Jon Kyl

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I rise to address one aspect of the ``21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act,'' H.R. 2215. Section 312 creates a number of Federal judgeships, including a temporary judgeship for the District of Arizona. Under the bill, the temporary addition of an extra seat to the 12-member Federal district court will commence in July 2003 and will end with the first judicial retirement that occurs after that ten-year period expires, returning the court to twelve seats. The District of Arizona sorely needs this judgeship. According to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, the District of Arizona ranks 10th in total weighted filings among all 94 districts. The general standard for weighted filings established by the U.S. Judicial Conference as an indicator of a need for additional judgeships is 430. With 604 weighted filings per judgeship, the District of Arizona exceeds this criteria by 29 percent, despite the recent and much appreciated addition of four new judges. The high level of filings in the District of Arizona is not temporary. The weighted filings in this district have been substantially higher than the national average since 1985. The District of Arizona reported 6,300 civil and criminal case filings in 2001, a 26 percent increase in filings over a five-year period. The District's criminal felony caseload has increased 104 percent over the past 5 years. The District ranks third among the Nation's 94 districts in weighted criminal felony filings per authorized judgeship, 231 percent above the national average. In addition to the burgeoning criminal caseload, the District's civil caseload is on the rise. This District is an unenviable 71st nationally in median disposition time for civil cases and 85th nationally in median time from filing to trial in civil cases. Seven percent of the civil cases have been pending over three years. According to the latest population statistics as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, Arizona's population increased by 40 percent from 1990 to 2000, while the national rate of population growth is only 13.1 percent. Arizona is ranked second only to Nevada for percentage of growth. The Arizona Department of Economic Security projects the State's population will grow another 25 percent by 2010. This new judgeship will provide emergency aid to Arizona's District Court, whose judges are extremely overburdened by crushing federal caseloads. Arizona's Federal court, like those in other border states, suffers special burdens as a result of sharp increases in drug trafficking and immigration prosecutions. This backlog delays justice for Arizonans and disrupts the proper administration of the courts. I would like to commend Senator Leahy, Senator Hatch, and Representative Sensenbrenner for including this much-needed judgeship. This temporary judgeship is at least one reason to support the ``21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act.''

Mr. KYL. A lot of people are approaching this issue on the basis that there has to be some demonstration that, in the relatively near future, Saddam Hussein is going to use a weapon of mass destruction against us or else this is not the time that we should take military action against him. That is a rational position to take, in a way. If you do not think that there is a real threat or that it is imminent, you could reach the conclusion that we should not engage in war, or at least ought to be continuing to try to engage in diplomacy or whatever. But there is another side to the coin. It is the way the President has chosen to look at it. I think, because he has chosen to look at it this way, he will go down in history as a very prescient leader. Noemie Emery, who is a fine writer, in an article in a periodical a week ago, observed that most Presidents have had to fight a war but only two Presidents have had to perceive a war. Harry Truman perceived the cold war. He instinctively knew at the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union was beginning to assert its power in regions of southern Europe, for example, and elsewhere, that it was important for the United States and other Western allies to stand and say no to the further expansion of the Soviet Union and communism, even though that was going to mean a longtime confrontation with the Soviet Union which might even escalate into a hot war. The Marshall plan to assist countries in southern Europe was a part of that perception, and we are well aware of all the other events that followed that. He perceived the need to stand and thwart the continued aggression of an evil power, and we are grateful to him for that. Emery said the other President to perceive a war is George W. Bush. Of course, September 11, you can say, made that easy. But I submit it is not necessarily that easy. Over time, people will begin to wonder whether our commitment to a war on terror is really all that important if there are not further attacks. If we go another several months, hopefully even a year or two, without a major terrorist attack on the United States, will the American people continue to believe that this is a war worth fighting? Or was it a one-time-only proposition? George W. Bush perceived the need to conduct a war on terror because he understood that from a historical point of view, over the course of the last dozen or 15 years, there had been a whole series of attacks against the United States or our interests, and when we in Congress Monday morning quarterback the FBI and CIA and say, ``You failed to connect the dots,'' I wonder what those same people say about President Bush's understanding of the history leading up to September 11. He is connecting the dots between the Khobar Towers and the Cole bombing and the embassy bombings in Africa. You can even go back further than that, bringing it on forward all the way up to September 11. Does an event have to occur every 6 months for us to believe this is really a war worth stopping or worth winning and bringing to conclusion? I do not think so. I think the President, when he said to the American people, we are going to have to be patient in this war, understood that we would have to be patient, that it could take a long time. I have been very gratified at the response of the American people in not being as impatient as we usually are as a people. Americans love to get in, get the job done, and move on. That is a great trait of Americans. But the President here is saying be patient. So far, I have been very impressed that the American people have been very patient. What the President has perceived, that not everybody has perceived, is that this is a struggle that has been going on for some time and it is going to continue in that same vein for as far out as we can see, unless we defeat terrorism. So the wrong question to be asking at this time is: Can you prove that there is an imminent threat to the United States as a result of which we have to take military action against Iraq? That is the wrong question. There are many fronts in this war on terror, from Lackawanna in New York where we get the six people who we think were connected to terrorism, to Tora Bora, Afghanistan, where we had to rout out members of al-Qaida; to Pakistan, where we are fighting remnants of al-Qaida; to places such as Yemen and Sudan and Somalia and the Philippines and Malaysia; Hamburg, Germany, where we have had to roll up al-Qaida operatives; and then other places in the Middle East where there is terrorism going on every day and when there are people such as Saddam Hussein building weapons of mass terror who would not be doing that, would not be spending the resources and trying to hide them, simply to play some kind of game. They are obviously serious people with evil intentions. I think everybody concedes that. Then the question becomes: Why should you put the burden on the President to prove that at a particular time Saddam Hussein is going to strike the United States in order to conclude that we have to do something about him? It is the same kind of thinking as in the late 1930s, that, in retrospect, we look back on and say: Anybody could have realized that Hitler was somebody who had to be stopped. Why did Neville Chamberlain act so foolishly when he came back from Munich and said, ``Peace in our time''? I submit there are people today who are hoping against hope that Saddam Hussein will never use these weapons, weapons that are far greater than anything Adolph Hitler ever had in terms of their potential for destruction and death. I just wonder whether there are people who really believe we should wait until something specific and objective happens before we have a right to act, or whether preventative action is called for. Some call it preemption; some call it prevention. But the idea is that with war on terrorism you shouldn't have to wait until you are attacked to respond. That creates too many deaths, too much misery, and is unthinkable after September 11. The President, based upon good intelligence, has concluded that Saddam Hussein has a very large stock of very lethal weapons of mass destruction. By that, we mean chemical agents and biological agents which have been or can be ``weaponized''; that is to say, there are means of delivering those agents that can cause massive amounts of casualties; that he has been working to acquire a nuclear weapon. All of this is in open, public debate. And there is no doubt about any of it. The only doubt with respect to nuclear weapons is exactly where he is in the process. Of course, we don't know because he hasn't allowed us to inspect the places in his country where we believe he is trying to produce these nuclear weapons or, more specifically, the enriched uranium that would be a part of the weapons. For 4 years now, we have had no inspectors in the country, and before that most of the information that we got was based upon information from defectors--people who came out of Iraq and told us: You guys are missing what Saddam Hussein is doing. This is where you need to look. This is what you need to look for. When our inspectors then demanded to go to those places, one of three things happened. Either they said, no, you can't go there; that is a Presidential palace or whatever it is, or they went there and as they were walking in the front door satellite photos showed people running out of the backdoors with the stuff, or in the couple of cases we actually did find evidence of these weapons of mass destruction. Of course, at that point, Saddam Hussein said: Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. But whatever the defector said, that is all there is. So he was confirming exactly what we already knew and gave us nothing more than that. Yet there are those who believe through some kind of new inspection process that we are going to learn more than we did before; that this will be an adequate substitute for going in and finding these weapons of mass destruction in an unrestricted way. Saddam Hussein first said, You can have total access with no conditions, and he immediately began tying on conditions, the basis of which are laughable. You can't go into the Presidential palaces. They are grounds or areas with 1,000 buildings the size of the District of Columbia. We are going to send three inspectors in there? OK. There is the District of Columbia with all the buildings, and so on. Have at it. We are not going to find anything. We are going to be running around for years. So inspections are merely a means to an end. They are not the end. The goal here is not to have inspections. The goal is disarmament. And we know from intelligence that he has certain things he has not disarmed; that he hasn't done what he promised to do--both to the United States and the United Nations; that he hasn't complied with the United Nations resolutions. In fact, we see his violation of those resolutions almost every day. We don't have inspectors in there anymore who he was harassing and precluding from doing their job. But we do have aircraft flying in the no-fly zones and having American pilots and British pilots shot at every month, necessitating our taking those SAM sites and radar sites out of action by military force. So, in a sense, this is unfinished business from the gulf war which has never stopped. At a low level we have been trying to enforce the resolutions ever since the end of the gulf war. Our effort to rid many of these weapons of mass destruction is but the latest chapter. We made the decision in 1998 that Saddam Hussein had to go. We voted on a resolution here, and everybody was for it in 1998. If it was the right thing to do then, why is it no longer necessarily the right thing to do? He has had 4 more years to develop these weapons and to get closer to a nuclear capability. We now have a group of terrorists in the world who we know talk to each other, help each other, and give each other safe passage and access and places for training, and so on. We are developing information on connections with these terrorists and the State of Iraq. All of this has happened in the meantime. But now, suddenly, it is not the time. If we establish too high a burden of proof here we are going to be fiddling until we become absolutely sure it is time, and then it will be too late. That is why I believe the President is on the right track to say we don't know exactly when, where, or how but we know that this is a man who has very evil intentions and is working very hard to be able to strike at us. We can't let it happen. We can't wait until he has hit us to get him. For those reasons, and a variety of others that I will be talking about, I believe it is important for us to go into this debate with a view towards supporting the President, and the action that he has called for publicly and in the resolution that he has negotiated with congressional leaders and which has been placed on the floor. I believe at the end of the day we will conclude that the President should be supported and that we should authorize the use of force, and that we will have intelligence satisfactory for all of us to back up this resolution. And the final point--going back to the original point of my conversation today--that it is a phony issue to somehow demand that the intelligence community provide us with information to which we haven't been given access. We have gotten all that we need to have access to. Our Members have asked for that information, and they can get it. The only information that they can't get is information that should not be provided anybody, including you, Mr. President, myself, and the distinguished minority leader who now joins us on the floor. I will have more to say later. I know the minority leader has some things he would like to say. At this point, I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 [From the New York Times, Oct. 3, 2002] C.I.A. Rejects Request for Report on Preparations for War in Iraq (By James Risen) Washington, October 2.--The Central Intelligence Agency has refused to provide Congress a comprehensive report on its role in a possible American campaign against Iraq, setting off a bitter dispute between the agency and leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Congressional leaders said today. In a contentious, closed-door Senate hearing today, agency officials refused to comply with a request from the committee for a broad review of how the intelligence community's clandestine role against the government of Saddam Hussein would be coordinated with the diplomatic and military actions that the Bush administration is planning. Lawmakers said they were further incensed because the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who had been expected to testify about the Iraq report, did not appear at the classified hearing. A senior intelligence official said Mr. Tenet was meeting with President Bush. Instead, the agency was represented by the deputy director, John McLaughlin, and Robert Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs. The agency rejected the committee's request for a report. After the rejection, Congressional leaders accused the administration of not providing the information out of fear of revealing divisions among the State Department, C.I.A., Pentagon and other agencies over the Bush administration's Iraq strategy. Government officials said that the agency's response also strongly suggested that Mr. Bush had already made important decisions on how to use the C.I.A. in a potential war with Iraq. One senior government official said it appeared that the C.I.A. did not want to issue an assessment of the Bush strategy that might appear to be ``second-guessing'' of the president's plans. The dispute was the latest of several confrontations between the C.I.A. and Congress over access to information about a range of domestic and foreign policy matters. Just last week, lawyers for the General Accounting Office and Vice President Dick Cheney argued in federal court over whether the White House must turn over confidential information on the energy policy task force that Mr. Cheney headed last year. The C.I.A.'s rejection of the Congressional request, which some lawmakers contend was heavily influenced by the White House, comes as relations between the agency and Congress have badly deteriorated. The relations have soured over the ongoing investigation by a joint House-Senate inquiry-- composed of members of the Senate and House intelligence committees--into the missed signals before the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Tenet in particular has been a target of lawmakers. Last Friday, Mr. Tenet, a former Senate staffer himself, wrote a scathing letter to the leaders of the joint Congressional inquiry, denouncing the panel for writing a briefing paper that questioned the honesty of a senior C.I.A. official before he even testified. A senior intelligence official said Mr. Tenet's absence at the hearing today was unavoidable, and that no slight was intended. The official said that he missed the hearing because he was at the White House with Mr. Bush, helping to brief other Congressional leaders Iraq. The official said Mr. Tenet had advised the committee staff several days ago that he would not be able to attend. Mr. Tenet has promised to testify about the matter in another classified hearing on Friday, officials said. One Congressional official said that the incident has badly damaged Mr. Tenet's relations with Congress, something that Mr. Tenet had always worked hard to cultivate. ``I hope we aren't seeing some schoolyard level of petulance,'' by the C.I.A., the official said. While the House and Senate intelligence oversight committee have received classified information about planned covert operations against Iraq, the C.I.A. has not told lawmakers how the agency and the Bush administration see those operations fitting into the larger war on Iraq, or the global war on terrorism, Congressional officials said. ``What they haven't told us is how does the intelligence piece fit into the larger offensive against Iraq, or how do these extra demands on our intelligence capabilities affect our commitment to the war on terrorism in Afghanistan,'' said one official. Congressional leaders complained that they have been left in the dark on how the intelligence community will be used just as they are about to debate a resolution to support war with Iraq. Congressional leaders said the decision to fight the Congressional request may stem from a fear of exposing divisions within the intelligence community over the administration's Iraq strategy, perhaps including a debate between the agency and the Pentagon over the military's role in intelligence operations in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been moving to strengthen his control over the military's intelligence apparatus, potentially setting up a turf war for dominance among American intelligence officials. Mr. Rumsfeld has also been pushing to expand the role of American Special Operations Forces into covert operations, including activities that have traditionally been the preserve of the

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, we have really already begun the debate on a resolution to authorize the use of force against Iraq if the President deems it necessary. Several Members have come to the Chamber and spoken about the issue. We are going to begin that debate formally sometime this evening, I believe, and it will continue on through Friday, Monday, and then shortly thereafter we will be voting on this important resolution. As with the debate 11 years ago when force was authorized and we repelled Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Members of both bodies discussed the issue at a level, frankly, that we are unaccustomed to doing. When we are making a decision to send our young men and women into harm's way, when we are literally authorizing war, I think a degree of seriousness begins to pervade all of our thinking. We address these issues with the utmost of seriousness because we are aware of the consequences, and they deserve no less, and our constituents and our military deserve no less than that degree of consideration. When we debate this issue, we will find there are good arguments on both sides of the issue, and I realize there will be different nuances, so it is not as if there are just two sides to the debate. But at the end of the day, we are going to have the question before us: Are we going to authorize the use of force? There will be some alternatives before us. That debate needs to be based upon the very best information, the very best intelligence, the very best analysis we can bring to bear, and it also has to be based upon a good relationship between the legislative and the executive branches because in war we are all in it together. We have to cooperate. We have to support the Commander in Chief. The last thing we would ever do is to authorize the Commander in Chief to take action and then not support that action. Our foes abroad, as well as our allies abroad, need to know we will be united once a decision is made, and we will execute the operation to succeed, if it is called for. I am very disturbed at the way that part of this debate is beginning, and that is what I wanted to speak to today. There has been an effort by some to broadly paint the administration as uncooperative in sharing intelligence information with the Senate, and more specifically the Senate Intelligence Committee. I have been a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee now for almost 8 years, and I have been involved in the middle of a lot of disputes about information sharing. When we are sharing information about intelligence, those issues are inevitable, just as they are sometimes with law enforcement. In our democracy, these become very difficult decisions because we are a wide open country. We tend to want to share everything, but we also recognize there have to be a few things we cannot share with the enemy, and the lines are not always brightly drawn. Sometimes the executive branch and the legislative branch get into tiffs about what information should be shared, what information cannot be shared. Again, reasonable minds can differ about the specifics of those issues, but what has arisen is a very unhealthy war of words about motives and intentions, and we need to nip that in the bud today. I read a story in the New York Times reporting on a meeting of the Intelligence Committee, which I attended yesterday in the secure area where the Intelligence Committee meets, under strict rules of classification. We were briefed by two of the top officials of the intelligence community about matters of the utmost in terms of importance and secrecy, and yet there is a three-page story in the New York Times which discusses much of what was discussed in that meeting, without ever attributing a single assertion or quotation. There is no name used of anybody who was in that room, and so we do not know exactly who it was who went to the New York Times and talked about what went on in our meeting. I am not suggesting classified information was leaked. I would have to have an analysis done to determine whether anything in the article was actually classified information. What was discussed was a purported dispute between our committee and the executive branch about the release of certain information and the preparation of certain reports. I will get into more detail about this in a minute. Obviously, somebody from the committee, a Member or staff, went complaining to the New York Times and spread, therefore, on the pages of this paper a whole series of allegations about motives and intentions of the Bush administration relating to the basis for seeking authority to use force against Iraq, if necessary. This is exactly what will undercut the authority of the President in trying to build a coalition abroad as well as in the United States, and it is the very people who demand the President achieve that international coalition before we take action who are the most exercised about what they perceive to be a slight from the administration and who, therefore, are being quoted in this story. I do not know the names, but there is a limited universe of people involved. I am going to go over this article in fine detail just to illustrate my point. One of the sources cited in the story is a congressional official. I will quote the entire sentence. One congressional official said that the incident has badly damaged Mr. Tenet's relations with Congress, something that Mr. Tenet has always worked hard to cultivate. Mr. Tenet is George Tenet, the director of the CIA. Sometimes I agree with Mr. Tenet and sometimes I do not agree with Mr. Tenet, but I believe Mr. Tenet has the best interests of the United States of America at heart when he is working with the President and Congress to present information and develop the appropriate approach to the use of force, if that is necessary. My point was this, though: The article quotes one congressional official. What is a congressional official? It is either a Member of the Senate or the House of Representatives--though no Representatives were in this meeting; it was just a meeting of Senators--or it is a staff person hired by the Senate. I find it interesting the article quotes a congressional official. Most of the article quotes congressional leaders, Government officials, or lawmakers. Either a Member of the Senate or a member of our staff talked to the press about what went on in the meeting and did so in order to damage, or to call into question, I should say, the relationship between the Senate and the executive branch, and to question whether the administration was being cooperative with the Senate in providing information. Let me discuss this in detail now. The central theme is identified in the first line of the story: The Central Intelligence Agency has refused to provide Congress a comprehensive report on its role in a possible American campaign against Iraq, setting off a bitter dispute between the agency and leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, congressional leaders said today. Those are Senators--not staff but congressional leaders. Only Senators were in the meeting. So some Senators said the CIA had refused to provide us with a comprehensive report on the agency's role in a possible American campaign, and this set off a bitter dispute between the CIA and leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee would be probably two people, the chairman and ranking member. Mr. Shelby, the ranking member, the Senator from Alabama, will have to speak for himself. The chairman is Senator Graham from Florida. I suggest they need to clarify what their view is with respect to this story. In the first place, it is not true the Central Intelligence Agency has refused to provide us with the report described in the story. There were two reports requested. As the article discloses, the first report has been provided. It was done at breakneck speed. It has to do with Iraq's capabilities; what kind of chemical and biological weapons does Iraq really possess; how far along is it in developing its nuclear capability; what means of delivery does it have; and a host of other questions that were put to the intelligence community. It is obviously important for us to have the answers to those questions before we take action. The reality is the information was all there. It had simply not been put together in one report, as the committee requested. What we requested was something called a national intelligence estimate. A national intelligence estimate is not requested by the Congress. A national intelligence estimate is ordinarily requested by the President or the National Security Council, and it is essentially a document which is supposed to analyze a particular country's or region's threat, or threat from weapons of mass destruction. It frequently takes a long time, up to a year, perhaps, to prepare. The purpose for it is to inform both the administration and others such as the Congress that would be dealing with the issues, but it is not intended to be an operational document; that is to say, to be integrated in operational military plans. Nevertheless, even though this is not the normal way the document would be prepared, the agency people worked overtime to produce, in a matter of several days, a very thorough report. About 100 pages in length was produced in about 3 weeks, according to the story, under very tight deadlines. It was presented yesterday. Most of the information had been presented before in a different way. But it was put together in one package. Leaders of the committee expressed their outrage that Director Tenet was not there in person to testify. He was with the President at the time. The two people who briefed us were very top officials of the intelligence community who probably knew more on a firsthand basis what was in the report even than Director Tenet. Some Members did not want to ask them questions but wanted to wait for Director Tenet to arrive, a pretty petulant attitude when we are trying to seriously address questions of war and peace. The information was before us. No one questioned the veracity of the information. We had a good hearing in discussing the various elements. That was one of the reports. There was complaining it should have been earlier, it should have been done more quickly. As pointed out, ordinarily these are the kind of reports that usually take a year to put together; it was done in a matter of 3 weeks. Under the circumstances, the community is to be complimented. The other report requested had to do with the role of the intelligence community in military operations, potential military operations against Iraq. In effect what was being asked, if we take forcible action against Iraq, and any aspect of the intelligence community is used in those operations, what is it likely to be? What is the likely response going to be? How effective do you think it will be? That is what the article means, in the first sentence, when it talks about a comprehensive report on its role in a possible American campaign against Iraq. The intelligence community, wisely, has a standard policy against doing analyses of U.S. action that is not overt and tied to military operations. We do not know our military plans for military action against Iraq if it were to come. Only the President and a handful of people involved in those plans know what they are. Thank goodness for that. There is so much leaking in this Government--both at the executive branch level and the legislative branch level--it would be folly in the extreme for operational plans to be discussed broadly before an operation begins or during the operation, for that matter. That is why we do not present that kind of analysis to anyone. Members of the Intelligence Committee ought to know that and ought not to feel slighted because it was not presented to us and because it will not be presented to us. That kind of information would be directly related to the plan of attack that the President may eventually approve. We know our leaders get called just before an operation begins and once it is begun, we begin to get information about how we will conduct the operation. But can anyone reasonably believe the plans of our military and intelligence community, in cooperating with some kind of action, should be put in a document and released to the Congress, even in classified form? If this article is any indication, it would be 1 day before it would be in the newspaper. We cannot do that, putting at risk the lives of the men and women we may send in harm's way. One success in the Afghanistan operation was the fact that we were able to combine good intelligence with military capability. Without going into a lot of detail, everyone appreciates the fact we were able to get assets on the ground from whatever source, providing information to our aircraft, for example, about very specifically where certain targets were. As a result of having that good intelligence, we were able to strike at the heart of the enemy, avoid for the most part civilian casualties, or collateral damage, and very quickly overthrow the Taliban government, and rout or capture a lot of the al-Qaida. We do not know much publicly about the interrelationship between the intelligence community and the military, but we know they combined efforts to make this a successful operation. That is all most Members need to know. We do not need to know in advance of a military operation how the intelligence community is going to be integrated with the military in conducting this campaign, what they are each going to do, and what the enemy might do in response and so on. The article itself alludes to this when it talks about the ordinary purpose of a national intelligence estimate. But intelligence officials say a national intelligence estimate is designed to assess the policies of foreign countries, not those of the United States. I quote: ``They were asking for an assessment of U.S. policy, and that falls outside the realm of the NIE and gets into the purview of the Commander and Chief,'' an intelligence official said. That is correct. So there was a misunderstanding of what a national intelligence estimate was, on the first part; second, the request for the information went far beyond what the administration should have been asked to provide and what it could provide. Yet Members of the committee were indignant that the administration had stiffed the committee, had stonewalled, had refused to provide this information. We have to engage in a serious debate about a very serious subject in a relatively objective way. We all bring our biases and prejudices to the debate. But one thing that should be clear to all of us is that the thing that is paramount is the security of American military forces in the conduct of an operation. And that cannot be jeopardized by either the inadvertent or advertent leak of material that pertains directly to those military operations. What was being requested here was wrong. And the administration was right to say: I'm sorry, we cannot give that to you. The debate should not be adversely influenced by this unfortunate set of circumstances. We should decide whether we want to authorize force and what kind of force is authorized based upon the merits of the argument as we assess them. No one here should be led down this path that says one of the reasons we should not act yet, or that we should deny the administration the authority is because they have stonewalled us. They have not given us information we need before we can make a judgment. As a member of the Intelligence Committee, that is simply not true. There are briefings being conducted now--both in an informal way, very classified but informally, as well as formally--to Members of this body and the House of Representatives, to answer Members' questions about Iraqi's capabilities and intentions as we see them and our assessment of circumstances. I encourage all Members to get those briefings and to ask any question they can think of asking and to try to keep it up until the questions have been answered. Some perhaps may not be answered. For the most part, they will learn of the primary reasons the President has decided it may be necessary to take military action against Iraq. What they will not learn, should not learn, and for national security purposes cannot learn, is how the intelligence community is going to be working with the military in the campaign should one be authorized. Those are operational plans that only the President and his military and small group of advisers can be aware of before there is military action begun. There is other information in this news story that is inaccurate, in suggesting that there has been this huge tug of war between the committee and the CIA about getting information. In my own personal view, a lot of it has to do with lack of communication, lack of clear specificity about what was requested. I remember when the original request was made, it was a rather routine kind of request, certainly not the big deal that some members of the committee are trying to turn it into. Information was given orally about when it would be provided to us, and information was given orally about the fact that the military operations could not be discussed. Yet members of the committee seemed to be pretty upset about the fact that we had not gotten a formal letter from George Tenet laying this all out. The members of the Intelligence Committee who were there apologized and said: If we had thought a formal letter was necessary or we could have gotten it to you sooner and didn't do that, we are sorry about that. But here are the facts. You wanted to know what the facts are, and here are the facts. So I do not think we should be dissuaded from basing a decision on the merits of the case, one way or the other, however we decide to vote, on the phony issue of whether or not somebody is providing us information or whether they got it to us soon enough or whether the head guy came down to testify as opposed to people directly below him. As I said, he will be there to testify tomorrow in any event. This is all a smokescreen. It may be useful to some people who want to find some reason not to support the President other than simply outright opposition to taking military action. I understand that. There seems to be a popular view that most Americans want to take military action and politically people had better get on that bandwagon, so maybe people who do not really want to take that action have to find some reason, some rationalization, for not doing it. But I really don't think that is right. I think a lot of American people are where most of us are. We would prefer not to have to take military action. We would hope to have a coalition of allies. We hope there will be some way to avoid this. But at the end of the day, if the President decides it is necessary, we are probably willing to go along and authorize the use of force. There is nothing wrong with taking the position that at the end of the day we are not yet ready to make that decision and therefore not vote to authorize the use of force. If that is where Members come down and that is what they in their hearts believe, that is what they should say and that is how they should vote. But what they should not do is try to latch onto an artificial reason for saying no, predicated upon some perceived slight by the Director of the CIA or failure to provide information quickly enough or in exactly the form they wanted it or most certainly on the grounds that the intelligence community has not provided the kind of information about operations of the intelligence community that they would like to get. That information should not be provided, and nobody should base a decision here on the failure to obtain that information. Let me just speak a little bit more broadly. I will ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of my remarks this particular article be printed in the Record.

Mr. KYL. I thank the Chair. Use of Force Against Iraq

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I thank the assistant majority leader for his courtesy. I wish to address a matter that is not directly related to the conference report before us, though there is some indirect relationship to it. I assume I do not have to ask unanimous consent.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Madam President, it is with mixed emotions that I rise today to pay tribute to my colleague, mentor and friend, Senator Jesse Helms, who is leaving this body after 30 years of extraordinary service to our country. I want to honor him and convey to people around America who do not know him, what a great person he is. Yet, I hate to see him go. Many words come to mind when I think of Jesse Helms: principled, stalwart, kind, patriot, American. But, when I mull his retiring from the Senate, one word keeps coming to mind: irreplaceable. Jesse Helms will not be, he cannot be, replaced, and that is a sad thing. His presence here has been a constant for three decades. Like few others in this body, Senator Helms' career has achieved near- mythical proportions; it is the stuff of legend. Why is that? I believe it's because few, if any, others can match Jesse Helms' deep and unshakable commitment to principle. Jesse's not much of a deal maker. His vote has never been up for grabs. You always, always knew where he stood. Some agreed, others disagreed. But you didn't have to guess. You get a glimpse of this simple yet profound approach when you walk into Jesse's office and see the large yes and no stamps on his desk. That is what it has been like to deal with Jesse Helms. If your idea met his high standards, you got an immediate and enthusiastic ``yes.'' If it did not, you got an amiable but unmistakable ``no.'' And if it was ``yes,'' he'd stick with you no matter what. Popularity was not a factor. The best interests of this country were what mattered. It has been a great honor for me to work with Senator Helms during my 8 years in this body. We have endeavored together to promote conservative ideas, in particular the idea that America's security is best preserved through the maintenance of our strength and the promotion of our values. But I was just following the trail that Jesse Helms blazed. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jesse Helms led the fight to put morality and strength back into American foreign policy. People the world over, from Louisiana to Lithuania, from Texas to Taiwan, are better off because of that. Mark Twain said: ``Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.'' I was always among those gratified by Senator Helms' courageous stands on matters of high principle. He did right. And watching other people's astonishment at this was one of the great things about the Helms era in American politics. We will miss you, Senator.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, we have a strict rule around here that a conference report, which is what this is--and for those who are not aware, that means the Senate has passed a bill, the House has passed a bill, representatives of the two bodies have gotten together and agreed on a compromise, a conference report. They held a conference and they agreed. The bill goes to the House and the Senate, and we are supposed to act on the conference report. That is our process. The idea is that the conference committee is supposed to iron out differences between the House and the Senate. That is what happens in a conference committee. What you do not do is bring up new issues in a conference committee. That is verboten. That is not right. If it was not in the House or the Senate bill, then it is not germane to the conference. Every now and then, people look the other way and forget about the rules and say: There is a group who wants another provision; granted it was not in the Senate bill and it was not in the House bill, but we are getting a lot of pressure to get it done, so we are going to stick it in the conference report. There is such a provision in this conference report. I do not know if it is a good or bad provision. I have heard arguments both ways. I have gotten a lot of pressure from the group who wants it. They are good people. They are friends of mine. I would like to support them. I do not know whether they are right or wrong on the provision, and I will describe it in a moment. The fact is, when it whizzed through the Judiciary Committee, I thought I would have an opportunity to come to the floor and hear a debate about it and perhaps be involved in that debate and ask questions, understand it, and maybe even offer an amendment or two, and then either pass it or not pass it or vote for it or vote against it. I am not sure what I would do, but when it comes in the form of a conference report, as you know, it is unamendable. Whatever is in here, you take it or you leave it. You either take everything or the whole bill goes down. This bill may not have a whole lot that is important or good in it, but I do not know that it has a whole lot of bad provisions in it. There are at least some good provisions in the conference report. I want to make that point, and I will speak to them. There are a couple items I like in this bill. I am not arguing this bill should not be adopted. The problem is, when the House and Senate conferees take something out of left field and stick it in the bill when it was neither in the Senate bill nor in the House bill, it comes back in a form we cannot even amend. That is what happened with this arbitration issue. I am not sure exactly what it is called--the motor vehicle franchise dispute resolution process bill. This is a bill that is supported by a lot of local auto dealers. As I said, at least the auto dealers in Arizona are, for the most part, good folks, as far as I am concerned. They have a complaint against the motor companies whose cars they sell having to do with the contracts, the franchise agreements they sign when they become a dealer for these cars. What they complain about is the fact that when they sign the contract, it pretty well binds them to a process of arbitrating disputes in a certain way so that if they and their parent company have a dispute, the contract says, you resolve that dispute by arbitration. In that way, the parties do not have to go to court. Arbitration is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. I would think you would want to keep the parties from having to go to court. And if both parties, the franchisee and the franchiser, agree they will resolve their disputes through arbitration, through the American Arbitration Association, rather than going to court, one would think that is a good thing. These dealers believe it is a bad thing. They said they signed bad contracts and were under pressure by the franchisers, the big auto companies, that had bargaining power leverage over them, basically, to say: You either sign the contract the way we have presented it to you or you cannot be our franchisee. I do not know whether that is right or not, but that is their argument. They say the Federal Government has to intervene and, in effect, create an opportunity for the voiding of those provisions of those contracts so they can literally take these disputes into court and fight it out with their lawyers in court. They were in my office a week or so ago wanting to talk to me about this. I will honestly tell you, I had no idea this provision was coming up then. I thought: Why are you guys coming in here? It turned out there was a mixup and I could not meet with them. I spoke with one of their representatives last Friday. I said: I am sorry you all were in and you thought we had a meeting, but I really did not think this issue was coming up. Little did I know. They probably knew something I did not know. I guess they might have known this was coming to the floor and I did not realize that was the situation. I perhaps should have. The problem now is that we debate this in a scenario in which there can be no amendments. The conference report, under our rules, cannot be amended. The only way to amend it is to send it back and have the conference committee revisit it, and that is a motion that very rarely is accepted. I am not even sure I would be for doing that. This is the kind of thing that should not be done in this type of bill. It was done by a very few people. I am on the Judiciary Committee, as is the Presiding Officer. I did not know it was put in there. I did not have anything to do with it. I was not asked, and yet we are members of the Judiciary Committee and this is supposed to be our product. Again, I do not know whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. I would have liked to have heard debate on it, perhaps an opportunity for it to be amended, but that will not be possible. That is another problem with the conference report as it has come to us. What I am talking about is the motor vehicle franchise dispute resolution process bill. That is not the only example of items that were added to the conference report and which had never been passed by the House of Representatives or by the Senate. Let me give some examples. In title I, subtitle A, there is something called the Law Enforcement Tribute Act. This section authorizes grants for the construction of memorials to honor the men and women in the United States who were killed or disabled while serving as law enforcement or public safety officers. Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not. I presume there is nothing wrong with it. I suppose if the grants for construction got out of hand from a monetary standpoint we might have some objection. We obviously want to use some prudence in what kind of money is appropriated for that purpose. I do not know anything about that issue. I am on the Judiciary Committee and that was never considered. It did not come through the Senate. It did not come through the House. But it is in the conference report. It was put in in the conference. There is a section 11002, disclosure of grand jury matters relating to money laundering offenses. This would add two sections relating to money laundering to the list of banking law violations where a prosecutor can disclose grand jury information to a State financial or a Federal financial institution or regulatory agency. We have had a lot of complaints in the war on terror about the disclosure of grand jury testimony. Here national security is involved. There are some who still say that we should not release grand jury testimony on a very classified basis to other law enforcement or intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, so that it can do its work better to protect us from terrorists; that when information is presented to a grand jury, it is as if it is sacred and nobody else can know about it. We cannot even use it for protection against terrorism. But this bill, without having passed through the House or Senate, includes a section that would let grand jury information be disclosed to either a State financial or a Federal financial institution or regulatory agency. That may well be a good thing if you are trying to go after people who launder money. That may well be a good section. I just do not know. Again, being a member of the Judiciary Committee and a Member of the Senate does not provide enough protection for us really to have had the opportunity to debate or amend this provision. There is a section called grant program for State and local domestic preparedness support. This would seem to be a good purpose, expanding the uses of grant funds and changes the name from the Office of State and Local Domestic Preparedness Support to the Office of Domestic Preparedness. It does not seem to me there would be anything wrong with that. It did not pass the Senate. It did not pass the House. There is a provision, section 11004, U.S. Sentencing Commission Act access to NCIC terminal. This is a big deal. It would allow the Attorney General to exchange NCIC information with the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The reason, I guess, is the Sentencing Commission has stated it is necessary for it to help complete a study that it wants to do on recidivism rates that they have been charged--by who else?--by Congress to complete. They are currently working with the FBI, and they support this. There is another section dealing with danger pay for FBI agents, and this could conceivably fall into the category of a response to the war on terror, although I do not know. It is the kind of thing one might expect to see in the bill even though it was not in the Senate-passed or House-passed bill. It would be interesting to find out whether or not the granting of the danger pay allowance is a response to the war on terror. That might well be an appropriate one of those rare exceptions where even though the House and Senate bills did not have this in it, it might be a good thing to include in the conference report, but one would hope there would be some description and discussion of that so we would all appreciate the reason for doing it. There is a section on Police Corps. It provides for increases in the tuition allotments for Police Corps officers; scholarship reimbursement from $10,000 to $13,333 a year; reauthorizes the program for 4 more years. It increases the stipend for training from $250 to $400 a week and eliminates the $10,000 direct payment to participating police agencies requirement--or opportunity, I should say. Again, that is what one ordinarily would have seen come before the committee and the Senate, but it did not pass this body. Section 11007, radiation exposure compensation technical amendments; section 11008, Federal Judiciary Protection Act of 2002--I have pages of these-- persons authorized to serve search warrants; a study on reentry, mental illness and public safety; technical amendments to the Omnibus Crime Control Act; debt collection improvement; use of annuity brokerage instruction settlements. There is a provision which I would certainly support, section 11014, reauthorization of a State criminal alien assistance program. There are those who oppose this. I favor it. For those who oppose it, maybe they would want to offer an amendment reducing the amount of it. Frankly, I would love to offer an amendment increasing the amount because the amount that is authorized is about one-third what is necessary to reimburse the States for the housing of criminal illegal aliens who are the responsibility of the Federal Government but whom the States undertake to house in their prisons. I am denied the opportunity to offer an amendment to increase the funding under this very good program because it comes to us in the conference report upon which we did not act. I will not go through all of these, but there are INS processing fees; U.S. Parole Commission extension; the waiver of foreign country residence requirement with respect to international medical graduates; pretrial disclosure of expert testimony relating to a defendant's mental condition; Multiparty/Multiform Trial Jurisdiction Act of 2002; direct shipment of wine, there is a provision on that; Webster Commission Implementation Report. There is a very large provision in effect authorizing the establishment of a police force within the FBI to provide protection for FBI buildings and personnel in various areas. There is a report on information management technology; a GAO report on crime statistics. There is a big grant program--well, not big. It authorizes $30 million for the Attorney General to make grants to States for various reasons. There is a new motor vehicle franchise-- excuse me, that is the one I mentioned before. There is a new holding court in a certain State. I will not mention the State, but just one State though. The point is that this bill includes numerous provisions which did not pass the House, did not pass the Senate, which we have no opportunity therefore to seek to amend, and which are presented to us in a take-it-or-leave-it form in the conference report. It is not the right way for us to do business, again, in the last 10 days or so of our session. I will not say anything more about the bill itself because I do not want one to get the impression that reauthorizing the Department of Justice is not a good thing; it is--that many of the provisions I read to you are not good provisions. Some of them I know are good provisions because I know what they are. Others I presume are good, though I do not necessarily know that. But I would like to at least offer one amendment to one of them, and I know I will not be given that opportunity. It is not what we should be doing in the context of the debate we are having in these last 10 days, which is, How do we enhance the national security of the United States of America? I go back to the three things we should be doing right now. We should be completing our work on the Homeland Security Department. At a minimum, the President should be granted an opportunity for Senators to vote on his proposal. Why have we not been allowed to do that? Why, right after the debate on that very issue, right after another cloture motion on that failed, do we in effect call a timeout on the Homeland Security Department legislation and go to this bill instead? That is more important, and that should take precedence. So should the Defense authorization and appropriations bills. Presumably, we are going to leave time to debate a resolution with respect to granting the President the authority he needs to take action in Iraq. I see my good friend and colleague on both the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the Senator from California, is in the Chamber and appears ready to speak. I will yield the floor to her in about 1 minute. It has always been my great pleasure first to chair and now to be the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology, a committee that has worked over the years, whether under my chairmanship or Senator Feinstein's chairmanship, on the kinds of legislation I was speaking of earlier, the very things we need to do to help our law enforcement agencies have the power to do the job we want them to do. I am very proud to say that legislation we worked on together as a result of hearings we held together was finally passed as part of the USA Patriot Act, and the work that that subcommittee has done over the years has really paved the way for a lot of what we now know was important to do but until, unfortunately, after September 11 people were not willing to focus on in order to get done. I conclude by saying it is a matter of priorities. We ought to be focused right now on first things first, and that is our national security, and that means first and foremost passing legislation such as the Schumer-Kyl amendment to FISA, getting our Homeland Security Department legislation concluded, getting our Defense authorization and appropriations bills concluded, and paving the way for action on a resolution of force with respect to Iraq.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I will speak to the legislation that has been placed before us this afternoon, the Department of Justice reauthorization bill or, as it is officially titled, the 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act. I begin by putting this in the context of what I would call priorities. We are now less than 2 weeks, probably, from closing the session of this Congress, and there is a great deal of unfinished business to which we need to attend. As a matter of fact, we are bringing this legislation up--I should say the majority leader has brought this legislation up--deferring, for our consideration, the bill that is currently on the floor, the homeland defense reorganization bill that the President asked us to deal with about 3 months ago. That bill has now been on the floor of the Senate for at least a month, and we still have not even voted on the President's proposal. This DOJ, or Department of Justice, reauthorization bill has a lot of important provisions in it. I am going to get to those in a moment. But in terms of priorities, it seems to me the reauthorization of a Department which has not been reauthorized for more than two decades, and clearly is going to continue to operate--that is, the Department of Justice--is a little bit lower priority, at this point in this legislative session, than voting on the President's homeland reorganization legislation. It is a lower priority than adopting a resolution dealing with the Senate's position with respect to the authorization of the President to utilize force in any action he may decide to take against Iraq. And it is less of a priority than having the Senate act upon the Defense appropriations and authorization bill. It is clear, because the majority was not able to pass out a budget this year--the first time since the creation of the Budget Act, which I think was in 1974--that we do not have a budget. That has been one of the reasons we do not have any appropriations bills done. I am not aware of any bill that has come from the House to the Senate and been voted on by both bodies and sent to the President. I might be wrong, but I do not recall any. I think we have only acted on three or four. It is common knowledge that in order to fund the Government beyond October 1, it is going to require the adoption of what we call continuing resolutions or CRs. We have already adopted one, and we are going to have to adopt another and then another one after that. These continuing resolutions will authorize Government to continue to be funded at some level; last year's level plus some increment of inflation, I suppose. Because we didn't pass a budget and because we haven't passed the appropriations bills, we don't have all of the other specific programmatic funding that would ordinarily be included in these appropriations bills, including new programs. That is not good. We can get by with these continuing resolutions for a matter of weeks and perhaps a few months if we have to. Where we can't get along without an appropriations bill is for the Department of Defense and the conduct of the war. Things have changed so dramatically since last year when an appropriations bill was passed for the Department of Defense that all recognize--this is not a partisan issue; I think everybody recognizes--we are going to have to pass a Defense authorization bill and a Defense appropriations bill for the next fiscal year. We are going to have to do that as a matter separate and apart from the continuing resolutions we will adopt. Those are the first three things we have to do before we complete our work. In one way or another they all deal with national security, which, obviously, is the first thing about which we have to be concerned. And in a time of war, I know it is very much on the minds of all Members. Again, a Defense authorization and appropriations bill to actually provide the programs and the funding for our military forces for this next year; an authorization that this body would approve the use of some kind of force for the President, should he deem it necessary in taking action against Iraq; and completion of our work on development of the Department of Homeland Security so that the President would know how he can organize the Government to best deal with the threat to the homeland--those should be our top three priorities. We don't yet have the Defense bill. It is ready but it hasn't been brought to the floor. The homeland security bill has been pending for 4 weeks perhaps. We still didn't even have a vote on the President's proposal for a Department of Homeland Security. The majority leader keeps filing cloture which is defeated because people are not ready to finish that bill until we have a chance to vote on the President's proposal. That is only fair. He ought to have some say in how his Department is going to be reorganized. Perhaps his idea won't prevail, but it will, if we can ever get it to a vote. He is at least entitled to a vote. Instead of granting that, we have left that national security debate, and we are now on the question of whether we should reauthorize the Department of Justice. What is an authorization? Ordinarily an authorization for a program tells you what you can do from year to year in this Department of Government. It is important in an organization such as the Department of Defense, where we have had such a dramatic change in requirements since last year with the war on terror. As I said, it has been now more than two decades since the Department of Justice has had a reauthorization. All we have done in those two decades is each year appropriate money for the various programs we have passed for funding of the Department. That has worked fine. It could work, obviously, again. One could argue that because of the war on terror, there are a lot of new things that need to be done in the Department of Justice--new authorities granted, new capabilities, new funding, and that it might justify a new authorization act. I could abide by that rationale, if we had before us a reauthorization that embodied those kinds of new programs. But that is not what we have. This is the same old, warmed over stuff that we have had for the last couple of decades. If we want to fight the war on terror and we want to take our precious time to reauthorize the Department of Justice with that in mind, we would write an entirely different bill than this. One example, just off the top of my head: We had testimony in the Intelligence Committee last week that there is a great deal of confusion about the FISA Act, the forward intelligence surveillance law under which our law enforcement officials have the ability to collect intelligence on people who are thought to be foreign agents or working on behalf of foreign governments or engaged in terrorist activities internationally. It is a little bit easier to collect intelligence on people like that than it is under our normal criminal justice system where a crime has been committed or is being committed and the FBI is investigating that crime. As part of the USA Patriot Act last year, we made changes to the FISA law to make it more effective in the new era of the war on terror. We found out something. This came about in a variety of different ways, but it has all come together here. This FISA law has one aspect that needs to be fixed. Senator Schumer and I have a proposal to fix it, but we haven't been able to get it on to the floor. As a matter of fact, I had anticipated including it in the intelligence reauthorization. We will have the conference on that tomorrow evening. It is almost to the floor. But I was told by Chairman Graham that a member on the majority side was going to object to the inclusion of the Schumer-Kyl provision and, therefore, would I please not include it in that bill. I said, of course, I would be happy to because we want to get the intelligence authorization passed. But at some point we have to make this change in FISA. I will describe what the change is. It should have been in here but it is not. If we are talking about priorities, I would much rather get that done than have to wade through all of this. We have gone two decades without this. But we need to make some of these changes for law enforcement. The evidence before the Intelligence Committee was that the FBI thought, with respect to Zacarias Moussaoui, thought to be the 20th hijacker, that he had some connection to international terrorism. He was a foreign person, not a U.S. citizen, and had engaged in flight training up in Minneapolis under conditions deemed to be suspicious by the FBI there. We all heard about the memorandum or letter from agent Rowley from the Minneapolis office complaining about the fact that the FBI had not seen fit to apply for a FISA warrant to look into Zacarias Moussaoui's computer to see what was there. We all know that after the fact, after September 11, this was done, and certain things were found, and so on, which we don't discuss here. The fact is, a lot of people criticized the FBI for misunderstanding or misapplying the law and not seeking a FISA warrant on Moussaoui. The testimony we had before the committee was that there was a dispute within the FBI about what they had to prove, and there was some suggestion that maybe he might have been connected in some way with a group of Chechens, but nobody could connect him to a foreign power or an international terrorist organization. Those are the two requirements for FISA to apply. Had the change that Senator Schumer and I advocate been in effect, it is clear that we could have gotten a warrant against Moussaoui because it would simply add the phrase ``or foreign person,'' which would mean that if you had probable cause to believe that someone is involved in a terrorist kind of enterprise, but you don't necessarily know what country he is working for and you can't necessarily connect him to a particular terrorist organization, you think maybe he is just a terrorist, and with this warrant you might find out exactly who it is he is connected to, but you don't really have that information at this point, you could go ahead and seek the warrant to tap his telephone or look in his computer, search his house, whatever the case may be. It is a very straightforward approach. Agent Rowley, who testified before the Intelligence Committee or the Judiciary Committee--we had a combined hearing--said she thought that would have been a very good thing and strongly supported it. It has the support of the Department of Justice and the FBI. We have had several different witnesses from those organizations testify both before the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, both of which I sit on. They have all indicated this would be a very helpful change in the law, so that with respect to a guy like Moussaoui, if you didn't have the evidence that he was connected to a particular terrorist organization, or that he was working for a particular foreign power, you could still get a warrant to investigate exactly what he was up to if you could demonstrate to the judge you thought he was up to something, that he was a foreign person, and that the kind of activity that he appeared to be looking at was a terrorist kind of activity. I cannot imagine anybody who would oppose that, but I understand maybe there is somebody who would. We need to vote on that before we leave here in a way that the House can also approve it, so that we can actually improve our ability to fight international terrorism. You would think those kinds of changes would be in this reauthorization act. It is not in here. Not only that, but one of the authors is alleged to be one of the people who would object to what Senator Schumer and I are trying to do. We need to get to the bottom of these things. I want to find out. If anybody objects to the Schumer-Kyl amendment, come to the Senate floor and tell us so we can find out who is behind the objection, get it on the floor, get it approved and enacted into law and signed by the President. Our law enforcement officials want it. It is important to fight the war on terror, to get after the terrorists so we can investigate them before rather than after they commit crimes against us. That is the kind of priority we ought to be engaged in here. Instead, what does this bill have in it? Well, it is about 240 pages long. It has a lot of provisions. For example, it authorizes $75,000 for an exchange program with Thailand for prosecutors. That is probably a nice thing. I don't know of any reason why that isn't a good thing to do. But $75,000, as you know, is kind of decimal dust around here. We would ordinarily be focused on somewhat larger issues. Here is a bigger one: $5 million for a DEA training site in south and central Asia. Probably a good idea, although I don't know. One thing that we have been asked by the administration--especially at this time of war--not to do is to impose any more reporting requirements on our agencies that are involved in the war on terror. I am trying to count the number of reports and commissions contained in the bill. There are too many to count so far. I am trying to get an accurate count. Suffice it to say there are numerous reports--report after report--that we are asking the Justice Department to prepare and send up to us on a whole variety of issues. Oversight is very important, and we need to engage in oversight of the Department of Justice. But there is a balance between causing them to have to spend so much time preparing reports that they literally cannot do the job we ask them to do. I am not sure how some of these reports, anyway, will advance the ball with respect to justice. The bill speaks of the 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Act, but it contains a lot more than just appropriations. It seems to me that we ought to be pretty well focused on the mission. If the FBI, for example, is going to literally change its focus from, first and foremost, being an investigator of crimes that have been committed so they can be prosecuted in court, to an agency--and remember it is part of the Department of Justice--which has now its first and foremost focus of preventing terrorism by conducting investigations that will potentially lead to uncovering the possibility of terrorists in the United States who would perform these horrible acts against us, if that is the new mandate--and certainly Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI, has been very forthright about the need for change in the FBI and the need to create this new priority in the FBI, and I commend him, and Attorney General John Ashcroft has supported the same kind of reformation of the Department of Justice and the FBI--then why is that kind of priority not reflected in this document? It is kind of the same old thing, rather than a new 21st century mission with terrorism at the core. We need to find resources to fight terrorism. A lot in this bill has nothing to do with terror. That is not to say there is not a great deal the Department needs to do that doesn't relate to terrorism, and we all understand and appreciate that. One would think there would at least be something here that represents the case for looking forward into the 21st century, rather than just looking back for the last couple of decades and trying to pull together different things that we would like for the Department of Justice to do for us. Let me get back to the issue of reports. Do we need to require the Attorney General to submit to the Committees on the Judiciary and Appropriations of both the House and the Senate a report identifying and describing every grant and cooperative agreement that was made for which additional or supplemental funds were provided in the immediately preceding year? I suppose somebody should put that information together. I wonder whether we need to mandate it in this authorization bill. Here is another report identifying and reviewing every office of justice program grant, cooperative agreement, or programmatic contract. I suppose some auditor needs to have that on the books, but is it necessary to send a report to the committees of the House and the Senate? Do we need to require that the Attorney General submit, within 6 months of enactment, a report to the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary, detailing the distribution and allocation of appropriated funds, attorneys, and pre-attorney workloads for each office of the U.S. attorney, except those at the justice management division? That is an internal matter that is important to the proper functioning and operation of the Department of Justice offices of U.S. attorney, but there is an office of U.S. attorney that is supposed to keep track of those things. It doesn't seem to me that this rises to the level of what we are including within the reauthorization. Do we need to require the Attorney General to conduct a study of offenders with mental illness who are released from prison or jail to determine how many such offenders qualify for Medicaid, SSI, or SSDI, and other Government aid? Do we need that? Should that be included in this 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act? At least, if it is, does it rise to the level of priority greater than giving the President the authority to take action to deal with Iraq, giving the President a vote on his idea for reorganizing a Department of Homeland Security and providing the Senate's approval of funding so our military can do what we ask it to do? Which of those ought to come first? We have now taken these other items and put them over here so we can deal with this Department of Justice reauthorization--an action that doesn't need to be done at all. We haven't had a reauthorization of the Department of Justice for over 20 years and yet it has functioned very well. There is more. I will cite one more. The bill provides the inspector general discretion to investigate allegations of criminal wrongdoing or administrative misconduct by an employee of the Department of Justice-- authority which already exists--and allows the inspector general to refer such allegations to the office of professional responsibility or the internal affairs office of the appropriate component of the Department of Justice. It seems to me that a lot of what is in the legislation is questioning the Department of Justice rather than supporting it. It is asking it to do a lot of things that will take time and money and divert resources from the job that is first and foremost on the minds of Americans. I will let that point go for the moment. It is not that this is a bad bill. That is not my point. My point is that this is an old bill that was written for another time and which isn't really necessary today--certainly not to take the time of the Senate away from those other items that I mentioned. We should not be taking the time to debate this. Now, I was just notified a couple hours ago that this bill was going to be brought to the floor. The problem with dealing with a bill such as this in this context is that there is naturally a tendency to hurry up and rush to get it over with because we have more important things to do. I suspect that is what you are going to hear from perhaps the chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee or others--``If these other things are so important, then hurry up and pass this bill.'' That is a nice technique: find a time when we really ought to be doing something else, insert this into the agenda and argue that we better hurry and get it over with so we can get back to these more important items. If it is so all-fired important to do, then it is important enough to be done right. I will give you one example of a part of it that wasn't done right. (Mr. KOHL assumed the chair.)

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

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I come to the floor today in opposition to the Lieberman Homeland Department proposal and in support of the Gramm/ Miller, administration-supported, bipartisan substitute. As Senator Gramm and others have so ably demonstrated, the Lieberman proposal takes away the President's existing authority to exempt personnel in the new department from collective bargaining requirements when national security requires it. The substitute reinstates the President's authority in this area. While I understand that those on the other side might have a different political agenda than the President of the United States on this, time has almost run out. If we don't soon get together and acknowledge the importance of passing a bill to allow Government to better deal with the threat of terrorism, Congress might adjourn without passing anything. After 6 weeks of Senate floor consideration, that would be a shame. Under the Lieberman approach to providing labor flexibility to the President when it comes to issues of national security, the President would be better off with the agencies as they exist, coupled with his authority, from an administrative or executive point of view, to move people around within those agencies; he would be better able to achieve his goals without any legislation than by adopting the legislation that is before us or under the amendment being proposed by the Senators from Nebraska, Rhode Island, and Louisiana. The labor issues that we must settle in this bill are extremely important, but I believe they are moving the debate far from some of the other important differences between the Lieberman homeland bill and the Republican homeland, Gramm-Miller, substitute. As the Senate continues to consider the homeland security proposal pending in Congress, I want to reemphasize the relatively few, but very important changes, that the Republican substitute makes to address border and immigration security concerns raised by the Lieberman substitute. ``Division B'' of the Lieberman bill creates the ``Immigration Affairs Directorate,'' with an undersecretary to oversee all immigration functions of the U.S. government. ``Division A'' of the Lieberman bill, among other things, creates the ``Border and Transportation Protection Directorate,'' with an undersecretary to manage all activities and policies related to border and transportation security. Under Division B, all immigration functions, including all immigration enforcement functions--intelligence, investigations, detention, border patrol, and border inspections--are under the ``Immigration Affairs Directorate,'' informally referred to as the ``Immigration Affairs box.'' The problem with this approach is that it leaves a gaping hole in the ``Border and Transportation box.'' One of the biggest priorities of the Bush administration, and of the Congress, has been to create a more streamlined border, both along the U.S.- Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. The Lieberman bill, by refusing to move the Border Patrol and border inspections functions out of the Immigration Affairs box and into the Border and Transportation box, will only exacerbate the coordination problems that currently exist at our nation's southern and northern border. Most importantly, coordination of personnel and the sharing of security information will be compromised. Mr. President, all of our Nation's immigration enforcement functions, including intelligence, detention, and investigations, have border components and could arguably be better placed with the undersecretary for Border Protection. At the very least, I repeat, the Border Patrol and Border Inspections functions should be included in the Border and Transportation box. Instead, in the Lieberman proposal, a bare-bones, almost meaningless ``Border and Transportation'' box is created. It includes Customs, but maintains that Customs is its ``own distinct entity'' so that Customs can continue to operate almost independently of the Under Secretary of the Border and Transportation Directorate, Coast Guard--again as a distinct entity, divisions of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, FLETC. Without including Border Patrol and border inspections as a function of the Border Protection Directorate, this ``box'' will not effectively streamline much border activity at all. Another ironic point is that FLETC is included in the Border Protection box. FLETC trains Border Patrol agents and yet the Border Patrol is not included in the Border Protection box. Mr. President, the Republican substitute, or Gramm-Miller substitute as it is known, in this area is a much wiser approach--it includes the Border Patrol and Border Inspections functions in the Border and Transportation Directorate. This will allow for better coordination of resources and elimination of duplicative functions at the border. Protecting our borders is one of our first lines of defense against terrorism, and we must get it right. Another major problem with Division B, ``Immigration Affairs,'' of the Lieberman bill is its inclusion of language that would abolish the Executive Office for Immigration Review and create within the Department of Justice what amounts to an independent agency for immigration judges. Immigration law is complicated. There is a process by which you have a decision made, a review of that decision, and eventually the final review all the way up the chain into the Department of Justice by the Attorney General of the United States. There is a body of case law built around this. There are procedures that are built around it. As far as I know, those procedures are working. I do not know of any reason, for homeland security, why we would want to change that. It seems at the very least that the Lieberman language, which designates when and how this new Executive Office for Immigration Review operates, needs to be changed so that the checks and balances that exist today with respect to EOIR will continue to exist--the Gramm-Miller substitute maintains this check by keeping the currently- existing authority for review of EOIR decisions with the Attorney General. Mr. President, one of the most critical functions of the reorganization of agencies that deal with our homeland security is the border function, and we must get it right. Let's work to pass the Gramm/Miller substitute, which, among the numerous other important improvements, incorporates two important border/immigration changes to the pending Lieberman homeland bill.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. I appreciate that from the Senator from Kansas. I know the majority leader this morning a little bit later, in talking to reporters in response to a question, said he was relying upon the newspaper accounts of what had been said. But I suggest that while that might ordinarily be all right, the press can make mistakes, and when you are accusing the President of politicizing a war effort, you better be correct. We have gone back and actually looked at the stories, and the Senator from Kansas makes a point, too. The Vice President is a very careful person. He is not prone to politicizing things. I will conclude by saying it is very important for us to keep our eye on who the enemy is. The enemy is the terrorists. The enemy is Saddam Hussein. The enemy for none of this is President Bush. I don't think we should be raising questions or throwing around allegations that undercut what ought to be a common effort from everybody in this country as well as this body to ensure we have the kind of consensus that will enable us to prosecute whatever war we prosecute in a way that enjoys both support in the United States and abroad. The kind of tirade entered into here this morning undercuts that effort. It does not assist.

Mr. KYL. I am aware of the fact the majority leader alluded to that. But he was only looking at a headline in a newspaper. I know the Senator from Kansas was actually at the event.

Mr. KYL. I am happy to yield.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I simply want to respond, very briefly, to what I saw this morning on the television when I was observing the activity on the floor. I saw the majority leader come to the floor and give what I thought were very intemperate remarks suggesting that--not suggesting-- demanding that the President of the United States apologize, allegedly for politicizing the war effort. My belief, after looking at all of the transcripts of the comments that were attributed to the President and the Vice President--and I have them all right here, as well as the newspaper accounts of the same--it suggests to me that it is not the President but the distinguished majority leader who needs to apologize. I say that because it is very clear the President has not politicized anything with respect to this war. The comments in which he criticized the Senate--and I believe rightly so--have to do with our failure to adopt a homeland security bill. And he referred to the special interests that have been involved in impeding action on the bill, and complained about the fact that the Senate has not followed the leadership of the House and passed a bill. As a matter of fact, earlier today the Senate precluded a vote on the President's plan. When Senator Gramm sought to have an opportunity to vote on the President's plan, that was turned down. So we have a situation in which the Senate, for the fourth week now, is debating the homeland security bill--has not passed it, will not even let the President have a vote on his proposal--and the majority leader suggests the President is politicizing national security. The President is right to complain about that. But what the President did not do was to connect any activity of the Senate, or Democrats in the Senate--or anybody else, for that matter--to the war effort, as was inferred by the majority leader. The majority leader attempted to take quotations that dealt with homeland security and transform them somehow or other into criticism of Democrats in the policy with respect to Iraq. And that simply is not true. It did not happen. For that reason, as I say, it seems to me the majority leader ought to be the one offering the apology, not the President. I had been talking, just before watching this, about the damage that was being done to the attempts by the President to reach an international consensus in developing a plan for dealing with Iraq by the comments of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder during his election. And both Dr. Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld have noted the fact that those comments were not helpful and poisoned the atmosphere. They poisoned the atmosphere internationally by, in effect, confirming what Saddam Hussein is saying, that the President is acting out of political motives rather than out of a desire to achieve peace in the world. When the distinguished majority leader comes to the Senate floor and seemingly validates those same criticisms of the President, he is further poisoning the atmosphere. That is another reason why he owes the President an apology. He is literally politicizing the issue in a way that is destructive to the President's attempt to achieve an international consensus. I find it ironic because it is the other party that has sought to assure the President would gain that consensus internationally, many of them suggesting that is necessary before we act, and then that very attempt is being undermined as a result of the comments made here.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I rise to speak for a little bit of time until Senator Nickles from Oklahoma arrives, and ask unanimous consent that he then be permitted to speak.

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

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator McCain and myself I am introducing legislation today that would codify the largest water claims settlement in the history of Arizona. This bill represents the tremendous efforts of literally hundreds of people in Arizona and here in Washington over a period of five years. Looking ahead, this bill could ultimately be nearly as important to Arizona's future as was the authorization of the Central Arizona Project, CAP, itself. Since Arizona began receiving CAP water from the Colorado River, litigation has divided water users over how the CAP water should be allocated and exactly how much Arizona was required to repay the Federal Government. This bill will, among other things, codify the settlement reached between the United States and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District over the State's repayment obligation for costs incurred by the United States in constructing the Central Arizona Project. It will also resolve, once and for all, the allocation of all remaining CAP water. This final allocation will provide the stability necessary for State water authorities to plan for Arizona's future water needs. In addition, approximately 200,000 acre-feet of CAP water will be made available to settle various Indian water claims in the State. The bill would also authorize the use of the Lower Colorado River Basin Development Fund, which is funded solely from revenues paid by Arizona entities, to construct irrigation works necessary for tribes with congressionally approved water settlements to use CAP water. Title II of this bill settles the water rights claims of the Gila River Indian Community. It allocates nearly 100,000 acre-feet of CAP water to the Community, and provides funds to subsidize the costs of delivering CAP water and to construct the facilities necessary to allow the Community to fully utilize the water allocated to it in this settlement. Title III provides for long-needed amendments to the 1982 Southern Arizona Water Settlement Act for the Tohono O'odham Nation, which has never been fully implemented. This bill will allow Arizona cities to plan for the future, knowing how much water they can count on. The Indian tribes will finally get ``wet'' water, as opposed to the paper rights to water they have now, and projects to use the water. In addition, mining companies, farmers, and irrigation delivery districts can continue to receive water without the fear that they will be stopped by Indian litigation. While some minor issues remain, we have every confidence that these issues will be resolved before a hearing is scheduled. In addition, before the next Congress begins its work we hope that negotiations with the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the only party not yet included in the settlement, will move forward so that all claims can be resolved by this bill. In summary, this bill is vital to the citizens of Arizona and will provide the certainty needed to move forward with water use decisions. Furthermore, the United States can avoid litigating water rights and damage claims and satisfy its trust responsibilities to the Tribes. The parties have worked many years to reach consensus rather than litigate, and I believe this bill represents the best opportunity to achieve a fair result for all the people of Arizona.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator McCain and myself I am introducing legislation today that would codify the largest water claims settlement in the history of Arizona. This bill represents the tremendous efforts of literally hundreds of people in Arizona and here in Washington over a period of five years. Looking ahead, this bill could ultimately be nearly as important to Arizona's future as was the authorization of the Central Arizona Project, CAP, itself. Since Arizona began receiving CAP water from the Colorado River, litigation has divided water users over how the CAP water should be allocated and exactly how much Arizona was required to repay the Federal Government. This bill will, among other things, codify the settlement reached between the United States and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District over the State's repayment obligation for costs incurred by the United States in constructing the Central Arizona Project. It will also resolve, once and for all, the allocation of all remaining CAP water. This final allocation will provide the stability necessary for State water authorities to plan for Arizona's future water needs. In addition, approximately 200,000 acre-feet of CAP water will be made available to settle various Indian water claims in the State. The bill would also authorize the use of the Lower Colorado River Basin Development Fund, which is funded solely from revenues paid by Arizona entities, to construct irrigation works necessary for tribes with congressionally approved water settlements to use CAP water. Title II of this bill settles the water rights claims of the Gila River Indian Community. It allocates nearly 100,000 acre-feet of CAP water to the Community, and provides funds to subsidize the costs of delivering CAP water and to construct the facilities necessary to allow the Community to fully utilize the water allocated to it in this settlement. Title III provides for long-needed amendments to the 1982 Southern Arizona Water Settlement Act for the Tohono O'odham Nation, which has never been fully implemented. This bill will allow Arizona cities to plan for the future, knowing how much water they can count on. The Indian tribes will finally get ``wet'' water, as opposed to the paper rights to water they have now, and projects to use the water. In addition, mining companies, farmers, and irrigation delivery districts can continue to receive water without the fear that they will be stopped by Indian litigation. While some minor issues remain, we have every confidence that these issues will be resolved before a hearing is scheduled. In addition, before the next Congress begins its work we hope that negotiations with the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the only party not yet included in the settlement, will move forward so that all claims can be resolved by this bill. In summary, this bill is vital to the citizens of Arizona and will provide the certainty needed to move forward with water use decisions. Furthermore, the United States can avoid litigating water rights and damage claims and satisfy its trust responsibilities to the Tribes. The parties have worked many years to reach consensus rather than litigate, and I believe this bill represents the best opportunity to achieve a fair result for all the people of Arizona.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, as a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, I have had reservations about creating an outside commission to investigate 9/11 as called for in this amendment. My reservations have essentially been twofold: First, the Intelligence Committees were given the responsibility to look into this very matter, so an additional investigation would be duplicative and place additional stress on our intelligence community at a time when its resources should be dedicated to fighting the war on terrorism. Second, we had every reason to believe that the joint committee investigation would do its job that is, find out what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how we can reform the intelligence community to try to prevent future such failures. Sadly, it appears that the joint committee will fall short of that goal. In the Intelligence Committee, I have expressed serious reservations about the direction of the investigation, including the allocation of time and resources to holding premature open hearings. Last week, the joint committee held public hearings in spite of not having completed its investigation. In fact, what was presented last week was only a staff document, not a consensus product of the committee. Members had no practical input into this interim report. The interim statement from the joint inquiry staff provided information about what has been done to date, a chronology of events leading to the September 11th attacks, and some background information about al-Qaida. This history may be useful, but it does not address the questions that are fundamental to this investigation. In the committee, we heard from more than one witness that at least some of the problems in the intelligence community stem from a bureaucratically and politically-induced culture of risk aversion and/ or an inadequate allocation and improper prioritization of resources. Yet, it is not evident that the joint committee inquiry is serious about pursuing these fundamental questions. For these and other reasons, it will be difficult for me to concur in the final joint committee product without reservations. We will not know what we haven't been told. Therefore, we will not be able to vouch unequivocally for the final product. And, of course, these are the very questions that have led to calls for the creation of a national commission to investigate these matters, and, hence, to this amendment. Reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that it is necessary. If its work starts after the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation has concluded, there should be no duplication or additional stress on the entities required to cooperate in the investigation. Mr. President, because of the inadequate course being taken by the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation, and because the imposition of that investigation on our intelligence apparatus will be ended by the time this commission begins its work, I will support the creation of the commission.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, our colleague Strom Thurmond is retiring soon, and I just wanted to say a few words, on this special day of appreciation, about the gentleman from South Carolina. For that is what he is: the consummate gentleman. There is the public Strom that everyone knows--the legend--then there is the private Strom, a colleague and collaborator I have always found to be eager to help a fellow Senator and accommodate his concerns. I have felt honored to work with him on issues of national defense, foreign policy, and many other matters important to the people of the United States. The people of South Carolina, in particular, can be very proud of this war hero, who landed in Normandy as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division in 1942, who was Governor of South Carolina, and who, in the Senate, distinguished himself as chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Armed Services Committee. There are great Strom Thurmond stories--many told by Strom himself, of course. For my part, I like to tell the one about his 90th birthday celebration, held here in Washington. One reporter asked if he could expect to see Strom on his 100th birthday. And Senator Thurmond looked him up and down and said: ``Well, you look fit enough to me. If you eat right and drink right, you ought to be around to see me then.'' He is an inspiration. As everyone knows, he represents continuity in the United States Senate, being, since 1996, its oldest serving member, and, since 1997, its longest serving member. Those are for the record books. But on a personal level, I can say that the Senate will not be the same without his buoyant spirit. I thank him for helping me in so many ways, and for his invaluable service to our country.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I want to have printed in the Record an op-ed by columnist Charles Krauthammer discussing the United Nations and its debate over how to deal with Iraq. Mr. Krauthammer makes the point that nations are driven by their own self-interests; thus, members of the U.N. Security Council--such as France, Russia, and China--all have varied perspectives on a potential confrontation with Iraq. He argues that it is not ``unseemly'' for the United States to similarly act in the name of its own interests. And that it is, in his words, an ``absurdity'' to suggest that the U.S. is suddenly granted ``moral legitimacy'' by U.N. Security Council approval for its actions, since the Security Council itself is composed of member states acting in their own self interests. I ask unanimous consent the op-ed by Mr. Krauthammer be printed in the Record.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, this editorial points out the plan that President Bush has proposed, as largely reflected in the proposal Senator Burns and Senator Craig and others have been talking about, is the way to scientifically manage our forests. We are bragging a little bit in Arizona because one of the scientists who pioneered this technique is Dr. Wally Covington of Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff. He and Stephen Campbell of the University of Arizona conducted these landmark management studies and demonstrated that by returning our forests to the conditions in which they existed 100 years ago, we can save them from disease, insect infestation, and catastrophic wildfire. What that entails is going in and mechanically thinning and removing--thinning the small-diameter trees that clog the forests and removing that and the other debris from the forest--cleaning up the forests, in effect; then when that debris has largely been removed, introducing fire through a prescribed burn in the wet, cooler months of October or November so the fire doesn't get out of control. There is not nearly as much fuel to burn and it is cooler. Then, at that point, basically we let nature take its course. Say the next summer a lightening strikes a tree and starts a fire. What is going to happen after this debris has been cleaned out and the fuel has been removed? It will move along the grass and it may burn the grass and a few pieces of dry limbs and debris on the floor; but since most of it has been cleaned up, it is not going to create a crown fire, which causes all the damage. Since most of the small-diameter trees have been removed, it is not going to have that ladder of trees to climb up to the canopy of the big trees. What you have seen on television is the preheating of these big ponderosa pines from the forest fire. Then when the fire goes through the smaller trees, it climbs up the ladder of the forest into the canopy of the big trees and explodes into those giant fireballs we have all seen and have been sickened by. That is what happened in Arizona this year, when fires devastated an area the size of the State of Rhode Island. That is how much burned in Arizona. When you look at the moonscape-type of environment that now exists, you are sickened by the reality that much of this could have been prevented. It turns out there was a project that had been proposed by the Forest Service in this area about 3 years ago, and there were about 2 years of lawsuits and appeals by environmental groups to stop this so-called Baca ecosystem management area. Well, the fire came through and only about 300 acres had been permitted to be treated by the time the fire came through because of the appeals that had been filed by these environmental groups, as a result of which about 90 percent of the Baca area has been burned. It is now nothing but sterilized soil and blackened tree trunks with no branches or pine needles on them whatsoever. So the filing of the appeal by these environmental groups resulted in about 90 percent of this area burning rather than being treated. Some of the environmental groups will say they want to protect endangered species or old-growth trees. Well, they protected neither in this case. The fire came through and wiped them all out. Why? Because we haven't been able to thin and do prescribed burning. We could not cut out that dog hair thicket that exists in the forests because they have not been treated before. It is called dog hair thicket because they say a dog cannot run through it without leaving half of its hair behind in the snarly little trees that are growing in the area of the forest that needs to be treated. What happens when the area is treated? You have cut out a lot of the small-diameter material and taken out the debris, and you open up the forest to the sunlight. You create an opportunity for grasses to grow, and you reintroduce butterflies, birds, insects, and small and large animals to the area. All of a sudden, instead of a dead and dying ecosystem, you have created a very vibrant and healthy natural ecosystem. What is our goal with respect to the trees? Our goal is to try to preserve as many of the old-growth and large-diameter trees as possible. That is what is done when we thin the forests the way we are talking about doing. So why haven't we been able to come to some compromise on the legislation we are talking about to enable us to do this? The reason is there are radical environmental groups that, frankly, have control of some of the politics of this issue with some of our colleagues and have persuaded them that we are going to open it up to unfettered logging, we are going to log the old-growth forests, we are going to clearcut the western forests, we are going to take away any opportunity for people to have input as to what is done, we are going to destroy all the environment for endangered species, and so on. All of that is simply wrong. It is not true. We are talking about legislation that has very significant limits. These thinning projects have to be approved by all of the different groups, the so-called stakeholders, the environmental process, the NEPA process where the forest plan has to have been followed. The whole point of the stewardship projects, as they are called, is to enable us to go in and clean out the forests, leaving the large trees. That is the whole point. Under our legislation citizens would be permitted to file a lawsuit in court and appeal the plan if they want to. Nothing stops them from doing that. All they have to do is point out to the judge: Look, the object here was to save these big trees and cut out the underbrush. Well, they are not doing that in this case, if there ever were such a plan proposed. I do not think they want to have to face up to the reality of what we have proposed, which is a very reasonable way to manage our forests. In many respects, they would rather cut off their nose to spite their face. That is a phrase I used earlier today, and one of my young staff said: What does that mean? It is a phrase my grandmother used to say. It means you are basically so selfish about what you want to do that you are not willing to look at the larger picture, which would enable you to save yourself if you would apply management techniques. We could apply this management technique to thin the forests and do prescribed burning and, thus, prevent the kind of disease or forest fires that in the past have ravaged these forests and absolutely wiped out the habitats. Some people would rather have the fires exist to catastrophically burn the entire area and ruin the habitat for the endangered species and all other species because at least that did not permit the loggers to log big trees. That is right, it did not permit the cutting of any kind of trees. What was the result? It burned the entire forest. So the entire ecosystem is now dead, and it will take literally hundreds of years to come back and produce those big, beautiful trees we all want to save. It is a sorry state of affairs that we have not been able to achieve a result on this issue. I hoped we would have been able to do so. I hope my colleagues will not vote for cloture when that vote comes in the next 10 or 15 minutes.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I first ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an editorial of the Arizona Republic this morning entitled ``Forest Plan Has Merits.''