John Conyers

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I am here to announce the celebration of the Detroit Pistons in their sweep last night and offer my condolences to those Members of the House, in particular from the Los Angeles area. I will not mention any names, but one, M.W., comes to mind. I wanted Members to know how wonderful it feels after some 14 years to come back as strong as they did. It has a lot to do with the teamwork and the spirit of basketball. By the way, there were no incidents in Detroit. The gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Kilpatrick) has some additional comments to make. We have a resolution we would like Members to join on.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 1086, the standards Development Organization Advancement Act of 2003. This measure has enjoyed bipartisan support in the Judiciary Committee, the House, and the Senate. It provides important and significant improvements to our antitrust laws. Title I of the bill recognizes that standards development organizations set thousands of standards that keep us safe and provide uniformity for everything from fire protections to computer systems to building construction. This Title provides a common sense safe harbor for these organizations. Those that voluntarily disclose their activities to federal antitrust authorities will only be subject to single damages should a lawsuit later arise. Those who refuse to disclose their activities, or those who take actions beyond their disclosure, will still be subject to treble damages under the antitrust statutes. This bill does not exempt anyone from the antitrust laws, but it does apply the rule of reason to standards development organizations. Therefore the pro-competitive market effects will be balanced against the anti-competitive market effects of an action before a violation of the antitrust laws is found. Organizations that commit per se violations--making agreements or standards about price, market share or territory division, for example--will still be fully liable for their actions. The rationale for such favored treatment is that standards development organizations, as non-profits that serve a cross-section of an industry, are unlikely themselves to engage in anti-competitive activities. However, if free from the threat of treble damages, they can increase efficiency and facilitate the gathering of a wealth of technical expertise from a wide array of interests to enhance product quality and safety while reducing costs. Title II, the Antitrust Criminal Penalty Enhancement and Reform Act of 2003, increases the maximum criminal penalties for antitrust violations so that the disparity is eliminated between the treatment of criminal white collar offenses and antitrust criminal violations. At this point, I do not see any reason to revise downward the current Sentencing Guideline presumption that twenty percent of the volume of commerce is an appropriate proxy for the pecuniary loss caused by a criminal antitrust conspiracy. This Title also incorporates a leniency provision that encourages participants in illegal cartels to turn against their co-conspirators. This provision allows the Department of Justice to limit the damages of the cooperating company's civil liability to actual, rather than treble damages. The Department of Justice will only grant such leniency if the company provides adequate and timely cooperation to both the government and any subsequent private plaintiffs in civil suits. And because the remaining conspirators remain jointly and severally liable for treble damages, the victims' potential total recovery is not reduced by leniency applicant's reduced damages. The central purpose of this provision is to bolster the leniency program already utilized by the Antitrust Division so that antitrust prosecutors can more effectively go after antitrust violators. The Department of Justice has assured me that it will always use these new tools cognizant of the needs of victims. Finally, Title II of the bill reforms the Tunney Act to strengthen the Act's requirement that courts review antitrust consent decrees in a meaningful manner, rather than simply ``rubber-stamping'' such decrees. H.R. 1086 is an important bill that modernizes and enhances the enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws. I'd like to thank the Chairman for his cooperative efforts on this bill and in writing the supplemental legislative history. We worked hard together on both and I'm very proud of the final product. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I strongly support the legislative proposal under consideration today. Without a doubt, H.R. 3866, the ``Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004,'' represents a major step in the right direction. First, the bill highlights the serious nature of trafficking in steroid precursors by increasing the criminal penalties associated with their distribution, particularly near a sports facility. It's worth noting that this outcome was achieved without the use of mandatory minimums. Instead, the bill was drafted in such a way so as to leave sentencing determinations solely to the discretion of the judge--with the more egregious offenders being exposed to harsher sentences. Second, the bill amends the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990 by adding steroid precursors such as androstenedione, ``andro'' and its chemical cousins to the list of anabolic steroids controlled under the Controlled Substances Act. It also makes it easier for the DEA to add similar substances to that list in the future. Scientific evidence shows that these performance-enhancing drugs create real and significant health risks. Potential long-term consequences of these products in men include impotence and the development of breast enlargement. While some women who use these products experience male pattern baldness, increased facial hair, and abnormal menstrual bleeding. And, most troubling of all, innocent children who are exposed to these products risk early onset of puberty and stunted growth. Finally, the bill directs the U.S. Sentencing Commission to review the Federal sentencing guidelines for crimes involving anabolic steroids and consider increasing them. Currently, the maximum sentence for offenses involving anabolic steroids is only 33-41 months for first time offenders. And to receive the maximum sentence an offender would have to have between 40,000 and 60,000 units, which is defined as a 10 cc vial or 50 tablets. Saving children is the ultimate goal of this legislation. About 1 out of 40 high-school seniors reported that they had used andro in the past year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) 2002 Monitoring the Future survey, which tracks drug use among students. The survey, conducted by HHS's National Institute on Drug Abuse, also found that about 1 out of 50 10th graders had taken andro in the previous year. In closing, I would like to thank Chairman Sensenbrenner and Representatives Berman, Sweeney and Osborne for their bipartisan leadership on this issue. I strongly urge my colleagues to lend their support to this sensible piece of legislation.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Focus: HOPE, a non-profit organization inspired by the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and founded by Father William T. Cunningham in 1968 in the city of Detroit. Focus: HOPE was founded as a civil rights organization, and now works to overcome racial and economic injustices, and has numerous other accomplishments Focus: HOPE has played an important role in acquiring affirmative action commitments from many employers through supporting African- American and female employees in class-action lawsuits. The non-profit organization has also helped to develop a program through the Agriculture Department's Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which is now responsible for feeding more than 43,000 people per month in southeast Michigan. Additionally, it has assisted in the revitalization of several areas in central Detroit by creating parks, rehabilitating homes, and redeveloping obsolete buildings. Additionally, Focus: HOPE has trained individuals for courses in advanced manufacturing and precision machining, which has resulted in the graduation of 2,500 people from their certification programs, thereby providing work opportunities to under-represented youth, women, and many others. Focus: HOPE has also developed two programs aimed at helping individuals improve their reading and math competencies. The organization has also enrolled candidates toward associate and bachelor degrees in engineering and technology programs, and as a result, has made contributions toward increasing diversity within these fields. Most of all, this resolution recognizes Focus: HOPE for its commitment and contributions to human rights in Detroit and the United States. Focus: HOPE is a critically important organization that has been a tremendous asset to the city of Detroit. For this reason, I commend Focus: HOPE's work in improving the quality of life for citizens of Detroit who may not have had access to many opportunities, but who have the desire to succeed in life, and want to become contributing citizens of the economic mainstream.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I regret to come here this morning to again call for the resignation of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The pictures, the videos that continue of our troops humiliating prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the acts of retaliation by Iraqi militants, the graphic accounts of sexual and physical abuse that go on and on and on, this is not about the failure of some rogue elements in the military. Quite the contrary. It is a part of the total failure of leadership at our highest levels, and I refer my colleagues to The New Yorker magazine article by the distinguished investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. No. This was from the author of the article, Seymour Hersh, the part that determined that the existence of a program was to avoid traceability, to have no budget that was reportable. So we did not have anything to even oversight, and then also that they could avoid congressional scrutiny and a requirement or obligation for being briefed to Congress.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much for allowing this intervention, and I begin by commending my colleagues from Pennsylvania and Hawaii and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt). It is my intention to offer into this discussion The New Yorker article entitled The Gray Zone by Seymour Hersh, which raises one of these other incidents that the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) has referred to, and that is, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the ongoing furor that has taken place around the world. I would like to ask my colleagues in the course of our discussion this evening whether they feel a need for an investigation conducted from the outside as the 9/11 Commission has, which it recently concluded, the Warren Commission in terms of the John F. Kennedy assassination, because this problem is beginning to tarnish our Nation's war against terrorism, and without a full and complete and impartial investigation, we will add another way of undermining our national moral authority. I just wanted to point out that it is mentioned in this article that will be reprinted that, ``Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target, a standup group to hit quickly,' a former high-level intelligence official told me. `He got all the agencies together, the CIA and the NSA, to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.' The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.'' Here, ``Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate `high value' targets in the Bush administration's war on terror.'' The people, and I conclude with this, ``the people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me,'' this is Seymour Hersh. ``They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America's elite forces, Navy SEALs, the Army's Delta Force, and the CIA's paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: `Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes.' No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.'' In other words, a deliberate development of a plan not only to commit these outrageous atrocities that have shocked the world but a way to avoid congressional scrutiny. I will insert this article that I referred to earlier at this point in the Record. [From The New Yorker, May 17, 2004] The Gray Zone (By Seymour M. Hersh) The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror. According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, ``Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.'' The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld's testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, ``Some people think you can bullshit anyone.'' The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration's search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as ``kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.'' In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they'd had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command. Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate ``high value'' targets in the Bush Administration's war on terror. A special-access program, or SAP--subject to the Defense Department's most stringent level of security--was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America's most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been SAPs, including the Navy's submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force's stealth bomber. All the so- called ``black'' programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security. ``Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target--a standup group to hit quickly,'' a former high-level intelligence official told me. ``He got all the agencies together--the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.--to get pre- approval in place. Just say the code word and go.'' The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said. The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America's elite forces--Navy SEALs, the Army's Delta Force, and the C.I.A.'s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: ``Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.'' In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military's facilities at Guantanamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations--using force if necessary--at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the SAP command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the ``white,'' or overt, world. Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were ``completely read into the program,'' the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. ``We're not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,'' he said. ``The rules are `Grab whom you must. Do what you want.''' One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. ``Remember Henry II-- `Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?''' the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. ``Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.'' Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld's disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.'s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone's military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan. Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, ``I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else.'' In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. ``It was an active program,'' the former intelligence official told me. ``It's been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States--and do so without visibility.'' Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however. By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The SAP was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and--without success--for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren't able to stop the evolving insurgency. In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist ``dead-enders,'' criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime--reproduced on playing cards--had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that ``the dead-enders are still with us.'' He went on, ``There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case.'' Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who ``fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.'' A few weeks later--and five months after the fall of Baghdad--the Defense Secretary declared, ``It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States.'' Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. ``When you understand that they're organized in a cellular structure,'' General Jon Abizaid, the head of the Central Command declared, ``that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you'll understand how dangerous they are.'' The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents' ``strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.'' According to the study: Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA's so-called Green Zone. The study concluded, ``Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council''--the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.-- ``as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.'' By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon's political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld's ``dead-enders'' now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well--thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, ``We'd killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to `pray and spray' ''-- that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. ``They weren't really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.'' In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said, that the insurgents ``spent three of four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they'd do it.'' Then, the analyst said.``the clever ones began to get in on the action.'' By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: ``Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence effort is not coordinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.'' The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic. The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantanamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that ``detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.'' Miller's concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to ``Gitmoize'' the prison system in Iraq--to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba--methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold, and heat, and placing prisoners in ``stress positions'' for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.) Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation. ``They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,'' the former intelligence official told me. ``No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up--the black special-access program--and I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff. But we've got more targets''--prisoners in Iraqi jails--``than people who can handle them.'' Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the SAP's rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices. ``So here are fundamentally good soldiers--military-intelligence guys--being told that no rules apply,'' the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. ``And, as far as they're concerned, this is a covert operation, and it's to be kept within Defense Department channels.'' The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included ``recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.'' He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. ``How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn't know what it's doing.'' Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib--whether military police or military intelligence--was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others--military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special- access program--wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. ``I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn't know,'' Karpinski told me. ``I called them the disappearing ghosts. I'd seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I'd see them months later. They were nice--they'd always call out to me and say, `Hey, remember me? How are you doing?''' The mysterious civilians, she said, were ``always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.'' Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski's leadership failures contributed to the abuses.) By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. ``They said, `No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan-- pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets--and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers- in-law, and people pulled off the streets' ''--the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. ``The C.I.A.'s legal people objected,'' and the agency ended its SAP involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said. The C.I.A.'s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret SAP, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. ``This was stupidity,'' a government consultant told me. ``You're taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.'' The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. ``There's nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,'' he told me. ``What could be more boring than needing the cooperation of logistical planners?'' The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, ``as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We've never had a case where a special-access program went sour--and this goes back to the Cold War.'' In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. ``The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,'' he said. ``This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.'' When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, ``but he's responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.'' Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial, however, it why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men. The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was ``The Arab Mind,'' a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. ``The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,'' Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, ``or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.'' The Patai book, an academic told me, was ``the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.'' In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged--``one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.'' The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything--including spying on their associates--to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, ``I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.'' The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn't effective; the insurgency continued to grow. ``This shit has been brewing for months,'' the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with SAPs told me. ``You don't keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.'' The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. ``We don't raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that's one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don't know the rules, that's another.'' In 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on International Human Rights. ``They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,'' Horton told me. ``They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it's going to occur.'' The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. ``They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The JAG officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.'' They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Gharib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army's Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush. The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. ``You can't cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it'll go away.'' The Pentagon's attitude last January, he said, was ``Somebody got caught with some photos. What's the big deal? Take care of it.'' Rumsfeld's explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring. ``We've got a glitch in the program. We'll prosecute it.' The cover story was that some kids got out of control.'' In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller's visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller's recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the ``flow of intelligence back to the commands'' was ``efficient and effective.'' He added that Miller's goal was ``to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.'' It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question facing the senators: If, indeed General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in you report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller's arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved. . . . Therefore, I for one don't believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller's orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of '03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward. Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was ``read in''--that is, briefed--on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. ``His job is to save what he can,'' the former official said. ``He's there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.'' As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, ``He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ``Holy cow! What's going on? If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. ``If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,'' the former intelligence official told me, ``you blow the whole quick- reaction program.'' One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld's account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organizations like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges. ``You read it, as I say, it's one thing. You see these photographs and it's just unbelievable. . . . It wasn't three-dimensional. It wasn't video. It wasn't color. it was quite a different thing.'' The former intelligence official said that in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because ``they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,'' as applied to the SAP. ``The photos,'' he added, ``turned out to be the result of the program run amok.'' The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, ``it was their permission granted to do the SAP, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.'' Thsi official went on, ``The black guys''--those in the Pentagon's secret program--``say we've got to accept the prosecution. they're vaccinated from the reality.'' The SAP is still active, and ``the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?'' The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. ``If you even give a hint that you're aware of a black program that you're not read into, you lose your clearances,'' the former official said. ``Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended--the poor kids at the end of the food chain.'' The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. ``The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn't know how to do it,'' the former intelligence official said. Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration's continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib.; ``Why keep it black?'' the consultant asked. ``Because the process is unpleasant. It's like making sausage--you like the result but you don't want to know how it was made. Also, you don't want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.'' The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as a ``a tumor'' on the war on terror. He said, ``As long as it's benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it--it becomes a malignant tumor.'' The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, ``created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we're going to end up with another Church Commission''--the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. ``When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?'' the consultant asked. ``You do it selectively and with intelligence.'' ``Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,'' the Pentagon consultant said. ``You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.'' He added, ``When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.''' Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, ``If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.'' ``In an odd way,'' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, ``the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.'' Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. ``Some JAGS hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,'' Roth told me. ``We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.''

Mr. CONYERS. I do, because they said they were taking people walking off the streets, taxi drivers, in-laws of somebody who may be more seriously implicated, and that they were bringing in an expert from Guantanamo. They do not make them enemy combatants so that these folks have no rights under the Geneva Conventions whatsoever, and the whole thing reads like an absolute nightmare. They are naming names and they are naming strategies. This so-called, what do we call it, the secret access program.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield.

Mr. CONYERS. Yes, but what I am trying to do is give us the basis of why there ought to be an investigation. I wish I could vet all of these statements, assertions, and I have as many questions as the gentleman probably does. The problem is that we are now confronted with taking a few reservists and throwing them into a court-martial situation, when clearly this problem that has been exposed started with more than a few privates and corporals and sergeants, determining how they were going to commit these abuses; that this was sanctioned. This was planned, and I repeat again, the President was informed of the existence of the program, a former intelligence official talking to Seymour Hersh said. This is an award-winning writer on the American government scene for many years. I need to know more, but I am certainly not going to walk away from this highly complex information that has been presented to us.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Mr. CONYERS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, this is indeed a historic moment in the history of this country and in the Congress as well. I begin by really lifting up the name of the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), who, with me, was able to get a unanimous resolution on this matter celebrating Brown v. the Board from the Committee on the Judiciary. I sincerely thank him. I have two colleagues that I want to mention because they had resolutions that we worked into ours, and we came up with one. The first was the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Loretta Sanchez), who brought to our committee's attention that in California they had worked out, in effect, a Brown v. Board-type solution even before the Brown decision, and we will hear from her later on this matter. The other person was the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne), who is on the floor now, who had an important resolution as a ranking member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. His interests on this were very large, and we were able to all work these regulations out. What is the significance of Brown? It reversed an 1896 decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which indicated that under the 14th amendment separate and equal was acceptable. Of course, there is very little in real-time that separate can be equal, but that was the law up until 1954 when a unanimous Supreme Court decision changed it. But the Brown decision went further. It was a decision about education; but thanks to the civil rights movement, Dr. King, Rosa Parks and even our own gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis) in the Congress, it was expanded to cover all forms of social life in the country. Finally, this resolution seeks to renew our commitment. Everything is not okay, as our colleagues all know and as this resolution which we are to support makes clear. So I am very happy to be with all of my colleagues today. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday, which I read more than some suspect, I was told that the Red Cross had complained to Secretary of State Colin Powell about the prison abuses and torture and other embarrassments for months, which was a new revelation to me. But today the Baltimore Sun says, and here it is, ``Powell says Bush was informed of Red Cross concerns and that he had been fully informed in general terms about complaints made by the Red Cross and others over ill-treatment of detainees in custody.'' Now, this is not about privates and corporals. And, by the way, the woman in charge of the camp said that she was put under pressure.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. I would be interested; and is the gentleman interested in the six points that I just raised that make this bill problematic? We cannot work together on two different bills.

Mr. CONYERS. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, could I recommend that the gentleman and I and my chairman, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), perhaps we can enter into an informal colloquy with some of the leaders in the other body and see if we can end this constant repetition of what is going on here in the House today.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, it is my experience in conferences the lights frequently go out and measures get substituted and all kinds of weird things go on. Let us do this in broad daylight, with everybody looking and listening. Conferences have not been the way the democratic process has been enhanced in my career in Congress, sir.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

Mr. CONYERS. Yes, I am.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, this motion is being offered by me and the dean of the Congress, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell). We are offering this motion to recommit to attack the heart of the medical malpractice crisis. Rather than limiting the rights of legitimate malpractice victims, as the bill before us would do, our motion would logically and directly address the problems of frivolous lawsuits and insurance industry abuses. Title I addresses the problem of frivolous lawsuits. It would require that both an attorney and a health care specialist submit an affidavit that the claim is warranted before malpractice action can be brought and imposes strict sanctions for attorneys who make frivolous pleadings. But it provides also for mandatory mediation, a uniform statute of limitations, and a narrowing of the requirements for punitive damage claims. Finally, insurers would be required to dedicate at least 50 percent of any savings resulting from the litigation reforms to reduce the premiums that medical professionals pay. Unlike the majority's bill before us, this motion is limited to licensed physicians and health professionals for malpractice cases only. It does not include lawsuits against HMOs, insurance companies, nursing homes, and drug and device manufacturers. The second part of this motion to recommit, title II, establishes a national commission to evaluate the rising insurance premiums and the causes for why that is occurring. The commission would consider, among other things, whether the McCarran-Ferguson Antitrust exemption for medical malpractice insurers should be reconsidered and possibly repealed and study the potential benefits of providing a Federal medical malpractice insurance program where insurance was unavailable or unaffordable. This same commission, 15-person commission appointed by the Comptroller General, would also consider government-sponsored grant programs to give direct assistance to areas facing a shortage of health care providers, as well as to send physicians to trauma centers that are in danger of closing because of rising premiums. Finally, it would consider alternative means of reducing medical errors and increasing patient safety. So support this motion to recommit. It is good policy. It changes the whole line of unbelievably reactionary legislation that has come out of this House on this subject before now. It is time for a change. We want to limit frivolous lawsuits, and this would give us an opportunity to examine the real causes of the medical malpractice insurance crisis.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott) from the Committee on the Judiciary, and that he may control that time.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton), the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, who explains to us why this keeps coming up, and he refers charitably to the other body. The other body for the last 10 years has been controlled by the gentleman's party. The last 10 years. The present head of the Senate is not only a Member of the gentleman's party, but he is a medical doctor. I ask the gentleman, what could he and I do together to help the other body get the message here?

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. My colleagues, it is slightly incredible that with all the pressing legislative challenges facing us today, we have nothing better to do than redebate and revote the same tired medical malpractice proposals that have been brought forward by a conservative Congress over the last decade. This is the fifth time in 14 months that we have had this bill before the House of Representatives. Sooner or later somebody is going to get it, that this bill is not likely ever to go anywhere because it insults the commonsense health care needs of the American people. Now, how can you put so many bad things in one bill? Let me explain how devious this thing can get. The bill before us would first supersede the law in every State in the Union, and these are states- righters over here, to cap noneconomic damages, to cap punitive damages, to cap attorneys' fees for those lawyers that would represent the poor, to reduce the statute of limitations, to eliminate joint and several liability and eliminate the collateral source rule. All in one bill. Six incredible things. Embarrassed? No, I do not think they are. Rather than helping, when this Nation faces a national health care system crisis of growing proportions, instead of helping Americans that seek health care remedies and remedies for bad medical practice, and to help the medical profession itself, the bill before us does none of that; but it does enrich the insurance companies of America, the HMOs of this country, and the manufacturers and distributors of medical products, which sometimes are defective, as well as the pharmaceuticals that might be involved, too. In other words, all the bad, unpleasant negative parts of our health care system are being protected. And who do we do it at the expense of? The innocent victims of medical malpractice, particularly women and children and the elderly poor. I am embarrassed that this measure is on the floor for the sixth time in 14 months. It's amazing to me that with all of the pressing problems facing us today, the Majority has nothing better to do than redebate and revote the same tired old medical malpractice proposals they have been pushing for the last ten years. In fact, this is the fifth time the Congress has voted on this bill in the past 14 months. The bill before us today would supersede the law in all 50 states to cap non-economic damages, cap and limit punitive damages, cap attorney's fees for poor victims, shorten the statute of limitations, eliminate joint and several liability, and eliminate collateral source. Rather than helping doctors and victims, the bill before us pads the pockets of insurance companies, HMOs, and the manufacturers and distributors of defective medical products and pharmaceuticals. And it does so at the expense of innocent victims, particularly women, children, the elderly and the poor. We need to cut the charades and get to the heart of the problem. The insurance industry is a good place to start. We have seen in the past that the insurance industry goes through boom and bust cycles, with premiums ebbing and flowing as companies enter and exit the market and investment income rises and falls. We also know from past experience that the insurance industry--which is exempt from the antitrust laws-- is not immune from collusion, price fixing and other anticompetitive problems. It is also clear that the legislative solution largely focused on limiting victims rights available under our state tort system will do little other than increase the incidence of medical malpractice-- already the third leading cause of preventable death in our nation. In other words, by limiting liability, we will increase incentives for misconduct. Under this proposal, Congress would be saying to the American people that we don't care if you lose your ability to bear children, we don't care if you are forced to live in excruciating pain for the remainder of your life, and we don't care if you are permanently disfigured or crippled. The majority in this bill would limit recovery in tens of thousands of these cases, regardless of their merits. The proposed new statue of limitations takes absolutely no account of the fact that many injuries caused by malpractice or faulty drugs take years or even decades to manifest themselves. Under the proposal, a patient who is negligently inflicted with HIV-infected blood and develops AIDS six years later would be forever barred from filing a liability claim. The so-called periodic payment provisions are nothing less than a federal installment plan for HMO's. The bill would allow insurance companies teetering on the verge of bankruptcy to delay and then completely avoid future financial obligations. And they would have no obligation to pay interest on amounts they owe their victims. And guess who else gets a sweetheart deal under this legislation? The drug companies. The producers of killer devices like the Dalkon Shield, the Cooper-7 IUD, high absorbency tampons linked to toxic shock syndrome, and silicone gel implants all would have completely avoided billions of dollars in damages had this bill been law. Nearly 100,000 people die in this country each and every year from medical malpractice. At a time when 5 percent of the health care professionals cause 54 percent of all medical malpractice injuries, the last thing we need to do is exacerbate this problem while ignoring the true causes of the medical malpractice crisis in America. I urge my colleagues to reject this anti-patient, anti-victim legislation. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.