Ed Markey

Mr. MARKEY

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the remaining time. I urge the House to embrace this amendment unanimously. It is wrong for the political, military and moral leader of the world to be taking prisoners which we have captured, putting them on planes, blindfolding them, drugging them and sending them to Syria, sending them to Uzbekistan, with the sure and certain knowledge that those prisoners are going to be tortured by countries that have already been condemned by the United States for those practices. That is wrong. It undermines our position in the world. It gives al Qaeda more ammunition to put up on al Jazeera that undermines our moral leadership. Vote ``aye'' on this very important amendment. The amendment I am offering today simply reaffirms the U.S. commitment to the Convention Against Torture by prohibiting the use of funds in contravention of laws and regulations promulgated to implement the Convention Against Torture. The U.S. signed this treaty under President Reagan, and the Senate ratified it in 1994. The House voted overwhelmingly to approve an identical amendment that I offered to the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill on March 16, 2005 by a vote of 420 to 2. That amendment, however, only applied to funds appropriated in the Emergency Supplemental. The amendment I am offering today would apply to all funds appropriated for fiscal year 2006 to the Departments of State and Justice. I am offering this amendment today because despite our commitments under this treaty and the statements made by the Administration emphasizing that the U.S. is emphatically and unambiguously against the use of torture, reports keep growing of the U.S. sending detainees to countries where they are likely to face torture, including to countries notorious for human rights violations. This practice, known as ``Extraordinary Rendition,'' amounts to nothing more than Outsourcing Torture. In order to meet its obligations under the Convention Against Torture, the Administration has been engaging in a piece of legalistic fiction. It obtains ``diplomatic assurances'' that the transferred detainee will not be tortured, and then based on these assurances it argues that our obligation under the Convention Against Torture has been satisfied because there is no longer a substantial likelihood that the person we are sending to one of these known torturing countries will, in fact, be tortured. This is a sham. If Uzbekistan, a country that has actually boiled prisoners to death says they will not torture a prisoner, can we believe them? If Syria, a country that Secretary Rice says we cannot trust, says they won't torture--can we believe them? Syria has broken off all relations with U.S. military and CIA. What does this mean for the ``diplomatic assurances'' we received from Syria? Here is what the State Department's annual human rights report says about Syria's methods of interrogation: administering electrical shocks, pulling out fingernails, forcing objects into the rectum, . . . In Uzbekistan, hundreds of protesters were recently killed under the corrupt regime of President Karimov in what human rights groups are calling a massacre. Last year former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to certify that Uzbekistan had met its human rights obligations. Why? Because the State Department found that Uzbekistan used the following interrogation techniques:--``suffocation, electric shock, rape, beatings, and boiling prisoners to death . . .'' The amendment I am offering today prohibits the use of any funds included in this bill to the contravention of our legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture, U.S. Law, and regulation. While I would have liked to include language barring the use of diplomatic assurances as the basis for renditions, I have not done so today, out of recognition that such an amendment would go beyond the scope of this bill and constitute new legislation. But what we can do today is take another step by having the U.S. Congress reaffirm that it does not support or condone torture, or rendition to countries likely to torture an individual. Throughout United States history we have encountered and defeated brutal enemies, inhumane and monstrous dictators and met with hideous violence. We take pride that even as our Nation fought for its survival against the Nazis and the Japanese Empire during World War II, that we did not ask our ``Greatest Generation'' to engage in torture or other war crimes. The legacy of the U.S. then, and now, is that we uphold our commitment to justice in the face of shadows of terror and war. The test of a nation is found as much in how it wages war as how it promotes the values of peace and democracy. That is what we must to today. I urge you to vote ``yes'' on this amendment, and say ``no'' to torture.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Harman). (Ms. HARMAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Ms. McCollum).

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. And in that 1 minute, I will say that I appreciate very much the statement by the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf). Even when he is not physically present, he is a huge spiritual presence in this Chamber when it comes to the issue of human rights and torture, and I appreciate his willingness to support this amendment. The amendment, quite simply, says that the United States, because of our support for the convention against torture, because of our support for the Geneva Convention, cannot condone the United States, after we have prisoners in our possession, sending those prisoners to other countries in the world that do not abide by the convention on torture, that do not abide by the Geneva Convention. So this amendment will make it unambiguously clear that that is a responsibility that the United States takes very seriously, and notwithstanding what goes on at Guantanamo, that when the United States has possession of a prisoner that we will not outsource torture, that we will not actually put these prisoners on planes and send them to countries which we know do engage in torture. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for her eloquent statement, and I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith).

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman, and I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mollohan).

Mr. MARKEY

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I will conclude by saying this: There are no Democrats, there are no Republicans when it comes to the issue of nuclear nonproliferation. The one thing that President Bush and John Kerry agreed upon in their Presidential debates is that this is the most important issue in the world. It may have been the only thing that they agreed upon, but they did agree upon this one issue. Now, interestingly, in the Atomic Energy Act of the United States, in 1954, it is, in fact, a requirement under our law that if another nation is in violation of the agreement, that the nuclear materials which we give to that country is not used for peaceful purposes, that all of the materials that we have sent to that country must be returned to our country. What this amendment says is that as a member of the United Nations and the IAEA, that we now will extend this not just to the United States, but to all countries in the world; that the IAEA must enforce a requirement that if a country is in violation of its agreement to use materials only for peaceful purposes, then the IAEA must act immediately to begin the process of reclaiming all of the material that all of the countries of the world have sent to that country which is in violation of the law. We must put teeth in this law. We must not allow the short-term diplomatic or political agenda of any President or any Secretary of State, Democrat or Republican, to interfere with the overarching goal of ensuring that nuclear weapons are not used anywhere on this planet at any time. And so I urge all Members to support this amendment. It goes a long way in sending a message to the rest of the world that the United States intends on being the leader on the issue of nuclear nonproliferation, regardless of which other country in the world is involved and regardless of which other country in the world was the supplier of those materials. We will be the moral leader. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, in the 35 years since the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has been in force, much has changed around the world, but what has not changed is the danger inherent in the spread of nuclear weapons. My amendment says that the President of the United States shall direct the United States permanent representative to the IAEA to use their influence and their vote to secure an agreement within the IAEA requiring that any member state of the NPT that is in breach of the treaty or withdraws from the treaty must return any nuclear materials or technology acquired for peaceful purposes. Now, why is this amendment needed? Well, for the first time in the treaty's history, one country has withdrawn from the treaty. In 2002, international inspectors were asked to leave North Korea, and, in 2003, North Korea withdrew from the nonproliferation treaty. And just this year North Korea announced to the world that it has nuclear weapons; all the while, North Korea is allowed to keep any and all nuclear materials, nuclear technology, and assistance they receive as a member of the NPT. So while considerable diplomatic activity has taken place to try to convince North Korea to reverse its action, there is actually no rule in place now at the IAEA that would require North Korea to return all of the nuclear materials it received. My amendment would mandate that the President direct the United States permanent representative at the IAEA to secure such an agreement amongst the IAEA member states. This type of requirement is not just important because of North Korea. Currently we have Iran declaring its rights to pursue all nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, it says. The United States and Europe are worried that Iran has a clandestine nuclear weapons program, but all the while Iran is insisting on its right to receive all nuclear materials, nuclear technology, and assistance for its peaceful program. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos).

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. MARKEY

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Missouri for this time. I made a request to the Rules Committee that we be able, on this House floor, to debate a very important issue, but permission was denied, even though this subject goes to the core of who we are as Americans. The issue is a concept called ``extraordinary rendition.'' That is a situation where the United States has a prisoner in its possession. We have him. We control that prisoner. And, yet, because we receive diplomatic assurances from another country, a country that does not abide by the convention against torture, we send the prisoner to that country. Now, these are just not ordinary countries that we send these prisoners too. These are countries like Syria; these are countries like Uzbekistan. The United States, in other words, has captured someone. We believe that they are a terrorist. We believe that they are a threat to our country. We have them in our own possession. By receiving these diplomatic assurances, we send these prisoners to other countries, knowing that there is a high likelihood that these people will be tortured. If Syria, for example, a country that Secretary Rice says we cannot trust, says that they will not torture someone who we have sent to them, can we really trust them? Just this week, Syria broke off all relations with the United States military and the CIA. What does this mean for the diplomatic assurances that we received from Syria? Did we really need these additional lessons to know that they do not abide by the convention against torture? Just this week in the New York Times there was a story about a case in which hooded operatives, in the middle of the night, took two Swedish prisoners to Egypt in a CIA-operated Gulfstream. Here is what the story said: one agent quickly slit their clothes with a pair of scissors. Another agent checked the suspects' hair, mouth and lips, while a third agent took photographs from behind. As prisoners stood there, naked and motionless, they were zipped into gray track suits and their heads were covered with hoods. The suspects were then marched in chains to the plane where they were strapped to mattresses on the floor of the cabin. The two Egyptians later told lawyers, relatives, and Swedish diplomats that they were subjected to electric shocks and other forms of torture. This is wrong. We should have had a vote here on the floor of Congress on this practice to prohibit it. And I regret that we will not. And I think it is a great deficiency in the debate we are having over the conduct of the war.

Mr. MARKEY

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, the amendment which the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt), the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) and I are offering would take $15.5 million from the Committee on Appropriations, which was added on to the President's request for reprocessing and nuclear waste management, and reallocate these funds to programs that would improve energy efficiency. We are offering this amendment today because we believe that now is the time to undo a policy first adopted back in the 1970s which discourages reprocessing of commercial spent fuel. We believe that nonproliferation risks associated with reprocessing are too great, that reprocessing is not economical and the additional funds recommended for reprocessing would be better spent on improving our Nation's energy efficiency. First, reprocessing presents grave proliferation risks. President Ford first put this ban on reprocessing in place. It gives us the high moral ground as we look at the North Koreans and Iranians to tell them not to do it. It only makes sense. Secondly, reprocessing is not economical. It would only be economical if, in fact, there was not a glut of uranium, which is what it is that we have in the world today. Third, reprocessing is not safe. Twenty tons of highly radioactive material leaked from a broken pipe at a nuclear reprocessing plant in the United Kingdom in April of this year. This area is going to remain closed for a long, long time. Fifth, the $15.5 million appropriated for reprocessing and interim storage would be better spent on energy efficiency priorities. It would be better to just use it to work smarter and not harder. The more efficient that we make our society is the absolute fastest way in order to guarantee that we would make ourselves less dependent upon imported oil, not moving along the route that this $15.5 million appropriation would move it. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Chairman, again, this is a huge moment. This is a decision to reverse a policy which is 30 years old. It has gone through Presidents, Democrat and Republican, going back to Gerald Ford, which essentially says to the North Koreans, to the Iranians, to every other country in the world, we are not going to reprocess our civilian-spent fuel; you should not do it either. You should stay away from it. This is too dangerous. We otherwise will wind up preaching temperance from a bar stool. We will be in a situation where we will be reprocessing civilian-spent fuel into plutonium, and we will be trying to tell the rest of the world that they should not do it. It would be like your father telling you that you should not smoke with a pack of Camels in his hand. It just does not work. You have to have some standard as a Nation on a policy as important as the reprocessing of plutonium in order to take that position and be a leader worldwide. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee). (Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the remainder of my time. Mr. Chairman, this amendment goes to a central, fundamental question which this Congress is going to decide this evening. The Senate yesterday resolved something they called the nuclear option. This is the real nuclear option. This is the nuclear option which the rest of the world is going to look at: are we going back to nuclear reprocessing? Are we going to become the leader in a technology which we are telling the rest of the world we do not believe they should have, especially since we do not even need it? So this question of nuclear weapons in the world, nuclear proliferation, this issue is a central issue in determining whether or not we are going to be the leader or we are going to be spreading these technologies across the planet. Vote ``aye'' on the Markey amendment. The amendment that the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt), the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) and I are offering would take the $15.5 million that the Appropriations Committee added onto the President's request for the reprocessing and nuclear waste management and reallocate these funds to programs that would improve energy efficiency. We are offering this amendment today because we believe that now is not the time to undo a policy first adopted back in 1970s which discourages reprocessing of commercial spent fuel. We believe that nonproliferation risks associated with reprocessing are too great, that reprocessing is not economical, and that the additional funds recommended for reprocessing would be better spent on improving our nation's energy efficiency. Reprocessing represents grave proliferation risks. Just look at North Korea. It has been reprocessing spent fuel from its reactors to use in nuclear bombs. In response, President Bush has asked the Nuclear Suppliers Group to limit access to reprocessing technology, arguing that: This step will prevent new states from developing the means to produce fissile material for nuclear bombs. How are we going to credibly ask the rest of the world to support us when we tell North Korea, Iran or any other nation that they cannot have the full fuel cycle and they can't engage in reprocessing, when we are preparing to do the same thing right here in America? It just won't fly. You cannot preach nuclear temperance from a barstool. That is why President Gerald Ford called for an end to commercial reprocessing back in 1976, and why no President since then has successfully revived reprocessing. Reprocessing also is not economical. A MIT study puts the cost of reprocessing at four times that of a once-through nuclear power. The current price of concentrated uranium ``yellowcake'' in the spot market is about $53.00 per kilogram. For reprocessing to be economical, there must be a sustained 8-fold increase in the long-term price of uranium. But the world is faced with a uranium glut. In addition, building a reprocessing plant would be enormously expensive. Consider Japan's nearly completed Rokkasho reprocessing plant--20 years in the making. Just building it cost on the order of $20 billion. But the total cost of Rokkasho when you factor in the full life-cycle costs--including construction, operation and decommissioning costs--is estimated to be $166 billion. Uranium costs would have to soar to 20 times what they are today for this to be economically viable. In France, Cadarache's ATPu MOX plant has ceased commercial activity because it is not economical, but it plans to fabricate test MOX assemblies to send here. In Russia, they too have closed their reprocessing plant, RT-1, and still have not opened its successor, RT- 2. The record is becoming clearer, reprocessing is not economical. Why would we think that the U.S. is immune from the fundamental laws of economics? Reprocessing will not alleviate the nuclear waste problem. Talk to the folks at Savannah River where over 30 million gallons of high-level were left behind from reprocessing. Under this bill, Savannah River may be targeted again for interim storage for spent fuel, awaiting reprocessing. So might Hanford and Idaho. In fact the bill report targets all DOE sites, federally owned sites, non-federal fuel storage facilities, and even closed military sites. The Appropriations Committee Report (page 124) calls for DOE to provide ``an implementation plan for such early acceptance of commercial spent fuel, transportation to a DOE site, and centralized interim storage at one or more DOE sites.'' If appropriate DOE sites can't be found, the Report recommends that the nuclear waste be stored at ``other federally-owned sites, closed military bases, and non- federal fuel storage facilities.'' The Report calls for DOE to prepare a plan for centralized interim storage within 120 days of enactment of the bill, and states its belief that DOE ``already has authority for these actions under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended.'' So, if you just had a military base in your district closed by the BRAC, you might be a candidate to get a nuclear waste dump. Talk about adding insult to injury. Reprocessing sites will become defacto nuclear waste dumps. The spent nuclear fuel cannot even be handled to be reprocessed for 5 to 15 years--it is so radioactive. And what will happen to all this waste when the hard reality of the disastrous economics combined with the fact that our government deep in deficit cannot afford to subsidize this anymore? Reprocessing is not safe. Twenty tons of highly radioactive material leaked from a broken pipe at a Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in the United Kingdom in April of this year. The affected area of the Sellafield plant will remain closed for months as officials devise a way of cleaning up the mess. Special robots may have to be built to clean up the waste as the area is too radioactive for people to enter. Senior officials at the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which owns the Sellafield reprocessing are pushing to close the plant altogether, arguing that it is more cost-effective to close the plant now rather than repair the problems only to decommission the plant as planned in 2012. The MIT Study said this about safety: We are concerned about the safety of reprocessing plants, because of the large radioactive material inventories, and because the record of accidents, such as waste tank explosion at Chelyabinsk in the FSU [Russia], the Hanford waste tank leakages in the United States and the discharges to the environment at the Sellafield plant in the United Kingdom. The $15.5 million appropriated for reprocessing and interim storage would be better spent on energy efficiency priorities. Under the Markey-Holt amendment, the $15.5 million added to the bill by the Committee for reprocessing and interim storage of nuclear waste would be transferred over to three under-funded domestic energy supply priority programs, as follows: $8.5 million would be added for Industrial Technologies (which was cut by $16.5 million from current levels). Despite the fact that manufacturing makes up 35 percent of the nation's energy use, this bill would cut the industrial energy efficiency program to help manufacturers deal with high energy costs and develop innovative technologies from $93 million in FY 2004 to $76 million in FY 2005, and now the House proposes $58 million in FY 2006. We are heading in the wrong direction. We are trying to maintain manufacturing jobs. We need to cut energy use and improve technology, since we can't cut wages to equate to China and India. This is a national security issue. Do we want to vacate the field in the key areas of steel, plastics, aluminum, chemicals, forest products, glass and metal casting? We need domestic production and this program helps make our domestic industries more energy efficient. $3.5 million would be added for State Energy Program Grants (which was cut $3.8 million from current levels). A recent study by Oak Ridge National Laboratories concluded that for every federal dollar in the State Energy Program: (1) $7.22 in annual energy cost savings are produced; (2) $11.29 in leveraged funds are provided from the states and private sector in 18 different project areas; (3) over $333 million is saved through annual cost savings (the appropriation is only $44 million in FY 2005); (4) 48 million source BTUs are saved--or 8 million barrels of oil; (5) 826,049 metric tons of carbon are saved; (6) 135.8 metric tons of volatile organic compounds are reduced; (7) 6,211 metric tons of NOX are reduced; and (8) 8,491 metric tons of SOX are reduced. $3.5 million would be added for the Distributed Energy and Electricity Reliability Program (which was cut by $4.8 million from current levels). This program is aimed at developing the ``next generation'' of clean, efficient, reliable, and affordable distributed energy technologies that make use of combined heat and power systems. The Department of Energy has established a goal of increasing installed combined heat and power systems from 66 Gigawatts in 2000 to 92 Gigawatts by 2010. As of 2004, this program is well on track, with 81 Gigawatts of installed power. However, much of the remaining potential for CHP systems is in small scale systems that are below 20 megawatts and employ micro-turbines, fuel cells and other technologies. This program needs full funding to continue delivering the benefits of increased reliability, security, efficiency and lower emissions to the U.S. economy. Let me reiterate that my transfer amendment would still leave both reprocessing and nuclear waste disposal fully-funded at the levels requested in the President's budget, but would only reallocate money added by the Appropriations Committee. In addition, the Congressional Budget Office informs me that ``This amendment has no effect on budget authority and would reduce outlays by $1 million for FY 2006.'' Under the Markey-Holt amendment, we transfer these funds to energy efficiency programs that will provide our nation with a much better value for the dollar than the incremental investment in a nuclear reprocessing technology that is expensive, that poses serious nuclear nonproliferation risks, and which threatens to create new nuclear waste dumps at sites around the country. I urge you to vote ``yes'' on the Markey-Holt-Inslee amendment.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I am willing to accept the gentleman's acceptance. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Hobson).

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote, and pending that, I make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, could you tell us how much time is remaining on either side.