Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, what the administration said and did not say removes any doubt: Secretary Rumsfeld must go. A Los Angeles Times story dated May 12, which I will enter into the Record, may prove to be the defining moment when the administration could no longer hide behind the PR spin because their own words were spinning out of control. Not only did this administration fail to tell Congress about the prisoner abuse in Iraq, it also failed to tell the United States Supreme Court at a time and a place when it should have. On the very day that CBS News first broadcast pictures of prisoner abuse, the administration stood before the United States Supreme Court. The case involved the rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The administration claims that prisoners held in Cuba are enemy combatants who can be held indefinitely without charges and without the protection of the Geneva Convention. The Deputy Solicitor General representing the United States invoked the ``Trust us'' defense in urging the Nation's highest court to side with the President. The lawyer did not know about the abuses in Iraq and the photos, but his client, Rumsfeld's Department of War knew, and said nothing. The Supreme Court, like the rest of America, like the entire world, was kept in the dark. On the very day that the prisoner abuse pictures were first shown, a lawyer for the administration stood before the Supreme Court and said only the executive branch should have the power to decide the fate of detainees. In response to that line of reasoning, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked, ``Suppose the executive says mild torture will help get a little information?'' The question was asked with no knowledge that torture had been used in Iraq. What answer did the administration's lawyer give Justice Ginsburg? The Deputy Solicitor General told the court that abuses would be a crime. The Supreme Court justice asked the attorney to elaborate on his remarks. The administration attorney said, quote, ``Our executive does not commit such abuses.'' The administration's attorney added, and again I quote, ``You have to recognize that in situations where there is a war, where the government is on war footing, then you have to trust the executive.'' ``Trust us.'' Well, Mr. Speaker, America did and look what happened. At last count 1,600 pictures of prisoner abuse have scarred the Nation and shocked the world. Instead of full disclosure, the administration remains in full denial. The President says the Secretary is doing a superb job. Superb job of what? Destroying our credibility overseas? Demoralizing the American people? Denying that soldiers follow orders? The administration says, ``Trust us,'' then blames a handful of low- ranking soldiers instead of looking up the chain of command, right up to the very top. ``Trust us.'' Well, Mr. Speaker, America did, and the administration sent soldiers off to war without adequate body armor. ``Trust us.'' Well, Mr. Speaker, America did, and the administration unilaterally told thousands of soldiers they were staying in Iraq instead of coming home as they were promised. ``Trust us.'' Mr. President, we did and look what happened. We are fresh out of trust, Mr. Speaker, in America, and around the world. It is time for Rumsfeld to go before we try and hand off sovereignty to the Iraqis. They will never be able to deal with our Secretary of war because nobody trusts him. Mr. Speaker, at this point I will insert into the Record the newspaper article I referred to earlier. [From the Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2004] Abuse Flap May Ruin Bush Team's ``Trust Us'' Argument on Detainees Washington.--The photos of abused Iraqi prisoners not only have shaken the Bush administration but also may have ruined its Supreme Court defense of its handling of terrorism suspects, some legal experts say. ``Their argument has been `trust us,' and that argument has been deeply undermined,'' said Yale University professor Harold Koh, an international law specialist who served in the Clinton administration. Before the court last month, the administration argued that the president and his military commanders have exclusive power to decide the fate of those captured in the war on terrorism. The court has yet to rule. Shortly after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan, the administration declared that people captured there and shipped to Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions: They were not prisoners of war but rather ``unlawful enemy combatants,'' falling outside both international law and U.S. law. International legal specialists criticized this decision to create ``a law-free zone.'' The Supreme Court surprised the Bush administration by taking up the issue. During arguments April 28, administration lawyers told the court that, in wartime, the federal courts have no power to hear claims from the imprisoned men. Only the executive branch should decide their fate. ``Suppose the executive says mild torture will help get information?'' asked Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Committing such ``an atrocity'' against a prisoner would be a crime punishable by court-martial, replied Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement. When pressed further, he added, ``our executive doesn't'' commit such abuses. ``You have to recognize that in situations where there is a war . . . you have to trust the executive.'' That same evening, CBS aired the first photos of soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners. Two days later, the Supreme Court justices began working on their opinions in the case. ``In a close and difficult case like this, this could tip the scales,'' said Michael J. Glennon, an international law specialist at Tufts University. ``The overriding issue in these cases has been to what extent can you trust the executive to police itself.'' A former Bush administration lawyer who advised the White House on wartime issues said the Iraqi prison scandal should have no effect on the court's decision. ``It is a false analogy. These are two separate and different kinds of detainees,'' said John C. Yoo, a law professor.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to offer congratulations and best wishes to Sonia Gandhi, India's next Prime Minister. India, the word's largest democracy, reminds us that people can change the course of their country without violence. In these troubled times, India has given us another valuable lesson. It is not the first time the world has looked to India and learned. Another Gandhi changed his country and changed the world by relying on ideas instead of violence, by believing in people and the common good. Mahatma Gandhi once said, ``You must be the change you wish to see in the world.'' How true those words are today. The voices of a billion Indians have spoken, and India today stands tall in the international community. We look forward to working toward peace with the Indian people and their new Prime Minister.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Dr. Lee L. Huntsman, who will soon complete his term as president of the University of Washington. I want to acknowledge his service to the State of Washington, to the students, faculty and staff of the University, and to the Nation. Research universities like the University of Washington are essential to the economic, cultural and educational vitality of the United States. The University of Washington is unquestionably one of the great research and educational institutions in this country. The University of Washington plays a key role in carrying out the scientific and research agenda set by Congress. Over the last 8 years Dr. Huntsman has provided key leadership as provost and president, helping the UW establish itself as one of the most innovative and entrepreneurial universities in America. Dr. Huntsman took the helm of this great educational enterprise and helped to move it forward. His integrity, intellect and incisive thinking have given the Regents an opportunity to continue their work and have enlightened and inspired the efforts of the entire community of the University of Washington. We are grateful to Dr. Huntsman for answering the call to public service and for doing so in such a principled and congenial way.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the President's new PR offensive in Iraq is offensive. The President sent Secretary Rumsfeld to Iraq. He should have sent him to see the Red Cross instead. This administration remains in denial over the prisoner abuses in Iraq. They think creating a photo op in Iraq will somehow divert attention from the photos that shock the world. Justice is not a PR stunt in Iraq. The responsibility is not a sound bite from Secretary Rumsfeld telling Americans from Iraq that he is in charge. Accountability is not a mug shot from the prison where policies that shame America spun out of control. Mr. President, this is a crisis of worldwide scope. Landing on an aircraft, Mr. Speaker, will not help. Standing your guy up in Iraq will not help. Pretending it will go away will not help. Put away the banner, Mr. President, because America is in the midst of a crisis. We are just beginning to comprehend the magnitude of the abuse at one prison in Iraq, and we are beginning to hear of abuses that may have taken place elsewhere. This PR stunt will be seen around the world as just that, and it will only make matters worse. Restoring America's credibility in the world will take America confronting this awful thing. The people mugging for the camera are the people who ought to be at the center of a complete and impartial investigation. Anything less will be a cover-up plan in plain sight. The world simply will not allow it. Every day the questions and comments worldwide get just tougher and tougher. From the Gulf News, today's editorial is entitled ``Inside Afghan's Prisons, U.S. Abuses are Shrouded in Mystery.'' Singapore's Straits Times newspaper carries the commentary today entitled ``Torture and the Politics of Ambiguity.'' I will insert these newspaper articles into the Record at this point. [From the Straits Times, May 13, 2004] Torture and the Politics of Ambiguity (By Michael Manning) Each new revelation of physical abuse, maltreatment and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers shocks international public opinion, leaving officials to scramble desperately to contain the damage. United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warns that more documentary evidence of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib prison lies in store, evidently in the preemptive hope that the outrages stopped there. As a former US military intelligence interrogator, I am convinced that the images from Abu Ghraib are just the beginning. The wanton cruelty there is all too clearly symptomatic of a systemic failure. But what system failed? Was it a failure of discipline and training--the result of sending inexperienced and unworldly reservists into poor conditions, abruptly extending their deployments and then leaving them understaffed in the face of a growing influx of captured insurgents? Or did the pattern of abuse amount to so many orders from superiors to ``soften up'' prisoners for interrogation? The answer is, most likely, both and neither. Ultimately, what gives rise to abuses such as occurred at Abu Ghraib is a policy of deliberate ambiguity concerning how to handle detainees. The pressure in a war setting to get information that could save lives is immense. But senior political and military officials--particularly in democracies--prefer to avoid any association with torture. Ambiguity is thus a political strategy that encourages the spread of implicit, informal rules of behavior, thereby shifting accountability onto the lowest ranking, least powerful and most expendable soldiers. I completed the US Army's three-month basic interrogation course in the late 1980s. It was rigorous--only seven of 33 students finished it--as it required mastering the technical minutiae of collecting, cross-checking, standardising and reporting enormous masses of information. But the curriculum was much less meticulous concerning interrogation techniques. An interrogation, we were instructed, should begin with polite, direct questioning, because a certain number of detainees simply want to unburden themselves. If more persuasion was needed, we could offer rewards for cooperation--anything from cigarettes to political asylum. Beyond this, we were taught that we could ``apply pressure.'' The term was never defined in any formal setting, but the concept was not difficult to decipher. As US Army General Antonio Taguba's report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib put it, the ``guard force'' was ``actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.'' This obvious violation of the Army's rule prohibiting participation by military police in interrogation sessions does not surprise me. I was never taught that military police came under a separate chain of command. On the contrary, between classes, during breaks in field training and in other informal settings, some of our instructors let it be known through insinuation and innuendo that we could have the guards beat uncooperative subjects. This was never said in the classroom, but it was made clear the role of military police was to serve the interrogators, for an interrogator's effectiveness depends on convincing the detained of his omnipotence. The hidden rules of the game came closest to being officially acknowledged during two weeks of simulated interrogations towards the end of the training course. These sessions involved only a student interrogator, and instructor in the role of the detainee and a video camera. When, during a simulation, I asked an imaginary guard to take away the detainee's chair, the instructor feigned being removed violently. When I told the non-existent guard to hit the detainee, the instructor played along. All of us knew that a failed interrogation could mean being dropped from the course. I was not dropped; I finished first in my class. For those who benefit from the politics of ambiguity, international law is an indispensable prop. In his recent US Senate testimony, Mr. Rumsfeld claimed that the military police at Abu Ghraib were instructed to abide by the Geneva conventions. So was I. Throughout my training as an interrogator, the admonition to follow the Geneva conventions accompanied virtually every discussion of ``applying pressure.'' Unfortunately, like ``applying pressure,'' the Geneva conventions were never defined. We never studied them, nor were we given a copy to read, much less tested on their contents. For many of us, the conventions were at best a dimly remembered cliche from war movies that meant, ``don't do bad stuff.'' Again, the tacit rules said otherwise. One instructor joked that although the Geneva conventions barred firing a 50- caliber machine gun at an enemy soldier, we could aim at his helmet or backpack, since these were ``equipment.'' Others shared anecdotes about torturing detainees. Whether such talk was true is irrelevant. We were being conditioned to believe that the official rules set no clear limits, and that we could therefore set the limits wherever we liked. In the end, the politics of ambiguity may fail Mr. Rumsfeld; all those high-resolution photographs from Abu Ghraib are anything but ambiguous. If similarly shameful disclosures multiply, as I believe they will, let us at least hope that official apologies and condemnations may finally give way to wider, more genuine accountability and reform.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the ship of state sails without a rudder. Increasingly, the world sees our presence in Iraq as an occupation, not a liberation. Any talk of democracy has been replaced with images of brute and brutal force. The President talks about a superb Cabinet Secretary, but America and the world reel in horror and shame over what was done in the name of defending our country. If only the administration had paid attention. The Red Cross knew, but the administration would not listen. American leadership and credibility have cratered deeper and deeper, yet the administration remains deaf to what happened and the need to act. The administration heaps praise on one of its own, even as it seeks to silence the images. They sent him to Iraq, I guess, to get him out of town, but the images have stirred the world. As it has for so long, the world looks to America again today. But today, the world looks with eyes averted, because the images that today define America in no way resemble America.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, let us be honest about what is going on out here today. It is Thursday. We are going home. They have got a fund-raiser tonight. The Republicans wanted to hang around for that. We have got to have something to put in the Saturday news that will kind of blot out what is happening in Iraq. So let us get this tax bill out here. We load up the cannon and we will get the rubber-stamp Congress in here and they will go bam-bam, and whatever the President says. You know, I think if the President said, I want the Republicans to come and stand on their head in the aisles, they would be down here in droves. This Congress is not thinking. Mr. Speaker, I submit for printing in the Congressional Record an article entitled ``All Quiet on the House Side'' from the Washington Post of May 11. That article goes on to lay out what this Congress has not done. Thirty-five of our people were killed in Iraq last week. Many more were injured. People have seen these pictures of abuse. They have been looking at it all. And what did the House do? Well, we named some post offices. That seemed pretty important. Last week, the Nation learned that the Federal debt reached an all-time high of $7.13 trillion. What did we do? Well, we said they could use the Capitol grounds to have the soapbox derby. That was a very important way we responded to that. Yesterday the Bush Department of Commerce announced that our trade deficit and the amount of money that this Nation borrows from foreigners to pay for our imports, from the Chinese to the Saudis, hit an all-time high. We are in the debt of the Chinese and the Saudis. Just do not ever forget that, because that is what we are doing. You are paying your taxes so we can pay interest on debt that we borrowed from the Saudis and the Chinese. If you read some of the books around town, the President is probably going to call the Prince of Saudi Arabia and ask him to produce some more oil so we can lower the price. That is, if you believe Bob Woodward's book. Secondly, the majority leader has dismissed the idea of any kind of investigation. And, third, despite the record-high budget and trade deficit, they come out here asking for more tax cuts that will disproportionately help the wealthy. When this passes today, there will be 225 Republicans or 300 Republicans, or whatever, I do not know how many, they will all be out here going home with their press release under their arm saying, I helped you. What they do not tell people is what this means in terms of long-term debt. They are going to say, well, but this is for the middle class. The amount of money that goes to the middle class is less than goes to the people on the top of the pyramid. This is not a tax cut for the middle class. It is really a tax cut for the people on the top, and there was no way to exclude the middle class so they had to get a few of the drippings off the edge of the table. My colleagues remember that story about Lazarus the beggar who was sitting on the floor, waiting for some crumbs to fall off the table. That is the middle class of this country according to this President. He ought to read that story about Lazarus. There is a real message there that I think gets lost in this whole process. In today's clips, you will also find a quote from our chairman, excuse me, our ranking member for the moment, who said, ``We don't want our grandkids to pay higher taxes tomorrow to pay for our tax cuts today. So all we are saying is don't take credit for extending the tax cuts on the one hand while you're breaking your promise to balance the budget for your children.'' Nobody looking at what is going on in the world today could possibly say you know where you are going. You made these tax cuts in the first place when you were going downhill 100 miles an hour and you said, oh, if we cut the taxes, it will be all better. The proof is going to be in the pudding on election day. The fact is that on election day, you are going to find out whether all your hot air that you have blown into the economy really turns out to be real or not. In February, you created 21,000 jobs. We have got to remember that it takes 250,000 jobs every month to keep up with the increase in population in this country. If you do not create 250,000 jobs, you are not even keeping up with the problem. They created 21,000 jobs. All government jobs, by the way. Not a single private sector. Then they came to March. This was their big winner, 308,000 jobs. Well, that is about keeping up. Then the next month they came up with 280-something thousand and, my goodness, they kept up one more month. But they have done nothing about the 2.25 million jobs that they lost over the last 3 years. They have also produced the highest long-term unemployment rate since the Second World War and they want to make another tax cut today. There is an old country saying that some of the people probably know about: When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing is, stop digging. The Republicans believe that the faster you dig, the better you are going to get out of the hole. We had to dig you out in 1993 under Mr. Clinton. We dug you out and you just went back to get your shovel and start digging a hole again. Please stop digging. Mr. Speaker, I include the following article from the Washington Post: [From the Washington Post, May 11, 2004] All Quiet On the House Side democrats say gop is evading debate (By Charles Babington) The week of April 26 was eventful and troubling for the nation, yet curiously brief and serene for the House of Representatives. Thirty-five U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq. CBS aired shocking photos of Americans abusing prisoners near Baghdad. The federal debt reached an all-time high, more than $7.13 trillion. In the House, meanwhile, members returned to Washington on Tuesday of that week for three quick, unanimous votes at nightfall. They renamed a post office in Rhode Island, honored the founder of the Lions Clubs, and supported ``the goals and ideals of Financial Literacy Month.'' The next day, Wednesday, was a bit busier. After naming a Miami courthouse for a dead judge, House members debated how to extend the popular repeal of the tax code's ``marriage penalty.'' The only real issue was whether to pass the Democratic or Republican version. The GOP plan prevailed, 323 to 95. After two days and one night of desultory activity--roughly their average workweek this year--House members packed up and rushed home to their districts. Despite the burgeoning scandal over U.S. treatment of Iraqi prisoners and persistent concerns about the economy and the deficit, the House has been keeping bankers' hours. The House's lean schedule is no accident. GOP leaders who set the agenda and floor schedule say they achieved most of their top priorities last year--including enactment of a Medicare prescription drug bill and the third round of President Bush's tax cuts--and are content to rest on their laurels through the election. While other House priorities are stuck in the Senate, House Republicans believe they have the best of all worlds: They can take credit for the enacted legislation and blame Senate Democrats for bottling up the rest of their agenda. ``Last year we sent a lot of legislation to the Senate, and we don't want to overload them,'' House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex) told reporters last week. ``They're already overloaded. . . . We need to be here passing good legislation, doing the people's work and not doing a bunch of make-work.'' House Democrats see a more cynical motive. The GOP majority, they say, wants a complacent Congress that will raise few questions about the Bush administration, despite the international uproar over the prison abuse scandal in Iraq and recent damaging revelations about Bush's decision to go to war. ``Given all the issues and problems the country faces, it's scandalous that we're only coming in to work three days a week, and even then most of the time we're renaming post offices,'' said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). ``This is a deliberate effort to keep Congress out of town, keep us from asking questions.'' House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) noted that senators held three committee hearings on the prison abuses before House leaders summoned Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the Armed Services Committee last Friday--a day that the Senate was meeting but the House was not. DeLay dismissed the idea of a full-fledged congressional investigation, which he likened to ``saying we need an investigation every time there's police brutality on the street.'' Pelosi complained: ``Americans are out of work. Our troops are in danger in Iraq. Our reputation is in shreds throughout the world. And we're leaving early afternoon on Thursday.'' She also said, ``The House of Representatives has demonstrated that it is nothing more than a rubber stamp for the administration.'' Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, contends that the House's anemic work schedule is symptomatic of the larger problem of political gridlock. He said lawmakers are ``probably realistic in saying, `We're not spending much time here because we know that nothing would get done.' '' He added, however, that ``if they stuck around and talked to each other, maybe they could figure something out.'' Last week's House action was typical in many ways. It featured bitterly partisan arguments over the Iraq war, in the House chamber and in dueling news conferences. But the main bills approved were a resolution condemning the prison abuses and a long-expected one-year extension of a provision to protect millions of Americans from the alternative minimum tax--a temporary measure that postpones difficult decisions about a major looming problem. The week of April 19 was similar. The House held three votes Tuesday night, all unanimous and all renaming post offices. On Wednesday, members quickly passed five bills without debate, under ``suspension'' rules. The one drawing the most opposition--14 nay votes--endorsed research and development into ``green chemistry.'' Thursday was that week's busiest day, as Republicans and Democrats vigorously debated a ``continuity of government'' bill, meant to ensure that Congress could function if many lawmakers perished in a terrorist attack. The measure, which passed 306 to 97, would require states to hold special elections within 45 days if at least 100 House members were killed. As usual, members had Monday, Friday and most of Tuesday free of Washington-based duties. Meanwhile, the U.S. military campaign in Iraq had one of its bloodiest weeks ever. Shells killed 22 Iraqi prisoners near Baghdad one day, and suicide bomb blasts killed 68 people in Basra--many of them children--the next. Violence in the besieged city of Fallujah continued, and 14 U.S. servicemen were killed during the week. The week before that, the House was in recess, as it plans to be the week of May 24, the week of June 28, the six weeks starting July 26, and all of October, November and December. John Feehery, spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R- Ill.), defended the House's accomplishments and pace. ``Last year we sent a lot of things over to the Senate, and they're sitting in Tom Daschle's back pocket,'' he said, referring to the Senate minority leader, from South Dakota. Those bills include tort reform to curb medical malpractice suits, energy legislation, and welfare reauthorization. This year, Feehery said, ``we've passed a lean budget'' for fiscal 2005. ``We're working very hard to keep the president's tax cuts in place. We're monitoring the situation in Iraq'' and will appropriate extra funds as needed. House committees, he said, ``have done a lot of oversight on the Iraq war,'' primarily aimed at seeing that money is well spent. The House does not need showy inquiries in front of cameras to fulfill its watchdog obligations, Feehery said. ``Our oversight is not politically motivated, which probably frustrates the Democrats,'' he said. ``It's motivated by better governance.'' Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a top adviser in the Clinton White House, is unconvinced. ``We can name post offices,'' Emanuel said, ``or we can ask the hard questions about the direction of our nation.''

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the gentleman from California's (Mr. George Miller) time.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the debate over the war in Iraq should not be derailed by the tragedy overwhelming the Berg family. That would be a victory against America that al Qaeda is hoping for. No Republican or Democrat should do or say anything except that we are profoundly sorry for their loss. The country and Congress must remain focused on those responsible for the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison. The administration would have us believe that the abuses were the work of a few rogue soldiers, but accounts from some of those directly involved tell a different story. Today's Washington Post and other media worldwide are reporting on interviews and testimony given by soldiers. A private seen in the photos told the news media she was ``just following orders.'' The general in charge of the prison says she was confronted by a superior and told ``my way or the hard way.'' From the Middle East, a 16-year-old Iraqi alleges he was subjected to a mock execution in front of his family. Mr. Speaker, I will include for the Record several news accounts. The military commanders and civilians at the Pentagon cannot agree on who was in charge and what policies were approved. That is what happened in a scandal before. History gets rewritten. Memories fade as if on cue. From the little Congress has been able to learn in the last few days, one thing is clear; the story keeps changing. This has the look and the feel of a cover-up. The tactic is a well-known one around here: Find some scapegoats; send out surrogates to decry every call for a full and impartial investigation; act and speak like scandal is no big deal. The American people have seen a cover-up in the past by another Republican administration, and the American people refuse to accept anything less than full disclosure and the truth. It was true for the Nixon administration, it will be true for the Bush administration. We do not have time to wait for the truth to trickle out, but we certainly cannot show the world that the government leaks are how America finds the truth. These abuses will not go away, no matter how many speeches the majority leader makes trying to divert the attention of the American people. These abuses will not go away until we back our words with deeds and bring justice to everyone involved. Privates do not set policy, they follow orders. This scandal goes deeper and higher than the Congress, and the American people have been told so far. The Australian newspapers carry the story ``Rumsfeld Approved Harsh Interrogation.'' We need to know the truth, and that means we conduct the most vigorous and independent investigation ever undertaken. An investigation must begin at the top where policies were set and command decisions were made. The investigation must be widened to include Afghanistan and Guantanamo. People outside the reach of the administration should conduct an investigation. This scandal has shaken this Nation to its core. It is a scandal being televised around the world every hour of every day. Virtually no one on the face of the earth has not seen or heard about the photographs and the atrocities. Yet some of the administration insist things are not so bad. Every time a Republican steps up to the podium to undertake damage control, the words echo around the world, and the words ring hollow. Every attempt to act like this is no big deal undermines leaders in both parties who are trying to show the world that America does understand the meaning of justice and responsibility. Like it or not, and I certainly do not, we have to meet this head on. Words like torture, humiliation, and murder do apply. We have no choice but to shine the light of free and democratic society into the darkness of the scandal, whatever the outcome. No one is above the law in America and we must show the world that the rule of law prevails in this country. It is not enough for the administration to say it will not happen again when the American people do not know how it happened in the first time. It is not enough to speak an apology on one hand, and then send Republicans to the podium to act as if we were somehow permitted an injustice now and then. Freedom does not come easy, and freedom does not come with exceptions. It is not enough to name a few low-level soldiers and pretend we have addressed the issue. Administration surrogates are sent to the podium to paint Democrats, the news media, and anyone who dares to disagree as unpatriotic. The message around the world is America will do what it damn well pleases, anywhere in the world, illegal, immoral; sorry, world, we are immune. We cannot and we must not send that message. The administration cannot spin-doctor its way out of the crisis. The world simply will not allow it. We cannot spin the inhumanity displayed in 1,000 pictures. No words can mitigate the humiliation. The war in Iraq is longer about affirming democracy in a far-off land. Now the war in Iraq is about affirming democracy in the United States. [From The Age, May 13, 2004] Rumsfeld Approved ``Harsh'' Interrogation (By Julian Borger) A list of two types of interrogation techniques: one is basic and for all prisoners; the other is much tougher and requires approval. U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of ``harsh'' interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay, including stripping detainees naked, making them hold ``stress'' positions and depriving them of sleep, a Pentagon official has confirmed. Stephen Cambone, the under-secretary of defence for intelligence, also said severe interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, had been approved by military commanders in Iraq. But Mr. Cambone, Mr. Rumsfeld's top intelligence official, insisted that all U.S. soldiers in Iraq were under orders to obey the Geneva Convention. He denied that the U.S. military leadership had helped create a climate for prison abuse. Mr. Cambone was speaking at a Senate hearing to investigate the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, and to determine whether the seven low-ranking guards facing courts martial for physical and sexual abuse of prisoners were following orders. Revealing the interrogation methods allowed in Iraq, the Senate Armed Services Committee released a single page titled ``Interrogation Rules of Engagement'', listing two categories of measures. The first showed basic techniques approved for all detainees, while the second involved tougher measures that required approval by Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Among the items on the second list were stress positions for up to 45 minutes, sleep deprivation for up to 72 hours and use of muzzled dogs. Mr. Cambone said the Bush Administration's policy has been to apply the Geneva Convention to the interrogation and other treatment of detainees in Iraq, but several senators expressed doubts about whether some of the listed techniques conformed with international limits. Major-General Antonio Taguba, who wrote a damning army report on abuse at Abu Ghraib, told the committee he found no evidence ``of a policy or a direct order given to these soldiers to conduct what they did''. However, he said the scandal was a result of ``failure of leadership . . . lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and no supervision'', and he criticised a command decision to put the jail under the control of a military intelligence unit. Critics have argued that Mr. Rumsfeld's decision to suspend Geneva Convention safeguards for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and the transfer to Iraq of interrogation techniques used there, helped create the conditions for the Abu Ghraib scandal, even if no order was issued to use torture. ``The despicable actions described in General Taguba's report not only reek of abuse, they reek of an organised effort and methodical preparation for interrogation,'' Democrat Senator Carl Levin said. According to Senator Levin, an unpublished annexe to the Taguba report stated that ``sleep management, sensory deprivation, isolation longer than 30 days and dogs'' were described as a ``permissible technique for use in the Iraqi theatre'' on condition that the commanding general gave approval ``prior to employment''. Mr. Cambone said the techniques had been approved by U.S. commanders in Iraq, not by the Pentagon. However, he confirmed that Mr. Rumsfeld had last year approved a new set of techniques, but insisted on being asked for permission each time this ``stress matrix'' was used. General Taguba stood by his inquiry's finding that military police jailers should not have been involved in conditioning Iraqi detainees for interrogation, even as Mr. Cambone disputed that conclusion. Mr. Cambone said that the military policy and military intelligence needed to work closely to gain as much intelligence as possible from the prisoners. Mr. Cambone also said that General Taguba misinterpreted the November order, which he said only put the intelligence unit in charge of the prison facility, not of the military guards. While General Taguba depicted the abuses at the prison as the acts of a few soldiers under a fragmented and inept command, he also said that ``they were probably influenced by others, if not necessarily directed specifically by others''. His report called for an inquiry into the culpability of intelligence officers, which is still under way. The unusual public sparring between a two-star army general and one of Mr. Rumsfeld's most trusted aides cast a spotlight on the confusing conditions at the prison last year when the worst abuses occurred, as well as the sensitive issue of whether the Pentagon's thirst for better intelligence to combat Iraqi insurgents contributed to the climate there.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, we finally got one up here that the gentleman is not going to call a hypocrite, is he? I do not mean that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. I know that one has to be flexible when one is the chairman, because the gentleman voted for pay-go many times and said it was a good idea, and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran) got out here and gave the gentleman all that evidence. But the fact is that what we are talking about here is, you know, there are a lot of people sitting out there watching this, and they go down to the grocery store and they have a $20 bill and they say, well, I am going to buy some groceries here. So they buy what they can get with $20. That is the way a lot of people operate in this world. But the Republicans, ever since they have taken over this House, in fact you did it under Reagan, we tried this Laffer curve business and all that and went into this great big deficit, and it took Clinton to get us out. For all you want to say about Bill Clinton, he did dig us out of your mess from the Reagan years. You did not learn anything from that. So you decided let us get out our favorite two credit cards and you said, well, we got Social Security, we got a whole lot of money over there in that one, and we got a whole lot over here in the Medicare one. Let us just spend off these credit cards like wildfire. That is where you get those red blotches on the graphs. Now, the people out there, they do not understand why it is you do not want to pay as you go. Who do you think is going to pay off these credit cards? Do you think maybe it is the Democrats who are going to pay it off when we take over next time? Our job will be, how do we dig ourselves out of the hole you put us in? We are just trying to lay the groundwork for saying, hey, look, we know we are going to be in charge soon, or hope so, or, if God wills. You know, under God we do not know what will happen, but we may wind up in charge. And you have spent our credit cards into such a mess, we will have to do something. We cannot keep spending, because people are getting older. There are a lot of those baby-boomers that are coming up, and they are expecting that the money that was in the account that you have been borrowing from is going to be there for them, and they are going to find out it is empty. We are going to be caught with digging us out of the hole. Now, you may think it is funny, and you may enjoy this ride, but I will tell you something: When the baby-boomers get to be senior citizens, you are going to have a price to pay, because all this profligate spending is going to come home to roost. I think it just makes sense to adopt this resolution and go with the Senate. They are very smart over there; oh, very smart.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, my good friend from Iowa is such a good Member, and I really hate to review the bidding here, but last time I looked, Republicans had the Presidency, and they had control of the Senate and they had control of the House, and, if I am not mistaken, the Federal law says that on the 15th of April you are supposed to pass a budget. Now, if we give you all the cards, for heaven's sake, can you people not work it out? Do you have to keep fighting among yourselves? I mean, here we are, and all we are asking you is to go along with that other body. Now, I know that the gentleman is not a bad person, and I do not like to bring up this stuff about how we have voted for this. You know, you pick on guys, these other guys who voted for tax cuts. Look for me in that list.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, with everything going wrong for our war President in Iraq, it would be easy to overlook another tragedy confronting the United States. Almost 44 million people are uninsured in this country; they go without health care and hope they do not get sick. The vast majority of these people come from families where one person works full-time. By our actions, we are forcing Americans to choose between food and health care. That is not a choice. That is a cruel reality perpetuated by this administration. The administration pretends every American has health care because there are emergency rooms, and we have a cabinet Secretary who says so, knowingly misleading the American people, and we wonder why the world questions our moral leadership. Almost 44 million Americans do not have health care, and we can change that. Bills have been brought before the Congress for years, but the administration ignores them. We are going to deal with two useless ones today. Every other industrialized country offers affordable health care except us. We could change it today, but we will not under this administration. We are going to have to have an election and send the President back to Texas.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, it is always good to come out here and talk about an important issue. We have had a wartime President who has wanted to talk about war: I am a wartime President, I am doing this, I am doing that. I wish we had a domestic President who would occasionally think about what needs to be done on the domestic scene. This particular little bill is what they are going to hold out for their evidence that they care about domestic health problems in this country. Now, I do not know; it would be laughable if it was not so sad that this is the only bill that they can come up with. I know my good friend, the gentleman from Louisiana, knows, he and I share the desire for everyone to be covered in this country, and the only thing that separates us is how to do it. And for this to be offered as one of the ways that we are going to make it easier is simply, well, they will have to say they have passed something. I think it is called the flexible savings and health savings account rollover. That will be a title that will certainly sound like they did something. The idea of health savings accounts goes against the basic issue here in how we ought to be dealing with health care. We do not have any problem in thinking that we should do fire departments collectively. We do not call them socialistic or whatever. They do not look to Canada for how to run a fire department. We started that in 1754, and police departments and roads and schools, all of those issues we deal with together. But in health care we say, hey, baby, you are on your own. You and you and you and you and you, you are on your own. Now, if you have a job that takes care of you, oh, well, you are lucky; you have the plastic, you are in good shape in the lottery. I have a piece of plastic in my pocket. Everybody has one in their pocket or in their purse, and that plastic keeps you in the game. But God forbid that you do not have a piece of plastic. Now, the answer for those 40 million people in this country who do not have plastic is, well, why do you not have a health savings account? Yes, that is a good idea. You can take your money, and you can put it in that health savings account and buy yourself a $10,000 deductible program and everything that comes up you can use the money out of the health savings account to pay for it, and it will work wonderfully. The problem with this whole thing is the idea that people have $4,500, or whatever the number is, to put into their health savings account is nonsense, and it puts people on their own. The idea of putting people on their own works very well for some people in this society, people who are rich. I mean, golly, if you are the head of Enron, you have a few extra dollars, you can just throw it into a health savings account; and if you happen to have a little problem that takes your life in some direction that costs a lot of money, well, you can take it out of your pocket. But all of those employees that were working for Enron that suddenly got dumped out in the street because crooks were running the business, they do not have anything. They could have their health savings account. Maybe it would cover, maybe it would not, but where are they going after that? Enron is not coming back, so after the first year, okay, where are you going to go? How do you cover yourself in a situation when you are out there alone? The individual market in this country is a mess. No one can afford it because they can look at each one of you and say, well, you look to me like you have the possibility of X, Y and Z and we are going to charge you $1,000 a month. The average person has trouble taking that kind of insurance. So having this savings account, I put that $4,500 in I did not have, I put that in there and then I get sick. I had a friend who went in the hospital with a heart attack. He was in the hospital 2 days, and the hospital bill alone was $10,000. So it could happen to anybody. Any Member of the Congress, anybody on the street can end up in the hospital and spend that deductible just like that. Where do they have the money to pay for it? I do not know how they are going to get some of it out of this health savings account. Now, this bill is predicated on the idea that they will never get sick and that at the end of the year they are going to have some money left. The idea is at the end of the year you have not been sick so you have got this money laying in your account so you can roll it over into the next year. Well, that is a nice idea. It would probably help maybe 15, 20 people in this country, maybe even 1,000, but it does absolutely nothing for 40 million people out there with no health insurance, and this is why this is a joke. We will pass it, of course. Nobody is going to vote against it. Well, I do not know, some might, but the fact is that it is not dealing with the problem that faces us, and if our war President would pay a little more attention to the domestic and not cut taxes everywhere in sight, we would have some money. Part of the problem is what is happening at the State now, because even Medicaid is going away, lots of States do not even put senior citizens into their Medicaid program. Only 34 States have a Medicaid spend-down for seniors. This country is in a mess, and this bill does not do anything.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Wynn).

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the world is watching and waiting. As bad as it is, things will get much worse if the President and the Pentagon continue to hope it will go away. We need new leadership and a new policy right now. Release every photograph and every videotape. Get it all out in the open. America's only hope for restoring credibility is to demonstrate with its actions, not words, that we will face the truth and punish everyone responsible. We have not done that. All these ``I am sorries'' are not working. Instead, the administration has launched another ill-conceived offensive to save one of its own. We can see it on television today as they testify before the Senate Committee on Armed Services. Throw some soldiers overboard and hope the world believes they acted alone. Mr. Speaker, by all accounts, the soldiers arrived in Iraq as good, decent people. Who thinks that now, either of the soldiers or America? Clean house, from the top down, not just Mr. Rumsfeld. I see them greasing the skids; the President is 1,000 percent behind him. There are some other people that ought to go with him: Wolfowitz and a few others.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I would ask you to suspend your emotions for a moment and look closely at the pictures from Iraq. The Americans appear to be dressed about the same, but there is one major difference. Some of the photos include U.S. soldiers and U.S. civilian contractors. In fact, in one photo the civilian contractors are turned away from the camera. Maybe they were trying to protect themselves. From what? Some of the U.S. soldiers involved will face a military court martial. The civilian contractors will not face a military court or an Iraqi court or an American court. Civilian contractors involved may not face any punishment thanks to the Pentagon. Secretary Rumsfeld outsourced the President's war. He outsourced the checks and balances. He outsourced the chain of command. He outsourced due process. The Pentagon wrote an order that specifically protects civilian contractors from prosecution in Iraq for crimes committed under the umbrella of official duties, and if a civilian contractor commits a crime while off duty in Iraq, U.S. Administrator Paul Bremer has to agree in writing to local prosecution. Does that sound like the United States? Is this the model of democracy we are trying to install in Iraq? Does this sound like adhering to the Geneva Convention? Last week, the Attorney General rushed to the microphones to tell America that he can prosecute civilians implicated in Iraqi crimes, but the Attorney General neglected to tell the American people that not a single FBI agent has been dispatched to Iraq to investigate. Not one. When two U.S. embassies were bombed in Africa during the Clinton administration, 900 FBI agents went to the scene. The Attorney General says he will wait until the Pentagon finishes its investigation. What is he waiting for? The International Red Cross has been sounding the alarm for over a year, but the administration and its war machine turned a deaf ear and a deaf eye to what was happening. Now the United States and every soldier is paying the price for benign neglect. Civilians were given authority to interrogate, clearly using any and all means. Civilians had some mission control over U.S. soldiers, and they exploited this control. Civilians were immune from local prosecution and immune from military chain of command. We know there has been torture and likely even murder; yet some soldiers were involved, but we cannot stop there and pretend that is the end of it. There are thousands of civilian contractors in Iraq. We owe it to every good and decent American soldier to get to the worst black mark in military history. We must know what role, secret or otherwise, the civilians were playing in the war. What else were they given besides protection? What secret orders are they carrying out? Who is accountable for the civilians? What assurances will the Iraqi people have that any civilian implicated will be brought to justice? How can we say that we stand for freedom if we let the criminals go free? The U.S. military told the administration before the war that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed. The administration refused to listen. Instead, the administration deployed a hand-over strategy concerning Iraq. The administration handed over critical duties to people outside the military and then protected them. The administration keeps talking about handing over Iraq on June 30. They have already handed over to the wrong people. We need to get back in control of what is going on in Iraq. This administration has got to come clean on what those contractors were hired to do, by whom, and who supervises them. Are there bosses in Virginia that run those companies? Are they exempt, too? Is nobody responsible for the interrogations that went on in that prison or in the other prisons in Iraq? These are the questions that must be answered by this administration, and I am afraid that if Mr. Rumsfeld does not want to do it, he is going to have to go.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the previous speakers have talked about the attitude of the American soldier and the American public, and the rhetoric of war is what really gets us to where we are today in the situation in Iraq. When you dehumanize people, you can then do anything to them. It is my firm belief that this attitude starts at the very top. When we have someone who leads us who says that the leader of the other country is Hitler, raising all those images of a Holocaust and all the rest, or talks about the issues of being on a crusade, which raises all the issues of the various crusades that went through the Middle East back in the 11th and 12th century, we realize that the stage is being set psychologically for everyone in this country. I was reading the British press. One of their articles started, ``The media in this country is politely shocked at photos of Iraqis being tortured and humiliated by U.S. and British troops. A BBC1 news presenter says the picture seem to have been ``merely mementos.' '' Something one would laugh about in the family and then paste in the family album. Now, those young people, and I have been watching the hearings over in the Senate, the effort to limit this and say it is just seven or eight young people and perhaps a couple of lieutenants up the line but really it is a rogue operation, is simply not true. It runs all the way to the top. The decisions here have to be signed off. Anybody who has been in the military knows about the chain of command, and somebody does not sign off down at the lieutenant level and not bother to send it up to the captain or to the colonel or to the general. They all go up the line. They have all been signed off, one way or another, or somebody at the top said here is a blank check, do whatever you want, which of course they would deny. They would never say that, but then how do you explain that this behavior went on through this period of time? Another excuse that I hear thrown around here is that, well, they are not as bad as Saddam. Look what Saddam did. Well, since when is our standard Saddam Hussein? That clearly is not the standard by which we operate; but unfortunately, the attitude of the people who took us into this, the neo-cons in the administration, right next to the President, couple of them, Ken Adelman, Paul Wolfowitz, have spoken of snakes. If you want to talk about Iraqi people as snakes, I guess you can, but you pay a price in your own soul when you think of another human being as a snake or you talk about going over and draining the swamps in uncivilized parts of the world. The Arabs invented arithmetic. They invented the zero. They were some of the earliest astronomers. Do not tell me they have no civilization. But when you start to dehumanize them and put them down at this low, low level, then you send the message out verbally, nonverbally, whether it is in a memo, whether it is in written form, whether it is how you talk to your troops, you are giving permission to do what was done and to take pictures. Now, you do not take pictures of this to take home to your family album. Those pictures were done to humiliate. Everybody says, wait a minute, let me comb my hair before I have my picture taken. Everybody knows what a picture does because it grabs the moment in a way that you cannot change it. So when you take a picture of one of these events, you know what you are doing. You are doing it because somebody told you to do it or somewhere you have got the idea that what you were doing was already one or the other. Either that was an order to take those pictures, or else the atmosphere was such that people felt that they could take these pictures. We have a moment here in this country in which we can examine our own souls and our own hearts about how we let this happen. We all bear responsibility for it. Our leadership from the top on down, they always dehumanized. I remember during the Vietnam War, we had a lot of names for people who were from Vietnam, not very nice names. You would not use them today; and when that starts happening at the top, it goes down and we cannot end with putting seven soldiers in the brig. That will not be justice.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I abhor nuclear weapons and would like nothing better than to see the world free of these weapons. I believe that Iran is a nation that we cannot trust. I also believe the House Concurrent Resolution rushed through Congress by the Republicans with little debate and even less clarity in intent is wrong, and I cannot support it. The wording of the Iran Resolution reminds me of the blank check the President got for Iraq. Here's what I mean. The relevant portion of Section 2 of the Iran Resolution says: ``. . . to use all appropriate means to deter, dissuade and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. . . .'' We must not make the same mistake twice. We need to deal with Iran. We need to deal with nuclear weapons programs, but this is not the way to do it.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, we all know what is going on out here today. We are passing a CYA resolution to limit the damage. The Christian Science Monitor carries the story of Mr. Miklaszewski from NBC News who asked the question of a Pentagon official about the soldiers involved. He said, ``You mean the six morons who lost the war?'' The decision has been made in the Pentagon what they are going to do to those six, but this resolution does not go wide and deep like it ought to. This was not six young people that we are going to blame and make scapegoats and send them out in the wilderness. This has to go all of the way to Mr. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of War. A Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Herald, said, ``The pictures that lost the war. The grim images of American and British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners has taken the moral high ground from Blair and Bush.'' And the article finishes with a quote from Lieutenant Colonel Retired Bill Cowan of the United States Marines, ``We went to Iraq to stop things like this from happening; and, indeed, here they are happening under our tutelage. If we do not tell this story, these kinds of things will continue and we will end up getting paid 100 or 1,000 times.'' The other side can try and limit the damage here with this and say let us keep it in the Secretary of the Army, but the fact is that the world knows much more broadly. [From the Sunday Herald, May 2, 2004] The Pictures That Lost The War (By Neil Mackay) It's an image that would do Saddam proud. A terrified prisoner, hooded and dressed in rags, his hands out-stretched on either side of him, electrodes attached to his fingers and genitals. He's been forced to stand on a box about one-foot square. His captors have told him that, if he falls off the box, he'll be electrocuted. The torture victim was an Iraqi and his torturers were American soldiers. The picture captures the moment when members of the coalition forces, who styled themselves liberators, were exposed as torturers. The image of the wired and hooded Iraqi was one of a series of photographs, leaked by a horrified U.S. soldier inside Saddam's old punishment centre, Abu Ghraib--now a U.S. POW camp. When the images were flashed around the world by America's CBS television network last Wednesday, there was a smug feeling within the U.K. that British troops would never behave like that to their prisoners. But on Friday night, the U.K. was treated to images--courtesy of the Daily Mirror--of British soldiers urinating on a blood-stained Iraqi captive, holding guns against the man's head, stamping on his face, kicking him in the mouth and beating him in the groin with a rifle butt. The pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing their captives have the added horror of sexual abuse. In five of the 14 images that the Sunday Herald has seen, a female soldier--identified as Lynndie England, a 21-year-old from a West Virginia trailer park--is playing up to the camera while her captives are tortured. In one picture, she's smiling and giving the thumbs-up. Her hand rests on the buttocks of a naked and hooded Iraqi who has been forced to sit on the shoulders of another Iraqi prisoner. In another, she is sprawled laughing over a pyramid of naked Iraqis. A male colleague stands behind her grinning. Later, she's got a cigarette clenched between grinning lips and is pointing at the genitals of a line of naked, hooded Iraqis. A third snap shows her embracing a colleague as a naked Iraqi lies before them. In other pictures, two naked Iraqis are forced to simulate oral sex and a group of naked men are made to clamber on to each other's backs. One dreadful picture features nothing but the bloated face of an Iraqi who has been beaten to death. His body is wrapped in plastic. Other pictures, which the world has not seen, but which are in the hands of the U.S. military, include shots of a dog attacking a prisoner. An accused soldier says dogs are ``used for intimidation factors''. There are also pictures of an apparent male rape. An Iraqi POW claims that a civilian translator, hired to work in the prison, raped a male juvenile prisoner. He said: ``They covered all the doors with sheets. I heard the screaming . . . and the female soldier was taking pictures.'' The British pictures show a hooded Iraqi aged between 18-20 on the floor of a military truck being brutalized. According to two squaddies who took part in the torture, but later blew the whistle, the Iraqi's ordeal lasted eight hours and he was left with a broken jaw and missing teeth. He was bleeding and vomited when his captors threw him out of a speeding truck. No one knows if he lived or died. One of the British soldiers said: ``Basically this guy was dying as he couldn't take any more. An officer came down. It was `Get rid of him--I haven't seen him'.'' The other whistle-blower said he had witnessed a prisoner being beaten senseless by troops. ``You could hear your mate's boots hitting this lad's spine . . . One of the lads broke his wrist off a prisoner's head. Another nearly broke his foot kicking him.'' According to the British soldiers, the military police have found a video of prisoners being thrown from a bridge, and a prisoner was allegedly beaten to death in custody by men from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. Although there is a debate about the veracity of the images, Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram said that if the pictures were real, they were ``appalling''. A Downing Street spokesman said Tony Blair expected ``the highest standards of conduct from our forces in Iraq''. The U.K.'s most senior army officer, General Mike Jackson, said that if the allegations were true then those involved were ``not fit to wear the Queen's uniform.'' The Defense Ministry is in crisis over the pictures as top brass know they ruin any hope of U.K. forces winning Iraqi hearts and minds. The U.S. torture pictures were taken by members of the American 800th Military Police Brigade sometime late last year. Following an investigation, 17 soldiers were removed from duty for mistreating captives. Six face court martial. Brigadier General Janice Karpinski, who ran Abu Ghraib and three other U.S. military jails, is suspended and faces court martial. Prior to the relevations, Karpinski assured the U.S. media that Abu Ghraib was run according to ``international standards''. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of coalition operations in Iraq, said he was ``appalled''. He added: ``These are our fellow soldiers. They were the same uniform as us, and they let their fellow soldiers down. Our soldiers could be taken prisoner as well--and we expect our soldiers to be treated well by the adversary, by the enemy-- and if we can't hold ourselves up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect . . . we can't ask that other nations do that to our soldiers as well. This is wrong. This is reprehensible. But this is not representative of the 150,000 soldiers over here.'' But these soldiers aren't simply mavericks. Some accused claim they acted on the orders of military intelligence and the CIA, and that some of the torture sessions were under the control of mercenaries hired by the U.S. to conduct interrogations. Two ``civilian contract'' organizations taking part in interrogations at Abu Ghraib are linked to the Bush administration. California-based Titan Corporation says it is ``a leading provider of solutions for services for national security''. Between 2003-04, it gave nearly $40,000 to George W. Bush's Republican Party. Titan supplied translators to the military. CACI International Inc. describes its aim as helping ``America's intelligence community in the war on terrorism''. Richard Armitage, the current deputy U.S. secretary of state, sat on CACI's board. No civilians, however, are facing charges as military law does not apply to them. Colonel Jill Morgenthaler, from CentCom, said that one civilian contractor was accused along with six soldiers of mistreating prisoners. However, it was left to the contractor to ``deal with him''. One civilian interrogator told army investigators that he had ``unintentionally'' broken several tables during interrogations as he was trying to ``fear-up'' detainees. Lawyers for some accused say their clients are scapegoats for a rogue prison system, which allowed mercenaries to give orders to serving soldiers. A military report said private contractors were at times supervising the interrogations. Kimmitt said: ``I hope the investigation is including not only the people who committed the crimes, but some of the people who might have encouraged the crimes as well because they certainly share some responsibility.'' Last night, CACI vice-president Jody Brown said: ``The company supports the Army's investigation and acknowledges that CACI personnel in Iraq volunteered to be interviewed by army officials in connection with the investigation. The company has received no indication that any CACI employee was involved in any alleged improper conduct with Iraqi prisoners. Nonetheless, CACI has initiated an independent investigation.'' However, military investigators said: ``A CACI investigator's contract was terminated because he allowed and/or instructed military police officers who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations which were neither authorised nor in accordance with regulations.'' One of the U.S. soldiers facing court martial is reservist Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick--the equivalent of a part-time territorial army squaddie. In civvy street, he was a prison warder in Virginia. Frederick has said he will plead not guilty and blame the army for the torture at Abu Ghraib. ``We had no support, no training whatsoever,'' he said, claiming he had never been shown the Geneva Convention. ``I kept asking my chain of command for certain things like rules and regulations and it just wasn't happening.'' Frederick also blamed the intelligence services for encouraging the brutality. Among the agencies coming to the prison were ``military intelligence'', said Frederick, adding: ``We had all kinds of other government agencies, FBI, CIA.'' In letters and e-mails home, he wrote: ``Military intelligence has encouraged and told us `Great job'.'' He added: ``They usually don't allow others to watch them interrogate. But since they like the way I run the prison, they have made an exception . . . We help getting [the PoWs] to talk with the way we handle them . . . We've had a very high rate with our style of getting them to break. They usually end up breaking within hours.'' Frederick said prisoners were made to live in cramped windowless cells with no clothes, running water or toilet for up to three days. Others were held for 60 days before interrogation. He said one prisoner with a mental health condition was ``shot with non-lethal rounds''. An interrogator told soldiers to ``stress one prisoner out as much as possible [as] he wanted to talk to him the next day''. Frederick also said one prisoner was ``stressed so bad that the man passed away''. Prisoners were covered in lice and some had tuberculosis. None were allowed to pray. Frederick said his commander sanctioned all this. The former commander of Guantanamo Bay prison, Major General Geoffrey Miller, has now been made deputy commander for containment operations to overhaul the Iraqi detention centres. Frederick, unlike mercenaries, faces jail and being thrown out of the army. His lawyer, Gary Myers said: ``The elixir of power, the elixir of believing that you're helping the CIA, for God's sake, when you're from a small town in Virginia, that's intoxicating. And so, good guys sometimes do things believing that they are being of assistance and helping a just cause . . . and helping people they view as important.'' Kimmitt admitted: ``I'd like to sit here and say that these are the only prisoner abuse cases that we're aware of, but we know that there have been others.'' This also applies to Britain. A Sunday Herald investigation has found that at least seven civilians have died in British custody in Iraq. Describing the images of abuse as an ``atrocity'', Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, said: ``The liberators are worse than the dictators.'' His sentiments have been echoed around the world. It is hard to find a country or agency that hasn't condemned the torture of Iraqi prisoners. From the Red Cross to the UN and from Amnesty to the coalition's loyal ``deputy in the Pacific'', the Australian premier John Howard, the world is united in horror against the actions of the US and UK forces. The awful cost of these acts of barbarism by Britain and America is summed up by ex-US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cowan: ``We went to Iraq to stop things like this from happening, and indeed, here they are happening under our tutelage . . . If we don't tell this story, these kind of things will continue, and we'll end up getting paid back 100 or 1000 times over.''

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, Secretary Powell came before the Congressional Black Caucus yesterday. Every Member was there. They asked him, Are you going to ask for more money? He said, There is no need for more money. Within 2 hours, the President of the United States came on and said, We need $25 billion more money. Even the Secretary of State is left out of the loop. This government has no plan; and the fact that a Member has finally stood up and said what everybody knows, the emperor has no clothes, it is about time somebody said that. My newspaper, the lead editorial this morning is ``Rumsfeld Must Go.'' He laid our people out there in danger. There is a study out of the Army that says that a quarter of the people who have died would not have died if they had provided the proper equipment. Now, this was a war of choice. We did not have to go. Nobody was attacking us. It is clear we were not in danger. They chose a day to go and so they went, whether they were ready or not. They did not care about the troops. Our troops are being badly used by rotten leadership. They should go.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, when it comes to education, the administration's rhetoric is there, but it masks the reality. The administration waves a lot of papers and makes a lot of speeches, but they have failed education in America; and it is a required course. Here are their test courses. The administration has an Education Secretary who calls the teachers' union ``terrorists.'' The administration left every child behind when it grossly underfunded that essential education in the United States. Today, we are celebrating and they are celebrating Cinco de Mayo, while they hide from the Hispanic community the fact that they have cut programs to promote staying in school, knowing that the high school dropout rate for Hispanics is four times higher than white students. Come November we are going to enroll the President and the administration in a remedial rhetoric course to learn how to tell the truth.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. One of the problems here in the House on an issue like this is that it is hard to have a real debate because we do not set it up as a debate. We really are having a bunch of 2-minute speeches, and nobody ever gets to answer anybody back and forth. The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. English) is an honorable Member and, I think, is just wrong on this issue. I do not bear him any ill will, but one of the interesting things about this is one of the more recent Members who came out here was the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger). He went on about the fact that the Democratic alternative is going to cost $17 billion. This is a time at which the Republican management of the economy has developed the biggest deficits in a very long time. We are going to have to raise the Federal debt limit again. We are going to have to sell more bonds to the Chinese. We are going to have to sell more bonds around the world to keep our economy afloat than ever before. The gentleman from California's complaint about the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) is that the gentleman from New York has come in here and said, you know, I think we ought to pay for this bill. We ought to pay for it. The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. English) and his colleagues are not interested in paying for it. They just want to throw it on the credit card, another $17 billion onto their kids and their grandchildren. I just had a grandchild born last August, so for the first time I am really thinking about grandchildren. I used to just think about my kids. But now I am looking two generations down the road. It is no problem for the gentleman from California and the gentleman from Pennsylvania and other Members to say, Hey, throw it to the kids. Let's not pay for it. You have done that since 1996. The mess we are in is directly related to what you have done. When President Bush took over, we had some kind of surplus, I forget, $200 billion; and we are now going into the hole at least $400 billion or $500 billion every year. When the gentleman from New York comes out here and says I would like to pay for it, he gets criticized. That is called raising taxes. No, it is being fiscally responsible. The gentleman from New York is no wild-eyed liberal. You think he is, but you have never looked at the proposal he made. He reached over across the hall here into another place and took a provision from the Finance chairman in the United States Senate. The provisions that he put in are offsets that are contained in the provisions of a tax abusive transactions bill from the Senate Finance Committee written by a Senator from over there. I cannot name him. The offsets are not tax increases. They are provisions designed to ensure that corporations cannot use aggressive tax shelter transactions to avoid the taxes they pay. So the charge that the gentleman from New York is trying to raise taxes is simply misleading, to be very generous. I am sure we will see advertisements going all over, well, you know, the Democrats tried to raise taxes on you another $17 billion, and we stopped them. They are not going to tell you about what it is going to cost your kids and your grandchildren in terms of interest rates and what is going on in this economy. The first group of offsets that the other body came up with are designed to curtail tax shelters by clarifying the economic substance doctrine. People back home, I am sure their eyes are crossed by now, but some of you people ought to be thinking about it. Increased reporting and penalty provisions. The economic substance doctrine is a rule of law that denies artificial losses or other tax benefits from transactions that have no business purpose or profit motive. It is the usual shenanigans of tax attorneys. Even a Republican in the other body thinks that ain't right. But, no, people over here say, oh, no, we can't do that, we can't tighten up. Oh, no, no, no. All those tax attorneys will have to go out there and find another way to take it away from the middle class and give it to the rich. They apply to transactions with no substance other than tax avoidance. That is what the gentleman from New York's bill does. He says, let's get people to pay their fair share. If we did, we could do this alternative minimum tax. In fact, we could do more. His bill actually says that if you have a combined adjusted gross income of $250,000, if you are less than that, you do not even have to look at this. That would take millions of people off the rolls. But the Republicans want to leave it so that everybody has to be at $58,000 and start into this alternative plan. The IRS says the record-keeping for that is 19 minutes. Then they say it takes an hour and 14 minutes to read the law and understand it. This is the IRS telling the taxpayers: it is going to take you an hour and a quarter to read this law and figure it out. Then it takes an hour and 49 minutes to actually figure it. And then copying and assembling and sending the form takes another 34 minutes. That is where we get the 4 hours. You are putting a half a day's work on the American public because you will not consider an alternative from the Democrats. You will not have a hearing to find out whether this is a better proposal or not, because all wisdom resides on that side of the aisle. And it is really wonderful to stand in the presence of people who know everything; but the problem, the reason you got into this mess is because you would not listen to anybody else and you are still in the mess because you will not listen to anybody else. The fact is that your own people, a guy from Iowa, my gosh, he is a wild liberal, right? Head of the Senate Finance Committee. He comes up with this, and you think it is no good. The fact is that this is a big problem that we need to work on together. If there were any bipartisanship at all on the Committee on Ways and Means, we could get something done. But if it is going to be done all by one side, where the ideology is we have to give it all to the people at the top and we cannot worry about what happens to the middle class, then we are going to continue to have these kinds of deals. If, God forbid, you are still in charge next year, you will be out here with a bill just like this with a bigger problem and a bigger cost and more money into the deficit. The question that really is sitting here today is, when is the Republican majority going to face up to the hole in the tax structure that you have dug and into which you have thrown all the people? You gave pittances, $676 average, for the average family and $112,000 for the people at the top. Do you think there is a millionaire in this country who needs $112,000? I mean, seriously. How could anybody come out here and support that, given the problems we have in this country right now? Spending $200 billion on a war that never should have happened in the first place, led into it by a President who stood right here and misled us, and you are throwing money out the door every way we can imagine; and you will not face what you are doing economically. I really pray, I really do pray that the day never comes when Europe stands up or the Japanese or the Chinese stand up and say, we are not buying any more of that worthless paper from the United States.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Speaker, this is one of those days when we come out here and try to fix a problem the Republicans created for themselves. Ever since you have been in charge of this place, you did not want to have regular order. You wanted to run bills through the committees without having any witnesses come in and talk about them. You would not listen to what people said to you. And now you have a big problem on your hands and you want to come out again today and put one more Band-Aid on a program that you put a Band-Aid on last year, and you will be back next year and next year and next year because you never understood what you were doing. Now, when this bill went into effect in 1987, it was designed to tax those people who made lots of money and paid not one penny. That is what it was about. It affected .1 percent of the payers in this country. And the same was true even with the adjustments that we made in 1993 when I was here. The numbers were essentially the same, around .2 percent of taxpayers. Today we are looking at 25 percent of the people in this country are having to figure their taxes twice, because the Republicans made all those tax cuts in 1997 and paid absolutely no attention to what was going on. If you live in a high tax State like New York or like California or like a lot of the progressive States in this country, and you have a couple of kids, you cannot deduct the money you pay in State taxes. You cannot deduct the money you pay in local taxes. You cannot deduct the deductions for your children. That is why it is sweeping down into the middle class. Half of the households who will be paying this tax are making less than $100,000 a year and over a third of them will be paying between 50 and $75,000. Now, consider we made these great big tax cuts, we gave $112,000 to people making more than a million and we gave $676 to people in the average income range in this country. And then we turn around and slap them with the AMT tax. Most Americans do not know what the AMT is. It is called, for those of you watching this on television including somebody at the White House maybe, alternative minimum tax. It means if you are not paying enough income tax, then you have to pay this alternative. Now, what has happened because the Republicans messed it up so badly, they have now swept up about a quarter of the taxpayers in the country with it rising to a third if they do not do something about it, and they have done that while they were busily helping their friends at the top who were not paying taxes anyway. Now, this bill is another, as I say, Band-Aid. We have an alternative which will be offered by one of my colleagues from Massachusetts which solves the problem in a much more reasonable way and gets the middle class out of this tax trap. Mr. Speaker, the following is an article from the Seattle Post- Intelligencer which describes this whole program. [From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 17, 2004] Get Ready for the Alternative Minimum Tax (By Mary Deibel) Few Americans have heard of the alternative minimum tax, but many taxpayers are about to find out that it's the biggest financial setback they face, an IRS taxpayer advocate says. ``Although the AMT was originally enacted to prevent wealthy taxpayers from avoiding tax liability through the use of tax avoidance techniques, it now affects substantial numbers of middle-income taxpayers and will, absent a change of law, affect more than 30 million taxpayers by 2010,'' taxpayer advocate Nina Olson said in her 508-page annual report naming this parallel tax system taxpayer enemy No. 1. Olson should know: State and local taxes pushed her into the alternative minimum tax last year so now it is personal as well as professional for her. And it's about to get personal for lots of other taxpayers, too. Absent action by Congress and President Bush, one in four households will owe the alternative minimum tax by 2010. Some 52 percent of them will be families making $100,000 or less a year, including 73 percent of households making $75,000 to $100,000 and 37 percent making $50,000 to $75,000. Married couples--especially couples with lots of children-- are most apt to be hit by the alternative minimum tax, which prohibits deductions for dependents along with write-offs for mortgage interest, state and local taxes, medical expenses and the like. ``It's a class tax that became a mass tax,'' says Urban Institute economist Len Burman, who co-authored the study projecting the future growth of the alternative minimum tax unless the tax code is changed. Congress enacted the tax in 1969 after being flooded with mail protesting reports that 155 ultra-rich Americans gamed the system to avoid paying a penny toward income tax. The alternative tax has been on the books since then, never indexed to inflation the way regular income taxes have been since 1981. The tax breaks President Bush and Congress enacted since 2001 expanding child tax credits, ``marriage penalty'' relief and the like make it more likely taxpayers who try to claim these write-offs will owe the alternative minimum tax. The 2003 tax cut contains a temporary provision that will help many families avoid the alternative minimum tax for just one year. Repealing the tax through 2010 would cost the Treasury $600 billion in revenue, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. Meanwhile, taxpayer advocate Olson says taxpayers who might owe the alternative minimum tax can expect to pay a higher tax bill and spend an extra 12 hours preparing their 2003 taxes. Many won't owe it, but they still must spend the extra half-day on the paperwork, she says. Mr. Speaker, the average citizen in this country is not aware what is happening; and the Republicans are out here today, the reason they do not want to have hearings in the committee is it might get on C-SPAN. Some people might find out what was really going on in the tax structure. But, no, we have to come out here, take it up to the Committee on Rules in the middle of the night, slip it down on the floor; and slam, bam, thank you, ma'am, it is out of here in an hour so that people will not know how badly you have messed it up for the middle class. You have got to put these commercials on that say the middle class have benefited immensely from our tax cuts, and then you run out here to take the pain away that you are creating for them. And in my view, it could all be stopped if you simply would follow the regular order and allow this to be a debate in this House and about the issues that you are changing. To go from .1 percent of the taxpayers to 25 percent of the taxpayers, including people making between 50 and $75,000 without letting people ever, their representatives in the Congress, to have an opportunity to explain that to the American people, is absolutely unacceptable. We will all vote for this bill, but it is another Band-Aid; and you will be back here next year. I bet you a month of my salary on that. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.