Nomination of Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State
Floor Speech
NOMINATION OF CONDOLEEZZA RICE TO BE SECRETARY OF STATE -- (Senate - January 25, 2005)
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Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, First let me thank my colleagues, Senator Boxer and Senator Durbin for making available this time for me to address the Senate regarding this nomination. I rise today to oppose the nomination of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State. I do so because she misled me about the situation in Iraq before and after the congressional resolution in October of 2002 authorizing that war, a resolution that I opposed. She misled other Members of Congress about the situation in Iraq, Members who have said they would have opposed that resolution if they had been told the truth, and she misled the people of Minnesota and Americans everywhere about the situation in Iraq before and after that war began.
It is a war in which 1,372 American soldiers have lost their lives, and over 10,000 have been wounded--many of them maimed for life. Thousands more have been scarred emotionally and physically. All of those families and thousands of other American families whose loved ones are now serving in Iraq are suffering serious financial and family hardships, and must wonder and worry every day and night for a year or longer whether their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters are still alive, will stay alive, and wonder when they will be coming home. For many, the answer is: Not soon.
I read in today's Washington Post that the Army is planning to keep its current troop strength in Iraq at 120,000 for at least 2 more years. I did not learn that information as a Member of Congress. I did not learn it as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee where I regularly attend public hearings, classified meetings, and top secret briefings. I did not learn it from the U.S. military command in Iraq with whom I met in Baghdad last month. I read it in the Washington Post, just as I read last weekend that the Secretary of Defense has created his own new espionage arm by ``reinterpreting an existing law,'' without informing most, if any, Members of Congress and by reportedly ``reprogramming funds appropriated for other purposes;'' just as I learned last weekend by reading the New York Times that the Administration is exploring a reinterpretation of the law to allow secret U.S. commando units to operate in this country.
I also learned of official reports documenting horrible abuses of prisoners, innocent civilians as well as enemy combatants, at numerous locations in countries besides the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which directly contradicts assurances we have been given repeatedly by administration officials in the Senate Armed Services Committee.
I might as well skip all the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings and meetings and top secret briefings and just read the papers--and thank goodness for a free and vigilant press to ferret out the truth and to report the truth, because we cannot get the truth from this administration.
Sadly, the attitude of too many of my colleagues across the aisle is: Our President, regardless whether he is wrong, wrong, or wrong, they defend him, they protect him, and they allow his top administration officials to get away with lying. Lying to Congress, lying to our committees, and lying to the American people. It is wrong. It is immoral. It is un-American. And it has to stop.
It stops by not promoting top administration officials who engage in the practice, who have been instrumental in deceiving Congress and the American people and, regrettably, that includes Dr. Rice.
Dr. Rice, in a television interview on September 8, 2002, as the administration was launching its campaign to scare the American people and stampede Congress about Saddam Hussein's supposedly urgent threat to our national security, shrewdly invoked the ultimate threat, that he possessed or would soon possess nuclear weapons. She said that day:
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Soon thereafter she and other top administration officials cited intercepted aluminum tubes as definite proof that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program underway. Dr. Rice stated publicly at the time the tubes:
......are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.
In late September of 2002, shortly before we in Congress were to vote on the Iraq war resolution, Dr. Rice invited me, along with I believe five of my Senate colleagues, to the White House where we were briefed by her and then-CIA Director George Tenet. That briefing was classified. What I was shown and told conformed to Dr. Rice's public statements, with no qualification whatsoever. Now, of course, we have been told, after an exhaustive search for 18 months by over 1,400 United States weapons inspectors, that Saddam Hussein did not have an active nuclear weapons development program underway and that he apparently possessed no weapons of mass destruction of any kind. We have also been told that in the fall of 2002, right at the time of my meeting in the White House, right at the time of the Senate and the House's votes on the Iraq war resolution, the top nuclear experts at the U.S. Department of Energy and officials in other Federal agencies were disagreeing strongly with Dr. Rice's claim that those aluminum tubes could only have been intended for use in developing nuclear weapons materials.
That expert dissent and honest disagreement--a different point of view--was not communicated to me then nor was it brought to me later. I received no phone call or letter saying: Senator Dayton just wanted to correct a mis-impression that I unintentionally gave you at that meeting. I now have information that contradicts what we were told then. I still believe in my own views but I want you to be aware of others before you cast the most important vote of your Senate career or even a call or communication after that vote was cast. There was nothing.
When Senator Boxer rightly pressed Dr. Rice on this point in the Foreign Relations confirmation hearing, there was no admission even then of any mistake. In fact, she replied: ``I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity. Thank you, very much.''
There is a saying that we judge ourselves by our intentions; others judge it by our actions.
I don't know what Dr. Rice's intentions were, but I do have direct experience with her actions. There was no slight misunderstanding, or a slip, or even a mistake that was limited to one meeting. This was a public statement made repeatedly by Dr. Rice and similar words by Vice President Cheney and even by President Bush as part of an all-out campaign, which continues even today, to mobilize public support and maintain public support for the invasion of Iraq and for continuing war there regardless of what the facts were then, or are now, and it has been done by misrepresenting those facts, by distorting the facts, by withholding the facts, by hiding the truth, by hiding the truth in matters of life and death, of war and peace, that profoundly affect our national security, our international reputation, and our future well-being--and will for many years to come.
I don't like to impugn anyone's integrity. But I really do not like being lied to repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally. It is wrong. It is undemocratic. It is un-American, and it is dangerous. It is very dangerous, and it is occurring far too frequently in this administration.
This Congress, this Senate must demand that it stop now. My vote against this nomination is my statement that this administration's lying must stop now. I urge my colleagues to join me in this demand, Democrat, Republicans, Independents. All of us first and foremost are Americans. We must be told the truth--for us to govern our country and to preserve our world. That is why we must vote against this nomination.
I yield the floor.
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