BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I wish to pause for a moment. I know we are on the bill, and I am most anxious to proceed with the Defense authorization bill, having served on the committee since 1994 and before then in the House. It is imperative now that we get as robust a bill as possible.
Before doing that, let me mention one thing because I haven't yet spoken about this. I have been watching several of our colleagues who have come to the floor to speak about a great Senator, Norm Coleman, who is no longer seated in the Senate but who is a remarkable character.
A good friend of mine, Paul Weyrich, who recently died, wrote an op-ed piece, and it is called ``The Workhorses and the Show Horses.'' He talked about so many of the Members of the House and the Senate who are out there just to make themselves look good. They are the ones who are show horses. Then there are the workhorses. We talk about someone such as Norm Coleman, who was always there and getting deeply involved in issues, many of which are not popular issues if you are using them to run for reelection. I am thinking of a close friend, a mutual friend of ours named Ward Brehm. Ward Brehm and I have been working together for a long time on some things in Africa, as the Chair is aware, and he was talking about being from Minnesota and how much involved Norm Coleman got in various international affairs issues that don't have any votes behind them, but he was willing to do it. Every time you turned around, he was willing to do things that other people weren't willing to do.
I remember several years ago when he and I met with a delegation from Burundi and Rwanda and the DRC. This was a group that was over here in conjunction with the National Prayer Breakfast. He and I always worked together during the time that we had the National Prayer Breakfast. We would get these people to come all the way over here from different countries, but we kind of concentrated on Africa. I remember him standing there talking about, for a long period of time--keep in mind he is a Jew. I was never real clear where in New York he was from--I think the Bronx or someplace. But anyway, he was very strong in the Jewish community, and I am not. I am on the Christian side. But we would always get together and talk to them about Jesus and talk to them about loving God. And then when he would pray--at the end of these things, we would offer a prayer, and he would end up giving a prayer in Hebrew--an amazing guy.
At the National Prayer Breakfast African dinner 2 years ago--I had sponsored the dinner that was for all the Africans who had come over for the Prayer Breakfast and stayed for the African dinner--he was a major player in that. So these are things people didn't know about Norm Coleman.
The idea is scripturally based; it is Acts 2:42. It is kind of a genesis of these weekly Prayer Breakfasts in the Senate. On Wednesday mornings, we had a Prayer Breakfast and about 20, 25 Senators showed up every Wednesday and Norm Coleman was the chairman of that and was always in these groups. But he was also one who was helping us in forming these same groups with members of Parliament from all over Africa. He was a tireless worker in that effort, which was not something out there to get any votes.
I talked to him the other day, having gone through this election and then the 8 months or so, whatever it was, in recounting and all of that. I told him that many years ago I was mayor of Tulsa, and I did a pretty good job, I thought. I was supposed to win hands down. Someone came out of obscurity and because of a set of circumstances that should have gotten votes, not lost votes, I had lost unexpectedly on that Tuesday.
Well, we had scheduled our Tulsa Mayor's Prayer Breakfast the next morning. Bill Bright, who died not too long ago, came by as the speaker. Keep in mind, here he was the speaker at the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast the morning after I lost the election. He gave the most brilliant speech. I remember how he said it and the words he used. He said: A lot of times we think in terms of what is happening to us today, looking at our own careers, but, he said, God is still up there and there is a plan for all of us. He said in a very clear way that I thoroughly understood, the day after I lost the election I wasn't supposed to lose, that God opens a window and he closes a door and that window is going to be bigger. I can tell you right now I wouldn't be doing what I am doing today if it had not been for that.
So I would just say about my friend, Norm Coleman, God has a plan in mind for you, Norm, and it is one we will look back someday and say perhaps this is the best thing that could have happened to you. In the meantime, we love you, Norm, and God bless you.
AMENDMENT NO. 1511
I wish to also speak in terms of a program that I think a lot of people don't understand, and on which I know there is honest disagreement.
The F-22, people have said, is something like a Cold War aircraft. It is not. To quote Secretary Donnelly and General Schwartz both, because they both said the same thing, they said the F-22 is unquestionably the most capable fighter in our military inventory, not just air to air, as some on this floor have insinuated, but also precision attack air to ground, as well as intelligence collection. In contrast, almost every other piece of military equipment in our inventory today--air, land, and sea--is Cold War equipment that needs to be replaced.
I think about the Bradley vehicle. It has been around since the 1960s. I think about the Abrams tank. It has been around since the 1970s. I think about the Paladin, even though we have had about five major upgrades on the Paladin, that is our artillery beast, and that was actually World War II technology where you had to get out of the thing after every shot and swab the breach. You hear that and people can't believe it. Well, fortunately, we are going to go through an improvement on that. But the point I am trying to make is most of the stuff we have is Cold War stuff and to find that F-22 isn't needed because it wasn't flown in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think, is pretty narrow-minded. We have a lot of people we have to defend America against for contingencies that we don't know are out there and we don't know what our needs are going to be. The need certainly wasn't there in terms of Afghanistan and Iraq, but we don't know where the next enemy is going to be coming from or what the next contingency is. I wish we did. I can remember being on the House Armed Services Committee my last year there in 1984. We had people testify. They said--these are smart people. They said: You know, in 10 years, we will no longer need ground capability. And look what has happened since that time.
So no matter how smart our people are, there is no way we are going to be able to determine where the next guy is going to come from and what our capability is going to have to be. Is it going to be in the air, sea, strike vehicles, lift capacity, cannons? So we need to keep that in mind because the only thing we have in the form of a fifth-generation fighter is the F-22, and it is uniquely designed and equipped to penetrate a hostile environment and be a savage air dominance for our ground forces. The F-22, I look at it as an investment in the future, not just 10 years down the road but 20 years and beyond. What we build today is going to have to be able to determine and deter and defeat adversaries for decades. Just look at the age of our entire military today. We talked about all these vehicles, but we have such things as the national security in long term, 40 years. We can't even see what we are going to need 10 years from now.
Now we talk about the F-35. Well, the F-35 is great. I am a strong supporter of the F-35 and working on it and getting it up as fast as possible. Its mission requirements are not the same as the F-22. The F-22 is out flying today, and we have that capability today. Only five F-35s are flying, and it is still in the testing period. It is impossible to assess the full capabilities of the F-35 until operational tests are completed in, I think, 2014. Well, that is 2014. This is 2009. There is a lot of time between now and 2014.
While we discuss cutting the only fifth-generation fighter in production today, China and Russia are continuing to move forward with the development of their fifth-generation fighters. I think they call the Chinese one the J-12 and the Russian is the T-50. They are out there right now talking about building these things. Today our Legacy, our F-15s, F-16s, F-18s are less capable than other fourth-generation fighters, such as the SU-27 and the SU-30 series aircraft.
I might remind the President that we have--we already know other countries are buying these capable fourth-plus generation aircraft that are better than what we have now, except for the F-22. We know of one sale, and I remember this--it has been quite awhile ago now--for F-27s from China, 240 of these. Now they are talking about cutting our number of F-22s--and I will talk about the numbers in a minute--down to the 187 and stopping the amendment that would increase that by seven vehicles. I don't want to see our Legacy fighters outmatched by fifth-generation fighters developed by China and Russia. I have always said our pilots are better, our training is better, but they have to have at least comparable equipment to survive.
So our air-to-air threat is only one aspect of the threat our Air Force faces today. Our surface-to-air threat remains to be a real serious problem. You just think about what the Russians are making now, the S-300s and the Chinese 4000s. They are capable of tracking up to 100 targets and getting as high as 90,000 feet in the air.
Now, that is priceless. These systems that make penetrating hostile airspace difficult and deadly for a legacy aircraft, including unmanned vehicles, such as our Predator, which has performed brilliantly, are uncontested facts. Only the F-22, with its advance stealth technology and weaponry and supersonic speeds, can successfully penetrate what we call denied airspace, hunt and destroy strategic ground targets during the day or night, and collect and provide battle intelligence and awareness, and maintain our superiority in the air.
The Air Force officials have repeatedly stated no less than 243 F-22s would be sufficient to maintain a moderate level of risk. We are talking about the deaths of Americans. If that is the goal, that is what we should have. In the beginning, it was 750 F-22s. We have slowly gone down. That is what this amendment is about today.
GEN John Corley, Commander of the Air Force Combat Command, said:
At Air Combat Command, we have held the need for 381 F-22s to deliver a tailored package of air superiority to our Combatant Commanders and provide a potent, globally arrayed asymmetric deterrent against potential adversaries. In my opinion, a fleet of 187 F-22s puts the execution of our current national military strategy at high risk in the near to mid term. To my knowledge, there are no studies that demonstrate that 187 F-22s are adequate to support our national military strategy. Air Combat Commandment analysis, done in concert with the Headquarters Air Forces, shows a moderate risk force can be obtained with an F-22 fleet of approximately 250 aircraft.
So we are talking about a bare minimum number, and whether it is 243 or 250, that should be a bare minimum number.
While the F-22 hasn't deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, a theater security package of six F-22s are on a continuous rotation to Guam in the Pacific Theater of Operations and have been forward deployed in Japan.
Why? Because it is the only fighter capable of stealthy penetration of North Korea's air defenses.
Finally, there continues to be allegations about the costs and operations of the F-22--to include an article last week in the Washington Post. The bottom line is, these allegations are false or intentionally misleading. The F-22 cost per flying hour is $19,750, not more than $44,000, as they were trying to say. The F-22 maintenance trends have improved from 62 percent to 68 percent. The F-22 skin is not vulnerable to rain. Finally, the fly-away cost for F-22s multiyear this Congress approved is $142.6 million, not $350 million.
One final point on all of these supposed studies about the F-22: We have been through this before with the approval of the multiyear and are going through it again. I have been briefed on both classified and unclassified studies, and while the range of numbers varied, each study concluded that 183 F-22s is not enough. So we need to continue to build the F-22s and look at exporting this aircraft to our allies. Fortunately, some of that is taking place today. Japan, Australia, and Israel have expressed considerable interest in the purchase of F-22s.
Nations around the world realize the F-22A Raptor is the only operational fighter-bomber available that can successfully defeat and destroy air and ground threats of today and tomorrow.
So what we are talking about is--in the markup, we increased the number by seven aircraft. The chief mover of this, I have to say, was Senator Saxby Chambliss. As I told him, this is not enough. He agreed, but it was the most we thought we could do.
I believe when the time comes for an amendment to cut that number down, we need to give serious consideration to that amendment and not allow it to pass.
There is an expectation of the American people--and I have gone through this before with other airframes and other ground platforms--the American people think we give our kids who go into battle the very best of everything. I can tell you that is not true. I gave an example. There are five countries, including South Africa, that make a better non-line-of-sight cannon than we have today.
To me, that is unacceptable. It is unacceptable to the American people when we explain that is the situation. The F-15, F-16, and the F-14 have done a great job, but they need to move on to the fourth and fifth generation, and the only way to do that is with the F-22, which has been a success story.
GUANTANAMO BAY
I have another interest I want to share today, and that has to do with Gitmo. People are probably tired of hearing me talk about Gitmo, but I think we are about to make a mistake. The administration is making the demand that we close Gitmo. I have stood on the floor of the Senate many times and talked about my experiences there--the fact that anybody who wants to close Gitmo, if you ask why, they will say that for some reason people associate that with the types of torture that allegedly went on at Abu Ghraib and all of that.
This has nothing to do with that. There has not been a documented case of waterboarding at Gitmo. It is a state-of-the-art prison.
When President Obama talked about the 17 locations in America where we can take terrorists and relocate them from Gitmo to America, one happened to be Fort Sill in my State of Oklahoma. I went down to Fort Sill, and there was a lady in charge. She is a young major in charge of the prison where they would put these terrorists.
She said, ``I don't understand what people are thinking.'' This young lady, named SMA Carter, said she had two tours at Gitmo, and it is designed for terrorists. They have a court system where they can do tribunals.
We have six classifications of security in Gitmo. It is one of the few good deals the government has. We have had it since 1903. I have told the Presiding Officer this before. We only pay $4,000 a year for it. Do you have a better deal than that in government? There isn't one.
I have to say the terrorists are still at war with the United States, and we are legally entitled to capture and hold enemies and fighters in the hostilities. We detain terrorists and supporters to prevent them from returning to the battlefield, saving the lives of our service men and women and the lives of civilians who are innocent victims. I have spent a lot of time there. I am familiar with some of the terrorists there who are really bad people. They want to kill everybody who is listening right now. That is their mission in life.
We have had about 800 suspected al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists who have been sent to Gitmo since 9/11--people who are really bad. I looked through there, and we saw Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was the architect of 9/11. There was also the guy who was the explosives trainer for 9/11, who provided information on the September 2001 assassination of the Northern Alliance leader, Masood, and on the al-Qaida organization's use of mines. There was also the terrorist financier who provided detailed information on Osama bin Laden's front companies. There was the Taliban fighter linked to al-Qaida operatives connected to the 1998 East Africa Embassy bombings. Remember that, in Tanzania and Kenya? Down there we also had an al-Qaida explosives trainer who designed a prototype shoe bomb for destroying airplanes, as well as a magnet mine for attacking ships.
These people are unlike the types of prisoners we have had in other wars. If we look back during any of our wars, we had soldiers fighting for their countries. These people are not soldiers fighting for a country. They are fighting for a cause, and that cause is to destroy us.
To date over 540 prisoners have been transferred or released, leaving approximately 230 at Gitmo. They include members of al-Qaida and related terrorist organizations, planners of major terrorist attacks worldwide, including 9/11. These are the types of people there.
The intelligence gained from detainees at Gitmo helped the United States and its allies identify, exploit, and disrupt terrorist operations worldwide, saving untold lives. There have been a number of terrorist attacks. For a long time, they were classified, but most are no longer classified.
In 2007, the Senate voted 94 to 3 on a nonbinding resolution to block detainees from being transferred to the United States, declaring:
Detainees housed at Guantanamo should not be released into American society, nor should they be transferred State-side into facilities in American communities and neighborhoods.
On May 20, 2009, the Senate voted 90 to 6 on a bipartisan amendment by myself and Senator Inouye to prohibit funding for the transfer of Gitmo detainees to the United States. Unfortunately, the supplemental appropriations conference report deleted that provision, allowing detainees to be transferred to the United States for trial.
If we put them into our Federal system--I can speak this way because I am not an attorney, so I can stand back and cite the obvious. If we do that, then the rules of evidence are different.
There are a lot of these guys who are picked up, and even now they talk about Miranda rights. That blows my mind when I think about it--when this goes on now and we have the opportunity to get these people and extract information from them. Thinking about the idea of trying them in the Federal court system where, if they cannot get a conviction--and many times they could not for one reason, which is that the rules of evidence are different.
When they were captured, they went by the rules of evidence for military tribunals. So we could have some who would be turned free, and many of them in the United States.
Recent polls show that a majority of Americans oppose closing Gitmo and moving detainees to the United States. By a margin of 2 to 1--which is huge in polls--those surveyed said Guantanamo should not be closed, and by more than 3 to 1 they oppose moving some of the accused terrorists housed there to prisons in the United States.
Again, one of the prisons the Obama administration talked about of the 17 prisons happened to be in Oklahoma. It should be obvious to everybody if we have 17 locations where we are housing terrorists, that becomes a magnet for terrorism--17 magnets in the United States.
A recent Fox News poll said President Obama made a mistake when he signed the order to close Gitmo. Seventy-seven percent of all Americans say that was a mistake, that Gitmo should not be closed, 60 percent of all Americans, up from 53 percent in April and 45 percent in January. You can see the trendlines. The vast majority--nearly two-thirds--is saying he should not close Gitmo and Gitmo prisoners should not be transferred into prisons in the United States. Sixty percent of all Americans say that is true. Sixty percent in polling is a huge number, a vast majority.
I encourage Senators who will be voting on this significant amendment to keep that in mind. Since President Obama announced he intended to close Gitmo, it has become widely circulated that these detainees could be transferred to American prisons for prosecution in U.S. criminal courts and potentially released in the United States. Moving detainees to prisons here would require significant investment in restructuring existing facilities and would cost taxpayers millions of dollars.
Currently, the United States only has one Supermax facility located in Florence, CO. According to the Bureau of Prisons, as of May 21, ``only 1 bed was not filled at Supermax.'' So if we want to give maximum security to these people, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we better decide who is going to be in that one bed because we don't have the capacity. The capacity of all the high security Bureau of Prison facilities at the beginning of this month was 13,448 inmates, while the total prison population was approximately 20,000.
So what we are talking about is they are overcrowded, and that is flat not going to happen. Despite claims by Senator Durbin that the Supermax prisons in the United States are ready to receive Gitmo detainees, the Supermax prisons in the United States are at or above their maximum capacity.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said there is the very real possibility that the Gitmo detainees will recruit more terrorists from among the Federal inmate population and continue al-Qaida operations inside the walls of prison. That cannot happen in Gitmo because they are all terrorists there. That is how the New York synagogue bombers were recruited, in our own prison system.
In 2002, an entire wing of a jail in Alexandria, VA, was cleared out for the 9/11 ``20th hijacker,'' Zacarias Moussaoui, to be housed for his trial--just for one detainee. Bringing Gitmo detainees to the United States could also place America and its citizens at risk by inevitably creating a new set of targets for the jihadist terrorists. Gitmo, on the other hand, is a state-of-the-art prison. I cannot find anyone who has gone over there, including unfriendly media, media that was bent on closing Gitmo--once they go over there and see it, almost all of them change their mind. It is a state-of-the-art facility that provides humane treatment for all detainees. It is fully compliant with the Geneva Conventions and provides treatment and oversight that exceed any maximum security prison in the world, as attested to by human rights organizations, the Red Cross, Attorney General Holder, and an independent commission led by Admiral Walsh. This is state of the art, and this is not a place where torture takes place. It is the only facility of its kind in the world that was specifically designed to house and try these types of dangerous detainees.
If President Obama ever decides to visit Gitmo, I am sure he would equally
be impressed as everyone else, including, I might say, Attorney General Holder. He came back and gave a glowing report and said how great this was and, at the same time, said the President still wants to close it.
When you look at the Gitmo situation, there are, on average, two lawyers for every detainee. There are 127 doctors and nurses. The ratio is 1 to 2 in terms of health care specialists to take care of these prisoners. Here we are talking about health care in this country. Maybe they want to go to Gitmo. They would be a lot better off. Current treatment and oversight exceeds that of any maximum security prison in the world.
There is also a $12 million expeditionary legal complex. This is very significant because if we are going to do tribunals, we cannot do tribunals in our court system in the United States because it is not set up for that. Obviously, there are some things in testimony that takes place that have to be private. You cannot have these things go out because that would endanger American lives. We spent $12 million on this complex. It is a courtroom at Gitmo to try detainees, and specifically that is what it is there for. It is the only one of its kind in the world, and it provides a secure location to try detainees charged by the Federal Government. They have full access to sensitive and classified information, full access to defense lawyers, and protection by the full media, access by the press. But it is set up to take care of that specific type of an incarcerated individual.
Senator Harry Reid declared, in a press conference after my bipartisan amendment was adopted, that ``We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.'' I applaud Senator Reid for that statement and hope he will stay with that because that is something the American people are not willing to tolerate.
He went on to say he opposes imprisoning detainees on U.S. soil, saying:
We don't want them around the United States ..... I can't make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.
Senator Durbin said:
The feeling was at this point we were defending the unknown. We were being asked to defend a plan that hasn't been announced.
I think Senator Durbin was correct then and is correct now.
There are lots of questions, very few answers. What is the impact? Let's say we close Gitmo. What is the impact of placing detainees in the U.S. prison system--pretrial and posttrial? Has an assessment been done to determine the risk of escape, as well as potentially creating targets in the United States for terrorist attacks? Will Gitmo detainees be segregated from the regular prison population? Keep in mind, these guys are trained to recruit. That would be a garden spot for them to get into the American prison system to recruit people to become terrorists. What facilities exist in the United States today that can hold these detainees? We talked about that. They tried to locate 17 facilities, and it will not work.
By the way, the State legislatures in each one of those States that have one of these facilities have passed resolutions or some type of a document saying: We don't want them in our States. That is what they are saying from the States, and we need to listen to them. One might ask, where will the military commissions be held--at Guantanamo or the United States? Obviously, if you close Guantanamo, you lose that facility. Assuming military commissions are held in Guantanamo, where will detainees who are convicted serve out their sentence, if not there, because there is no other place that has the capability of doing that. There are all these questions.
What additional constitutional rights will a detainee gain if they are tried in the United State versus Guantanamo?
Are there differences in the rights awarded to detainees tried in a Military Commission versus civilian court? Could location or geography affect the right afforded to detainees--somewhere in the U.S. versus Gitmo?
How do we handle protection of classified information during trials?
What are the long-term implications on future conflicts of trying these detainees in a civil court versus military commissions?
Why is the administration reading Miranda rights to some detainees captured or held in Iraq and Afghanistan? How many are being read Miranda rights? How many have invoked their rights?
What is the impact of requiring the reading of Miranda rights to terrorists captured on the battlefield and advising them they have the ``right to remain silent''?
What if a detainee is found not guilty--where will he be released?
What does the administration plan to do when a Federal judge orders the release of a detainee but the administration knows is too dangerous to release of transfer?
What do you do with a detainee you cannot try or release due to national security concerns?
Despite not having a plan, the administration continues in its quest to empty Gitmo regardless of the cost or the risk.
The Obama administration initially talked with the small South Pacific island of Palau, population 20,000, to accept transfer of a group of 17 Chinese Muslims currently at Gitmo, called Uighurs, at the cost of some $200 million. That is $11.7 million per individual. This is not a cheap thing he is talking about doing. The total cost to build Gitmo was only $275 million. As I said, it has been on lease since 1903 for $4,000 a year. The Wall Street Journal just yesterday had a government official who said that well over 50 detainees have been approved for transfer to other countries and that negotiations are continuing with Saudi Arabia to take a large group of Yemeni detainees. Attorney General Eric Holder has estimated that more than 50 detainees may end up on trial by U.S. authorities. This news comes as more and more Americans are growing opposed to the closure of Gitmo, placing them unnecessarily at risk in order to satisfy political goals.
I think we need to stop, sit back, take a deep breath, and look at some of the things that are going on today. The idea that we would have Miranda rights for terrorists, people who have killed Americans, is pretty outrageous.
Finally, on June 9, the Obama administration again went against the will of the Congress and the American people by transferring the first Gitmo detainee to the United States for his trial in New York City.
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani has been indicted for the 1998 al-Qaida U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 224 people, including 12 Americans. Ghailani was later captured in Pakistan in 2004 while working for al-Qaida, preparing false documents. Intelligence shows he met both bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Afghanistan and remained a close associate with al-Qaida until his capture in 2004.
This bonafide terrorist will have the privilege of a U.S. civilian court trial in the United States--I think it is New York. To me, it is inconceivable that could happen. The press reported that Ghailani was smiling when the charges were read to him in New York.
Despite the Obama administration's intentions, they will find themselves in a position where they cannot even try or safely transfer or release Gitmo detainees. As of May 2009, 74 transferred/released detainees have returned to the fight--74. These are the ones we captured again. We know they returned to the fight. How many more are there out there? If you release these people, they go right back to their practice of killing Americans. Former Guantanamo Bay inmate Mullah Zakir, also known as Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, is leading the fight against the U.S. Marines in the Helmand Province in Afghanistan. He surrendered in north Afghanistan in 2001, was transferred to Gitmo in 2006, and then released. He is out there killing marines today. That is what is happening currently. There is no alternative to Gitmo.
I go through all this not to be disagreeable with anyone except to say there is an answer, and there is only one answer.
Today, we are considering the Defense authorization bill. I have an amendment to that bill. I now have, in a matter of 3 hours, 22 cosponsors. This is amendment No. 1559 to the Defense authorization bill, S. 1390. This does something very simple. I like simple bills because they cannot be misunderstood. They are not like the health insurance bill with over 1,000 pages no one has read. They are not like the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House with no one reading it, over 1,000 pages. This is just two pages. That is all. It is easy to read. Let me tell you what it says. I am wrong, it is one page. It says an amendment offered by Senator Inhofe:
Sec. 1059. Prohibition on transfer of Guantanamo Detainees.
No department or agency of the United States may
(1) transfer any detainee of the United States housed at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to any facility in the United States or its territories.
That is No. 1.
No. 2 is, we cannot ``construct, improve, modify, or otherwise enhance any facility in the United States or its territories for the purpose of hous-Ðing any detainee described in para-Ðgraph (1) .....''
No. 3: We cannot ``permanently or temporarily house or otherwise incarcerate any detainee described in paragraph (1) in the United States or its territories.''
That is a very simple solution. It is all in three sentences on one page.
I have a feeling there are going to be many people who know that we are on the right side of this issue, know that the American people are overwhelmingly, by more than two to one, in support of an amendment such as this, and are going to offer some amendment full of loopholes that will still allow them to close it. It will sound good. But this is the only one out there.
Mr. President, I say to my colleagues, if their interest is to really do something about keeping Gitmo open, there is only one vehicle out there. We are on it right now--the Defense authorization bill. That is amendment No. 1559. All it does is prohibit us from transferring any detainee from Gitmo to any facility in the United States of America or its territories; it prohibits us from constructing, improving, modifying, or otherwise enhancing any facility in the United States or its territories for the purpose of housing any detainee described in paragraph 1 above--that is the terrorist; and No. 3, it prohibits us from temporarily or otherwise incarcerating any detainee described in paragraph 1 in the United States or its territories. Period. That is all it does.
I say to those two-thirds people of America, there is a vehicle now we can use to make sure that facility, one of the really true state-of-the-art resources we have in this country, stays open and keeping those detainees, those terrorists out of America. If you want to keep them out of America, this is the way to do it.
Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
GLOBAL WARMING
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I notice no one else is on the floor right now. I was only going to address those three subjects, but I do want to make a couple of additional comments. If anyone comes in and seeks the floor, I will come to a close.
There is one other major issue that we are dealing with right now--we have had a number of hearings--and I would like to kind of put it in perspective so people will understand.
There are a lot of complaints around the country about the cap and trade bill that was passed by the House of Representatives--interestingly by one vote over the majority--which is 219. Most of the bill actually was written at about 3 o'clock in the morning and passed the same day--a thousand pages. I applaud JOHN BOEHNER over there for saying that we want to establish some kind of a program whereby anything we are going to consider on the floor should be on a Web site so all of America can read it at least 72 hours before it is voted on. I applaud that, and I hope we will be able to do that.
I certainly hope we will be able to do that with a bill that I am sure will be passed from the Environment and Public Works Committee of the Senate--the cap and trade bill that has yet to be drafted. The chairman of that committee, Senator Boxer, has stated it is going to basically be the framework of the Waxman bill from the House that was passed by a margin of 219 votes to 212, I think it was.
Anyway, that at least gives us something to talk about. I would like to go back historically to my first exposure to this whole issue. Back about 10 years ago, when we had the Kyoto Treaty, the Kyoto Treaty was a treaty the Clinton-Gore administration was trying to get us to ratify in the Senate. It was a treaty that would establish a cap-and-trade type of arrangement to limit the number of CO2--and the proper term is anthropogenic gases--anthropogenic, man-made gases, methane, CO2.
The theory behind that, and I believed it at that time because everyone said it was true, was that these man-made gases were causing global warming. I assumed the science was there and was settled. As I say, everybody thought it was. It was at that time that the Wharton School of Economics came out with the Wharton econometrics survey. That survey quantified how much it would cost America in taxes if we in the United States ratified the treaty and lived by its requirements. The result was in the range between $300 billion and $330 billion a year.
Now, I have often said one of the most egregious votes ever taken in the Senate was the vote that took place in October of 2008 when we gave an unelected bureaucrat the $700 billion to do with as he wished. It was just unconscionable. I voted against it. I was opposed to it, but we lost. We did it, and now, most of the people who voted for it, are sorry. I tried to equate at that time what $700 billion was, and I said if you take all of the families who file tax returns and pay taxes and do your math, it is $5,000 a family--$5,000 for every American family, not just the ones in Oklahoma but everywhere. So I thought, as bad as that was, that was a one-shot deal. If we pass cap and trade, we are talking about a $300-plus billion tax increase every year, not just once.
So at the time we looked at this, and the Wharton School came out with these figures, I thought, let me be sure in my own mind, as a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, that the science is there. So I looked into it, only to find out this whole thing came from the United Nations' IPCC--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All we have seen are just the reports not from scientists but from politicians on the summaries they give policy donors. So we started talking to real scientists only to find out that really well-established scientists--and this is 10 years ago--who looked at this said: Well, yes, there could be a connection between man-made gases, CO2, and global warming. However, it is not a major significant contribution.
Now, to fortify this, then-Vice President Gore was trying to build his case on why we should ratify this convention and he did his own study. He hired a guy--one of the top scientists in America--named Tom Wigley to do an analysis. Now, here was his challenge. If all of the developed nations in the world--America, France, Western Europe and the rest of the developed nations--would ratify this treaty and would live by its emission requirements, how much would that lower the temperature in 50 years? So if all the countries in the developed nations did this, how much would it lower it in 50 years? The result of the study was seven one-hundredths of a degree Celsius. Well, I said that is not even measurable. And I said, if his own scientist says that, we have to have a wake-up call here in America. And that is when I made this statement that people have been throwing at me for 10 years--the idea of the notion that man-made gases significantly contribute to global warming is probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
Well, when we stop and look back now at what has happened in the scientific community, many members of the community were the recipients of grants and had those grants held up unless they would come in and say, yes, we are going to have to do something about CO2 in order to stop global warming.
By the way, I have to just say that at this time we are in our ninth year of a global cooling. People seem to forget we have been going through these ups and downs all throughout recorded history. God is still up there, and we are going to have warming and cooling periods.
The same individuals who are so hysterically behind this idea of passing a cap and trade--putting a huge tax on America at this time--are the same ones in 1975 that were saying we are going to have to do something because another ice age is coming. Well, anyway, this has been going on for a long period of time.
So as we have progressed through the years, more and more scientists have come over who were on the other side. And I call to mind now, just from memory, Claude Allegra, from France. Claude Allegra is a socialist over there--very prominent scientist. He was marching through the aisles with Al Gore 15 years ago, and he has now reversed his position and said, wait a minute, everything we thought from the modeling didn't happen. This thing is not real. He is solidly on the skeptic side now, saying I was wrong back then. This Claude Allegra is the guy Sarkozy now is talking about putting in as the environmental minister of the country of France. Now that is the caliber of people we are talking about.
David Bellamy was the top scientist in the U.K. and David Bellamy was solidly on the other side 10, 12 years ago. He is now saying, we have looked at the modeling and we have changed and this is just flat not true.
A guy named Nir Shaviv from Israel, another top scientist, he was on the other side of this issue and he has now come over.
And for my colleagues who want to really see the fortification, see the numbers we are talking about in terms of scientists who have reversed their position, go to my Web site, Inhofe.Senate.Gov, and look it up. There are a lot of speeches I have made from the floor of the Senate, but one was about the 700 scientists, most of whom were on the other side of the issue and are now saying the same thing as Claude Allegra, David Bellamy, Nir Shaviv, and others have said because they have changed their minds on this thing.
So clearly the science has turned around, and that gives a sense of urgency for some people who want to respond to some of the extremists--mostly in California, and mostly in Hollywood--to go ahead and pass something. Get something passed and get it passed quickly. It is kind of like health care. They want to get it passed before people have a chance to read it.
So now we have a bill that is going to be put together and drafted in the Environment and Public Works Committee, which was going to be coming to the floor of the Senate prior to the August recess--just a few weeks from now--but Chairman Boxer has now decided to put it off until after the recess. I applaud her for that, because time is not the friend of the people who are trying to make believe we are going to have to pass an expensive tax to address what they consider to be a more serious problem than I consider it to be. And during the August recess, during those 30 days, you are going to have a lot of Members of this Senate be approached by people--such as people in the agricultural community.
I had the opportunity of going and talking to the National Farm Coop the other day and discussing with them what would happen if we were to pass a cap-and-trade system and what that would do to the farmers of my State of Oklahoma and all throughout America. Stop and think about it. Seventy-one percent of the cost of a bushel of wheat is in fertilizer and in energy costs. That is what would go up. So you would be talking about doubling the price of wheat, or I could use soybeans or any other commodity. It would be disastrous for our farmers in America.
So the years have gone by, and slowly people have caught onto this thing, and that is why there is such a sense of urgency by people who want to pass this before the public realizes what it is. Fortunately, the public already understands, and the vast amount of recent polling shows that, just like the issue of closing Gitmo, which I talked about a few minutes ago, they are solidly on the side of not passing a cap-and-trade tax which would constitute the largest tax increase in the history of America to address a problem that people aren't really sure exists to start with.
So I think we will defeat that in the Senate. It will, of course, pass out of the committee. It is a very liberal committee. I love everyone on that committee, but they will pass anything that has to do with a cap-and-trade package, so it will be on the floor of the Senate. But it will not pass the Senate. And the reason I say that is we have had several votes in the Senate--the House had never had any votes. We have considered this five times, and actually voted three times--2003, 2005, and 2008.
In 2003, it was called the McCain-Lieberman bill. At that time, I was the only one on the floor. For 5 days, 10 hours a day, I talked about this and was trying to defeat that thing. For 50 hours, only two or three Senators came down for a short period of time to help me. Now, fast forward from 2003 to 2005 to 2008. The bill was called the Warner-Lieberman bill. We had 23 Senators who came down, and it didn't take 5 days to defeat it; it was just 2 days.
So I think in terms of passing the tax increase called cap and trade, they have about maybe 34, 35 of votes, and it takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass it. Really, I am happy our forefathers were divined and inspired when they thought of the two Houses so we could have checks and balances.
So I think that is what will happen. I know there are other names I could mention but cannot because some of the things I know are at a level of confidence. But some of the new Senators who have been elected, they don't really want to go back and say--whether Democrats or Republicans, but, in fact, it is the Democrats I have in mind--saying to the people who have just elected them: Aren't I doing a good job for you, coming back from my first session and passing the largest annual tax increase in the history of America? That isn't going to happen, Mr. President. People are so sensitive right now with the level of spending that is going on in this country.
I can remember in 1993, it was the first year of the Clinton administration, and I was complaining at that time on the floor--I was serving in the House of Representatives--of the huge tax increase he was pushing, and all of the things that were going on--with gun control, the Hillary health care, which we all remember. At that time, I remember complaining on the floor: He even has a budget of $1.5 trillion. Well, guess what. This one is $3.5 trillion. We can't sustain that. We can't do that in America.
So I think one at a time we are going to have to stop these expensive programs, one being the health care program--I know we can't afford that--another being cap and trade. I think we will defeat that, and I believe America is now going to look a lot more carefully, and they are going to applaud the efforts being made to make sure any bill that comes up for consideration of this magnitude should be on a Web site, as Mr. Boehner suggested, and several other Senators have suggested, including myself, for at least 72 hours so we and the American people can read and see what it is going to be. I can assure you, if that had happened when the cap-and-trade bill passed the House, it would not have passed the House.
With that, I see there is someone else on the floor wanting to have the floor, so I yield the floor.
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