Cynthia McKinney

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I wish to enter the following into the Congressional Record:

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I come before this body today as a proud American and as a servant of the American people, sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Throughout my tenure, I've always tried to speak the truth. It is that commitment that brings me here today. We have a President who has misgoverned and a Congress that has refused to hold him accountable. It is a grave situation and I believe the stakes for our country are high. No American is above the law, and if we allow a President to violate, at the most basic and fundamental level, the trust of the people and then continue to govern, without a process for holding him accountable--what does that say about our commitment to the truth? To the Constitution? To our democracy? The trust of the American people has been broken. And a process must be undertaken to repair this trust. This process must begin with honesty and accountability. Leading up to our invasion of Iraq, the American people supported this Administration's actions because they believed in our President. They believed he was acting in good faith. They believed that American laws and American values would be respected. That in the weightiness of everything being considered, two values were rock solid--trust and truth. From mushroom clouds to African yellow cake to aluminum tubes, the American people and this Congress were not presented the facts, but rather were presented a string of untruths, to justify the invasion of Iraq. President Bush, along with Vice President Cheney and then-National Security Advisor Rice, portrayed to the Congress and to the American people that Iraq represented an imminent threat, culminating with President Bush's claim that Iraq was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. Having used false fear to buy consent--the President then took our country to war. This has grave consequences for the health of our democracy, for our standing with our allies, and most of all, for the lives of our men and women in the military and their families--who have been asked to make sacrifices--including the ultimate sacrifice--to keep us safe. Just as we expect our leaders to be truthful, we expect them to abide by the law and respect our courts and judges. Here again, the President failed the American people. When President Bush signed an executive order authorizing unlawful spying on American citizens, he circumvented the courts and the law, and he violated the separation of powers provided by the Constitution. Once the program was revealed, he then tried to hide the scope of his offense from the American people by making contradictory, untrue statements. President George W. Bush has failed to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States; he has failed to ensure that senior members of his administration do the same; and he has betrayed the trust of the American people. With a heavy heart and in the deepest spirit of patriotism, I exercise my duty and responsibility to speak truthfully about what is before us. To shy away from this responsibility would be easier. But I have not been one to travel the easy road. I believe in this country, and in the power of our democracy. I feel the steely conviction of one who will not let the country I love descend into shame; for the fabric of our democracy is at stake. Some will call this a partisan vendetta, others will say this is an unimportant distraction to the plans of the incoming Congress. But this is not about political gamesmanship. I am not willing to put any political party before my principles. This, instead, is about beginning the long road back to regaining the high standards of truth and democracy upon which our great country was founded. Mr. Speaker, under the standards set by the United States Constitution, President Bush--along with Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of State Rice--should be subject to the process of impeachment, and I have filed H. Res. 1106 in the House of Representatives. To my fellow Americans, as I leave this Congress, it is in your hands--to hold your representatives accountable, and to show those with the courage to stand for what is right, that they do not stand alone.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following for the Record. [From the Black Commentator, Apr. 13, 2006] The McKinney Affair--Rampaging Racism and a Cowardly Caucus (By Glen Ford and Peter Gamble) There are profound lessons to be learned from the ongoing travails of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), under siege by white America at large, the leadership of her own party, and the chairman of her own caucus. In the aftermath of McKinney's run-in with a Capitol Hill police officer, we have witnessed an orgy of unadulterated defamation that is actually directed at Black women in general. In rejecting and denouncing McKinney's defense, her tormentors demonstrate that the very concept of racial profiling was never sincerely accepted among most white Americans, and that 9/11 is just an excuse for undoing decades of legal and political struggles against the abominable practice. So virulent and shameless have been the attacks on McKinney--spewing caricatures of the six-term lawmaker that reflect whites' own hallucinatory visions of Black people--it leads us to conclude that racists are conducting a kind of ritual, an exorcism to cast the ``militant Black'' out of the national polity, once and for all. Disgustingly, a number of Black voices have joined mob, in order to prove that they are reasonable and trustworthy Negroes who won't intrude on white folks' illusions of innocence. Most distressingly, the McKinney affair dramatically demonstrates that the Congressional Black Caucus has been eviscerated as a body. The CBC is revealed as collectively gutless, devoid of any semblance of Black solidarity, without which it has no reason for being. CBC Hits New Low We at BC had previously believed that April, 2005, when 37 percent of the 42 Black House members voted for Republican bills, was the lowest point in Congressional Black Caucus history. A year later, the CBC has found a new nadir. On the evening of April 5, undoubtedly on orders from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, CBC chairman Mel Watt gathered twenty or so members to browbeat McKinney into firing her legal team and cease appearing before the media. Watt absented himself from the beat-down, so that it would not appear to be an ``official'' CBC event. As congressional aides wandered in and out of the room, some Members dutifully echoed Pelosi's demand that McKinney not frame the March 28 confrontation with the policeman as a ``racial'' incident, and that she issue an apology on the House floor the following morning. According to several sources who spoke with BC on condition of anonymity, and based on an account given by McKinney staff assistant Faye Coffield to a weekly Atlanta meeting of the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, a ``consensus'' was reached that McKinney would deliver the apology and abandon efforts to defend herself in the media (although not her legal team). The next morning, at the appointed hour, McKinney was prepared to offer her apology to the House. But Mel Watt had already put the word out that CBC members were to renege on their part of the deal. The Caucus must not stand with McKinney when she stepped to the microphone. Mel Watt, Nancy Pelosi's poodle, attempted to enforce his Mistress's wish that McKinney appear utterly isolated and alone. Nothing should distract from the Democrats' non-strategy of doing and saying nothing until mid-term elections in November. The Republicans must be allowed to self-destruct without interference. McKinney's charge of racial profiling was a distraction from the Democratic non-strategy--so she must be shunned. Mel Watt was the enforcer--the designated shunner- in-chief. Pelosi appears to harbor a deep hatred for McKinney, whom she cannot control. Most recently, the 51-year-old Georgia lawmaker defied the Leader's orders, voting in favor of a Republican bill, cynically modeled on Democrat John Murtha's measure for a quick exit from Iraq. She was among only three Democrats, and the only CBC member, to do so. McKinney also ignored Pelosi's order that Democrats boycott hearings on Katrina and leave the field to Republicans. However, Pelosi has been the aggressor all along, bent on bringing the CBC and other progressives to heel as she pursues her spineless non-strategy for victory by default over the GOP--a scenario that by definition requires African Americans to mute their own demands, to be quiet and compliant. When McKinney returned to congress in January 2005 after a two-year hiatus, Pelosi denied her seniority, bumping her down to freshman status despite her previous ten years on The Hill. Not a peep from the CBC, cowed by their Leader and, recent events have shown, packed with members who are themselves fearful that McKinney's militancy will raise the bar of constituent expectations for their own performances on Black people's behalf. On the House floor, the morning of April 6, Pelosi/Watt had set McKinney up for further humiliation. Not only would she be required to deliver an apology that would be seen as an admission of guilt (by those who had already condemned and defamed her), but the absence of CBC members at her side would mark her as a lone ``extremist,'' a ``loon'' whose politics could be dismissed out of hand. Why, even McKinney's own colleagues won't stand with her. She's crazy (like the rest of those darkies who cry racism). According to several congressional sources, McKinney confronted a gaggle of CBC members, reminding them of the consensus agreement of the night before, in which they had promised a display of physical solidarity at the microphone in return for her concessions. White Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), seeing the commotion, hurried over to the Black circle: ``I'll stand with you, Cynthia.'' Others stepped forward to fulfill their pledge, despite CBC chairman Mel Watt's treacherous machinations. Here is a partial list of those who were videotaped standing with McKinney when she read the words of apology that had been demanded of her: *Elijah Cummings (MD), *Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (MI), *Barbara Lee (CA), *Alcee Hastings (FL), *Maxine Waters (CA), *Bobby Rush (IL), *Corrine Brown (FL), *Major Owens (NY), *Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX), Marcy Kaptur (OH), Dennis Kucinich (OH), Jose Serrano (NY), Bob Filner (CA), (*CBC members). Only nine of the 20-plus CBC members who had reached ``consensus'' on standing with their sister the night before, bucked Pelosi's petty dictatorial edict--and straw-boss Mel Watt's attempt to enforce it. Once upon a time, the CBC could collectively call itself ``the conscience of the congress.'' No more. Multi-Profiling and Sheer Malevolence By bowing to Pelosi, Black congresspersons reinforce her and other white's belief that they can pick and choose the African American leaders and representatives they deal with, and isolate the rest, while still retaining mass Black support for the Democratic Party. Such Blacks are enablers of racism, and must eventually pay the price at the hands of their constituents, who are no different than the Black Georgia voters who sent McKinney to Washington six times. Worse, in urging McKinney to drop the ``racial'' aspect of her defense--to pretend that she was not racially profiled, when they know that police profiling is near-universal--they do grave injury to fundamental Black interests. Days after his attempt to pound McKinney into dust, the duplicitous Mel Watt related to the Charlotte Observer his own scary run-in with Capitol police ``a year or so ago'': ``I was running to the floor to vote and an officer said, `Can I see your ID?' and I said, 'No' and kept running. I looked back and he had his hand on his gun. Then another (Capitol) police officer said, `Member.' He recognized me (as a House member). It just so happened that the first (officer) was white and the other one was black . . . I was probably very rash. In retrospect, I thought to myself, `You had to be out of your mind.' I was trying to get to a vote and he had a job to do.'' Watt understands very well that the Black officer, who didn't go for his gun, but instead called his white partner off, was intervening in a case of racial profiling. Yet Watt's desire to stay in the good graces of his Leader, Pelosi, drives him to conspire against a fellow Black congressperson, Cynthia McKinney, whose recent hair makeover is said to have made her fair game to be accosted by Capitol police. Said McKinney: ``Do I have to contact the police every time I change my hairstyle? How do we account for the fact that when I wore my braids every day for 11 years, I still faced this problem, primarily from certain police officers.'' Nobody knows better than Black officers that racism is rampant in the Capitol Police force. Of the 1,200 officers, 29 percent are Black, and many still have racial bias suits outstanding. ``You have, basically, a renegade police department up here, that's been operating under the protection of Congress,'' said Charles J. Ware, an attorney representing the Capitol Black Police Association. But it's not just race. Police officers, like workers in any organization, spend much of their time talking shop. For Capitol police, the subject of their shop-talk is the members of congress they are hired to protect. Cynthia McKinney is famous--no less so on Capitol Hill. She is the Black woman viciously branded as a friend of ``terrorists,'' the most uppity African American in the federal legislature. The cops are quite aware of what she looks like, new hair-do or not. A McKinney lawyer got it right when he told a Howard University press conference that his client was targeted for reasons of ``sex, race and Ms. McKinney's progressiveness.'' The cops know who McKinney is--they have profiled her politically. Michael C. Ruppert, former Los Angeles cop and current honcho of the popular web site From the Wilderness, has felt the police hostility directed at his longtime friend, Cynthia McKinney: `` I have walked the halls of Congress with Cynthia McKinney maybe eight to ten times. I have walked into and out of the Cannon and Longworth house office buildings with her. I have walked to hearings in the Rayburn house office building with her. I have walked the underground tunnels from one of those office buildings directly to the edge of the House floor and its anteroom with her. I can tell you one thing for certain because I have seen it and I have felt it. Cynthia McKinney and her staff get treated differently from just about anyone else on the Hill. It's subtle, but so is the taste of dirt when it's in your mouth.'' Although the Capitol police have failed to produce a surveillance tape of McKinney's confrontation with their officer, the congresswoman captured one incident in the movie, ``American Blackout,'' now being screened at sites around the country. The film depicts McKinney's investigation of voting irregularities in the 2000 elections. One segment shows the congresswoman being accosted by police as she and her party approach the Longworth building of the Capitol. McKinney turns to the camera and reports that police subject her to such treatment ``all the time.'' Does that happen to 535 members of congress ``all the time''? Not hardly. California Rep. Tom Lantos, according to the web reference site Wikipedia, ``ran over a teenager in the Capitol parking area and refused to stop despite screams from the crowd. He never apologized for the hit-and-run either.'' The Boston Globe reported that Lantos was not charged with hit-and-run, but was only fined $25 for ``failure to pay full time and attention.'' However, a teacher accompanying the student was threatened with arrest by Capitol police when she chased Lantos' car, demanding that he stop. Apparently Capitol police are quite zealous in protecting their lawmakers--if they are white. In an otherwise inane, anti-McKinney article, Black columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson gave some historical perspective to recent events: ``In past years, the Caucus raised heck when a white Republican Congressman punched a black Capitol police officer and a year later Ohio Democratic Representative Louis Stokes was hassled by Capitol police. And the Congressional Black Caucus rushed to their defense.'' Not this time, not for Cynthia McKinney. The Congressional Black Caucus is broken. Sex and the Federal City Around midnight on April 8, Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson performed a grotesque, bewigged skit in which he conjured up a fat, sloppy, dull-witted, belligerent, loud- talking, no-listening, from-deep-in-the-ghetto character who was supposed to be--Cynthia McKinney. Of course, this TV minstrel's interpretation bore no resemblance to the congressperson--daughter of one of Atlanta's first Black policemen, a former faculty member at Clark Atlanta University, world traveler and sought-after speaker, six-term legislator. But that did not matter. Although SNL does superb work caricaturing public personalities, its usual standards did not apply in McKinney's case. The skit was a dehumanizing assault on Black women as a group, with ``Cynthia'' standing in for the female gender of her race. A specific profile of Black women exists in the minds of vast sections of white America. As Dr. Abdul Karim Bangura relates in this issue of BC, in ``an analysis of White students'' stereotypes of Black women by professor of women's studies and sociology Rose Weitz at Arizona State University and Wakonse fellow Leonard Gordon at the same university, the students primarily characterize Black women as loud, aggressive, argumentative, stubborn, and bitchy.'' White men (and women, and some Black men) on and off Capitol Hill are eager to vilify and diminish McKinney, to call her a ``bitch,'' a ``racist,'' ``crazy'' and all manner of epithets. This abuse is actually directed against the defamers' twisted idea of who and what Black women are. So diseased are their minds, they see only their sickness- induced delusions. White supremacy allows them to translate their delusions into public policy. September 11 gave them a free pass to run buck wild, with no apologies, under the umbrella of ``homeland security.'' Black Voters Will Decide It can be no consolation to Rep. McKinney, that she is just a convenient target for what we now recognize as a great resurgence of racism in the United States. The South rules a South that is not defined geographically but socio- politically. White Americans have become much more homogenous in the electronic and high-mobility age--to the detriment of sanity. Their never-forsaken dreams of domestic and planetary racial conquest were given a Frankenstein-like jolt and boost by the Bush regime, which spoke directly to the predatory core of American myth and historical practice. Emboldened, they have snared Cynthia McKinney in one of their IRTs: Improvised Racist Traps. She awaits the decision of a grand jury. The moral and political collapse of the Congressional Black Caucus could not come at a worse time--but it has occurred. Corroded by corporate money dependent on corporate media-- with the near extinction of independent Black media--adrift in the gulf between the needs of the Black masses and the narrow aspirations of the minuscule hyper-mobile Black classes and still steeped in rank male chauvinism much of Black ``leadership'' cannot abide a genuinely progressive, charismatic female in their midst. Many also look on in sulking jealousy at the burgeoning unity and militancy of Latinos, whose grassroots are on the move and whose media support their cause. The CBC cannot even support each other. When CBC members urged Cynthia McKinney to forsake the truth, to hide the ugly fact of racial (and political, and sexual) profiling they gave enormous aide and comfort to the enemy. If there was one victory that African Americans had achieved in the post-Civil Rights era it was to make racial profiling legally, politically and socially unacceptable. This victory was the fruit of countless suitor demonstrations--all manner of political struggles--and the legacy of the legions of dead, maimed, jailed and humiliated victims of profiling who became the focus of sustained Black action. September 11 provided the excuse to undo decades of anti- profiling victories. Profiling is reckoned to be a good thing. Now the racists seek to reestablish arbitrary and capricious white supremacy, with legislation that would de facto deputize every police officer as an agent of ``homeland security'' who need not respect the constitution in the case of ``suspected'' undocumented immigrants. At that point, all persons of color become grist for the suspicion mill. Just as the Capitol policeman chose not ``recognize'' Cynthia McKinney as a congressperson, any cop could willfully fail to recognize his fellow Americans and strip them of their rights. Such a regime already exists in designated ``drug zones'' in urban America where everyone is suspect. Yet the CBC allows Republicans and racist Democrats to jeer and bully Cynthia McKinney into a legal cul-de-sac because she dares to cite profiling. The masses of African Americans know the deal--they are profiled constantly in stores, when observed outside their neighborhoods, on the highways, when breathing while Black. McKinney's version of events does not seem bizarre to them. Although the laughing racist hyenas convince each other--with the tacit help of be chair Mel Watt--that McKinney is on the ropes, it is the Black constituents of Dekalb County who will decide if she is ``crazy'' for standing up for her (and our) dignity and rights. When McKinney arrived back in Atlanta shortly after her confrontation with the uniformed profiler, State Representative Tyrone Brooks, president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected officials, was among those to greet and support her: ``It's really not about Cynthia McKinney,'' said Brooks. ``It's about African-Americans in America who are victims of racial profiling every day.'' Much of the Congressional Black Caucus seem to have lost touch with this reality. As a body, they have lost their moorings, and must be rehabilitated, surgically. A bunch of them have got to go. BC Co-Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a book to be titled, Barack Obama and the Crisis in Black Leadership.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following for the Record: In an effort to save both U.S. and Iraqi lives by adhering to International War and common decency, I sent the following letter to the Captain of the Navy's top hospital ship. Thomas J. Nagy, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Health, Johns Hopkins, '77-'79. November 12, 2006. To the Captain, USNS Comfort: Would it not be to the benefit of all if the USS Comfort were to return immediately to the Persian Gulf to provide life-saving health care to Iraqi infants and children who are dying in huge numbers for the lack of medical services and supplies. Further, does not the Geneva Convention on the Responsibilities of Occupying Powers require that the U.S., as the de facto if not de jure Occupying Power in Iraq furnish lifesaving health care to Iraqis? Finally, please forward my note to the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General as well as the captain of the USN HOPE and the captains of any other USN Hospital Ships. I request a written reply. Sincerely, Thomas J. Nagy.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Members of the House and the Senate for passing legislation that included language authorizing the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area in my district. Mr. Speaker, this is a boon to the environmental community that seeks to preserve pristine areas everywhere. But for such an area to be in the middle of a bustling African American community is especially rare. We need green space in south DeKalb, and this will go a very long way toward realizing a community dream. Initially, our thought was to have the funding go to the country or the State, and that was reflected in one version of the bill. However, the House Resources Committee adopted a private-public partnership approach. Good stewardship of taxpayer dollars is extremely important, and I want to work closely with the private entity to make sure that the community and its concerns always come first. Mr. Speaker, I look forward to walking the nature trials in both DeKalb and Rockdale Counties that will be made possible by the Congressional action today. I would also like to thank the Georgia Department of Natural Resources that also lent its support to this very important bill.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Madam Speaker, I was unavoidably delayed getting to the floor due to Delta Flight #634 being delayed due to bad weather in the area and missed rollcall vote Nos. 394 and 395 on July 24, 2006. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Chairman, during rollcall No. 370, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.'' Amendment No. 2 Offered by Mr. Gohmert

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Chairman, many of my colleagues have expressed some bit of surprise at the virulence coming from the Republican Members of the Georgia delegation. Well, let me just say that I am not surprised at all, because I was born in Georgia and I live there. I served in the Georgia legislature with a few of them. But let me also say that just this week the second attempt by the Georgia legislature to impose a voter ID bill on the people of our State was struck down by the courts in violation of the Voting Rights Act. We also learned in 2002, in my own election, with the crossover vote, that crossover voting can be used as effectively as the all-white primary was in days past. So we need the Voting Rights Act. We need it because we are looking at the State of Georgia. We see what you are doing. And now the Nation also sees that the State of Georgia desperately needs to be under the Voting Rights Act because some things still have not changed.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, the Voting Rights Act was passed to put an end to intimidation of poor and black voters. Sadly, acts of intimidation and voter fraud directed at black and Latino voters are not just a thing of the past. In 2000, Florida's blacks were intimidated and illegally removed from the voter rolls. In 2002, in my district in Georgia, we learned that crossover voting can be used as effectively as the all-white primaries once were. In 2004, Ohio's black voters faced intimidation and fabricated long lines by misallocating the voting machines. Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting was ruled by this Supreme Court to violate Latino voting rights. And just last week, the Georgia legislature's second Voter ID bill got smacked down by the courts a second time. The Voting Rights Act is relevant and necessary to protect our precious right to vote.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I know from time to time all of us have to balance our bank books. Now if the discrepancy is $9, we might ignore it figuring we made a small error. If it were $90, most of us would recalculate and discover the error and call the bank. If the statement is off $900, we will probably be down at the bank visiting the manager. If our account is missing $9,000, we would be on the phone to our lawyer. At $90,000, it would probably mean that we were working at Enron. If $900,000 were missing from an account, there would probably be a call to the accountant, the IRS and our creditors. Or else we might be a CEO working at a large corporation who lost their bonus. When $9 million shows up missing, usually that means contract overruns or fraud and a government audit is inevitable. A congressional committee might look into unaccounted expenditures of $90 million, and we might read about it in the New York Times. When $900 million goes missing, corporations collapse, mergers are cancelled, contracts are terminated, inspectors general are appointed, contracts are sometimes banned or fined, and charges are brought to court and people usually begin to take notice. I point all of this out to ask what should happen when we find out that $9 billion is discovered by an official investigation to be missing in our contracting accounts for the reconstruction of Iraq relating to one corporation, Halliburton, and oil revenues. Apparently, this administration thinks very little should happen because there has been no further investigation, appointment of a special inspector, a charge against a person responsible, or even any penalty or ban on that corporation which continues to make massive profits from contracts with the U.S. military despite evidence of overcharging, minimal accountability for funds, incompetence, and abuses of international and civil rights. And if that doesn't concern us enough to act, shouldn't we pause over recent revelations of an additional $12 billion in unaccounted funding shipped as currency in $100 bills directly to Iraq from the Federal Reserve? Worse yet is the story we are learning from the funds we can account for and how they have been spent or misspent, stolen or wasted, and how little they have improved the lives of the Iraqi people they are supposed to help. The expenditures for the Iraq war continue to grow at a rate that is putting our country into levels of spending and debt never seen before. Don't the American people deserve a full accounting of where their tax dollars are going at a time when more money is being spent to allegedly improve the infrastructure and life-style of the people of Iraq than here at home.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 306, had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, on the eve of the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, I come to the floor to say to that the dream of full participation by all Americans has yet to be fulfilled. And, in fact, even at the dawn of a new century, black voters are still confronted with a concerted effort to deny their right to vote when it is politically necessary and expedient to do so. We can start with the fiasco that brought the current administration to power, the Florida vote of 2000. First of all, in testimony from African American voters in Florida, outright voter intimidation is documented in dozens of cases. You know, the passage of time is a wonderful thing. It makes wine taste better; it makes women look better; it makes us long for the days of good music, however we define ``good music.'' The older songs always just seem the best. So, too, it is with information. But with the passage of time, truth crushed to the Earth, rises. The ashes of the Phoenix rise. As a result of a town hall meeting that I organized in Georgia, bringing in the vice president of ChoicePoint, the company hired by the Florida Board of Elections under the control of the then Secretary of State Katherine Harris, we now know that ChoicePoint was asked to provide an incorrect list of supposed convicted felons who would be denied the right to vote in Florida. The only thing is that the list compiled by ChoicePoint imported data from several States; Ohio, New Jersey and Texas. Now, it just so happens that the Governor of Texas is now our President, and the interesting thing about the list that was given from Texas to Katherine Harris in Florida is that it was not a list of convicted felons. The Texas list was a list of those convicted of misdemeanors, thereby enlarging the number of entrants on the ChoicePoint list destined for Florida. Now, why is this important? Because the method of disenfranchisement in Florida was to deny people the right to vote based on fictitious felony conviction records. And since Katherine Harris had told ChoicePoint that she only wanted an 80 percent match, an example is that John Smythe, who had committed a misdemeanor in Texas, say, for example, became John Smith, a convicted felon in Florida. The list was labeled by race, so that the folks down in Florida knew who would be denied the right to vote before the voting even started. As a result, ChoicePoint presented a list of about 90,000 so-called convicted felons, whose only crime was being registered to vote in a battleground State whose leaders were willing to commit crimes in order to deny people the right to vote. And I am sorry that the Democrats didn't fight this gross travesty of justice carried out against black voters. Now, there will be folks who will say that we don't need a Voting Rights Act any more. If you ask George Wallace or George Maddox or, for that matter, even Strom Thurmond back then, I am sure they would have said you didn't need a Voting Rights Act then too. I am sure they would have said no. But if this gross disenfranchisement scheme could happen in 2000, it means that the right to vote and the right to representation are still precious, so precious that we have to have laws in place to protect those who will not respect the rights of their fellow Americans. Then in 2002 we learned that crossover voting can be used as effectively as the all-white primaries were to deny African American voters their right to choose their representatives. I am glad to know that Bennie Thompson from Mississippi, our colleague, has filed a lawsuit against Mississippi's open primary statute. We need to rid the South of open primaries, because, as in my State, they were enacted in the days when the lips of staunch segregationists dripped with the words of nullification and interposition. The advent of the electronic voting machines offers another peril to the voting rights of all Americans who use them. In my own district, those machines broke down, burned out, froze screens and cast votes for the candidate not intended by the voter. In Georgia, our machines are also equipped with a wireless capability. That means that somebody who has got a Treo that is properly outfitted can come in and change the outcome of an election just by entering the signal space of a voting machine. Since no action has been taken by the Federal Government to prevent any of these abuses, we can expect more of the same. And speaking of voting machines, the allocation of those machines is also done to manipulate the outcome. Who wants to wait 5 hours in line in the rain to vote? Thousands of voters in Ohio had to do that and it just so happened that they were black. Scholars and researchers have done the math. Voting machines were allocated not by the number of registered voters by precinct, but by some other calculation. How could majority black precincts in Columbus, OH have 3, 4, or 5 machines and have over 1,000 voters in their precincts, and mostly Republican precincts in say, Dublin, OH had the same number of machines for one third the number of voters? This pattern of devaluing and marginalizing the black vote was seen again in the recent Mayoral election in New Orleans. Here it was not Republicans, but a conservative Democratic Governor who blocked efforts to provide electronic polling stations to enable hundreds of thousands of mostly Black Katrina survivors the chance to vote. It was among the largest instance of African-American voter disfranchisement since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Since no action has been taken by the Federal Government to prevent any of these abuses, we can expect more of the same. In addition, in the coming Fall election we will see the introduction of electronic poll-books, which are untested and non-transparent. Governor Ehrlich of Maryland, a Republican, has deemed this new addition to the voting experience to be unreliable. So, Mr. Speaker, who cares? We care. And that is why we need a Voting Rights Act. Not to tarry in the days of the past, but to protect us from encroachments on the right to vote that occur today and that might be tried tomorrow.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, this administration speaks of patriotism, yet cuts health care for wounded soldiers, now numbering over 18,000. It wraps itself in the flag, the same flag draping the coffins of our dead, numbering over 2,500 as of today. Yet now there are revelations of $12 billion missing from the Treasury, shipped to Iraq in $100 bills and distributed in ways we may never learn, bringing a total of unaccounted funds from the Iraq Rebuilding Fund to $21 billion. Yet the Bush administration has launched no investigation, has imposed no penalties on the corporations involved. The American people have been defrauded of our money, our morality, and the precious lives of our soldiers.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, this week several of my colleagues and I are circulating a chart listing 176 Katrina bills, out of which only a dozen have become law to date. As we sit here today, dozens of survivors are protesting the injustices suffered at the hands of FEMA. Hurricane season is upon us again, and FEMA continues to deny housing assistance to tens of thousands of needy families, many of them now rendered homeless. New Orleans remains a toxic disaster zone that still looks much like it did the day after the hurricane. Despite the tens of billions of dollars spent on no-bid, sweetheart contracts, much of it wasted. Will the 163 Katrina bills sitting in committee also go to waste? Or will Congress address the ongoing specific needs of the survivors by moving existing legislation and checking fraud and abuse by providing real oversight of appropriations? The choice is ours.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I would like to join my colleague, Mr. Owens, in commending Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey for her consistent and strong voice in opposition to the war in Iraq. It is a voice that is needed in this Congress. She utters words and takes positions that are needed, that we need to hear in this Congress, and those positions reflect the positions of the American people and the people in her district. I have had the opportunity to actually visit her district, and I know that Lynn speaks well with respect to the issues and their position on this war. I would like to talk about another aspect of President Bush's Middle East policy that I think could be problematic for us if the interpretation is one along the lines of the interpretation of information that was received that led us into the war in Iraq. What I am talking about is the April 26 national emergency that was declared by President Bush. On that day, he issued an executive order to freeze the assets of those suspected to have been involved in the October 1, 2004, assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. On the face of it, this might look like a straightforward attempt to bring justice to the perpetrators of a heinous act of terrorism. But I decided I would not just rest with the Speaker's announcement, the Clerk's announcement, and that I would actually read the document. I read the document, and then I reread the document, and then I read it for a third time. When we examine the language of the document, we have to ask ourselves are there some other motives involved in the issuance of this executive order. The reason I say that is because of the language that is used in the executive order. It says that this executive order applies to persons involved in ``any other bombing that implicates the government of Syria or its officers or agents.'' Now the keyword is ``implicate'' because that means that you are talking about bringing into intimate or incriminating connection. Well, I remember, and I was not in this body in 2003, but the President chose to invade Iraq in 2003 because we were told that Iraq was implicated in possessing weapons of mass destruction. That Iraq was implicated in the tragic events of September 11. We now know that both of those implications were false, but that is after nearly 2,500 young men and women from these shores have been killed, countless thousands others have either mangled bodies or addled minds as a result of the shock and the shell shock and the presence in the theater of war. How many tens of thousands of Iraqis are now dead as a result of the implications that the American people were told and then action taken on those implications? Now once again, the President is implicating an Arab regime and taking action that preempts a conclusive investigation into the facts. This administration has already made ominous utterances about the need for regime change in both Syria and Iran, and I would just ask this Congress before it relinquishes any more power, please examine the facts before we plunge ourselves into another military disaster in the Middle East.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, war is not an acceptable energy policy. This bill is an attempt to dupe the American public into thinking that drilling in ANWR will lower gas prices. It is a disservice to the American people. This bill is really about serving ANWR to the oil industry lobby, something they have coveted for a very long time. Just by making cars modestly more efficient, Americans could save $25 billion a year and 1 million barrels of oil per day. Republicans should really deal with our energy problems and not this handout to the oil lobby.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, mock executions by putting the barrel of a shotgun into the mouth of a prisoner and pulling the trigger. Using alligator clips on ears, noses and genitals. Racial attacks and use of racial slurs, burns all over the body, electric shock to the genitals. Suffocation with bags. In other words torture which is now almost synonymous with U.S. run prisons and detention centers. Immediately the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq come to mind when even the word is said. But the question I have, Mr. Speaker, is how did we get to this point? Some prison activists immediately pointed out that we must not forget Attica when we are talking about Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. And so I participated in a forum entitled, From Attica to Abu Ghraib. But now as the memory of Attica has been invoked, it appears that another U.S. detention facility must be named too. Area 2 in Chicago, run by the Chicago police department. Area 2 will now go down in U.S. annals as a domestic torture center. Sadly, over 135 African Americans have come forward to say that they were tortured, mostly in Chicago's Area 2, in what could be one of the greatest scandals of modern day American prison practice and procedure. Documentation shows that torture of African American men occurred in Areas 2 and 3 of Chicago jails for over 20 years, and no one with authority to stop it did so. Moreover, these actions were covered up for 30 years by those in Chicago in authority. How many people are in jail today because confessions were tortured out of them? Incredibly, some prisoners were even on death row after having had confessions tortured out of them. Moreover, the torture victims have psychological issues that have never been clinically resolved. Thank goodness former Illinois Governor Ryan commuted all of the death row cases, and gave full innocent pardons to four death row inmates who should never have been in prison. Incredibly, even after Governor Ryan's actions, the City of Chicago is paying more than $5 million to lawyers who represent the accused police officers. How do we know about this? Due to the hard work and the thankless hours put in by activists, lawyers, and journalists who refused to let this issue go or be swept under the rug. And thank goodness we have dedicated journalists for what is referred to as the alternative media, who are willing to write those stories and get the message out. I learned about this story from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now broadcast on the Pacifica network of stations. This week or next, the judge will rule whether or not to release the report to the public. But in the interim, one thing is clear, and that is, that Areas 2 and 3 of the Chicago city jail must be added to the annals of U.S. prisoner abuse, from Attica to Abu Ghraib and beyond, Chicago now owns an unfortunate chapter. Chicago's Abu Ghraib: UN Committee Against Torture Hears Report on How Police Tortured Over 135 African-American Men Inside Chicago Jails Extraordinary rendition. Overseas prisons. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo Bay. Practices and places that have become synonymous with the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody are getting renewed attention at the United Nations this week, where the UN Committee Against Torture is holding hearings on U.S. compliance with its international obligations. But there is one name expected to arise this week that few people in this country will have heard about--and it's the one that's closest to home. It's called Area 2. And for nearly two decades beginning in 1971, it was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags placed over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions. Yet the case around Area 2 is nowhere near a resolution--to date, not one Chicago police officer has been charged with any crime. The most prominent officer, former police commander Jon Burge, was dismissed in the early 1990s. He retired to Florida where he continues to collect a pension. Today, a special prosecutor is now in the fourth year of an investigation. Just last week, a group of Chicago police officers won a court ruling to delay the release of the prosecutor's preliminary report. David Bates, one of dozens of men to come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of the Chicago police. Flint Taylor, an attorney with the People's Law Office in Chicago, which he helped found in the late 1960s. He has represented many of the torture victims and was directly involved in spearheading the special prosecutor's investigation. John Conroy a journalist and author who has covered the case for over a decade. He has written several articles for the Chicago Reader, and is the author of the book ``Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture.'' Amy Goodman. We go now to Chicago, where we're joined by three guests: David Bates, Flint Taylor and John Conroy. David Bates is one of dozens of men to come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of the Chicago police. Flint Taylor is an attorney with the People's Law Office in Chicago, which he helped found in the late 1960s. He has represented many of the torture victims and was directly involved in spearheading the special prosecutor's investigation. And John Conroy is a journalist and author who's covered the case for over a decade. He's written several articles for the Chicago Reader and is the author of the book, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture. We welcome you all to Democracy Now! I want to begin with Flint Taylor for an overview. You have been working on this case for years. You have represented people who said they were tortured. Give us the scope of this story. Flint Taylor. Well, the scope started out with one man who was tortured by electric shock and having a plastic bag put over his head and being beaten by Jon Burge and others at the Area 2 police station. He, on his own, brought a lawsuit in the mid-`80s. That lawsuit, we got involved in, and over the years we were able to uncover, with the help of journalists such as John Conroy, others such as David Bates, who had also been tortured and had told their stories in various courts, but no one had put all this evidence together. We were able to assimilate, over many years, over 60 cases of torture, and when I say ``torture,'' I mean electric shock, I mean suffocation with bags, I mean mock executions, I mean racial attacks, that kind of thing. And they were all coming out of the same station, and they were all headed up by this man, Jon Burge, who came out of Vietnam, started out as a detective and quickly rose in the ranks through sergeant, lieutenant and commander. This went on--the actual documentation now shows that this went on for over 20 years, from 1972 to 1992, when in fact Burge was finally, after community outrage, suspended and fired from his job. As you said, he has never been prosecuted. The State's Attorney of Cook County at the time this evidence first came to light in the mid- `80s was none other than the now major Richard Daley. The Superintendent of Police at that time contacted him with the evidence of torture and said, ``Are you going to prosecute this?'' Daley did not intervene or prosecute at that time. Later on, his first assistant, Richard Devine, became State's Attorney of Cook County. Remarkably, Devine, while he was in private practice, had been Burge's lawyer, defending many of these civil cases. He then became prosecutor in 1997. Of course, he did nothing either, because his clients were the ones that needed to be investigated. So for 20, 25, 30 years, no one in the prosecutor's office, the current mayor or the current state's attorney, no one else did any investigation. Finally, the community outrage was so strong with regard to all of that that a special prosecutor was appointed. That was four years ago, as you said. Four years of investigation has led to his publicly saying that he now has 192 cases of torture and abuse at Area 2 and later at the Area 3 station, where Burge was transferred to later on. He now is talking about releasing a report. He still is not talking about indicting anybody. The rumor has it that, because it is so long, that we're going to have a catch-22 situation, and we're going to have the statute of limitations invoked by the special prosecutor, who's going to release a report but say it's too late to indict anybody. Of course, we all say that that's ridiculous, that there are ongoing conspiracy allegations and evidence that there's an obstruction of justice going on in the various courts. There's perjury going on. So, no one's going to be satisfied if, in fact, all that happens is a report, no matter how damning the report may be. So the struggle here in Chicago continues and will continue, as long as people are still in jail because of the confessions that were tortured from them, and as long as Burge and others sit in Florida and other places and collect hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars in police pensions, rather than to face criminal charges, whether they be state charges, federal charges or charges before the International Court of Justice. Amy Goodman. We are also joined by David Bates. Can you tell us what happened to you? When did it happen? Tell us the whole course of events. David Bates. Well, I believe it was October the 28th or 29th of 1983, when a few officers knocked on my mom's door and announced that they were police officers and let my mom know that I'll be taken away and that I'll be coming home shortly. There were supposed to be some questions regarding a case. Of course, I got to the police station. I was questioned. I let the officers or detectives know that I had nothing to do with the case. I knew nothing. This went on for two days. At that time, it was five sessions of torture, starting with two with slaps and kicks and threats. It was two particular sessions of torture that was very devastating, in which a plastic bag was placed over my head. I was punched and kicked. And I'll tell you, when you talk about torture, you're talking about individuals who, most part, were young, had a few brushes with the law, but never in a million years thought that they would have a plastic bag placed over their head. More importantly, the torture has never been resolved. No one has ever owned up to the torture. So we have hundreds of individuals who have psychologically been warped, been destroyed. There's never been any clinical resolution to the torture. No one has owned up to it. And I tell you, the fact that this attorney and this journalist have spent years trying to uncover the truth and community organizations and individuals--we're talking about a city. We're talking about a state. We're talking about legislators, who have not looked into the issue of torture, and I say it's a shame. And I would like to commend these gentlemen for working hard to bring the issue of torture out. But I say it's time for the legislators and mayor and individuals who had firsthand knowledge of it to come clean with it and bring these individuals to justice. Amy Goodman. Flint Taylor, I remember years ago with an especially active group of mothers, mothers in Chicago of men on death row, who kept raising the issue of this police commander, Burge, and saying that their sons had been tortured, that one had engraved in a metal bench in the police station, ``I am tortured, I'm forced to confess,'' something like that. What about this? What about death row cases, where men ended up on death row? Flint Taylor. That's been a major, major piece of this whole struggle against police torture. In the early and mid- `90s, the movement against police torture and for human rights came together with the anti-death penalty movement here in Chicago and raised a very strong set of voices, some of whom you've just mentioned. For people, there were at least ten to twelve people on death row here in Illinois who alleged and had evidence to show that Burge and his men had tortured them into giving confessions, one of whom was Aaron Patterson, whom you just mentioned, who during a break in one of his torture sessions etched in a bench that he had been suffocated with a bag and was being tortured. That later came out. Ultimately, due to the combination of the factors, and articles that John wrote, and speaking out by David and others in the community, and the work of various lawyers, Governor Ryan looked at all of these cases, and as you know, he not only commuted the sentence of all of those on death row, some 160-odd people, but he looked specifically at four cases of torture by Burge and others and found that those individuals were innocent, that they had been tortured into giving false confession, and he gave full innocence pardons to those four individuals. That's Aaron Patterson, Stanley Howard, Madison Hobley and Leroy Orange. Those four men are now ``fortunate'' enough--and I put that with quotes around it--to be able to, because they've been exonerated, bring lawsuits in federal courts. So there is not only the special prosecutor, but there are these lawsuits by the individuals who have been pardoned in federal court, where we are fighting the issues of torture and bringing out evidence in that forum, as well. And there's an obstruction of justice going on in that courtroom, as well as against the special prosecutor, as the city has paid over $5 million to a set of private lawyers to represent the police officers, including Burge, in all these cases. Burge now and his men--and there's now over 50 detectives that are named in one or more of these 192 cases-- they are all getting free lawyers, and they're getting the advice from the city-paid lawyers to take the Fifth Amendment. So you now have the spectacle of, in these federal cases and in front of the special prosecutor, that former and present law enforcement officers, rather than to answer questions about whether they tortured and abused people like David Bates and the men on death row, they have all lined up and taken the Fifth Amendment as to each and every allegation of police torture. Amy Goodman. John Conroy, you're a journalist and author. You've covered the torture case for over a decade for the Chicago Reader, and you wrote the book, ``Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture.'' How has this taken so long to come out, though it has come out in parts over the years and in certain communities well-known? And now the question of whether, in fact, it will be released, this report that among other people calling for this, four black aldermen are calling for the public release of this report. John Conroy. Well, it hasn't taken that long to be out. It was out in 1990, when we did the story in the Chicago Reader, the first story, and we've done more than 100,000 words since. And I think that what's dragged on--the reason why it's dragged on--I differ with the estimable Mr. Taylor here on this--is that there is no community outrage. People don't care. As in every society in which people are tortured, there's a torture book class in Chicago. It's African American men, most of them with criminal records. And they're just beyond the pale of our compassion. We just don't care. And that's why it's taken 15 years for you probably to do this program and many others now interested in this report, when the information has been out there for a very long time. The New York Times, I think, it's covered this twice: once, when the men were pardoned; and once, when there was a float in the St. Patrick's Day parade that was going to honor four of the officers who had been accused, and the float never came to be in the parade, but there was a controversy about it. So, that shows you, I think, the level of concern in the United States about this issue. Amy Goodman. We are talking to John Conroy, author of Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture. We're also joined by David Bates, a torture victim, and Flint Taylor, an attorney who has worked on this case for decades. Amy Goodman. Our guests in the Chicago studio are John Conroy, who is a journalist and author, covered the torture case for over a decade for the Chicago Reader, author of Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture; David Bates is also with us, as is Flint Taylor, attorney with the People's Law Office in Chicago. David Bates, are you going to sue the police department? David Bates. Well, I have to consult with my attorneys regarding that. I'll just have to say that in conjunction with what Flint said and John, this has been going on for so long, and there hasn't been the outrage needed to bring attention to the torture in order to get those convictions. But, again, I just want to commend individuals who have been tirelessly working to keep this issue of torture in the news. We have to look at this from a human perspective. These are individuals who were tortured and beaten at the hands of people who basically are supposed to serve and protect them. And imagine keeping this thing and not being able to talk to people about this. A lot of these gentlemen went to prison and served long stints of time incarcerated. There was no one to talk to about the torture. Even contact with public officials or community leaders, it was no one to talk to about it. And, again, I just want to commend everybody for coming on board with this issue. But there's a lot need to be done. Amy Goodman. David Bates, did you hear about this happening to other people at the time that this happened to you? David Bates. Well, see, the problem comes in, is that when you're in prison and you're in an environment like that, you do not want to let anyone know that you made a confession, whether you were tortured, whatever--however you made the confession, it was not in your best interest to expose that while you were in prison. You would be considered weak. So, imagine these individuals in prison not able to even seek legal help and advice. I liken it to being raped, honestly. Individuals not able to be--go for help. Then, when you did go for help, when you had the opportunity to go for help, people said it didn't happen. So, I tell you, when you get rid of all--when you get down to the human aspect of this problem, you're going to deal with a lot of sick men, a lot of sick men that need clinical-- some type of clinical help to deal with the torture. Amy Goodman. David Bates, when you saw the pictures at Abu Ghraib, what were your thoughts? David Bates. Well, the pictures, I'll say this. My thoughts on the whole process was: how the hell did they get hearings, and torture from anywhere is wrong. But as we've spoke on, this torture has taken place for over two to three decades in America, on the Southside of Chicago. Why didn't we have public hearings? Why didn't the state legislators come in and do investigations? We actually had to go outside the country to an international court to deal with police torture. On October the 14th, the People's Law Office and other attorneys met in front of the Organization of American States to bring attention to the issue of torture, and we're looking for delegation of individuals to come in and to ask Mayor Daley questions that he hasn't been able to answer to the public since this Jon Burge stuff has been going on. And I tell you, it's going to be an embarrassment to a lot of people, but like my good friend Conroy said, they've been knowing about it. Amy Goodman. Let me ask about the knowledge to the very top. Some are saying--and I want to put this question to Flint Taylor, attorney with the People's Law Office in Chicago--that the report could well implicate, as you were talking about, the State's Attorney, Richard Daley, his assistant Richard Devine, who now holds the top job. Can you talk more about how they knew, the whole issue of them being told early on? Flint Taylor. Well, as I said, Richard Daley was previously the State's Attorney of Cook County. In 1982, when one of the major--the first major case broke with regard to police torture, the Andrew Wilson case, the superintendent of police was informed by the head of the hospital, the prison hospital where Andrew Wilson was being held, that there was serious evidence of torture, that Andrew Wilson not only said, but had physical evidence that supported the conclusion that he had been tortured by electric shock, by beating, and he had 15 injuries all over him, burns and everything like that. And the head of the hospital was so shocked, he brought it straight to the superintendent of police. The superintendent of police then brought it straight to Richard Daley. He knew that Andrew Wilson had been charged with very serious offenses, shooting two police officers and killing them. So Daley decided that rather than to investigate the criminal activities of Jon Burge in torturing Andrew Wilson, that that would, in fact, undercut and undermine, he thought, the prosecution of Wilson, so he did nothing. He did no prosecution at that time. He then presided over the next eight years over the State's Attorney's office, which was complicit in taking over 55 confessions from 55 different victims of Burge and police torture. In all of those or many of those cases in the individual courts, there was testimony from those victims that they had been tortured. However, Daley defended all those cases, put all those people behind bars, many of them on death row, and in no instance did he investigate the continuing allegations that were coming out of Burge's police headquarters that people were tortured. Daley then went on to be the mayor of the City of Chicago. There was--and John and I disagree in the sense that there had been at times public outrage. The public outrage reaches certain proportions at different times. We're at one those key points again today. We had been in the early '90s. And one the reasons for that was this Andrew Wilson trial that brought out all this evidence and put together all these different allegations of torture. Because of all of that, the police department was forced to reinvestigate. This was in the early 1990s. They put an honest investigator in charge of the investigation, and lo and behold, he came to an obvious conclusion. He said there was systematic torture at Area 2. He said he had looked at 50 cases, and there was systematic torture. Well, what did the superintendent of police do? He suppressed that report. He then met with the mayor of the City of Chicago, after we had gotten that report released by a judge, and he and the mayor, who is now Richard Daley, instead of saying, ``Now we have the evidence to prosecute. Now we should proceed. Now we should lock Burge up,'' what did they do? They not only attempted to suppress the report, but then they went publicly and discredited it. Daley stepped forward and said, ``These are only rumors and innuendo.'' So, at every point, as I've mentioned, Daley, rather than taking his responsibility as chief law enforcement officer and chief executive officer of the City of Chicago, moved to suppress and to do nothing. Amy Goodman. Legally--let me ask you, Flint Taylor. Legally, if crimes are known about, and they are covered up, is Mayor Daley criminally liable? Flint Taylor: Well, at this point, is he criminally liable? I suppose you could see him a co-conspirator, in that it was certain obstruction of justice over the years, certainly. But I think at this point what we're looking for is if a special prosecutor comes out with a report and says, ``I can't indict, because it's too late,'' then the people of the City of Chicago have to look in two directions. They have to look backwards to Daley and Devine and say, ``Well, the special prosecutor was hamstrung by the fact that Daley and Devine didn't act when they should have,'' and then we have to look forward and say, ``That's not sufficient. That's not right.'' There are continuing criminal violations here, and if the special prosecutor won't do anything about them, then Fitzgerald, who is the U.S. Attorney here and who, of course, has made his name in the Valerie Plame case and has already indicted Daley's people in a wide-ranging truck scandal, he has to open his investigation into federal RICO or racketeering charges, as well as obstruction of justice and perjury. And as David has mentioned, it has been taken to the international forum, not only last fall to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is the Organization of American States, who is still looking into this issue, but this past week and right now, it's been presented to the Committee Against Torture of the United Nations in Geneva, and one of our people has spoken with and presented evidence to the Committee Against Torture, and that committee has ordered the government to respond and to speak to the issues of torture here in this country. And in its concluding remarks, it put with Abu Ghraib and put with Guantanamo the situation of Chicago. And so, perhaps there's not enough public outrage here, but the international community is looking at it in a very strong way, and to hear Chicago put in the same breath with Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is something that--if that doesn't wake up the powers that be here in the City of Chicago and that doesn't wake up the U.S. Attorney's office and that doesn't, in fact, put on the carpet the State's Attorney of Cook County and the Mayor of the City of Chicago, I don't know what will. Amy Goodman: John Conroy, the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights will present a report that includes the Chicago torture allegations to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. How significant is this? And, finally, why do you call your book ``Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People''? John Conroy: Well, let me take the second question first. I call the book ``Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People,'' because torture is always done by--we want our torturers to be monsters, but it turns out that they're just ordinary people like you and me. And I can go back and cite you all kinds of psychological experiments in which they have found that people will do extraordinary things, inflicting pain on other people, if they are simply ordered to do so, simply following orders someone else is taking responsibility. And it doesn't require any sort of a twisted mind to do this. We are all-- most of us are given to obedience. And so, I've interviewed torturers from around the world, former torturers, and they all struck me as very ordinary men. How significant the international attention will be remains to be seen. It's a unique turn, and it's somewhat thrilling, I think, for those of us who have been watching this for a long time to see it finally raise to the level of being mentioned in a phrase with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. But whether this will just be one of those media--you know, where the media comes in for a day or two and then leaves remains to be seen. Amy Goodman: And what's the timetable on this? John Conroy: The special prosecutor is supposed to--I'm sorry. The judge who oversees the prosecutor is supposed to rule, I believe, on the 12th of May, as to whether the report will be released or not. Amy Goodman: That will be Friday, and we will certainly follow it up. I want to thank you all for being with us: David Bates, torture victim himself, telling his own story; Flint Taylor, attorney with the People's Law Office in Chicago, who has represented many of the victims; and John Conroy, who has written about this for years for the Chicago Reader, author of ``Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture.''

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, after evicting all Katrina survivors in temporary housing on March 15, FEMA has now announced that 55,000 families will lose their emergency housing assistance as of May 31. Tens of thousands of these families are being told they are ineligible for further assistance because of FEMA's onerous and discriminatory rules. Is this how we treat people who have lost everything? Where do we expect families who have lost their homes, their jobs, even their city, to turn without housing assistance? Nearly 9 months have passed since Hurricane Katrina hit. If FEMA can't help these families reclaim their lives, then Congress has to act. Literally dozens of Katrina bills are still languishing in committees, including H.R. 4197, the most comprehensive relief package offered to date. I urge my colleagues to pass H.R. 4197 in support of Katrina's survivors.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Chairman, the Congressional Black Caucus budget is a better statement for our country's values. Educators are asking for a fully funded No Child Left Behind because America's children are being left behind; seniors deserve accessible health care, but Medicare part D is leaving everyone confused; and veterans are only asking to receive the health care that recruiters promised them and that they deserve. But, you know, Tupac observed a long time ago that there's money for war, but we can't feed the poor. Sadly, a study done by the Pentagon estimated that Halliburton has received over 52 percent of the $25 billion that it has paid to contractors. The study also shows that Halliburton presented questionable bills for nearly $2 billion, lost prefabricated bases worth over $75 million, and yet Halliburton still gets new contracts. If this Congress wants to truly balance the budget and satisfy the needs of working Americans, it should vote to pass the Congressional Black Caucus budget.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Chairman, I anticipate today that mine will be one of the few votes against this bill, just as I cast the only dissenting vote on the bill in committee. I have submitted a thoroughgoing written statement of the reasons for my dissent. President Theodore Roosevelt said, ``To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.'' The American public are expressing their criticism of our President and his war in opinion polls showing the President's approval rating is the lowest it has been during his tenure. But Congress continues to march in step with the President's war plans. The wars and military operations we are funding through this defense authorization act are based on a simple use of force authorization passed by this Congress in October of 2001, which was to have been linked to the provisions of the War Powers Act of 1973. Thus, it is Congress that paved the way for the disastrous war in Iraq, and Congress must accept that it too bears responsibility for this war. No regular review of that authorization has taken place, which has been cited by the President to justify preemptive war, the creation of a dual legal system, military tribunals, imprisoning enemy combatants without due process, the abandonment of the Geneva Accords and U.N. principles relating to war, extralegal secret renditions involving illegal methods of interrogation, including torture, expanded secrecy and attacks on civil liberties at home. Calls from the executive for ending the principle of separating military and civilian policing by rescinding the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 should send a chill to all who value civil liberties. We are quick to honor our young men and women in uniform with words and medals, but do we honor them where it really counts, in the pocketbook? In the hospitals for amputees and third-degree burns? We must do a better job of representing the American people and our people in uniform. Unchecked fraudulent recruitment, failed retention, violation of rights and regulations, stop-loss policies and over-rotation, lack of adequate protection for combat troops, protection of rights of conscience, diminished medical care for troops and their families, decreases in veterans benefits, environmental damage done by the manufacture, storage and use of military weapons, falsified benefits and bonuses, and privatization of functions all remain inadequately addressed by the passage of this bill, and in some cases, they are worsened. By passing this bill virtually without dissent, the Congress is effectively legitimizing these unprecedented actions of the executive. As we enter a fourth year of war in Iraq, the level of violence in Iraq continues unabated. It is higher than it has been at any time since the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. As we enter a fifth year in Afghanistan, there is renewed violence and the specter of another drawn-out war. Meanwhile, our military budget continues to grow to unprecedented levels along with the deficits it is creating. We now have a larger and more lethal military force and a more expanded intelligence budget and consolidation than we did at the height of the Cold War. That threat has receded, but the threat of unconsolidated and ill-equipped terrorist groups has been used to expand the funding of huge corporate contracts for weapons and war while denying the human suffering and needs that face us. According to Pentagon figures, we are spending $9 billion a month to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That comes to $300 million a day, $12.5 million an hour, over $200,000 a minute, and $3,500 a second. After the Second World War, President Truman set up a commission to investigate war profiteering and the government asked that corporations plow their war profits back into social programs to help rebuild the postwar economy. But today, corporations are profiting from war and its related military activities as never before, with a green light from the White House to proceed, despite massive abuse, waste and corruption. Our current military budget is larger than the budgets of every other major country in the world combined, both allies and perceived enemies. Our nuclear arsenal and other weapons systems are maintained and defended, while new systems with questionable utility are designed and promoted each year. It is time for these wars to end and for alternative military budgets that reduce the waste on flawed weapons systems to be considered by this Congress. More diplomacy, less Pentagon waste on little or nonused weapons systems; less support for corrupt regimes in the developing world; more support for the judiciary and law-abiding regimes that respect human rights; and most of all, a global plan to eliminate poverty. Those who commit acts of terrorism may not themselves be motivated by poverty, but they are able to thrive where they can exploit the hopes and dreams of the poor and the oppressed. As many have said, terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. The victory over terrorism will not come through war, but through peace and prosperity.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to address the House out of order for 5 minutes.

Ms. McKINNEY. Madam Speaker, I rise today to commend, celebrate and commemorate the military service of Brigadier General ``Big John'' Collins, Lieutenant General Cuthbert A. ``Bill'' Patillo, Major General Charles C. ``Buck'' Patillo and Major General Joel B. ``Bill'' Paris. These four generals were, in the year 1946, founders of the first State of Georgia Air National Guard Fighter Aircraft Wing, the 54th Fighter Wing. Big John Collins is a friend of mine. This friendship began when my efforts resulted in him getting his long overdue war medals. Big John had tried for 20 years to get his medals. And he was a pilot. Bill and Buck Patillo are identical twin brothers who, along with Bill Paris, flew Republic Aircraft Corporation P-47 Thunderbolt fighter aircraft. These four pilots formed a tight ``Diamond'' attack formation. These four pilots were ordered to fly at air shows around the State of Georgia to boost enlistments in the Georgia National Guard. The idea was a great success; so successful, in fact, that the increase in Georgia enlistments came to the attention of the National Guard Bureau at the U.S. Air Force headquarters at the Pentagon. This work of these four pilots was the foundation upon which the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds Precision Flying Team was created to rank along with the Blue Angels Precision Flying Team of the U.S. Navy. Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg credited the Georgia Air National Guard with being the founders of the Air Force Thunderbirds Precision Flying Team. All four of these pilots are alive today. They are healthy, and they are happy to have their service recognized in this way. Although the Patillo twins now live in Valrico, Florida, near McDill Air Force Base, I am proud to say that they were born in my district in Decatur, Georgia. Bill Paris was born in my home State and still lives in Georgia, in Alpharetta. Big John Collins, my friend, was born in Oklahoma, raised in Bradenton, Florida, but saw the light and found his way to Georgia where he has lived since 1939. I think he found our sweet Georgia peaches too irresistible to leave. Bill Paris was a leading fighter pilot ace destroying nine Japanese aircraft. Bill Patillo destroyed a Japanese version of the German ME 262 rocket-powered fighter, one of only three of such fighters destroyed worldwide in World War II. Plus Bill destroyed five other Japanese aircraft. Buck Patillo destroyed five Japanese aircraft. And big John Collins, my constituent who has now become my friend, shot down three Japanese fighter aircraft. Sergeant James Campbell shot down two Japanese fighter aircraft. Sergeant Donald Schopp shot down one Japanese fighter, making a total of six enemy fighters downed on one mission. Plus one Japanese war ship exiting Simpson Harbor at full speed was destroyed. Big John Collins led an attack on Tobera Air Drome, destroying numerous Japanese aircraft on the ground. Bill and Buck Patillo, Bill Paris and Big John Collins collectively received the following combat medals: 4 Silver Stars, 9 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 9 Legion of Merits, 36 Air Medals, 5 Distinguished Service Medals, 9 Presidential Unit Citations, 4 Government of the Philippines, 2 Croix de Guerre with Palm, US SWPA medal with 9 major campaign battle stars, 121 various noncombat service medals. Sixty years after the conclusion of World War II, all Americans should renew and rededicate their honor for the noble sacrifices, valorous deeds and enduring accomplishments of military veterans of what has become known as the greatest generation. I would also like to commend my sister colleague, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who just spoke, who fought hard to get a memorial on the Mall for them, the greatest generation, including for my four Georgia pilots. Congratulations to them all for a job well done.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Madam Speaker, the American people seem wedged between record oil company profits, half-billion-dollar retirement packages for oil executives, and a Federal energy policy that just does not work. Now Americans have to choose between not only medicine through a prescription drug plan that is a boon to pharmaceuticals and a doggle to the people who need the drugs, but the people are also being victimized by a secret energy plan drawn up by oil barons. For years, people like me have been saying that this Nation needs to decrease oil dependence, that it was depletable, causes global warming, was not worth destroying ANWR or waging wars over. Better policy is possible, but we won't get it from this administration of oil barons.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I come before this body to personally express again my sincere regret about the encounter with the Capitol Hill Police. I appreciate my colleagues who are standing with me, who love this institution and who love this country. There should not have been any physical contact in this incident. I have always supported law enforcement and will be voting for H. Res. 756 expressing my gratitude and appreciation for the professionalism and dedication of the men and women of the U.S. Capitol Police. I am sorry that this misunderstanding happened at all, I regret its escalation, and I apologize.

Ms. McKINNEY

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in protest at this Administration's egregious treatment of tens of thousands of families of survivors who were displaced by and continue to suffer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Today, on the Ides of March, some ten thousand families are being evicted from temporary housing in hotels by FEMA. This would have happened months ago but for cries of protest and legal injunctions that forced FEMA to keep rolling back the eviction deadline: December 15th, January 7th, January 31st, February 15th, February 28th, and now March 15th--on each of these dates, families were evicted. So to the 10,000 families being evicted today, we must add some 30,000 families already evicted, giving us a figure of some 40,000 families who will have been evacuated from temporary housing in hotels. FEMA and DHS have not provided any comprehensive plan to transition these survivors out of temporary and into permanent shelters, and while tens of thousands are already living in tents and cars, thousands more are being thrown out to sleep on the streets, because the shelters are already full. Last week, during one of his rare visits to the Gulf Coast, the President bluntly accused Congress of moving too slow in providing funds for housing and reconstruction. Let me read to the House a passage from the Stafford Act. This is from Section 407: The President is authorized to provide assistance on a temporary basis in the form of mortgage or rental payments to or on behalf of individuals and families who, as a result of financial hardship caused by a major disaster, have received written notice of dispossession or eviction from a residence by reason of a foreclosure of any mortgage or lien, cancellation of any contract of sale, or termination of any lease entered into prior to such disaster. Such assistance shall be provided for the duration of the period or financial hardship but not to exceed 18 months. So under the Stafford Act, survivors being evicted from temporary housing are entitled to 18 months of housing assistance, that means another full year, of rental assistance, but only if the President authorizes the necessary sums. Rather than stepping in and taking charge, the President is passing the blame back to the Congress for a ``Failure of Initiative,'' the title of a report coming from his own party, which delivered stinging criticism of the Administration's handling of the aftermath of Katrina. Mr. Chairman, the failure to take initiative did not arise from this side of the aisle. We now have 77 signatures on H.R. 4197, the Hurricane Katrina Recovery, Reclamation, Restoration, Reconstruction and Reunion Act, which sets out a comprehensive plan to provide housing, health care, education, environmental clean-up, and to meet nearly all of the still urgent needs of the Gulf Coast survivors. And we are calling out to our colleagues across the aisle to join our initiative and do what is just and right for our fellow Americans caught up in the largest population displacement our Nation has seen since the Great Depression and slavery. As we consider yet another supplemental request for tens of billions for a military occupation of Iraq, where violence is spinning out of control and toward all-out civil war under our watch, let us ask ourselves the hard questions: How can we deny housing, education and health care to American citizens displaced by Katrina and yet continue to build homes, schools and hospitals in Iraq? How can we refuse to provide satellite voting for hundreds of thousands of displaced New Orleaneans and yet spend hundreds of millions on satellite voting stations for Iraqis in America? Why are survivors in Mississippi and Texas entitled to trailers whilst those in Louisiana are not? Why are hurricane survivors in Florida and Texas entitled to maximum benefits under the Stafford Act whilst Katrina survivors from Mississippi and Louisiana are told they must fend for themselves? And finally, Mr. Chairman, was the decision to send the poorest and most traumatized survivors of the flooding of New Orleans into diaspora simply an ad hoc decision, or part of an overall strategic plan to keep as many poor and minority residents as possible from returning to New Orleans, in order to lay the groundwork for an urban real estate bonanza? Is this the reason our government is so intent upon refusing New Orleans survivors their basic rights under law?