Jim Inhofe

Mr. INHOFE

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I have not a speech but a story to tell. The name of that story could very well be ``What Would Have Happened To Frankie Vee?'' Now, they say confession is good for the soul. I confess that during the Memorial Day recess a couple weeks ago I did not work during the whole recess. I spent some time with my family, with my wife, with my daughter Katie, her husband Brad, their baby, and some of the other kids, and we went to south Texas where we own some property. There is a little town down there called Port Isabel. There is a restaurant there that none of the tourists go to. It is just the local people who go there. It is right there on the channel that goes out ultimately to the gulf. There is a guy down there who sings. You sit down and you have dinner. He has these machines he turns on; they make music. He has a microphone, and he sings. He has a beautiful voice. The reason I like it is he sings the kind of songs I know such as ``Your Cheatin Heart'' and ``Lord, Help Me, Jesus,'' and songs like that. While he is singing, his wife sways to the music with her eyes closed. It is just a beautiful setting there. This was going on when all of a sudden a light went on, and I do not know how this happened, but I was looking at this guy, who is just an ordinary person--he is about my age. He has gone through tough times in his life like I have. He has made money; he has lost money; but he is just a very typical American. He is someone who has to obey the laws, has to work hard, and has to pay taxes. What occurred to me was that if Frankie Vee had blatantly and knowingly and wrongfully committed a crime like Kenneth Bacon, blatantly and knowingly and willingly committed a crime, he would not be singing there and spreading joy in the hearts of many while his wife is swaying. He would be serving time in a Federal penitentiary. I am not outraged; I am not mad; and I am not feeling any anxiety about this. I guess the best way to characterize my feelings after the last 7\1/2\ years of this administration using the Justice Department to protect its friends and to punish its enemies is just something that I feel numb about. I am proud of two of the mainstream media--only two--that have been willing to write about these things. And that is Fox News and the Washington Times. So in this case, we have talked about comparing the crime that was committed by Kenneth Bacon with other crimes that were committed--and I am going to talk about that in just a minute--by other people in other administrations. But what occurred to me was that every citizen out here, whether in Wyoming or Oklahoma, has to obey the law and has to be punished under the law if that person disobeys the law, and that he would be prosecuted if there was justification for prosecution and then would be punished accordingly--except in this administration. On Thursday, May 25, which was the eve of the Memorial Day recess when we left for about a week, the Clinton administration perpetrated another outrage to add to its long trail of operations, I guess you would say. In the face of the Pentagon inspector general's firm conclusion that Kenneth Bacon and Clifford Bernath violated the Privacy Act and broke the law and committed a crime, the Secretary of Defense announced that he would do nothing to hold these men accountable for their actions. And this neatly follows the earlier decision of the Justice Department not to prosecute after engaging in a 2-year coverup. Now, as I have said before, this case has broad implications for what has been done to the rule of law and to the concept of honesty and integrity in Government over the past 7\1/2\ years. Above all else, the systemic undermining of these time-honored principles constitutes the true and lasting legacy of the Clinton and Gore administration. Time after time after time, again and again, the Justice Department and Janet Reno have used that Department to protect the President's political friends and to punish the President's political enemies. Today, as a result of this case, there are millions of Federal employees who are on notice that the information contained in their confidential Government personnel records cannot be protected from politically motivated disclosures. They are on notice that the Privacy Act can be violated with impunity even when the perpetrators are caught redhanded. In an additional outrage, we find that the administration now wants the taxpayers to pay the legal bills for those two individuals during this process. This is a letter we have uncovered, after it had been covered up, that the Office of the General Counsel is writing to Mr. Kaser, U.S. Department of Justice, requesting that the taxpayers pay the legal fees of Kenneth Bacon and Clifford Bernath. I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of my remarks this letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I will chronologically reconstruct what happened in this case. It is important I be redundant so that people will understand and that it will not be forgotten and covered up. On March 12, 1998, New Yorker magazine writer Jane Mayer, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, called Kenneth Bacon who used to work with Mayer at the Wall Street Journal, asking him about a question on Linda Tripp's personnel file for a story she was writing. On March 13, the very next day, Bacon tasks Clifford Bernath, then a Pentagon public affairs deputy, with answering Mayer's question. Bernath writes in his journal: ``Ken has made clear it's a priority.'' Further, in March of that same year, the New Yorker story claims Tripp violated the law. In March, Defense Secretary William Cohen calls the disclosure ``certainly inappropriate, if not illegal.'' Cohen continued: Tripp's file ``was supposed to be protected by the privacy rules.'' The DOD inspector general's investigation is initiated. An investigation was initiated in March of 1998. In April of 1998, Cliff Bernath was deposed by Judicial Watch. Bernath was accompanied by a battery of Government lawyers from the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and the White House, in addition to one from Williams & Connolly appearing on behalf of the First Lady who was then a defendant in the FBI file suit. Over the next 6 hours, Bernath proceeded to change his story. He had previously insisted the request was handled in a routine way. In this deposition, he concedes that it was a high-priority issue by Ken Bacon. On May 21, 1998, at a Pentagon press conference, Ken Bacon declined comment--as he has since repeatedly--to the press, including refusing to deny whether the White House directed him to release that information on the grounds that the IG was still investigating. On July 10, 1998, Federal Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the Defense Department to seize the computer of a Pentagon staffer who admits releasing information on Tripp's security clearance form. Lamberth ruled that the Department's inspector general should check the computer because the Pentagon aide, Clifford Bernath, deleted documents, although Bernath claimed none of the deleted documents concerned Tripp. Jumping forward to February 9, 2000, at a House Armed Services Committee hearing, Secretary Cohen had no answer to the question from Representative Buyer on where the DOD report was, in what stage it was. We found out the report was concluded almost 2 years before that question was asked. I have to add a personal note in defense of Bill Cohen. I do not believe he knew. I think the White House covered that up and the Justice Department covered up the fact that the report was concluded almost 2 years before that hearing. I do not believe Cohen actually was aware of that. On March 6, 2000--this brings the Federal court back in--Federal Judge Lamberth signed an order requiring DOD to produce records concerning the release of information in Tripp's DOD files and information on any attempts to withhold information from the public and/or investigators about the details of that release. Then on March 13, 2000, Judge Royce Lamberth stated: The Tripp release presents such a clear violation of the Privacy Act. Lambert said: The court finds it impossible to fathom how an internal investigation into such a simple matter could take so long to conclude. In fact, even though that statement was made by the judge in the court records on March 13, 2000, that internal investigation had been concluded in July 1998, nearly 2 years before. In previous talks on the floor, I have had occasion to compare this crime with a crime that was committed 20 years before. I have done so because when you talk about what President Clinton and Vice President Gore have allegedly done in terms of getting foreign contributions, which are a violation of law, there is nothing really precedented about that that we can go back and compare with someone else who was prosecuted. In this case, the crime that was committed by Kenneth Bacon, and perhaps more people with him, is a crime exactly like the crime that was committed 20 years before by Chuck Colson. Let's go back and see just what Chuck Colson did. This is what he said and did, in his own words. This is going back to 1971: . . . I got hold of derogatory FBI reports about Ellsberg and leaked them to the press. He said further, in 1976: I happily gave an inquiring reporter damaging information compiled from secret personnel files. I know, again, this is exactly the same thing that we now have a confession by Kenneth Bacon that he did. He got ahold of derogatory reports about Linda Tripp. And then he happily gave them to an inquiring reporter--the same thing. So what happened to Colson? Colson was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Gerhard Gesell to a prison term. On April 7, 2000, in a deposition, he provided the New Yorker writer Jane Mayer with Tripp information. In other words, he admitted it. He admitted that. There is no question about whether or not he committed this crime. There is no doubt about it, no dispute about it. Bacon said: I am sorry that I did not check with our lawyers or check with Linda Tripp's attorneys about this. Sorry? Sorry really didn't cut it for Chuck Colson. Chuck Colson ended up in a Federal penitentiary. Colson committed the crime in July 1971. He admitted his guilt and pleaded on June 3, 1974, and was sentenced to the Federal penitentiary on June 21, 1974. Bacon committed his crime in March of 1998. He admitted what he had done in June of 1998. The Pentagon inspector general referred the matter for criminal prosecution in July of 1998. So now 2 years later, in April, May, and June of 2000, the Clinton Justice Department says it is going to take a pass, hoping nobody will see or hear about this at this late date. After all, 2 full years had transpired since the report was concluded. So Colson went to jail and served time in prison. If there were justice and equal application of the law, Bacon would go to jail and serve time in prison. Is this the first time the Clinton administration has been involved in lawbreaking and corruption? Not hardly. It has almost become a way of life--Travelgate, Filegate, Buddhist Temple fundraisers, illegal foreign campaign contributions, the compromise of high-technology nuclear secrets to the Chinese, not to mention perjury and obstruction of justice. The list goes on and on. Why is this important? It is all about a concept. It is as basic to America as the concept of going to church on Sunday. That concept is: Equal application of the law. Chuck Colson realized he did the wrong thing. Chuck Colson, in a book that he wrote in 1976, called ``Born Again,'' stated: I happily gave an inquiring reporter damaging information about Ellsberg's attorney, compiled from secret FBI dossiers. He said: . . . I pleaded guilty after being told by Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski that my conviction would deter such a thing from [ever] happening again. That is a quote. I suggest that it has happened again, and they are hoping no one will notice. I refer to an article that was written on June 12--a current article--in the Weekly Standard by Jay Nordlinger. The question is: ``Why Didn't Bacon Get Fried?'' That is the name of the article. I will quote a few things from it. Jay Nordlinger wrote: It's just a small matter, in all the Clinton grossness, but it counts. Linda Tripp was the victim of a dirty, and illegal, trick. It was played on her by her own bosses at the Pentagon. And now those men--Kenneth Bacon and Clifford Bernath--have escaped with the wispiest slaps on the wrist. This is ho-hum for the Clinton administration; but it is a reminder of how unlawful and indecent this administration has been. Further in the article he talks about Joseph diGenova, who is a former U.S. attorney with long experience in this area. Quoting from the same article, diGenova is quoted as saying: The treatment of Bacon and Bernath suggests that the Privacy Act will be enforceable only in civil lawsuits filed by the victims. If there's no adverse action--not even a letter that goes into somebody's file--there's no deterrence here. None whatsoever. The article by Jay Nordlinger further states: The president and his men have a bit of history with the Privacy Act. You perhaps remember Passportgate. Toward the end of the 1992 presidential campaign, it was learned that political appointees in the Bush State Department had rifled through candidate Clinton's passport files and those of his mother. Democrats demanded an independent-counsel investigation. They got one--led by diGenova. One of the officials involved, Elizabeth Tamposi, was dismissed. The acting secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, offered to resign over the matter. (President Bush refused). Said Clinton, in his first press conference [after he had been elected President of the United States], ``If I catch anybody doing [what the passport-file offenders did], I will fire them the next day. You won't have to have an inquiry or rigmarole or anything else.'' About a year later, Passportgate had something of a reprise, this time featuring appointees in Clinton's own State Department. A few of them got hold of Bush- administration personnel files and leaked them to Al Kamen of the Washington Post. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent this article be printed at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. INHOFE. Finally, I guess it begs the question, What can be done now? I mentioned that the media, the mainstream media, has pretty much ignored this. They like Kenneth Bacon. He was a member of the media. They are not going to do anything about it, I have decided. Fortunately, the Washington Times has done something about it. Fortunately, Fox News has done something about it. But there is something that can be done. When the new administration takes office, and a new Attorney General comes in, the Bacon-Bernath lawbreaking should be referred again for criminal prosecution. A professional Justice Department, freed from corrupt partisan influences, should prosecute this case and uphold the law. Such a referral can easily be added to a list of such referrals on other matters which are already being contemplated, as Representative Dan Burton, who is the chairman of the appropriate House committee, mentioned yesterday. For example, these, as mentioned, would include criminal referrals related to: No. 1, evidence that the President broke campaign finance laws, was aware of illegal foreign contributions, and changed policies in return for campaign contributions; No. 2, evidence that the Vice President broke the law when he made the illegal fundraising phone calls from the White House; No. 3, evidence that the Vice President committed a felony by lying to the FBI investigators about his knowledge of illegal fundraising activities; No. 4, that Janet Reno committed obstruction of justice when she refused to appoint an independent counsel; And now we add this to the list: Evidence that Ken Bacon and Clifford Bernath broke the law when they violated the Privacy Act in the Linda Tripp matter. It is obvious if the next President of the United States happens to be Al Gore that very likely we will have the same type of Justice Department. I don't think our forefathers ever anticipated, when they were constructing these documents, our Constitution and our statutes, that we would have someone in the President's office who would use the Justice Department to protect his friends and punish his enemies. I have come to the conclusion that if this had been Frankie Vee who had done this, he would currently be serving time in the Federal penitentiary. I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 Department of Defense, Office of General Counsel, Washington, DC, December 3, 1999. Re Request for Representation of Clifford H. Bernath in Tripp v. Executive Office of the President (D.D.C. No 99-2254). Sylvia Kasar, Esq., U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division--Federal Programs Branch, Washington, DC. Dear Ms. Kasar: I am writing to request that the Department of Justice authorize private counsel at federal expense for Mr. Clifford H. Bernath in connection with the above- captioned litigation, pursuant to 28 C.F.R. Sec. 5015. We believe that this lawsuit concerns matters within this scope of Mr. Bernath's employment at the Department of Defense. Based on the information now available to us--which has also been made available to your office--we believe that providing Mr. Bernath with private counsel at federal expense is appropriate and in the interest of the United States. Thank you for your consideration of this matter. Sincerly, Brad Wiegnam. Exhibit 2 [From the Washington Times, May 27, 2000] Clinton Accused in `Smear'--Tripp Lawyers Blame White House for Leak (By Jerry Seper) Attorneys for Linda R. Tripp yesterday said the release of information from her confidential personnel file was ``wrong and illegal,'' and part of a ``smear campaign'' by the White House to damage her reputation. The attorneys said the campaign was engineered by President Clinton and his senior advisers, who ``turned their public relations machine against Mrs. Tripp'' to divert attention from the president's conduct with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. ``The campaign worked, and Mrs. Tripp was publicly humiliated on numerous occasions,'' attorneys Stephen M. Kohn, David K. Colapinto and Michael D. Kohn said in a statement. ``Her reputation was poisoned, her motives questioned and even her personal appearance became fair game for ridicule.'' They said the leak of the Tripp file by Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon to a reporter looking to write a critical story of Mrs. Tripp was part of that scheme, and that the file's disclosure was prohibited under the federal Privacy Act. The Defense Department's Office of Inspector General concluded that Mr. Bacon and his former top deputy, Clifford H. Bernath, violated Mrs. Tripp's privacy rights by providing information from her confidential personnel file to a reporter for the New Yorker magazine. But the two men received only mild reprimands Thursday from Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. Mr. Cohen criticized Mr. Bacon and Mr. Bernath in letters for what he called a ``serious lapse of judgment,'' although neither letter was made part of the men's personnel files and no further disciplinary action was recommended. The case is closed. Mr. Clinton, through a spokesman, yesterday said he had ``full confidence'' in the Cohen decision. ``The president has full confidence in the secretary of defense's management of his staff and the Pentagon and supports the judgment of the secretary of defense to take the actions appropriate,'' said P.J. Crowley, chief spokesman for the White House National Security Council, Mr. Crowley formerly worked for Mr. Bacon. Mrs. Tripp is the Pentagon official who blew the whistle on Mr. Clinton's affair with Miss Lewinsky. Both Mrs. Tripp and Miss Lewinsky worked for Mr. Bacon. Mrs. Tripp has since field a lawsuit accusing the White House and the Defense Department of using her confidential file to smear her reputation. In a five-page statement, her attorneys noted that the leak to Jane Mayer, a reporter for the New Yorker, came after Mr. Bacon met privately over dinner with former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes--who ``volunteered'' to help Mr. Clinton in damage control after the Lewinsky accusations surfaced. They said Mr. Ickes also had met with Miss Mayer before the information was released. ``This was simply not an innocent release of information in response to an inquiry by a reporter,'' they said. ``It is well-established that Mr. Bacon and his associate who was involved in the illegal leak knew that the information requested from Mrs. Tripp's security file would be used in a derogatory manner to smear Mrs. Tripp and question her credibility.'' They also said Mr. Bacon and Mr. Bernath had been told the information from the file was covered by the Privacy Act and could not be released without Mrs. Tripp's consent. Mr. Ickes, now coordinating first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's run for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, did not return calls to his office for comment. He previously denied any wrongdoing, saying that while he met with Mr. Bacon and Miss Mayer before the file was leaked, he denied the discussions were part of a conspiracy. The White House also has denied any involvement in the leak, and Mr. Bacon, in a statement on Thursday, said he did not believe he violated Mrs. Tripp's privacy rights and that ``ultimately my conduct will be found lawful.'' Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican who denounced a Justice Department decision last month not to seek an indictment of Mr. Bacon or Mr. Bernath, despite concerns outlined in a July 1998 report by the inspector general, called the Cohen reprimand ``a travesty.'' ``At a minimum, Bacon and Bernath should have been fired,'' said Mr. Inhofe. ``This is what happened to the Bush administration official who misused candidate Bill Clinton's passport file in 1992. It is what Bill Clinton said would happen to anyone in his administration found guilty of a similar invasion of privacy.'' Mr. Cohen yesterday denied that he whitewashed the release of information from Mrs. Tripp's confidential file, saying there was ``no attempt to injure Miss Tripp's credibility or her reputation.'' He told reporters at Morristown Airport after touring nearby Picatinny Arsenal that Mr. Bacon and Mr. Bernath were seeking to respond to pressure from the media and that there was no attempt to orchestrate any campaign to discredit Mrs. Tripp. ``I don't intend to fire him,'' Mr. Cohen said of Mr. Bacon. In a final report made public yesterday, acting Inspector General Donald Mancuso said the harm to Mrs. Tripp's privacy interests caused by the release of her confidential personnel file outweighed any public benefit. ``Accordingly, the release constituted a clearly unwarranted invasion of her privacy,'' the report said. The report said the actions of Mr. Bacon and Mr. Bernath constituted a violation of the federal Privacy Act. The documents leaked showed that Mrs. Tripp had said she never had been arrested, when in fact she had--in what later was described as a teen-age prank that occurred more than 30 years ago. Exhibit No. 3 [From the The Weekly Standard, June 12, 2000] Why Didn't Bacon Get Fried?--The Pentagon's Anti-Tripp Leakers Get a Slap on the Wrist, and the Privacy Act a Slap in the Face (By Jay Nordlinger) It's just a small matter, in all the Clinton grossness, but it counts. Linda Tripp was the victim of a dirty, and illegal, trick. It was played on her by her own bosses at the Pentagon. And now those men--Kenneth Bacon and Clifford Bernath--have escaped with the wispiest slaps on the wrist. This is ho-hum for the Clinton administration; but it is a reminder of how unlawful and indecent this administration has been. Before this little affair slides all the way down the memory hole, recall the essential facts: In January 1998, the Lewinsky scandal exploded on Bill Clinton's head. From the point of view of the White House, Linda Tripp was the major villain. It was therefore a matter of urgency to discredit her. In March, Jane Mayer, a Clinton-friendly reporter for the New Yorker, acquired what seemed a valuable piece of information: Tripp, as a teenager, had been arrested for larceny. Mayer put in a call to Ken Bacon, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. He was an old friend; the two had worked together at the Wall Street Journal. Mayer had an amazingly specific question for him: How had Tripp responded to Question 21, parts a and b, on Form 398? This was a highly sensitive national-security questionnaire, under the eye of the Privacy Act Branch of the Defense Security Service; Question 21 dealt with arrests and detentions. Bacon quickly swung into action. He ordered his deputy, Cliff Bernath, to get Mayer her answer. Hours before the reporter's deadline, Bernath told her not to worry: ``Ken has made clear it's priority.'' Moving heaven and earth, and alarming career officers as he went, Bernath delivered--right on time. It looked like bad news for Tripp: She had not, in fact, disclosed on Form 398 her 1969 arrest. Bernath told the New York Times that Tripp faced the ``very serious charge'' of lying to the government. Defense secretary William Cohen declared on CNN that Tripp was ``guilty of a contradiction of the truth,'' which would be ``looked into.'' It soon emerged, however, that Tripp's arrest had been the result of a juvenile prank, perpetrated against her. The judge had reduced the charge to one count of loitering, telling her, as she recalled it, that her record would be clear. The Pentagon, rather sheepishly, dropped its investigation of Tripp. Instead, Congress demanded that the department investigate Bacon and Bernath--for violating the Privacy Act. In their attempt to help Mayer nail Tripp, the two men seemed to have nailed themselves. The Pentagon's inspector general, Eleanor Hill, duly launched an investigation. The case being clear-cut, it didn't take her long to find that Bacon and Bernath had indeed violated the Privacy Act. In July 1998, she referred the matter to the Justice Department--which then sat on it for almost two full years. This would have been incomprehensible in any other administration. Only in April 2000 did Justice announce that it would not prosecute. Incredibly, the department claimed that there was ``no direct evidence upon which to pursue any violation of the Privacy Act.'' It was then left to Secretary Cohen to determine a penalty for Bacon and Bernath--if any. What he decided to do was write a letter expressing his ``disappointment'' in the men. Each would receive a copy. In this letter, Cohen said that his subordinates' actions had been ``hasty and ill- considered.'' He noted that, at the time of the incident, they and others at the Pentagon were under instruction not to release anything concerning Tripp without first consulting department lawyers. The strongest language he used was ``serious lapse of judgment.'' But this was balanced against ``the very high quality of the performance that you have otherwise exhibited.'' Amazingly, Cohen told the press that ``there was no attempt to injure Miss Tripp's credibility or her reputation.'' Contemplating this, Dick Morris, the former Clinton adviser, had no choice but to remark, ``Generally, it is a good political rule never to say anything that the average 6- year-old knows isn't true.'' The most striking thing about the Cohen letter is that it will not even be placed in either Bacon's or Bernath's permanent file. According to the Pentagon, this is not a letter of reprimand. A department spokesman, Craig Quigley, described it as ``a personal letter to both Mr. Bernath and Mr. Bacon.'' Incredulous, a reporter said, ``So, it's not a letter of reprimand?'' ``No,'' said Quigley, ``Well, what would you call it?'' Said Quigley, ``It's an official letter expressing the secretary's disappointment in the judgment'' of the two officials. Quigley, like his boss, Bacon, also persisted in the fiction that the leak to Mayer was no big deal--a matter of routing, just business as usual. ``This information was taken in the normal course of the day.'' It was ``done very clearly and above board.'' You know how it is at the Pentagon: ``A reporter will call with a question or request for data of some sort, and it's provided as best we can.'' Anyone who has ever covered, or tried to cover, the Defense Department will gladly tell you this is rot. Quigley trotted out another line as well, one that is increasingly becoming the Bacon defense: ``You always do a balancing act between the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act.'' This assertion is absurd: Form 398 is strickly a Privacy Act document. After Cohen's non-reprimand, a few Republicans properly cried bloody murder. Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma accused the Pentagon of ``a whitewash and a coverup.'' He said that ``the law was broken, and nothing is being done about it.'' The failure to punish the leakers would ``send a signal to millions of federal civilian and military employees that their private government records can be made public for political purposes, and no one will be held accountable.'' For their part, Bacon and Bernath are denying any violation of the Privacy Act. At a press conference, Bacon was asked whether he would apologize to Tripp. ``Well,'' he replied, ``I have already issued the apologies that I have to issue.'' (He didn't specify what those were.) ``I don't think that I performed unlawfully,'' he continued. His only regret was that he had not ``checked this with lawyers.'' In an official statement, Bacon said, ``It certainly never occurred to me that the Privacy Act would preclude disclosing how a public figure recorded a public arrest record on a security clearance.'' And here is more, perhaps Bacon's richest utterance to date: ``I obviously knew that this was an issue of considerable public concern and that the public had an interest in knowing whether Ms. Tripp had accurately acknowledged her arrest record.'' Bernath, the junior partner in the enterprise, following orders, although blindly, was similarly unbowed, saying, ``My actions were not only legal, but also ethical and correct.'' Meanwhile, Tripp is suing both the Pentagon and the White House for Privacy Act violations and witness intimidation. This suit may in fact have been on Cohen's mind when he declined to take serious action against his guys. Cohen gave the game away somewhat on Meet the Press, saying of Bacon, ``He is now the subject of a major lawsuit. And so he will continue to be held accountable to the legal process.'' This is exactly the sort of thinking that worries many observers, including Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney with long experience in this area. Says diGenova, ``The treatment of Bacon and Bernath suggests that the Privacy Act will be enforceable only in civil lawsuits filed by the victims. It there's no adverse action--not even a letter that goes into somebody's file--there's no deterrence here. None whatsoever.'' In other words, ``Don't leave it solely to the victim, who has to pay lawyers and so on, to enforce her rights under the Privacy Act. The government should enforce those rights, especially given that it was government people who broke the law.'' The president and his men have a bit of a history with the Privacy Act. You perhaps remember Passportgate. Toward the end of the 1992 presidential campaign, it was learned that political appointees in the Bush State Department had rifled through candidate Clinton's passport files and those of his mother. Democrats demanded an independent-counsel investigation. They got one--led by diGenova. One of the officials involved, Elizabeth Tamposi, was dismissed. The acting secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, offered to resign over the matter (President Bush refused). Said Clinton, in his first press conference as president-elect, ``If I catch anybody doing [what the passport-file offenders did], I will fire them the next day. You won't have to have an inquiry or rigmarole or anything else.'' About a year later, Passportgage had something of a reprise, this time featuring appointees in Clinton's own State Department. A few of them got hold of Bush- administration personnel files and leaked them to Al Kamen of the Washington Post. Kamen thus had the following story: ``Guess whose working file was empty? That of very controversial longtime Bush employee Jennifer Fitzgerald.'' Kamen, of course, was being coy here: Fitzgerald was the woman rumored to have had an affair with President Bush. Damen was also able to report that Elizabeth Tamposi's file included ``concerns from very senior State Department types that she was not ready for an assistant secretaryship.'' Immediately, the State Department's inspector general, Sherman Funk, began an investigation. He found that two employees--Joseph Tarver and Mark Schulhof--were stone-cold guilty. Funk told Congress that the pair had engaged in ``criminal violations of the Privacy Act provable beyond a reasonable doubt.'' The Justice Department (developing a pattern) refused to prosecute. In November 1993, the department secretary, Warren Christopher, fired Tarver and Schulhof. This must have been one of the last acts of Clinton-administration honor. The contrast with the Bacon- Tripp case--in this last respect--is overwhelming. Then, of course, there was Filegate, in which the White House gathered unto its bosom hundreds of Republican FBI files, including Linda Tripp's. And the president himself was prompt to release letters from Kathleen Willey--a woman who had accused him of improper sexual conduct--when it was convenient. If all this didn't begin with Watergate, it was certainly enshrined there. When the Bacon-Tripp story first broke, Charles Colson reminded this magazine that it was to a Bacon- style disclosure that he had pleaded guilty, in 1974. He had released information from Daniel Ellsberg's FBI file to the Copley Press, at a time when Ellsberg was a defendant in the Pentagon Papers case and a thorn in the Nixon administration's side--the parallels to Tripp are neat. Colson went to jail for this. The special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, rejoiced that Colson's plea had set a precedent: No longer would political appointees so readily smear their foes in this way. Indeed, the Privacy Act was a post-Watergate reform, intended to check Nixonian abuses. Says diGenova, ``The Bacon thing is a facial and obvious violation of the Privacy Act. It is made for it.'' Bear this in mind: ``Linda Tripp was engaged in a very public dispute with the president.'' His presidency hung in the balance; he, like Nixon before him, was on the road to impeachment. ``This is precisely the kind of circumstance that Congress had in mind when it gave us the Privacy Act. And not to punish this conduct is a very serious mistake.'' Apart from Tripp's lonely lawsuit, this affair has now reached an end. Yet two questions hang over it. First, Who gave Jane Mayer that promising tidbit from Tripp's past? Mayer says that it was a former wife of Tripp's father. Others--not necessarily full-time conspiracy theorists, either--wonder whether that's the full story. Team Clinton had every reason to dig for dirt on Tripp. The chief recordkeeper in the White House, Terry Good, testified in a deposition that the White House counsel's office had requested ``anything and everything that we might have in our files relating to Linda Tripp.'' The second question is, Did Bacon act of his own initiative? Or was he prompted by someone--presumably at the White House--to let fly what appeared to be damaging information? Bacon has steadfastly claimed that he acted entirely on his own, with no order, wink, or nod. But this strikes most people familiar with the workings of the Pentagon--and of the Clinton camp generally--as implausible. A veteran Defense Department hand told us, ``Couldn't happen, didn't happen, no way, no how. Remember: Everyone who comes into public affairs is told Privacy Act rules. You don't release someone's confidential information--to anyone, much less the media. This is Public Affairs 101. And Bacon is perpetrating a shameful lie. Any professional in the building will tell you the same thing.'' So, the Clinton administration lurches to a close, its players going this way and that, its loose ends being tied up, however unsatisfactorily. Jane Mayer, the little lady who started this not-so-great war, was recently a guest at a White House state dinner. She was seated in a place of honor: the first lady's table. As for her friend Bacon, he has waxed philosophical about his humble-gate: ``This is an extremely small part of a large and painful national drama.'' Yes, but it is significant nonetheless. The rule of law has taken a beating in this administration, not to mention such demands as honesty and trustworthiness. After Cohen flaked out, one of Tripp's lawyers made a somewhat poignant statement: ``Despite Linda Tripp's unpopularity, the law should protect her.'' Such a simple notion. And powerful, even now.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the outstanding performance of several students from Enid High School in Enid, Oklahoma. The following students participated in the We the People . . . The Citizen and the Constitution national finals competition in Washington DC. The students who participated in the competition are: Aaron Bonnett, Beau Brumfield, Cheyenne Combs, Keneisha Green, Heather Hansen, Tim Healy, Erin Hickey, Kenneth Ingle, M. Brandon Jones, Heather Kline, Thomas Lentz, Becky Lewis, Meredith Meara, Yvonne Midkiff, Katie Oden, Derek Podolny, Brandi Pride, Diana Rogers, Ryan Seals, Jamie Thibodeau, Carl Tompson, along with their teacher Cheryl Franklin. The national finals competition brings together 50 classes from throughout the United States and provides the students the opportunity to testify as constitutional experts before a panel of judges. The students from Enid displayed remarkable understanding of the ideals and values of the American Constitution and are to be commended for their efforts. Again, congratulations to these outstanding Oklahoma students and their teacher.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I regret we are doing this today. I can only speak for myself and not others, but if you wanted to do away with 527s for everybody and not leave anybody out, I would do it and do it in a heartbeat. But not on this bill. Everybody knows the consequences of putting something such as this on this bill. I hope in this very brief period of time --I was hoping to have more time--to at least address how significant this thing really is and what we are talking about. Mr. President, I have said this since 1995. Our country is facing the greatest threat it has faced in its entire history. But it is not just me saying this. Now we have George Tenet, who is the Director of Central Intelligence and an appointee of President Clinton, agreeing, in my committee, that we as a Nation are in the most threatened position we have been in in the history of America. So we need to turn this thing around. This is the first year in 14 years we are able to start turning the corner and rebuilding a deteriorated system. At the National Training Center-Ft Irwin, units coming to the NTC today have not had enough time to train at their home stations to allow them to maximize the training opportunities. This means that the units are leaving the NTC less proficient than those who went thru the rotations in previous years. At Ft. Bragg, according to the base commander, O&M funds have never been so tight. Commanders are being forced to make choices and trade- offs that their predecessors never faced. Insufficient Base-Ops funding has forced commanders to rob from training accounts. Insufficient RPM funding has resulted in the degradation of facilities in which the military personnel work and live. Maintenance on barracks is so bad that every time it rains, one building leaks into the rooms where the troops sleep, and even into the armory where their weapons are stored which damages those weapons. At the Norfolk Naval Base, the Navy is experiencing an increase in the cross decking of equipment and munitions as less modern systems are available to outfit all the hulls. In addition, supplies and spare parts are insufficient to support the surging of the Navy to meet its 2 MTW requirements. Insufficient steaming days and flying hours are amongst the biggest readiness concerns within some Navy units. At the San Diego Naval Base, on average, 20 percent of the deployed planes on the carriers are grounded awaiting parts or other maintenance requirements. Furthermore, the cannibalization of aircraft has gone up by 15% over the last three carrier deployments. There have been notable reductions in the mission capability and the full mission capability rates of Naval aircraft over the past 4 years. This is true for the deployed and the non-deployed squadrons. At the Nellis Air Force Base, reduction in Red Flag exercises from 6 to 4 means that fewer pilots can participate each year. The new goal is to move pilots thru Nellis once every 18 months vs. once every year. The high OPTEMPO of the forces--deployments are up fourfold while the force is down by a third--has been the principle reason for the reduction in exercises. Regarding Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center-29 Palms, conditions at 29 Palms and the Marine Corps in general: money is low; ammo is short; and spare parts are scarce. ``The level of training and readiness has diminished, it is not what it was in Desert Storm.'' At Camp Lejuene, modernization delays have a serious readiness impact. Equipment is more costly to maintain, less capable, and spare parts cannot always be obtained. In particular, the CH-46 is wearing thin. Some replacement parts are no longer available. One Marine officer estimated that if a Gulf War size operation erupted today, only about 50 percent of Marine units would be qualified to deploy. I can tell you, the problems are in all these areas. We have retention problems because we do not have adequate accounts being funded. The various military installations are taking money out of one account and putting it in another account. So at Fort Bragg, for example, they have not been able to maintain their barracks. When it rains, the troops have to lie down on the equipment to keep it from rusting. We have a crisis in terms of cross-decking at Norfolk as well as on the west coast. So we have very serious problems, and these problems can only be met with this bill. I will just quote one thing out of the DOD Quarterly Readiness Report: Readiness deficiencies are most readily visible in the later deploying and non-deploying forces, some forward deployed and first-fight-forces are also experiencing these difficulties. What they are saying is, for several years we are able to take all our assets and concentrate them in areas that are behind the lines in favor of the forward deployed. Now even the forward deployed are having a problem. I can remember in our committee, the committee I chair, the Readiness Subcommittee, we had the four chiefs in there. I asked them the question: If you were going to have to take a reduction someplace to increase your modernization or some other accounts, would it be in force strength, modernization, quality of life, and so forth? Up until a couple years ago, the Marines would always say ``quality of life, because the Marines don't need quality of life.'' Now we are not even hearing that from them. We are facing a crisis at a time when this country is in the most vulnerable position in which it has ever been. I think we should really be looking at the overall picture and the fact we have something very serious going on right now. We need to address it with this bill. This defense authorization bill turns the corner for the first time in 14 years. It is being held hostage right now on a matter that has nothing to do with defending America. Mr. President, I think we need to get on with the bill and away from extraneous, nongermane amendments.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, if I can respond to a couple of the statements of the Senator from Ohio and the Senator from Rhode Island, first of all, I know the Senator from Rhode Island is sincere when he says this would not take place until 2003; it would be a new administration. But we have to keep in mind that administration could very well be a Gore administration. It was Vice President Gore who was very instrumental in politicizing the system before. I think that is significant. I would say also to my friend from Ohio, while there are savings that would be effected, the savings, according to Secretary Cohen, would not even start until 2008. By that time, we are hoping we will have been able to use every available dollar to get us out of the situation we are in right now. I think that is very significant. Our crisis is now. Our crisis is a rebuilding program for the next 4 to 5 years. I yield.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, on behalf of the manager, I yield myself such time as I may need.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I wouldn't want anything I say to be misinterpreted by anyone as to how I am going to be voting on the defense authorization bill under consideration. I am going to strongly support it, although it is strongly inadequate for the needs we are faced with right now. I am realistic enough to know that when we get into a rebuilding program, that is going to have to happen under a different administration than the administration we have had over the last 7\1/2\ years. I was elected to the House of Representatives in 1986; my first term was 1987. It happened that a very smart young Congressman from Texas named Dick Armey made the decision that we were going to have to do something about excess infrastructure and devised a way, this smart guy who got his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, to take politics out of the base realignment and closing process. I strongly supported him. The first round voted on, I believe, in 1987, to be implemented in 1989, about which I spoke on the floor of the House and supported, was one that I felt this country did need. So for the first two of the four rounds we have already had, it was cherry-picking time. Yes, we closed bases and installations that resulted in a tremendous savings, and it was good. The third and the fourth rounds didn't work out that way. We have to keep in mind that it had always been virtually impossible politically to close installations because of the politics involved. There are always Members of the House and Senate who don't want anything closed in their States. Consequently, this system that was devised, this BRAC process, was to take politics out. Everyone agreed, even though they didn't like the results, that there had to be a process free from politics to do that. It worked out for the first four rounds. The last round that came through in 1995 was one where, among other things, the BRAC committee evaluated the air logistics centers. There are five of them in the United States, and each one was operating at that time at 50-percent capacity. Any logical business conclusion would demand that we close two of them and transfer the workload to the remaining three. I heard the distinguished Senator from Michigan talk about the process, about the fact that privatization in place is something that would be precluded in the next BRAC round, if he is successful in getting that authorized. I suggest that if somebody in the White House wants to violate the integrity of this process, it is not only privatization in place that will happen. He can find out some other way of doing it. We are going to have, it now appears, one of two people as the next President of the United States. It will either be Vice President Al Gore or George W. Bush. In the case of Vice President Gore, let's remember what happened in the 1995 round. They made the recommendation to close two and transfer the workloads of the remaining three. They evaluated all five air logistics centers and determined that the two least efficient ones were at McClellan Air Force Base in California and Kelly Air Force Base in Texas. That being right before the election and both being in vote-rich swing States, the President and the Vice President went to McClellan and then to Kelly and said: Don't worry; even though they said that we are going to close your bases, we are not going to let that happen. We are going to--and just out of the air he grabbed a phrase--``privatize in place.'' Well, that made it very clear that if you really want to figure out a way to politicize the system, you can do it. Who was it at that time who made the announcement out at McClellan in California and at Kelly in Texas? It wasn't President Clinton. It was Vice President Al Gore. I said when I began that one of those two individuals, Gore or Bush, is going to be the next President. I will fight to the bitter end, until at least the time we know who the next President is going to be, before I will vote to authorize future BRAC rounds in that one of the candidates, Vice President Al Gore, has already demonstrated that he will induce politics back into a system that is supposed to be free of politics. I think that has to be considered. The second issue is, in this rebuilding process, I believe that if the next President of the United States is George W. Bush, having had personal conversations with him, he recognizes that we are in the same hollow force situation we were in in 1980 when Ronald Reagan became President and had to start a massive rebuilding program. What is a massive rebuilding program today? The Joint Chiefs have all said, in testimony before our committee, with Senator Levin and myself present, that we need to have an additional $140 billion over the next 6 years to reach the minimum expectations of the American people. What are the minimum expectations of the American people? It is to defend America on two regional fronts. This has been a concept most Americans think we can do today, and we cannot do that simultaneously. So if we start this rebuilding process and it is going to be as significant as we think it is going to be, then we need to be looking at what our infrastructure needs will be then, not what they are today. If we have artificially lowered our force strength in this country to an artificially low level, we don't want to bring our infrastructure down to the same level because when we start to rebuild, we don't know what our infrastructure needs will be. That is the whole point. We will know with the new administration, and we will be able to project in the future what that is going to be. The argument is used that we can't have it both ways and we need to have more money. That is true. I think we need to have a lot more money than we have right now. In fact, we have testimony from the service chiefs that, even with the budget we have today, we are still inadequate to the degree of about $11 billion-plus a year in order to start the rebuilding process and get to the point we just described. Why would we be in a hurry to do this? When they talk about the fact that we are going to have savings, we know those savings aren't even going to take place in the best scenarios until, at the earliest, 2008. In fact, I will read out of a March 2, 2000, news article that quotes Bill Cohen. He said it will be somewhere between 2008 to 2015. Now that is beyond the point, hopefully, that we have a crisis in this country. Our crisis is here today. There are a lot of people who would like to believe there is not a threat out there because the cold war is over. I look wistfully back to the days of the Cold War. At least we knew who the opposition was. We had two superpowers, and we had good intelligence on both sides. We knew what they had, and they knew what we had. We were able to address it. Today, we have all these rogue nations that all have weapons of mass destruction. We have countries that possess missiles that will reach to the United States of America, China, Russia, North Korea, and maybe others--warheads that could blow us up. I come from Oklahoma, and I think most of the people realize it was just 5 years ago in April that we had the most devastating domestic terrorist attack in the history of America. It happened in Oklahoma. When you saw the pictures of that Murrah Federal Office Building, you saw parts of bodies that were stuck to the wall in that flaming building and the absolute devastation, and you stopped to realize that the smallest nuclear warhead known to man today is 1,000 times that powerful. So here we are vulnerable, with no defense system at all on an incoming missile. Secondly, we are at one-half the force strength in 1991 during the Persian Gulf war. We have one-half of the Army divisions, one-half of the tactical air wings, one-half of the ships floating out there. Our force strength is down. At the same time, under this administration, we have had more deployments in the last 7 years than we had in the previous 40 years collectively. They have been in areas where we don't have national security interests. So we are taking these rare assets we have, and we are putting them into places such as Kosovo and Bosnia, where we should not have gone in the first place. So facing that 1980 dilemma our rebuilding is going to have to start immediately for national security reasons. I would like to think that by 2008 we would be back where we were in 1986 after the rebuilding. I have no way of knowing that for sure, but let's hope that is the case. Anyway, while the Senator from Arizona said it is not at all sure, he said, to be perfectly candid, that we are going to be able to save $20 billion over that period of time. There is one thing I suggest we are sure of, which is that the cost over the next 5 years is going to be $2.6 billion. That means it is going to be negative during this time that we have to start the rebuilding process. Things, right now, are in a much more deplorable condition than America wants to believe. As chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, I have had occasion to go to all the military installations around the world, and I don't like what I see. We have RPMs, real property maintenance accounts, that are supposed to be done immediately, taken care of, and they are not doing it. We have barracks in Fort Bragg where when it rains--and I was there when it rained--the roof has been leaking now for years. They are unable to fix that because they don't have the money to do it. Our troops are actually lying down over their equipment to keep it from rusting. It is a crisis. You can go to the 21st TACOM over in Germany and look at our M-915 trucks. Many of them have over a million miles on them. They are spending as much in maintenance on each one over the next 3 years as it would take to buy a brand new truck. It is a crisis that we don't have the money to buy new trucks when we need them. It is not feasible to do it that way, but that is our only choice. We don't have spare parts for airplanes. The cannibalized rate is higher than ever before. That means they bring in a crated F-100 engine to be put into an F-l6, and in order to keep the F-l6 there running with a fairly recent engine, they have to rob parts from this. It is highly labor intensive. Consequently, we are having a problem in retention that is not only with pilots, which is an-all time low, but also the mechanics putting those parts in. Our pilot retention in the Navy right now is below 20 percent. It costs between $6 million and $9 million to train each one of them. Yet over 80 percent of them are leaving and not taking the second full tour of duty. The mechanics fixing the planes are leaving, too. I have talked to these people, and they say this country has lost its sense of mission. It is not keeping its strength. We can't buy bullets for guns. Talk to the Air Force people who go out to the red flag exercises at Nellis in the desert. They have cut them down so they don't believe they are getting the necessary training to be combat ready and to compete. Look at our modernization program. Now we have been cutting back on the Crusader Program, which the Army believes is the crown jewel--that thing we have to have for our launching capability on the ground. Look at our modernization program in airplanes. I was never more proud of a four-star general than I was the other day when he stood up and said America needs to know that the Russians now have the SU-34, an air-to- air, air combat vehicle that is better than anything we have, including the F-15. The average American would say we are fine and we have the very best of equipment. We used to, but we don't now. Look at the ranges we have now. We are faced with an issue of having to close--temporarily, I hope--the firing range on Vieques. That is going to have a dramatic effect on which installations to keep open. We won't have anyplace to have live fire training. We will lose such ranges as Cape Wrath in Scotland, Capo Teulada in southern Sardinia. Why? Because there is no justification to allow us to fire our artillery if we are not willing to do it on our own lands. All of these things form a crisis. When I said I look back wistfully at the days of the cold war, it isn't just me. I was redeemed the other day at our subcommittee meeting when we had George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, there. This happened to be telecast live on C- SPAN. I said: Right now, we are in the most threatened position that we have been in as a Nation in the history of this country since the Revolutionary War. Would you respond to that? He said: Absolutely correct. We are in the most threatened position. It is because of the combined reasons of deployments, force strength and, of course, not having the national missile defense systems. All those will be elements of rebuilding. Who knows what our needs are going to be when we start this rebuilding. I hope the next President will be a Republican, and that we will be in a position to rebuild our defense system. When that happens, we don't know what the elements of that system are going to be. Lastly--and I don't want to overdo the time here--we are asked this question by the distinguished Senator from Arizona: I challenge my colleagues to name any military expert who says we should not have another BRAC round. You can name a lot of them. The Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan said in an article in the Washington Post on May 14, 1998, when we were having the same debate, that Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen is correct when he says that the Department of Defense needs the support of Congress to have a cost-effective national defense. But the Secretary is blaming Congress for problems that are not of its making. More importantly, Cohen is ignoring the administration's own complicity in creating funding difficulties for defense and vastly is exaggerating the potential problems that could occur if Congress fails to heed his advice. Cohen wants Congress to authorize two new rounds of base closures to free up an additional $3 billion a year for buying badly needed new weapons. But what Cohen has not stated is that these savings would not begin until a decade from now. I think that is the significant thing. These savings would set in after a period of time that we would be going through this rebuilding process. I hold him up as one expert who says we should not do a round at this time. Another is the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Jim Jones, who said that he knew of no Marine installation he would recommend for closure. He said: We cannot give it away or we will never get it back. I don't think anyone is going to say that Gen. Jim Jones is not a military expert. He has one of the most distinguished careers of any of them. Adm. Jay L. Johnson, the CNO, said his view was ``not far'' from that of Jones. He said he is concerned about permanently losing training ranges, air space, and access to the sea. The Chief of the Army, General Shinseki, said he would support some closures in the future but said that the Army needs to decide what its future force level is going to be before it can judge base consolidation with certainty. We have three of the four chiefs of our services saying if we are going to do it we should wait and do it after we determine what our force strength should be in the future and not do it before that time. For the combination of those reasons, there is certainly no rush to do it and do it in this bill. Certainly I would be willing to talk about this after the next administration comes in. It wouldn't make any difference anyway because the first round wouldn't be until 2003. I think Dick Armey did a wonderful job back in 1987. I think it served a very useful purpose--particularly the first three BRAC rounds that we were able to accomplish. They saved a lot of money. We are now enjoying some of the savings. However, the amounts that we saved have far exceeded what we lost by the cleanup costs. I don't think those estimates would be anymore accurate if we were to go through two new rounds. Keep in mind that every succeeding round is going to yield fewer benefits than the round before. I certainly think the Senator from Rhode Island, with his background and experience, knows that if you are going to start a closing process, you pick off the cherries to start with and accumulate those savings. I conclude by saying that we need to look at them in the next administration after we find out what our force strength is going to be, and after we find out what degree of rebuilding we will have to undergo in order to protect America and meet the minimum expectations of the American people. I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Major Greg Sheppard, an Air Force fellow in my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the debate on Defense authorization.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, on Wednesday, May 17, at page S. 4069 of the Record, the distinguished minority leader announced, ``I am going to demand that every single appropriations bill that comes to the Senate before it can be completed be passed in the House first because that is regular order.'' To be clear he repeated, ``We are going to require the regular order when it comes to appropriations bills.'' The Senator refers to the origination clause of our Constitution Art. 1, Sec. 7, Cl. 1. The origination clause states that ``All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.'' The meaning of this clause is widely known, and I do not know why the distinguished minority leader would attempt to make an erroneous claim before those who know better. I do know why he did not challenge his 99 colleagues to correct this statement, as he did with another. The reason is that many could have come forward to tell him he was mistaken. When I open Riddick's Senate Procedure, I read that ``[i]n 1935, the Chair ruled that there is no Constitutional limitation upon the Senate to initiate an appropriation bill.'' The House does claim ``the exclusive right to originate all general appropriations bills.'' Specific appropriations, however, ``have frequently originated in the Senate.'' If the Senator intends to say that there is no precedent for the initiation of appropriation bills in the Senate, that is false. Perhaps there is some confusion between ``raising revenue'' and ``appropriating.'' The former the Senate cannot do. The latter it can. Also, the room the Senate has to work within is broad rather than narrow. The Rules of the House of Representatives note that ``[a] bill raising revenue incidentally [has been] held not to infringe upon the Constitutional prerogative of the House to originate revenue legislation.'' The courts agree with these constitutional interpretations. In fact, as recently as 1989, the Court of Appeals for the Tenth District in U.S. v. King, 891 F.2d 780, 781 ruled that where a bill does not qualify as a revenue bill, it is not subject to the provisions of the origination clause. The United States Supreme Court, in Twin City Nat. Bank of New Brighton v. Nebecker, 167 U.S. 196, 202. ruled in an 1897 decision, which is cited as precedent to this day, that ``revenue bills are those that levy taxes, in the strict sense of the word, and are not bills for other purposes which may incidentally create revenue.'' On another occasion, the Supreme Court, in U.S. v. Norton, 91 U.S. 566, 569 (1875) said that ``[t]he construction of the [origination clause] limitation is practically well settled by the uniform action of Congress'' and that ``it `has been confined to bills to levy taxes in the strict sense of the word, and has not been understood to extend to bills for other purposes which incidentally create revenue.' '' Indeed, in 1997, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth District in Walthall v. U.S., 131 F.3d 1289 ruled that the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA) did not violate the originations clause. It was not the intent of our Founding Fathers not to allow the Senate to decide how to spend government monies. Obviously, we must do that. Almost every action we take requires some money to be spent. What the Founding Fathers wanted to achieve with the origination clause was a check on government by which the most representative body had to authorize the extraction from the people of taxes. The only obstacle I know of to the Senate passing certain appropriation bills is the objection of the distinguished minority leader. He claims, ``This is getting to be more and more a second House of Representatives.'' Who is making it so, I ask. According to Procedure in the U.S. House of Representatives, Sec. 3.2, p. 134 it is the other body in which ``[i]nfringement of the Senate on the constitutional prerogative of the House to initiate revenue measures may be raised * * * as a matter of privilege.''

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I want to have a better solution, but this is the only solution there is. I urge my colleagues to support this for the state of readiness of our Nation. Exhibit 1 [From the Washington Post, Feb. 22, 1999] (By Henry Kissinger) No U.S. Ground Forces for Kosovo--Leadership Doesn't Mean That We Must Do Everything Ourselves. President Clinton's announcement that some 4,000 American troops will join a NATO force of 28,000 to help police a Kosovo agreement faces all those concerned with long-range American national security policy with a quandary. Having at once time shared responsibility for national security policy and the extrication from Vietnam, I am profoundly uneasy about the proliferation of open-ended American commitments involving the deployment of U.S. forces. American forces are in harm's way in Kosovo, Bosnia and the gulf. They lack both a definition of strategic purpose by which success can be measured and an exit strategy. In the case of Kosovo, the concern is that America's leadership would be impaired by the refusal of Congress to approve American participation in the NATO force that has come into being largely as a result of a diplomacy conceived and spurred by Washington. Thus, in the end, Congress may feel it has little choice but to go along. In any event, its formal approval is not required. But Congress needs to put the administration on notice that it is uneasy about being repeatedly confronted with ad hoc military missions. The development and articulation of a comprehensive strategy is imperative if we are to avoid being stretched too thin in the face of other foreseeable and militarily more dangerous challenges. Before any future deployments take place, we must be able to answer these questions: What consequences are we seeking to prevent? What goals are we seeking to achieve? In what way do they serve the national interest? President Clinton has justified American troop deployments in Kosovo on the ground that ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia threatens ``Europe's stability and future.'' Other administration spokesmen have compared the challenge to that of Hitler's threat to European security. Neither statement does justice to Balkan realities. The proposed deployment in Kosovo does not deal with any threat to American security as traditionally conceived. The threatening escalations sketched by the president--to Macedonia or Greece and Turkey--are in the long run more likely to result from the emergence of a Kosovo state. Nor is the Kosovo problem new. Ethnic conflict has been endemic in the Balkans for centuries. Waves of conquests have congealed divisions between ethnic groups and religions, between the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic faiths; between Christianity and Islam; between the heirs of the Austrian and Ottoman empires. Through the centuries, these conflicts have been fought with unparalleled ferocity because none of the populations has any experience with--and essentially no belief in-- Western concepts of toleration. Majority rule and compromise that underlie most of the proposals for a ``solution'' never have found an echo in the Balkans. Moreover, the projected Kosovo agreement is unlikely to enjoy the support of the parties for a long period of time. For Serbia, acquiescing under the threat of NATO bombardment, it involves nearly unprecedented international intercession. Yugoslavia, a sovereign state, is being asked to cede control and in time sovereignty of a province containing its national shrines to foreign military force. Though President Slobodan Milosevic has much to answer for, especially in Bosnia, he is less the cause of the conflict in Kosovo than an expression of it. On the need to retain Kosovo, Serbian leaders--including Milosevic's domestic opponents--seem united. For Serbia, current NATO policy means either dismemberment of the country or postponement of the conflict to a future date when, according to the NATO proposal, the future of the province will be decided. The same attitude governs the Albanian side. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is fighting for independence, not autonomy. But under the projected agreement, Kosovo, now an integral part of Serbia, is to be made an autonomous and self-governing entity within Serbia, which, however, will remain responsible for external security and even exercise some unspecified internal police functions. A plebiscite at the end of three years is to determine the region's future. The KLA is certain to try to use the cease-fire to expel the last Serbian influences from the province and drag its feet on giving up its arms. And if NATO resists, it may come under attack itself--perhaps from both sides. What is described by the administration as a ``strong peace agreement'' is likely to be at best the overture to another, far more complicated set of conflicts. Ironically, the projected peace agreement increases the likelihood of the various possible escalations sketched by the president as justification for a U.S. deployment. An independent Albanian Kosovo surely would seek to incorporate the neighboring Albanian minorities--mostly in Macedonia--and perhaps even Albania itself. And a Macedonian conflict would land us precisely back in the Balkan wars of earlier in this century. Will Kosovo then become the premise for a NATO move into Macedonia, just as the deployment in Bosnia is invoked as justification for the move into Kosovo? Is NATO to be the home for a whole series of Balkan NATO protectorates? What confuses the situation even more is that the American missions in Bosnia and Kosovo are justified by different, perhaps incompatible, objectives. In Bosnia, American deployment is being promoted as a means to unite Croats, Muslims and Serbs into a single state. Serbs and Croats prefer to practice self-determination but are being asked to subordinate their preference to the geopolitical argument that a small Muslim Bosnian state would be too precarious and irredentist. But in Kosovo, national self-determination is invoked to produce a tiny state nearly certain to be irredentist. Since neither traditional concepts of the national interest nor U.S. security impel the deployment, the ultimate justification is the laudable and very American goal of easing human suffering. This is why, in the end, I went along with the Dayton agreement in so far as it ended the war by separating the contending forces. But I cannot bring myself to endorse American ground forces in Kosovo. In Bosnia, the exit strategy can be described. The existing dividing lines can be made permanent. Failure to do so will require their having to be manned indefinitely unless we change our objective to self-determination and permit each ethnic group to decide its own fate. In Kosovo, that option does not exist. There are no ethnic dividing lines, and both sides claim the entire territory. America's attitude toward the Serb's attempts to insist on their claim has been made plain enough; it is the threat of bombing. But how do we and NATO react to Albanian transgressions and irredentism? Are we prepared to fight both sides and for how long? In the face of issues such as these, the unity of the contact group of powers acting on behalf of NATO is likely to dissolve. Russia surely will increasingly emerge as the supporter of the Serbian point of view. We must take care not to treat a humanitarian foreign policy as a magic recipe for the basic problem of establishing priorities in foreign policy. The president's statements ``that we can make a difference'' and that ``America symbolizes hope and resolve'' are exhortations, not policy prescriptions. Do they mean that America's military power is available to enable every ethnic or religious group to achieve self-determination? Is NATO to become the artillery for ethnic conflict? If Kosovo, why not East Africa or Central Asia? And would a doctrine of universal humanitarian intervention reduce or increase suffering by intensifying ethnic and religious conflict? What are the limits of such a policy and by what criteria is it established? In my view, that line should be drawn at American ground forces for Kosovo. Europeans never tire of stressing the need for greater European autonomy. Here is an occasion to demonstrate it. If Kosovo presents a security problem, it is to Europe, largely because of the refugees the conflict might generate, as the president has pointed out. Kosovo is no more a threat to America than Haiti was to Europe--and we never asked for NATO support there. The nearly 300 million Europeans should be able to generate the ground forces to deal with 2.3 million Kosovars. To symbolize Allied unity on larger issues, we should provide logistics, intelligence and air support. But I see no need for U.S. ground forces; leadership should not be interpreted to mean that we must do everything ourselves. Sooner or later, we must articulate the American capability to sustain a global policy. The failure to do so landed us in the Vietnam morass. Even if one stipulates an American strategic interest in Kosovo (which I do not), we must take care not to stretch ourselves too thin in the face of far less ambiguous threats in the Middle East and Northeast Asia. Each incremental deployment into the Balkans is bound to weaken our ability to deal with Saddam Hussein and North Korea. The psychological drain may be even more grave. Each time we make a peripheral deployment, the administration is constrained to insist that the danger to American forces is minimal--the Kosovo deployment is officially described as a ``peace implementation force.'' Such comments have two unfortunate consequences. They increase the impression among Americans that military force can be used casualty-free, and they send a signal of weakness to potential enemies. For in the end, our forces will be judged on how adequate they are for peace imposition, not peace implementation. I always am inclined to support the incumbent administration in a forceful assertion of the national interest. And as a passionate believer in the NATO alliance, I make the distinctions between European and American security interests in the Balkans with the utmost reluctance. But support for a strong foreign policy and a strong NATO surely will evaporate if we fail to anchor them in a clear definition of the national interest and impart a sense of direction to our foreign policy in a period of turbulent change.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for this time.

Mr. INHOFE. I would like to have 12, if I could.

Mr. INHOFE. No, I will not yield unless I yield on your time. I would like to have a better solution than the solution that is in front us. Frankly, I think we should have done this some time ago, but this seems to be the only vehicle in town. There are reasons we should not have been involved in Kosovo. It is not in our vital national security interests. There is no clear mission objective or schedule to accomplish it. There is no exit strategy. The thing that really concerns me more than anything else, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, is what this has done to our state of readiness. I have been saying since before we sent the cruise missiles into Kosovo that the United States is in the most threatened position we have been in as a nation in this Nation's history. I have been saying that for a long time. It finally was redeemed the other day--our chairman will remember this--when we had George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, before our committee. I made that statement. I asked him to respond live on C- SPAN. He said, yes, we are in the most threatened position we have been in as a nation in the history of this country. Why is that? It is because of three things. First of all, we are at one-half the force strength that we were in 1991 during the Persian Gulf war. Second, we do not have a national missile defense system. We were to have one deployed by fiscal year 1998, and through the President's veto and his veto messages saying he is not going to put more money into a national missile defense system, in spite of the fact that in July of last year we passed a bill that he signed into law with a veto-proof margin saying that is our No. 1 concern, we still do not have one. But the third reason is all these deployments that have nothing to do with our national security interests. I can remember the first one that came along. It was Bosnia. I went up to Bosnia. I knew the President was bound and determined to send our troops into Bosnia. I knew we did not have the spare troops to send in, that we could not respond to a crisis in the Middle East or North Korea if we were to continue to make these deployments, so I went up to the northeast sector. I remember this so well because I was the first American, civilian or military, up there. I went up there with a British General named Rupert Smith, a colorful guy. He and I really enjoyed that trip, going up, talking about what the President promised the American people. If you remember, we had a resolution of disapproval to stop the President from sending troops over there and getting involved. We lost it only by three votes. We lost it because the President said all the troops they would send there, in December of 1995, would be home for Christmas 1996. This is not an approximation. This is the commitment the President made to the American people. We knew that was not going to happen. So we tried this same thing before. We tried at that time to say let's just draw a line in the sand at June of 1996; then June of 1997. We had the same debate at that time. ``No, they are going to come back, but all in good time.'' There is no end in sight in Bosnia. They are still there. So here we have our people involved in an area with the Croats and Serbs and Muslims. Then you have the various other groups such as the Arkan Tigers and Black Swans. The only thing all these groups have in common is they all hate us, hate that we are over there. We lost our resolution of disapproval by three votes. I have tried to determine how much we have spent in Bosnia alone. The most conservative figure will be $13 billion. When you consider everything that has to go with it in terms of ground logistics support, it is considerably more than that. Then along came Kosovo. I knew the same thing was going to happen. This President has an obsession for sending our troops into places where we do not have any national security interests. So I went over to Kosovo. It is not a hard place to go across; it is only 75 miles across. I went by myself, one individual with me. As I went across Kosovo, I only saw one dead person, and that was a Serb, a Serb soldier who had been killed by an Albanian. I rounded one corner and looked down the barrel of a rocket launcher, and it was held by an Albanian. Of some 92 mosques that are there, only 1 was burning. CNN had pictures of it from every angle. When you got back to the United States, you thought every mosque in Kosovo was burning. It was a propaganda effort deliberately to make the American people believe things were going on there that were not going on there. What has happened since then, I might add, speaking of us, on this Senate floor I showed pictures and documented, since the Albanians are now on top, they have burned to the ground a minimum of 52--and we have pictures of all 52--Serb Christian Orthodox churches, most of them built prior to the 15th century. If you do not have any sensitivity to the religious aspect of this, look at the historic aspect. Nonetheless, this is the propaganda effort that got us over there. I can remember one of my many trips. I have to say, I believe I have been in the Balkans, both places, more than any other Member has. Normally I am by myself, to really try to determine what is going on there. I remember being in Tirana. Tirana is where all the refugees showed up. They were all pretty well dressed, but they were all upset with us. They said to me, ``When are you going to do something about this?'' I said, ``Why should we do it?'' They said, ``It's your fault we had this ethnic cleansing.'' I will quote out of the Washington Post of March 31 of last year. They wrote: For weeks before the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, CIA Director Gen. Tenet had been forecasting that Serb-led Yugoslavian forces might respond by accelerating ethnic cleansing. Then Bill Cohen said: With respect to Director Tenet testifying that the bombing could in fact accelerate Milosevic's plans, we also knew that. This was live on Tirana television. They said: When are you--and I was the only American in the group--going to do something about our plight? Because it is your fault we had the ethnic cleansing. Anyway, I think one of the bigger issues is the fact we are diluting our scarce resources. I will quote the comments by Henry Kissinger. He said at that time: Each incremental deployment into the Balkans is bound to weaken our ability to deal with Saddam Hussein and North Korea. He said: The proposed deployment to Kosovo does not deal with any threat to American security. . . . Kosovo is no more a threat to America than Haiti was to Europe. So I know a lot of lies got us into this thing. I remember they rewrote history, saying if we do not go in there, we are going to have another world war because that is the way World War I started and that is the way World War II started. Again quoting from Kissinger's book: The Second World War did not start in the Balkans, much less as a result of its ethnic conflicts. He wrote: World War I started in the Balkans not as a result of ethnic conflicts but for precisely the opposite reason: because outside powers intervened in a local conflict. The assassination of the Crown Prince of Austria--an imperial power--by a Serbian nationalist led to a world war because Russia backed Serbia and France backed Russia while Germany supported Austria. That is exactly what we are doing. We have rubbed Russia's nose in this thing because we have gotten involved in this thing, creating another serious problem facing our Nation. We are now down to where we have diluted the forces. General Richard Hawley, who at that time, in 1999, headed the Air Combat Command, said: The Air Force . . . would be hard-pressed to handle a second war in the Middle East or Korea. Hawley said that 5 weeks of bombing Yugoslavia have left the United States munitions stocks critically short, not just of air-launched cruise missiles as previously reported but also of another precision weapon, the Joint Direct Attack munition, that is JDAM, dropped by the B-2 bombers. If my colleagues go to the 21st TACOM in Germany, right down the road from Ramstein, they will find--that is where they handle the ground logistics--that even before we went into Kosovo, we were at 100-percent capacity. I asked the question: What would happen if we had to respond to a serious problem in the Persian Gulf where we do have national security interests? The response was: We would be 100-percent dependent upon Guard and Reserve. What has happened to our Guard and Reserve as a result of all these deployments? We have critical MOSs, military occupational specialities, because they cannot be deployed 180 and 270 days out of a year and keep the jobs they have at home. Finally, I want to read one paragraph of an article written by Henry Kissinger which says: President Clinton has justified American troop deployments in Kosovo on the grounds that ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia threatens ``Europe's stability and future.'' Other administration spokesmen have compared the challenge to that of Hitler's threat to European security. Neither statement does justice to Balkan realities. I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of my remarks the article be printed in the Record.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, as our chairman, Chairman Warner, I listened to the distinguished Senator from New Jersey talk about this issue. While I do have the utmost respect for him, I would have to say that one of the problems we had, getting into this mess to start with, was the grossly exaggerated figures that were used. I believe the Senator used the number 100,000--100,000 has been batted around quite often. I am going to read into the Record at this point from Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary--this is October of 1999. He is under pressure to answer claims that ministers misled the public on the scale of deaths of civilians in Kosovo: At the height of the war, western officials spoke of a death toll as high as 100,000. President Bill Clinton said the NATO campaign had prevented ``deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide''. Emilio Perez Pujol, a pathologist who led the Spanish team looking for bodies in the aftermath of the fighting, said: I calculate that the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most. The U.N. report came out and said the figure is closer to 2,000. There is a big difference between 2,000 dead and 100,000. I am involved in West Africa. I can assure you, as I said on the floor back during this debate, for every one killed there through ethnic cleansing and otherwise, 100 were killed in Sierra Leone. That seemed to be the excuse that was used for our intervention into that area.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO, is a specialized agency of the U.N. that has been tasked for more than 50 years with the safe and orderly growth of international civil aviation. Based in Montreal, this 185 countries strong organization develops international standards on such critical issues as noise, emissions, and air worthiness. I am saddened to report that, last week, the European Union dealt a severe blow to the integrity and future viability of this critical organization. I, of course, am speaking of the EU's implementation of the so-called hushkit regulation. This regulation bans hushkitted aircraft from being registered in Europe, prohibits such aircraft that are not European registered from flying in Europe within two years, and bars certain reengined aircraft with low by-pass ratios from European airspace. The regulation was implemented despite the fact that the aircraft in question meet the highest international noise standards. Thankfully, in March, the U.S. filed an Article 84 case within ICAO against the fifteen EU Member States arguing that the regulation violated the Chicago Convention. ICAO will review the matter this fall, and hopefully resolve it in a way that reaffirms its position as the sole, international standard setting body. Ironically, the EU wants to have its cake and eat it too. EU Members States are now anxious for ICAO to establish new, more stringent, Stage 4 noise standards. Indeed, the U.S. is working with ICAO on this endeavor as we speak. The key question becomes, why should we develop new standards if the EU has demonstrated that the old ones can be disregarded at whim? If the EU wants Stage 4, it must begin by demonstrating its respect for Stage 3 by withdrawing the hushkit regulation. Mr. President, I will be following the resolution of this dispute very carefully. It is critical to future trading opportunities that the integrity of the ICAO process be upheld.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I ask unanimous consent for 2 additional minutes.

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I want to update my colleagues and the American people on the latest developments in the Linda Tripp file case. As my colleagues will recall, this is a matter concerning how information from the confidential personnel file of a Pentagon civil servant was leaked to the media in March of 1998, more than 2 years ago, by the Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon and a colleague in violation of the Privacy Act. As my questions at an Armed Services Committee hearing revealed for the first time on April 6, the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General essentially completed its investigation of this matter within 4 months of the incident. In July of 1998, it referred its report to the Justice Department, having found sufficient evidence that a crime had been committed. From July 1998 until March of 2000, the Justice Department sat on the report, taking no action, making us believe the IG report was not completed and not given to them--essentially engaging in a coverup, in its typical stonewalling, delaying tactics. Then finally, on March 28, 2000, they quietly returned the report to the Pentagon, informing them it would not criminally prosecute anyone in the case. I reported all of this to the Senate in a floor statement I made on April 11. At that time, I pointed out that the offense in this case-- disseminating to the media information from a Government employee's confidential personnel file--was the same offense Chuck Colson pleaded guilty to during Watergate. It was the same offense for which Colson served in the Federal penitentiary. Since all of this was revealed last month, three principal defenses-- I would call them excuses--have emerged as to why Mr. Bacon should not be prosecuted. These have been put forth to the media by Mr. Bacon's lawyer and by the Justice Department in its decision to take a pass on prosecution. Let me state these three defenses and what they are: No. 1, defense by Kenneth Bacon is that Bacon only leaked a part of a confidential file, not the whole file; No. 2, that the Freedom of Information Act ``trumps'' the Privacy Act; and No. 3, that Bacon ``didn't intend to break the law.'' Today, I want to report to the Senate that all of these arguments have been refuted and exposed as having no merit in this case. This leaves us facing the stark truth: The law was violated, and those who violated it should be prosecuted. In testimony on April 26 before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, which is the Committee I chair, I asked Pentagon Deputy Inspector General Donald Mancuso about these issues. He confirmed these points: No. 1, that criminal violations of the Privacy Act are not contingent on whether a whole file or just a part of a file is compromised. Common sense would lead us to this conclusion anyway, but this was confirmed by the inspector general in our committee meeting. Either one constitutes a violation. There is no distinction between leaking part of a file or leaking the entire file. Secondly, that there was no formal written Freedom of Information Act request made prior to the Tripp file leak; that, in any event, the Freedom of Information Act does not trump the Privacy Act; and that, indeed, the Freedom of Information Act includes specific exemptions directly related to the Privacy Act. So we are saying two things really. We are saying, first of all, when they said they used the Freedom of Information Act request as an excuse, they were lying, because there was no request under the Freedom of Information Act. Secondly, if that had happened, there is specific exemptions within our law to the Freedom of Information Act, one of which is the Privacy Act. Finally, in its March 2000 decision not to prosecute, the Justice Department stated that Bacon and his colleague ``didn't intend to break the law when they released information from Linda Tripp's personnel file.'' What this tells me is that the Justice Department knows the law was broken. It is all the more reason why their decision not to prosecute is so outrageous. The next time I am stopped by a policeman for speeding, I am going to tell him, ``I didn't intend to break the law.'' I suppose then everything will be all right. Recently, I received a letter from Mr. Bacon's lawyer taking exception to a couple of points I made it my previous remarks on the floor. I would like to respond to each of those points here: First, Bacon's lawyer claims that comparing Kenneth Bacon's offense to Chuck Colson's offense in Watergate is ``inaccurate'' and ``unfair'' because the two cases, he says, are not ``remotely comparable.'' But he is wrong. They are directly comparable. He goes into a lengthy description of the charges against Colson which were dropped by the court. All of this is interesting, but it is irrelevant to the current case. Colson released information from Daniel Elsberg's confidential file, violating Elsberg's privacy. Bacon released information from Linda Tripp's confidential file, violating Tripp's privacy. What could be more ``comparable'' than this? Second, Mr. Bacon's lawyer notes that the court said Colson implemented ``a scheme to defame and destroy the public image of Daniel Elsberg, with the intent to influence, obstruct, and impede the conduct and outcome'' of pending investigations and prosecutions. Similarly, Bacon's action can easily be seen as part of ``a scheme to defame and destroy the public image of Linda Tripp, with the intent to influence, obstruct, and impede the conduct and outcome'' of pending investigations and possible prosecutions of the President and of Linda Tripp herself. Let's not forget that Linda Tripp has testified that she was told by a top White House aide that she would be ``destroyed'' if she came forward and exposed illegal activities she witnessed in the Clinton White House, including matters related to the Filegate scandal. Tripp's FBI file was one of over 900 FBI files improperly obtained by the Clinton White House. Tripp remains a material witness in continuing legal proceedings on the Filegate matter. In addition, let's not forget that Tripp has also been the target of a politically motivated prosecution in Maryland concerning the taping of Monica Lewinski's phone calls. All of this provides ample evidence of possible motivations ``to defame or destroy'' her ``public image.'' Third, Mr. Bacon's lawyer claims that Bacon did not violate any law in releasing the information on Tripp. Again, he is simply wrong. Bacon clearly violated the Privacy Act, the law which was enacted in 1974 as a direct result of the Colson case. It isn't even a close call. The contention that the media inquiry constituted a FOIA request that somehow superseded the Privacy Act will simply not stand up to scrutiny. Finally, Mr. Bacon's lawyer makes a legitimate point with which I am prepared to agree; and that is, that Mr. Bacon is a dedicated public official who has served the Department of Defense with distinction for 6 years. Similarly, Linda Tripp is a dedicated public official who has served in the Pentagon and the White House with distinction for many years. The problem is that there must be equal application of the law if the law is to have any meaning. Mr. Bacon simply cannot be permitted to escape responsibility for an act that so clearly violated the law--a law which is designed to protect the rights of all government employees. The news media, I think, has created a particular problem in this case. It is a travesty that the major news media have not covered this story and informed the American people about why this is important. What a contract with how the news media acted during the Watergate era. At that time, the news media led the charge to uncover wrongdoing by high government officials, explaining why adherence to the rule of law was so vital to the protection of liberty. In the aftermath of Chuck Colson's pleading guilty in June 1974, along with other Watergate figures, newspapers across the country expressed appropriate outrage. They covered the story. They commented on it forcefully. They didn't sweep it under the rug. They did not say they were bored. They did not argue that the country should ``move on'' to other things. They knew that lawbreaking by high officials was one of the most important things they could report to the American people, because, as they kept telling us, an informed public is essential to the protection of liberty in a democracy. Here are a few examples of editorials during the Watergate years. Where are the similar editorials today? On June 12, 1974, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin was upset that another Watergate figure got off too lightly with a 30-day suspended sentence for his Watergate crime. They said. The circumstances (in this case) did not call for a tap on the wrist. [The judge's] praise for (the defendant's) integrity in this setting seems inappropriate. If [the defendant] is to be so excused for failing to do his duty . . . then how are others to be held accountable for placing personal loyalty above their duty and the requirements of the law?

Mr. INHOFE. Then, speaking of Chuck Colson, on June 4, 1974, the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News wrote: In this tawdry matter, Mr. Nixon's White House again has been exposed--this time by an aide who was high in its deliberations and was an intimate of the President's--as acting against the political and judicial process of this country as if they were enemies. Finally, in commenting on Chuck Colson, in the home state of the Presiding Officer, the Portland (Maine) Evening Express wrote on June 30, 1974: Yet another close aide or high appointee of President Nixon has been brought to justice . . . He had attempted to defame Elsberg and destroy his credibility . . . Daily, it becomes abundantly clearer that [the Nixon Administration is] the most morally reprehensible administration in the history of the nation. So who is at fault? Of course, Ken Bacon is at fault for violating the law. But I suppose it is human nature to cover up to save oneself. Who is really at fault is the press--the media--who are covering up this crime. No one can look at the way the press assailed Chuck Colson for his crime and now covers up the crime of Ken Bacon without asking, ``Why? Why are they so defensive of Ken Bacon when they so aggressively went after Chuck Colson?'' Unequal application of the law is no worse then inequality in reporting. The consequences of both serve to diminish our liberty. Unfortunately, Ken Bacon, who should have been prosecuted, is now in the hands of Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Cohen is charged with reviewing the IG report and issuing any administrative discipline, short of criminal punishment. I urge him to act swiftly and in accord with the seriousness of this matter. Federal employees throughout government are watching this case. What will it say to them if someone who has so clearly violated the Privacy Act is not held accountable? It will say that no one's privacy can ultimately be protected, that the law is largely meaningless, and that ideal of public service in support of the Constitution and the laws is forever diminished. Madam President, I am not trying to single out Kenneth Bacon. I don't even know him. But I do know Chuck Colson, and he admits he was properly prosecuted, and Kenneth Bacon has committed the same crime and gets off free. This is wrong. I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I thank both managers of the bill for giving me some time.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet on Thursday, May 4, 2000, at 9:30 a.m. on the nominations of members of the Federal Aviation Management Advisory Council (8 nominees).

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet at 2 p.m. on Thursday, May 4, 2000, in executive session, to mark up the FY 2001 defense authorization bill.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Production and Price Competitiveness of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, May 4, 2000, at 2 p.m., in SR- 332, to conduct a subcommittee hearing on carbon cycle research and agriculture's role in reducing climate change.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, first of all, let me address something that the Senator from Alabama was talking about. He gave so many good, concrete examples of the discipline problem we have in our public school system. It is a very real thing. I appreciate him bringing this up and the fact that we know why we are having this, with all the mandates and requirements. I want to tell you a story. You talk about the discipline problems. I want to give a concrete example of how one ended up in doing a great disservice to the children of Oklahoma and other places. I have kind of a unique situation at home. I have a wife and two daughters, all three of whom teach or have taught. My wife taught back in the fifties, when we were first married. As our four children were growing up, I remember so well the youngest one--I call her the runt of my litter--Katie, always wanted to be a schoolteacher just like her mom, and her mom's discipline was accelerated math. So Katie was in school. She got her degree and got her master's in math education. She is really an accomplished teacher, because she loves the kids. She was active in Young Life because she liked to be around troubled kids and help them with their problems. When someone is a dedicated person like that, that means they are a much better educator. To make a very long story short, little Katie had wanted to teach the same thing her mother did. When she finally got all of her degrees, she came to the school where her mother taught and where Katie and her brothers and sisters all went to school. After she got the job, it wasn't only that she got a job in the same school as her mother, but she taught the same course in the same school in the same classroom that her mother had taught in 30 years before. She was rejoicing. It had just been a few years before that that she had gone through that school. She taught there for 4 years, and she came to me one day literally in tears. She said, ``Daddy, I feel like a traitor because I have to leave to go to another school district.'' I said, ``Why? This is where your mother taught. This is where you went to school. Our whole family went to school there. It is a tradition.'' She said, ``I teach math, and the kids are so disruptive and not listening. There is no discipline. When you send them to the principal's office, the principal says, `Our hands are tied. We can't do anything about it.' '' So it continues. Consequently, these kids are not getting an education. This is in the fourth week of the beginning of the school term. She said, ``I told the kids, `If you do not get the basics right now at the beginning of the school term, you are going to fail the class.' They all shrugged their shoulders in unison, and said, `We don't care.' '' And the parents didn't care. There is no way that the school was going to discipline those children. Katie quit. She went to a private school. She is now involved in teaching and is an accomplished teacher. The public school system lost. I am a prejudiced daddy. I admit that. But they lost one who is considered by the parents and fellow teachers and certainly students as one of the best math teachers that taught, including my wife, in that school. It is all for one reason: There is no discipline. That is what local emphasis is all about. I think we can untie the hands of the local school districts and let them do it. On the bill we are considering today, I would like to go further with vouchers in getting into more choice. But this is certainly a good personal first step. I would like to mention one other thing before the Senator from Alabama leaves the room because I want to make one comment about a program that works and one that we are going to try to change and get fully implemented. That is called impact aid. I know the Senator from Alabama is interested in this because Alabama would qualify for $12 million of impact aid. Last year they got $2.4 million. They are at 20 percent of where they should be. Impact aid is a Federal program that really works. By and large, it is not something that is giving something to somebody. It says to go the Federal Government, you have come in here with your military installations, with your Indian reservations, or any other Federal type of program, and because of that those lands on which you are working are off the tax rolls. So there is no property tax coming in. Yet while you are doing that you have brought in with you a large number of children. Those children have to be educated in our educational system. Yet there is no funding there to offset the cost of not being able to collect revenues from those lands that are on various installations. This as one of the rare programs we can talk about that is not just something good for students, but it is an obligation that we have to these students. Oklahoma, I might add, is in a very similar situation. What we are proposing in a letter that we encourage people to sign, and which the Senator from Alabama has already signed, is that we need to phase in full funding for impact aid. Over a 4-year period of time, we start with 6 percent. Then we move on up until we have 100 percent. This is a program that I think of as a moral responsibility to keep our word with local school districts because when we don't do that the amount of money they have to spend to educate that child is taken away from other programs such as computers and teacher-pupil ratios. This is something I think is an obligation and something that we should strive for. Hopefully, we can get the language in here. I don't care if it ends up being an entitlement, as much as I hate to say that. This is a responsibility that we have.