National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I would like to say that I believe the Senator from Colorado has a good point. I say that as someone who is a strong supporter of military commissions, who in many cases has aligned himself with my good friend the Senator from South Carolina and Senator McCain as well on these issues. To me, this is not a jurisdictional issue, and it is not an issue about whether we should be holding people under military commissions under the right cases or under military detention under the right cases.

My difficulty and the reason I support what Senator Udall is doing is in the statutory language itself. I say this as someone who spent a number of years drafting this kind of legislation as a committee counsel. I have gone back over the last 2 days again and again, reading these sections against each other--1031 and 1032 particularly--and I am very concerned about how this language would be interpreted, not in the here and now, as we see the stability we have brought to our country since 9/11, but what if something were to happen

and we would be under more of a sense of national emergency and this language would be interpreted for broader action.

The reason I have this concern is we are talking here about the conditions under which our military would be sent into action inside our own borders. In that type of situation, we need to be very clear and we must very narrowly define how they would be used and, quite frankly, if they should be used at all inside our borders. I think that is the concern we are hearing from people such as the Director of the FBI and the Secretary of Defense.

I am also very concerned about the notion of the protection of our own citizens and our legal residents from military action inside our own country. I think these protections should be very clearly stated. There is a lot of vagueness in this language.

What the Senator from Colorado is proposing is that we clarify these concepts--that we take this provision out and clarify the concepts. Protections are in place in our country. We are not leaving our country vulnerable. In fact, I think we are going to make it a much more healthy legal system if we do clarify these provisions.

That is the reason I am here on the floor to support what Senator Udall is saying. I know the emotion and the energy Senator Levin has put into this, and I respect him greatly. I happen to believe we need to do a better job of clarifying our language.

I spent 16 years, on and off, writing in Hollywood. One of the things that came to me when I was comparing these sections is that this is kind of the danger we get in when we get to the fourth or the fifth screenwriter involved in a story. We want to fix one thing and we are not fixing the whole thing.

I greatly respect the legitimacy of the effort that is put into this. But when we read section 1031 against section 1032, there are questions about what would happen to American citizens under an emergency. Let's take, for instance, what happened in this country after Hurricane Katrina. It is not a direct parallel, but we can see the extremes people went to under a feeling of emergency and vulnerability. We had people who were deputized as U.S. marshals in New Orleans, and we could see them on CNN putting rifles inside people's cars, stopping them on the street, going into people's houses, making a decision--which later was rescinded--that they were going to take people's guns away from them. The vagueness in a lot of this language will not guarantee against these types of conduct on a larger scale if a situation were more difficult and dangerous than it is today.

Section 1031, which Senator Levin mentioned, may be clear to the administration but it is not that clear to me, when they talk about a covered person. This isn't simply al-Qaida, depending on how one wants to interpret it, in a time of national emergency. It is a person who is a part of or who substantially supported al-Qaida, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act. We might be able to agree to what that means here on the Senate floor today, but we don't know how that might be interpreted in a time of national emergency. I am not predicting that it will; I am saying we should have the certainty that it will not.

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Mr. WEBB. OK. Similar concerns also revolve around the definitions in terms of the applicability of U.S. citizens and lawful resident aliens when we go to the words ``requirement does not extend.'' What about an option? These are the types of concerns I have. We should have language that very clearly makes everyone understand the conditions under which we would be using the U.S. military inside the borders of the United States.

I yield the floor.

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