectors will never find them.'' Also, he pointed out that the artillery shells that had been found by the inspectors that were hollow were, in fact, a demonstration of the fact that there were weapons of mass destruction--that is, chemical and biological weapons-- because when the inspectors said, oh, there is no problem here, the warheads are hollow and there is nothing there, this man who worked in Iraq to create these weapons said, of course, they are hollow; the weapons are not put into the artillery shells until just before they are to be used. The artillery shells are prepared for weapons of mass destruction--for chemical or biological weapons--and then stored hollow. So instead of saying that the discovery of these weapons proves they don't have chemical or biological capability, in fact, the reverse is actually true. We do not have a storehouse in the American military of hollow artillery shells because we don't use chemical weapons. The Iraqis have hollow shells because they expect to put chemical agents in those shells. All of this is part of the record and was available prior to the current debate of those who just want to look back and find it. Senator Bob Graham, who used to be chairman of the Intelligence Committee when all of this intelligence was being developed, and is still the ranking member of that committee, had this to say when Colin Powell went before the United Nations and laid out the case: I applaud Secretary Powell for finally making available to the world the information on which this administration will base its actions in Iraq. . . . In my judgment, the most significant information was the confirmation of a linkage between the shadowy networks of international terrorists and Saddam Hussein, the true coalition of evil. All of this information was available to all these individuals prior to the time we went into Iraq, and all of them were satisfied that it was sound information. All of them were satisfied that it was real. And now the press is pretending that nobody--nobody--believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq except the Bush administration, and that everybody simply took the Bush administration at its word and now is being betrayed by the facts because we have not found enough of it to satisfy them; we have only found hollow artillery shells; we have only found chemicals that could be used for pesticides. I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of just how many pesticides Iraqi agriculture requires. Looking at the stores of chemicals they have found, chemicals that have dual use--yes, they could be pesticides or they could be a component part of a chemical weapon. Look at the quantities we have found and ask yourself: Do the Iraqis really need this much for pesticides? Or do they have another purpose? We have not yet found Saddam Hussein. As Kit Bond said today at lunch, if we don't ever find Saddam Hussein, is that proof of the fact that he doesn't exist? If we don't find him, will that be evidence that the Bush administration made him up? If we don't find him, is that proof that he never was in Iraq? That same kind of reasoning is being applied here. We have not found all of the weapons of mass destruction that all of the critics would like to have as proof of their position, so our failure to have done that so far is, in their logic, proof that these weapons never existed or proof that they were never in Iraq. I think Senator Bond's question is a legitimate one. If we don't find Saddam Hussein, does that mean he never existed or he was never in Iraq? Of course not. It means something happened. Either we killed him the first night with that first strike and his remains have been removed by the SSO--his central group of key supporters--so that his body will never be found or he has left the country or he was killed somewhere else. But we know he was there. Everybody knew he was there, and our failure to find him now does not mean he was not there when the attack began. Quite the contrary. Everybody is satisfied he was there. The same thing applies to the weapons of mass destruction. As I have demonstrated, starting with President Clinton, we have known they were there, we have known they had them. If we cannot find them all, that means either they were destroyed by us or by the Iraqis or they have been moved somewhere. It doesn't mean they never existed. The evidence that they existed cannot go down the memory hole just to make the present arguments sound more convincing. I read a commentator who quoted Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, in what the commentator thought was a damning admission on this story, when he said: Yes, we had other reasons for going into Iraq, but we stressed weapons of mass destruction because that was the one everybody was focused on. According to the commentator, that is a damning admission on the part of the Secretary that we had other motives, and that is part of the attack that is being mounted on the floor, that the Bush administration was duplicitous: They told us they were going after weapons of mass destruction, but they had other motives. And here, Secretary Wolfowitz has admitted it; a smoking gun. Back to my memory. I remember very clearly that the Bush administration openly and directly said they had other motives. Let me go down them as I remember them. Weapons of mass destruction--there are many countries that have weapons of mass destruction. If we were to go after the country in the world, other than ourselves, that has the highest stock of weapons of mass destruction, we would go after Russia. Why don't we? Because weapons of mass destruction alone are by no means justification for attacking another nation. They must be tied to other motives. This is what I am sure Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz was talking about. Right now President Putin and President Bush have a good relationship. Russia and the United States have a trusting relationship. Why should we attack Russia just because it has weapons of mass destruction when that relationship exists? Iraq was ruled by a tyrant, and not just your everyday tyrant but a brutal, bloody tyrant who had demonstrated that he not only possessed weapons of mass destruction, he was willing to use weapons of mass destruction and has done so--the only person in the world whose government has employed weapons of mass destruction against anyone else--in this case it was his own people--in the last half century. So, yes, there are other motives besides possessing weapons of mass destruction. They are the man's personality and his history. We are not just interested in nations that have WMD. We are interested in brutal tyrants who will use weapons of mass destruction. Next, Iraq was clearly a crossroads of terrorist activity. That is what Senator Graham referred to, not just al-Qaida. Iraq was one of the principal financial supporters of the terrorist suicide bombings in Palestine. They offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who would kill himself as long as he took a few Jews with him. How many tyrants around the world are willing to harbor terrorists and support terrorists? The list gets a little smaller. North Korea has weapons of mass destruction. North Korea is ruled by a brutal tyrant. But North Korea has not invaded any of its neighbors for half a century, and North Korea is not a haven for al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the other terrorist organizations. We are closing down here on the other motives. Attacking your neighbors. Saddam Hussein has attacked his neighbors twice in the last dozen years, set off two major wars, and is responsible for killing more Muslims than any other person on the planet. The other motives that the Bush administration had in dealing with Iraq were the totality of the situation. Yes, they wanted to deal with WMD. Yes, they wanted to deal with a tyrant who was brutalizing his own people. Yes, they wanted to deal with terrorism. And, yes, they wanted to deal with somebody who was threatening his neighbors. If you take that criteria and apply it to all the countries in the world, you come up with only one that qualifies on every count. It was not the single issue that current commentators and candidates, pundits and pollsters are talking about that prompted President Bush to give the order to go ahead in Iraq. It is a distortion of history to hammer again and again on the fraud that says only weapons of mass destruction drove us to go into Iraq, and it is our failure to find weapons of mass destruction in this time period in Iraq that demonstrates we were wrong. Nobody has gone to the last part of that sentence. Nobody has said yet that we were wrong to have taken out Saddam Hussein. They come close to that in their attack on the President. They say he lied. They say he manipulated. They say he distorted. But they cannot quite bring themselves to say we were wrong to have done it, and no one will say the world would have been a better place if we had not. Why? Because we have discovered some other things we did not know. If you are going to talk about intelligence failures, our intelligence community did not know until we got into Iraq about the mass graves. We did not know about the prisons holding children who were put in there as young as 4 and 5 years of age and have been there for 5 years or more. We did not know the details of the brutality of this man. We did not know that he treated his own population, those who were hostile to him or, indeed, simply suspect in his eyes, as brutally as Adolf Hitler treated the Jews in World War II in Germany. We did not know that. We have discovered that now. So no one will quite go to the point of saying we made a mistake, that Bush did the wrong thing. One commentator closed his attack on the Bush administration with this interesting quibble, in my view. He said: It was the right war but it was fought for the wrong reason. I find it very difficult to reconcile those two. If it was the right war and has achieved the right result, it was the right thing to have done, and it was the right thing to have done for all of the reasons that people who hate this administration are now conveniently forgetting all of the historical buildup to this that has gone down the memory hole that people are now conveniently saying never happened. This is a historic Chamber, and it has seen all kinds of debates, high and low. It has seen all standards of rhetoric, good and bad, and, yes, if I may, true and false. There has been a call for the rafters here to be ringing in a discussion of the Iraqi war and America's activity. I wanted to answer that call and do what I can to see that the rafters are ringing with the truth; that the rafters are ringing with real history, not invented history; that the rafters are ringing with a recognition that what the Bush administration has done in Iraq was the right thing to have done; it was based on sound and careful analysis that ran over two administrations; that was vetted thoroughly with our allies abroad, bringing Great Britain, Australia, Poland, and others, into the fight, and the result has demonstrated that the world is a safer place. The Iraqi people live in a safer society, and the prospects for the future are better than would have been the case if we had gone to the brink, as President Clinton did, and then changed our minds. President Clinton thought the evidence was overwhelming but decided not to act. President Bush thought the evidence was overwhelming and did act, and the rafters should ring with at least one speech that applauds that decision and that level of leadership. I say to my colleagues, I say to the country, I say to my constituents, I believe the history is there that justifies the decision, and I believe the evidence is there after the fact that more than justifies the decision. In this case, America and her President can stand proud before the world as having done the right thing for the right reason. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period for morning business.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNETT. For the information of all Senators, the Senate will reconvene on Monday. On Monday, the Senate will resume consideration of S. 14, the Energy bill. The chairman and ranking member will be here and are encouraging Members to come forward with their amendments. In addition, we will continue to try to reach an agreement to limit amendments to the Energy bill. Next week, we will have a busy session as the Senate continues to make progress on this important legislation. As a reminder to all Senators, on behalf of the leader, I announce that the next rollcall vote will occur at 5:45 on Monday in relation to the confirmation of Michael Chertoff to be a United States circuit court judge. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I am happy to yield.

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I thank my friend from Nevada. I will tell him, there is a way this can be done this Congress. It is my understanding an attempt will be made in the House to place this amendment in the bill in the House where it does not run into the relevancy difficulty I ran into here today. I would hope our chairman and ranking member, when they get to conference, if they find the language in the bill, would feel so disposed to accept it as it becomes a conferenceable item. Madam President, I withdraw my amendment.

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, this amendment deals with the subject which I have dealt with before. It has to do with the National Defense Authorization Act which requires the President to use as a measure for computer performance in setting export control thresholds a measurement known as MTOPS, which stands for millions of theoretical operations per second. The interesting thing about MTOPS is that, like Topsy, which sounds like they are named after, they are constantly growing, and the level of MTOPS keeps growing from 4,000 to 8,000 to 16,000 to 56,000, and on and on. Every time we set an MTOPS level as saying we can control the exportation of supercomputers by insisting that this level not be exceeded, technology catches up. Quite literally, the last time we dealt with this, someone could go down to Toys-R-Us and buy a Sony PlayStation and have a device with more MTOPS in it than we were allowing to be exported in the name of protecting supercomputers from falling into improper hands. This matter has been discussed at some length. It has been decided and confirmed by the GAO that the use of MTOPS as the measure for controlling exports in this area is not productive and that MTOPS no longer presents any kind of logical measure of what has happened. Nonetheless, it is written into the law that MTOPS should remain as our present measure. My amendment would repeal that requirement in the law. It is supported by virtually everyone who understands the reality of where we are in the high-tech industry. I would go on to debate the amendment at greater length and outline its need, but I understand from conversations with the chairman's staff and with the Parliamentarian that this amendment would not be considered relevant to this bill at this time. For that reason, I will withdraw the amendment.

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I thank the distinguished chairman and my friends on the Democratic side for allowing me to make this presentation. Amendment No. 776

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Senator. Mr. President, I had stayed here prepared to vote against the amendment, to vote against all amendments, not knowing that the Senator from Delaware had these conversations with people at the White House and the Senator from Pennsylvania had these conversations with the leadership of the House. Therefore, I feel released from my previous commitment to oppose all amendments when I discover that passage of this amendment will not only not impede passage of the bill--as was the case with the other amendments--it would in fact enhance passage of the bill on the basis that both the House and the White House were willing. So I appreciate knowing this new information. On the basis of this information, it will cause me to change my position. I thank the Senator for sharing this information with me.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I would like to ask the distinguished ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee if he knows--and I see the majority leader here and I will ask him the same question--if the House of Representatives has indicated they would accept this amendment? I have been standing shoulder to shoulder with the chairman of the full committee all night, voting against every amendment on the basis that the House would not accept an amendment. Now, the ranking member, Senator Biden, has said the White House has indicated they would accept this amendment and that is very powerful medicine for us. I do not want to abandon my chairman and the position he has taken in support of the House bill, unless I can be assured that on this amendment, unlike all of the others, the House leadership has indicated they are willing to accept it. I ask the ranking member and the majority leader, if either one of them could respond, would the House be willing, contrary to what we have been told about all the other amendments, to accept this amendment?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.