Carl Levin

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. So there is no effort, no intent in the statement of policy on line 4 on page 1 through line 6 on page 2, to in any way modify the policy set forth in that Executive Order 11850?

Mr. LEVIN. So this restatement of policy is not intended to modify this in any way. But as I understand it, what the good Senator from Nevada is saying is that some people in the Government have interpreted Executive Order 11850 differently from the way the policy is stated in section 1073?

Mr. LEVIN. I thank my friend from Nevada. Mr. President, we will reserve the time. We are not necessarily at all in opposition, but we would like to review this overnight. We thank the Senator from Nevada.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I thank my good friend from Virginia. We have on our side disposed of six amendments. We are trying to boil down the balance of the amendments. We have to boil down to six. We have not yet done that. I don't want to identify which ones other than to say we know there will be a Dorgan amendment on the Truman Commission which we hope will come immediately after lunch tomorrow. There is still a surplus of amendments we have to work out.

Mr. LEVIN. I don't think it is, but I am not certain.

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. That is my understanding. There may be such an amendment, a second-degree amendment. But I would agree with you in identifying the Harkin amendment as a good prospect for completion tomorrow morning. We do have a speaker on our side--at least one--and I am going to try to line that speaker up for the morning.

Mr. LEVIN. Well, Mr. President, if the chairman will yield, that may be optimistic, but I think we are making progress. I will work overnight--I know the chairman will--to try to line up speakers to complete the pending amendments so we can at least have, hopefully, one vote before the caucuses tomorrow, regardless of what hour we start. I am going to try to line up some speakers to complete at least one of these amendments before the caucuses.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I understand there may be a second-degree amendment to the Chambliss amendment.

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. I thank my good friend for that clarification. The ``we'' applies to the Congress. We, the Congress, have oversight responsibility. We have not carried it out. There are at least five major areas where we have failed to carry it out. We have to address those areas. We have been unable to do so. I see no evidence that we will. Therefore, the only way we can do this is with an outside, independent, 9/11-type panel. But I was not in any way suggesting that any one committee has been the source of this failure. It is all of the Congress together, which, obviously, is in the control of the Republican majority. That is a fact. But, nonetheless, we as a Congress have not carried out the oversight responsibility which our troops deserve. I hope I have assured my friend.

Mr. LEVIN. I did not mean in any way to impugn--

Mr. LEVIN. I thank my friend again. I would say of all the committees I know of, our committee, the Armed Services Committee, have carried out their responsibilities better than other committees. I wish to give credit where credit is due--to our chairman. I do not know of any more honorable, decent, hard-working, fair person in this body or any body in which I have ever served. We have still, overall, as a Congress, failed in five major areas to look at the way in which detainees have been handled. That failure is going to come back to haunt our troops, and it is haunting our Nation right now. But I surely did not mean in any way to single out our committee as being the source of that failure. But we are part of a larger failure in terms of the whole Congress failing to carry out its oversight responsibility. Now, Mr. President, I wonder if my friend would accept a unanimous consent request that the time we have just taken on this subject be in morning business rather than deducted from the time on this amendment, given the interest in it.

Mr. LEVIN. Would the Senator from Iowa yield 1 minute to me?

Mr. LEVIN. He sets forth what has happened here in terms of abuses and how it hurts our military. It hurts him. It is not just hurting our honor, it makes their lives more dangerous in case they are ever captured. And he ends by saying: If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ``America.'' Now, that is a member of the U.S. military. We cannot sweep this under the rug. The investigations so far have swept critical issues under the rug. They are going to surface sooner or later. Better to have an independent commission take a look at them, get it away from any partisanship, and have a commission the way the 9/ 11 Commission was appointed, with five Democratic appointees, five Republican appointees, and have the President appoint the chairman of the commission. But we owe it to the Captain Fishbacks of this world. We owe it to all the men and women who serve so honorably, which is 99 percent, probably 99.9 percent, of our military. We owe it to them to protect them. One way to protect them is to make sure we have a thorough investigation, without these major gaps, as to what went wrong. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that additional material be printed in the Record.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I believe the Senator from Iowa is ready, in case the Senator from Virginia is ready to have his amendment offered.

Mr. LEVIN. I thank my good friend from Virginia. What our committee has done is held some hearings. They are important hearings. They are valuable hearings. They have not covered five critical areas. Those areas have to be brought to the surface. As to those areas, I am not saying the chairman or our committee has swept them under the rug. We have allowed those issues to be unaddressed.

Mr. LEVIN. Will the Senator yield for a unanimous consent request?

Mr. LEVIN. If the Senator will yield, I say to the Senator from Maine I will be very brief because the Senator is waiting, but I want to comment on the amendment that has been offered by the Senator from Georgia. First, I commend him for offering this amendment. It is a very fair amendment. It is a very balanced amendment. It takes on a very important subject and deals with it very forthrightly, which is the fact that our Reserve Forces are called upon more and more now and are put under greater demands, and there is a lot of pressure and a lot of stress now. We do not require our Active-Duty Forces to wait until they are 60. After they get their 20 years in, they are eligible for retirement. What the amendment of the Senator does, as I understand it, is to credit the Reserve personnel for 90 days of mobilized active-duty service toward--it allows them to gain 3 months reduction from the current requirement that they be 60 years of age. It is a very important amendment. It addresses an inequity that we have, which is we require our Reserve Forces, even after they have been mobilized, even if they are mobilized year after year, not to get any credit for that active-duty service the way our regulars do. I commend the Senator. It is a very fair amendment. It has a lesser cost than the one that was opposed by the Department of Defense last year. I hope the Department of Defense will not oppose the Senator's amendment. We have not received a statement from the Department of Defense yet, but I hope, even though they opposed the amendment last year, they will not oppose the amendment of the Senator from Georgia. It is a worthy amendment. It has bipartisan support. As I understand, in addition to his colleague from Georgia, Senators Landrieu and Pryor are cosponsors. We very much support his effort.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, very briefly, on the question of the independent commission, my good friend from Virginia rattled off a bunch of statistics as to how many investigations have taken place, how many hearings have been held, how many witnesses have been interviewed, with something like 12 major investigations. We have had 40 closed hearings, I think he said, 30 open hearings, and 16,000 pages of documents have been obtained. As I thought was going to happen, those kinds of numbers were going to be utilized. The problem is, they are not particularly relevant to the point which this commission amendment seeks to address, which is there are huge gaps in these investigations. There could be 20 hearings or 50 hearings or 100 hearings, but these investigations have not gotten to 5 major points, such as, What is the role of the intelligence community? The people who have done the investigating have said they have not gotten to that point, they have not reached that issue. The CIA has not cooperated with them. So we have that huge gap in the investigations that have taken place so far. Are there secret prisons around the world being maintained? What about the ghost detainees? There is not a week that goes by that we are not reading about an issue that relates to the intelligence community, particularly the CIA's role in terms of interrogating detainees. Yet that is an almost complete blank slate. All of those investigations which have been made, which the Senator from Virginia referred to, have said: Well, we have not gotten into that issue. We were not allowed to get into that issue. Another major area is the U.S. Government policy on rendition. We have not had any investigation on that. Another major area is the role of contractors. We have not had any investigation on that. Another major area is the legality of the interrogation techniques, particularly the two major documents setting forth the techniques which were going to be used, the so-called second Bybee memo and the memo from Mr. Yoo to the Department of Defense general counsel, Mr. Haynes. We have not gotten there. So there has been no investigation of the legality of the interrogation techniques permitted by the Office of Legal Counsel's memos to which I have just referred. And there are a number of outstanding document requests which have been flatout denied relative to what happened at Guantanamo. Now, it does not make any difference how many hearings have been held--as long as you have those gaps which are greater than the amount covered, you have not had a thorough investigation, or anything close, of detainee abuses and these so-called secret prisons around the world which are allegedly maintained. That is the point. That is why you need an independent commission. You cannot sweep this under the rug. It is going to pop up again. There is going to be another captain who is going to show up-- and my friend from Virginia met with this captain. This is a letter to Senator McCain from Captain Fishback, who is in a parachute infantry regiment in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, talking about the way intelligence personnel were used to give directions to soften up detainees. But we have had no investigation of intelligence. So you have an honorable member of the U.S. military, CPT Ian Fishback. I had a personal conversation with this captain where he described to me what I just said, that there were directions from the intelligence community to soften up detainees. He says: Instead of resolving my concerns, the approach for clarification process leaves me deeply troubled. This is a letter to Senator McCain. I ask unanimous consent it be printed in the Record.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Iowa. I support his amendment. It simply would codify provisions in a directive. It puts some force behind what is already supposed to be in regulation, which is that there be fair and balanced political programming for the Armed Forces network radio broadcast. That is what the Harkin amendment does. It does not do the allocation. It does not make a judgment. It simply says we have to put some stronger teeth behind a regulation because we are talking about political programming. We have to be certain that political programming is fair and balanced. That is what the regulation states it is supposed to be already and just simply codifying it means Congress believes that is essential, as well as in addition to that it establishes an ombudsman to make sure the Armed Forces network adheres to its own programming standards and practices. I think that is a fair request, and I support the amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that there be 5 minutes provided to Senator Salazar prior to the vote at 5:30.

Mr. LEVIN. That is correct.

Mr. LEVIN. I, too, must reluctantly oppose this amendment. I have come through significant base closings in my State and am going through them right now. I know exactly what the Senator from Maine is referring to. There are many occasions when land needs to be granted to a local economic redevelopment authority at no cost. There are many cases like that, but there are other uses that have to come first that she would not allow for, including such things as parks or schools, conveyances for those public purposes which it seems to me must come first if we are using Federal property and deciding what to do with Federal property. In terms of the priority list, it seems to me public purposes such as parks and schools should have priority over the economic redevelopment, as desirable as that can be. But there is another problem with that amendment, and that is it does not provide discretion. It makes it mandatory that the land always go free to a local reuse even though that land may have tremendous value and the proceeds we have been able to obtain, which are not great, nonetheless have been there to help us clean up property which we want to turn over to local governments. We have huge cleanup costs. We have been able to obtain money for the resale of land. That money has gone into the cleanup of these bases before they are turned back to the local authority. I have nothing but understanding for the Senator from Maine in the situation she and her State face. We have a number of facilities which have been realigned in my home State which have value. In one case, we have a property where a buyer is willing to purchase it if we could get the military to negotiate with that purchaser. That would be money which would come to the Federal Treasury. The buyer is willing to pay to the Federal Treasury. Instead, the Air Force prefers to auction the property. The question is whether, under all the circumstances that exist, it is fairer to auction that property or to negotiate with a private buyer with whom the Government had long been negotiating. Without getting into that issue as to which is fairer--an auction or a negotiated sale--neither one of them would be permitted under the amendment of the Senator from Maine. It would have to go for nothing to somebody even though you have a buyer out there who wants to pay for it. We should not take such an absolute position on the disposition of these properties. There will be occasions--and I happen to agree with the Senator from Maine--where property should be turned over to a local development or redevelopment authority for free. That is true. But there are also occasions where the property has tremendous value, where the Government, as our dear friend from Virginia has said, has invested an awful lot of money in this base and where it has great value and where those dollars are needed in the Treasury, in part to pay for the cleanup of property before it is turned over for any other use. I don't see why we would want to write an absolute rule into the law which says that the property must be given away to a local reuse authority rather than there should be an effort made to obtain fair compensation for it. It does not say that there always must be compensation; it says that there will be an effort to seek fair compensation. There are certain ways of building discretion and flexibility into that. We have another situation where we have a significant piece of property that will be available as a result of this last round of base closures. This property has immense value. I don't know that we can come close to equating it to the Presidio in San Francisco, but it has, nonetheless, immense value. The question is, What will the military do with this property? It is my belief that the military should keep it because part of the base that was kept open and not realigned needs the property for its own use. But the military may decide it does not need that property. It may decide that property is expendable and can be surplused. Then what? Under the Senator's amendment, extraordinarily valuable property which any developer would like to get their hands on and pay for it and pay the National Treasury money for must go for nothing to a local redevelopment authority. We cannot get any financial benefit from that land no matter how valuable if it goes to a local redevelopment authority. That is too rigid. That is too inflexible and deprives the Federal Treasury of desperately needed money, including money for cleanup. We have a huge cleanup bill for these properties. We cannot simply give away the opportunity to recoup some funds for the Federal Treasury from highly valuable land. I have lost a lot of bases in my home State. All three of our Strategic Air Command bases have been closed. We have lost other facilities, as well. I know firsthand what a complicated process this is. I do know, as the Senator from Maine says, there are occasions when property under all the circumstances should go to a local redevelopment agency without reimbursement to the Government, but there are other occasions when land is extraordinarily valuable and when people are willing to pay for that land where, if it is not going to go for a public use and it will be put up for private redevelopment, there should be some recouping to the National Treasury. I am afraid this is too rigid, and I cannot support it.

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I wonder if we could get a list of pending amendments made, unless the chairman has already done that, as to what amendments are already pending and how much time is left on those amendments.

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. Madam President, that certainly is fine with me. I always welcome the opportunity to hear from our colleagues. I understand there are a number of amendments on the side of the Senator from Virginia that may be ready to go this afternoon. We believe we have one that will be ready at 4:30.

Mr. LEVIN

Mr. LEVIN. In that case, I ask unanimous consent to lay aside the pending amendment and to call up amendment 2430.