INVESTIGATION INTO TREATMENT OF IRAQI PRISONERS
Mr. SESSIONS. Thank you, Mr. President.
I would like to comment on some of the things that have been said.
First of all, I believe there are things our country has every right to maintain secrecy on. I think the administration has been open about producing memorandum to us in a way that I don't know they are required to do. I was a Federal attorney in the Department of Justice and a U.S. attorney for 12 years. I have some appreciation for the way the Government works. The President has a right to receive legal advice on all the options he may have from his Attorney General or staff attorneys. In fact, a lot of reference has been made here, and as far as I can tell, Attorney General Ashcroft's memoranda are memoranda written only by lower level attorneys, detailing the legal options available in a time of war.
Certainly we want to encourage attorneys to consider these ideas and these issues on what is appropriate in terms of interrogating prisoners who are bent upon the destruction of the United States of America and as many of its citizens in this country as they can possibly kill. That is fact, and we know it. The rules of law and of war are a joke to the terrorists that we have captured and others still bent on attacking Americans. They care nothing about it. They make television movies of beheading people. That is what they think of the rules of law.
So what we need to do is decide what is appropriate and what laws we are bound by, and we ought to set a good policy there.
I would say this: The Senator from New York is a good lawyer. He has said in his own view that torture sometimes may be necessary. That is what Senator Schumer said.
I think any Attorney General should properly advise any President of the United States in time of war on absolutely what the limits of his powers are. Those are things that maybe ought not be bandied around the world. It is hypothetical. You don't know what the precise circumstances are.
But the question that started all of this is abuses in prison in Iraq. The memos at the center of this debate have absolutely no connection-there is no connection-between what went on in Iraq and these memos, because our soldiers were operating under established policies of the military and internal discussions between the President and various lawyers, or memoranda they may have received from various lawyers.
I want to say this about Attorney General Ashcroft. I was at the Judiciary Committee hearing when he testified. I saw him subjected to unfair abuse by former colleagues on that committee which was embarrassing to the committee. I don't think I have ever seen in my experience in this Congress the kind of disingenuous and unfair treatment of a former Member of this body. It was not right. The ranking member was using the whole time to make a litany of distortions and charges against the Attorney General where he had no opportunity to answer them. He knew there was no way he could. It was not right. It was wrong. I said that then, and I say it now. He had no opportunity to respond to the ranking Member. Senator Leahy knew it, and said these things one right after another: You did this, you did that. They continued in that vein.
The question here was, Oh, he wouldn't define torture, yet he had a memorandum defining torture.
That is not what Attorney General Ashcroft said. Go back and read the transcript. I saw what he said. Attorney General Ashcroft is a smart man, an honest man, and he answered the question directly. He said, Senator, the Congress defined torture. It is not for me to define torture. You define torture. The Attorney General doesn't define torture. I am not defining torture. The Congress has already defined it.
There is a statute. I have a copy of it here in which we defined it under certain circumstances. We set out an anti-torture statute. That is what the Attorney General was referring to.
Then somebody with great demand said, We want these memos; you are going to give them right now. Are you giving them or not? The Attorney General sat there in a nice, direct, soft way, and said, No, Senator, I am not giving you these right now. Are you claiming executive privilege? He said, No, I am not claiming executive privilege.
These are memorandum submitted to the President of the United States. It is the memorandum of his client. It is the President's memorandum. It is not his to give. He can't go around giving out the confidential information he sent to the President of the United States about what he can do during the conduct of a war. That is not right. He didn't do it. And he didn't back down on it. One of the Senators said, Well, this is important because I have a son in uniform. The Attorney General said, My son has been in Iraq. He just got home, and he is going back to Iraq. He is in uniform, too. I care about this issue.
I don't think what has been said is fair.
With regard to the amendment that is pending, I reject it. We need to vote it down. It is political. It is designed to embarrass this administration politically, and it hurts us around the world. We are asked to cast a vote suggesting that this administration has not conducted itself in a proper way. The evidence does not show that.
I am on the Armed Services Committee as well as the Judiciary Committee. We have had, I think, four hearings in Armed Services. We brought back the top general. We had the Secretary of Defense, Secretary Rumsfeld. We had Secretary Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary. We had General Abizaid and General Sanchez. We had General Taguba who went over there and conducted the investigation and issued the report on it.
I heard all of that evidence. None of them said, Well, we got a memorandum from the Attorney General that the President of the United States signed off and said we are supposed to torture prisoners, we are supposed to carry them around, move them around and put hoods over their heads, and otherwise abuse them.
There is no evidence that was so. In fact, the military had a pretty good series of policies about how to treat prisoners. Some said, some of them went too far. If some of them went too far, let's hear exactly what they say went too far and what was wrong. If we need to change that policy, I am willing to discuss that. In fact, we are discussing that at this very moment.
A number of the things that were so objectionable, none of the things that happened in that prison, were in any way remotely connected to the memorandums and directives and regulations issued by General Sanchez and the commanders in Iraq. In fact, all the memorandum said they should follow Geneva Conventions in how they handle prisoners.
Some say we did not train them about the Geneva Conventions. Every American soldier is trained about the Geneva Conventions. I was in the Army Reserve for 10 years. I was a lawyer and U.S. attorney for some of that time, and for a short period of time I was a JAG officer. I taught a course on the Geneva Conventions. You had to sign a document saying you briefed your soldiers every year on the Geneva Conventions.
Everyone knows you cannot torture prisoners, you cannot display them in sexual ways. Everyone knows that. Every private is taught that. Everyone up to the generals is taught that. It is not the way we are supposed to treat people. Certainly it was not justified and not the policy of the military. It never was the policy of the military. I don't appreciate the suggestion that this was the policy of the military and that somehow the internal memorandums up in the Department of Justice in Washington about hypotheticals and what powers the President might have somehow were carried out in the prisons. They had established policies.
I saw in the Washington Times today, quoting one of these memos, a memo entitled "Humane Treatment." That ought to make some people around here happy. It actually says "Humane Treatment of Al-qaida and Taliban Detainees." That is a pretty good title for a memorandum. They are complaining about some military memorandum they did not like the title of, saying the title suggested something bad and within the memorandum there were commands to preserve and protect the prisoners.
This title is a good title. President Bush says he accepts "the legal conclusion of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority." Of course, our values as a Nation call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment.
Now, what is all this about? Senator Hatch mentioned, as I believe Senator Cornyn did, and several years ago in the Judiciary Committee we had a number of hearings right after September 11 on what the authority of the United States is with regard to treatment of prisoners and the application of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to unlawful combatants. It is that simple.
What is an unlawful combatant? It is a person who does not wear a uniform, who enters a country surreptitiously, who attacks civilians, and does not comply with the rules of war. Our enemies are supposed to comply with the rules of war also. Unlawful combatants do not comply with the rules of war. Al-Qaida does not. Most of the people in Afghanistan were not complying with the rules of war and the people who are bombing and killing in Iraq right now are not complying with the rules of war. All of them are unlawful combatants.
One of the reasons for the Geneva Conventions is to give protections to prisoners of war who were lawful combatants, to encourage people to be lawful combatants and not to be unlawful combatants, not to be terrorists who sneak around and bomb people.
Has this ever been dealt with in America? Are we making this up? Is this some idea the Senator from Alabama thinks is an idea that has never been dealt with before? No. In the Judiciary Committee we had a hearing on it and discussed these issues in some detail not long after September 11. We had testimony and read and debated the Ex parte Quirin case. In Ex parte Quirin, the Nazis sent saboteurs into the United States to bomb and kill and dismantle our civilian structure. That was their plan. They were Nazi saboteurs. They were not wearing German uniforms. They were not acting in a way consistent with the regular Army. Their plan of attack was terrorist in nature. They were apprehended.
The President of the United States, certainly a greatly respected President for our Democratic colleagues who are pushing this legislation, President Franklin Roosevelt, was highly offended. He said we are not going to give them a trial in Federal court. We are not going to try them with a jury in the United States of America. These people are setting about to destroy our country, to kill our people, and to sabotage our civil infrastructure. They are going to be tried, as I have the power to do so, by a military commission. He so ordered it.
They were tried in the U.S. Department of Justice right down the street by a military commission. They did not have public trials. After completely trying the case and building a record and making findings of guilt, most of them were executed within weeks of their arrest. The validity of these trials were challenged and the case went to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court affirmed the views of the President. Some of these enemy combatants were given probation and some of them who were tried that way were American citizens.
Crimes were committed in the United States by American citizens, but they were participating as unlawful combatants. They were tried by a military tribunal. They were convicted. Most of them were executed. Some of them got lesser times and one or two who cooperated got out of jail before too long. But all served a considerable amount of time and the Supreme Court said that was appropriate. That was right.
The history of the military commission is strong. That is justice. Military commissions do justice. Military officers are people. They do not want to convict innocent people, send innocent people to jail, or do things that are wrong. They are empowered in combat to use deadly weapons on a whole host of people that could kill them.
President Truman, who followed President Roosevelt, dropped an atom bomb on two cities in Japan. The President of the United States does have powers in wartime that are different from that kind of situation when somebody robs a bank down the street.
Fundamentally, what we are dealing with is how to deal with prisoners under these circumstances. Some people say, a lot of people in this country say, they don't respect us, they don't respect law, they bomb innocent civilians, women, men, children. They cut off people's heads and make a video of it and brag about it. But they are not entitled to any rights. They are not entitled to any rights. We just ought to go at them and kill them, the sooner the better.
We have some in this body who say these terrorists are entitled to more rights than the laws themselves give. In fact, they have insisted on it. This resolution actually calls on the Government to give these terrorists and unlawful combatants more rights than they are entitled to under the law.
President Bush has said: I am going to comply with the Geneva Conventions. We are going to treat these people humanely. That is the right position, I believe, and that is what he has done. We have given them fair treatment.
I visited Guantanamo and saw how it was done down there early on. I believe they were treated very well. The reports that come out of there continue to show that.
We know we had a terrible problem in Abu Ghraib prison where, on a midnight shift, a group of soldiers were out of control. Now we have a desperate attempt by Members of this Senate to go around and say the abuses that occurred on that night were somehow the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense, General Sanchez, General Abizaid, President Bush, and John Ashcroft.
That is not true. It is wrong. It undermines our ability to lead in the world. It does, I believe, place greater risk on our soldiers who, at this moment, are on the battlefield in Iraq because we sent them there. We should not do that.
If you have legitimate complaints, let's have them, let's hear them in the Senate. But I do not believe we need to be suggesting there is a policy of this Government to mistreat people as was done in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
We had a distinguished senior Senator who said we had traded Saddam Hussein's prisons for American prisons. What he meant by that was we were treating prisoners just as Saddam Hussein did. That is wrong. It is a slander on the soldiers of the United States. It should not have been said. When that was said, it got headlines in the terrorist camps all over the world. It should not have been said. It is false.
Not long ago I had the opportunity to meet seven Iraqi individuals who had had their hands chopped off in Saddam Hussein's prisons, with Saddam Hussein justice. We know of the thousands he had killed there-without trial, without any benefit of being able to put on a defense, and how he used, as a policy of his government, terror.
These kinds of dictators use random violence to terrorize a population to keep power. He did it systematically. This was one of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world. He killed hundreds of thousands of people. There are maybe 300,000 graves in that country of people who were killed.
So it is wrong to say that. Why we keep pushing this, I do not know. I will just say this: The Armed Services Committee-we have this bill on the floor right now, and it has taken us too long, and it has caused us to not be able to have the hearings we probably would have had-but we are going to have more hearings on what happened in Abu Ghraib prison. Already people are being tried and convicted and sentenced for misbehavior there. We are going to keep on, and the higher up it goes, they are going to be followed.
I was a former prosecutor for some time, and I will ask anybody in this body to tell me: If a soldier is charged with committing an abuse on a prisoner, and he was ordered to do so, or there was some written document he was relying on to do this abuse, do you think he is not going to produce it? Do you think he is not going to say that in his defense? Certainly, he will. So if there are any higher-ups involved in this, it is going to come out.
But, frankly, I do not see the evidence that any higher-ups in the higher echelons of the Government ever issued any orders in any way that would have justified this. It did not happen at any time except on a midnight shift by a few people, who videoed themselves, videoed themselves in circumstances that would be very embarrassing to their mamas and daddies if they had seen it, I can tell you that, on their own behavior, much less what they were doing to the prisoners.
So I do not think it was a pattern. I do not think it was a policy. In fact, all the evidence we have seen so far shows it was not. Within 2 days of this information coming forward to the commanders in that region, General Sanchez ordered an investigation. He suspended people. The military announced publicly, in a public briefing in Iraq, that they were conducting an investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
They have continued those investigations. A number of people have been charged criminally by the military. A number of them have had their cases end with punishments being imposed, and others will have them as time goes by. I would say, what more can you ask them to do? They are cracking down. I do not appreciate resolutions such as this that suggest it was a policy of the United States that this occurred, that suggest that our American soldiers are the same as Saddam Hussein's soldiers and prison guards-the way they treated their prisoners. It is not right. It is wrong. It should not be said, and it undermines the confidence that we ask the world and the Iraqis to have in our soldiers.
We believe they are going to do good work. We believe they are doing good work. We know, when you have 100,000, 200,000 soldiers over there, some of them will make mistakes. Just like any city in America that has 200,000 citizens, 130,000 citizens, some of them are going to commit crimes and make errors and do things wrong. They ought to be disciplined. They ought to be held accountable. But we do not need to fire the mayor because somebody commits a crime on the streets of the city.
Mr. President, I see the Senator from Arizona is in the Chamber, and I know he may well have comments to make on this or other issues.
I will conclude by saying this is not a good resolution. It has no business here. It is contrary to what we ought to be doing.
We ought to be spending our time on how to help our military get a handle on this problem in Abu Ghraib, and we ought to be spending our time mostly on trying to help them be effective in dealing with, capturing, and killing the terrorists who reject all rules of law, who reject all Geneva Conventions, who believe they have a legitimate right to advance their personal power agenda by killing innocent people whenever and wherever they can.
I am most grateful that we have American soldiers this very moment following the vote of this Congress and executing the policy we ask them to execute in Iraq to further freedom and liberty around the world.
I yield the floor.