Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the President's speech last night. I have no doubt that the President loves this country as much as I do, and he wants to do what is right. My problem with what he said is this: Many of the facts he cites and the things he believes about Iraq and about international law, and I hate to say this, are just plain wrong.

There is a very good article in today's Washington Post buried on page 13 which is entitled ``Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq,'' which I will submit for the Record. It reminds us of some things we have forgotten.

For instance, does Iraq have nuclear weapons? Is it trying to make them? The President has said that Iraq tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes to use in machinery to enrich uranium. The International Atomic Energy Commission determined the tubes were for conventional weapons.

The administration has pointed to 30 pounds of fissile material that was being smuggled into Iraq in a taxi from Turkey. It turned out to be less than 3 ounces of nonradioactive metal.

In his State of the Union Address, the President relied on a report that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Niger, in Africa. That turned out to be a forgery, and it was a forgery that the CIA had warned the administration about.

Last week the Vice President said Iraq has ``reconstituted nuclear weapons.'' Later in the same interview, he said that Iraq would get nuclear weapons, and it was only a matter of time. But the International Atomic Energy Commission, which has people on the ground in Iraq, or did until we told them to get out, says that there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities.

Does Iraq have ballistic missiles that can strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey, as the President said? U.N. arms inspectors found the missiles, determined they could not fly as far as those three countries, but they ordered them destroyed anyway. The Iraqis destroyed them, but the President said Hussein has ordered continued production, apparently based on nothing more than an electronic intercept where someone said they could build missiles in the future.

Does Iraq have an extensive ongoing weapons program? Well, a graduate student 12 years ago wrote a paper that

says so. It was plagiarized by the Blair government and passed on to Secretary Powell and cited in the United Nations as a news-breaking British intelligence document. When I weigh a plagiarized graduate school paper against the U.N. inspector's report, my inclination is to go with the United Nations report.

But this administration sticks with the plagiarized paper. The President also threw in some misconceptions about international law. He believes that various U.N. resolutions add up to enough authority to go to war. That is not true. When the President takes his oath, he agrees to follow the treaties in article 6, clause II: ``This Constitution and all treaties made shall be made under the authority of the United States and shall be the supreme law of the land.''

When we go to war in Iraq, we are breaking that law. Now I hope the President, who still has 2 days to do some thinking, will consider drawing back from the brink.

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the President's speech last night. I have no doubt that the President loves this country as much as I do, and wants to do what is right.

My problem with what he said is simply this: many of the facts he cites and the things he believes about Iraq and about international law are--and I hate to say this--just wrong.

There is a good article in the Washington Post today called ``Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq,'' which I will submit for the Record. It reminds us of some things we have forgotten.

Does Iraq have nuclear weapons? Is it trying to make them?

The President has said that Iraq tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes to use in machinery to enrich uranium. The International Atomic Energy Commission determined that the tubes were for conventional weapons.

The Administration has pointed to 30 pounds of ``fissile material'' that was being smuggled into Iraq in a taxi from Turkey. It turned out to be less than 3 ounces of nonradioactive metal. In his State of the Union Address, the President relied on a report that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Niger that turned out to be a forgery, and a forgery that the CIA had warned the Administration about.

Last weekend, on Meet the Press, Vice President Cheney said Iraq has ``reconstituted nuclear weapons.'' Later in the same interview, he said Iraq would get nuclear weapons and it was ``only a matter of time.''

But the International Atomic Energy Commission which has people on the ground in Iraq--or did until we told them they should get out--says ``there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities.''

Does Iraq have ballistic missiles that can strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey, as the President said? U.N. arms inspectors found the missiles, determined that they couldn't fly as far as those three countries, but ordered them destroyed.

The Iraqis destroyed them, but the President says Hussein has ordered their continued production--apparently based on nothing more than an electronic intercept where someone says they could build missiles again in the future.

Does Iraq have an extensive, on-going weapons program? Well, a graduate student wrote a paper that says so and it was plagiarized by the Blair government, and passed on to Secretary Powell and cited as a newsbreaking British intelligence document.

When I weigh a plagiarized grad school paper against the U.N. inspector's report, my inclination is to go with the U.N. inspector's report--but this administration sticks with the plagiarized paper.

The President also threw in some misconceptions about international law in his speech last night. He believes that various U.N. Resolutions add up to enough authority for the U.S. to launch an air and ground invasion of Iraq.

This is not true. When we joined the U.N., we signed a treaty. The treaty says a member state can attack another country under two conditions--when attacked or in imminent danger of attack or when an attack is authorized by the Security Council.

The President said last week that we were going to the Security Council for authority and we'd have a vote ``no matter what the Whip count is.'' Well, we didn't. We didn't because we were going to lose.

Mr. Bush came up here to the Capitol steps on January 20, 2001 and said, ``I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'' That's the Oath of Office, friends.

The Constitution he pledged to uphold says, Article 6, Clause 2: ``This Constitution . . . and all Treaties made, or which shall be made under the Authority of the United States, shall be the Supreme Law of the Land.''

Treaties are the Supreme Law of the Land, on a par with the Constitution. The Constitution says so. We aren't supposed to pick and choose.

We've never before in the history of the United States invaded another country without some kind of immediate provocation. But from now on, under the Bush Doctrine, we're going to invade when we think it's a good idea whether the Security Council agrees or not.

This is a dangerous course--and it's especially dangerous when the information used to decide whom to invade is so very, very bad.

Mr. Speaker, there is still time for the President to pull back from this course of action, to re-examine the so-called ``facts'' he's relying on and to find another path. Let us pray that he does.

[From the Washington Post, Mar. 18, 2003]

Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq

(By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank)

As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this

week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations

against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been

challenged--and in some cases disproved--by the United

Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence

reports.

For months, President Bush and his top lieutenants have

produced a long list of Iraqi offenses, culminating Sunday

with Vice President Cheney's assertion that Iraq has

``reconstituted nuclear weapons.'' Previously, administration

officials have tied Hussein to al Qaeda, to the Sept. 11,

2001, terrorist attacks, and to an aggressive production of

biological and chemical weapons. Bush reiterated many of

these charges in his address to the nation last night.

But these assertions are hotly disputed. Some of the

administration's evidence--such as Bush's assertion that Iraq

sought to purchase uranium--has been refuted by subsequent

discoveries. Other claims have been questioned, though their

validity can be known only after U.S. forces occupy Iraq.

In outlining his case for war on Sunday, Cheney focused on

how much more damage al Qaeda could have done on Sept. 11

``if they'd had a nuclear weapon and detonated it in the

middle of one of our cities, or if they had unleashed . . .

biological weapons of some kind, smallpox or anthrax.'' He

then tied that to evidence found in Afghanistan of how al

Qaeda leaders ``have done everything they could to acquire

those capabilities over the years.''

But in October CIA Director George J. Tenet told Congress

that Hussein would not give such weapons to terrorists unless

he decided helping ``terrorists in conducting a WMD [weapons

of mass destruction] attack against the United States would

be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large

number of victims with him.''

In his appearance Sunday, on NBC's ``Meet the Press,'' the

vice president argued that ``we believe [Hussein] has, in

fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.'' But Cheney

contradicted that assertion moments later, saying it was

``only a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.''

Both assertions were contradicted earlier by Mohamed

ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic

Energy Agency, who reported that ``there is no indication of

resumed nuclear activities.''

ElBaradei also contradicted Bush and other officials who

argued that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum

tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. The IAEA

determined that Iraq did not plan to use imported aluminum

tubes for enriching uranium and generating nuclear weapons.

ElBaradei argued that the tubes were for conventional weapons

and ``it was highly unlikely'' that the tubes could have been

used to produce nuclear material.

Cheney on Sunday said ElBaradei was ``wrong'' about Iraq's

nuclear program and questioned the IAEA's credibility.

Earlier this month, ElBaradei said information about Iraq

efforts to buy uranium were based on fabricated documents.

Further investigation has found that top CIA officials had

significant doubts about the veracity of the evidence,

linking Iraq to efforts to purchase uranium for nuclear

weapons from Niger, but the information ended up as fact in

Bush's State of the Union address.

In another embarrassing episode for the administration,

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cited evidence about

Iraq's weapons efforts that originally appeared in a British

intelligence document. But it later emerged that the British

report's evidence was based in part on academic papers and

trade publications.

Sometimes information offered by Bush and his top officials

is questioned by administration aides. In his March 6 news

conference, Bush dismissed Iraq's destruction of its Al

Samoud-2 missiles, saying they were being dismantled ``even

as [Hussein] has ordered the continued production of the very

same type of missiles.'' But the only intelligence was

electronic intercepts that had individuals talking about

being able to build missiles in the future, according to a

senior intelligence analyst.

Last month, Bush spoke about a liberated Iraq showing ``the

power of freedom to transform that vital region'' and said

``a new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and

inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the

region.'' But a classified State Department report put

together by the department's intelligence and research staff

and delivered to Powell the same day as Bush's speech

questioned that theory, arguing that history runs counter to

it.

In his first major speech solely on the Iraqi threat, has

October, Bush said, ``Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with

a likely range of hundreds of miles--far enough to strike

Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations--in a region

where more than 135,000 American civilians and service

members live and work.''

Inspectors have found that the Al Samoud-2 missiles can

travel less than 200 miles--not far enough to hit the targets

Bush named. Iraq has not accounted for 14 medium-range Scud

missiles from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but the

administration has not presented any evidence that they still

exist.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the time allocated to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Madam Speaker, as we inch closer to Mr. Bush's unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Iraq, I come to the floor to talk about an issue that I think the American people should be aware of and Members of House should be very concerned about, and that is the type of news coverage they get about this war.

I see in today's Roll Call that the Republicans are setting up a spin room that will be briefings from the White House on a regular basis, but it is only on one side. It is all being coordinated through the gentleman from California (Mr. Cox).

Now, in addition to that the question is then about reporters, and there are going to be two kinds of reporters in this war. The first are the embedded reporters. Those are the American reporters who are brought in and put in military uniforms and put in units of the military. They will be under constant censorship by the leadership of the unit that they are with. They have to sign an agreement to that effect. It is called the Coalition Forces Land Component Ground Rules Agreement, and that means they cannot write anything that the commander of that unit does not say is all right to go out.

Now it is pretty clear that the Secretary of War, Mr. Rumsfeld, is trying to deal with the problems of the Vietnam War. The press played an enormous role in stopping that war by reporting what is going on over there. Had there not been free press, there is no telling how long it might have gone on because the official reports were all bogus and we now know it. But, in the last couple of wars we have controlled the press, and this is the real best control I have ever seen.

There is a second kind of reporter, and that is the unembedded reporter, the international reporters. There is an article in today's paper from the Irish radio, an interview with a woman by the name of Kate Adie, who is the chief news correspondent for the BBC. She said when asked if there were any consequences of fatal actions, the Pentagon officers said we do not care. They have been warned, stay out of

there. She says, ``I am enormously pessimistic of the chance of decent, on the spot reporting as the war occurs.''

Another man on the same program, Phillip Knightley, who is a war historian, said, The Pentagon has also threatened they ``may find it necessary to bomb areas in which war correspondents are attempting to report from Iraq.''

Now, Miss Adie was told the Americans, and I have been talking to the Pentagon, their attitude is ``entirely hostile to the free spread of the information.'' I have been told by a senior officer in the Pentagon that if uplinks, that is television and electronic links, that is the television signals, were detected by any planes, the military would fire on them, even if they were journalists, she said. And the man said, Who cares?

Well, the fact is those smart bombs, they tell us a lot but they cannot tell the difference between a radio link, a cell telephone or a radar. They are going to do everything they can to stamp out any kind of information about this war that they do not want to have to have processed.

Now the American people are being taken into a war which is, we are going to be told it is going to be short and quick and sweet, and we were told that about the last war. We were told that only 147 people died in Iraq. But the fact is that 10,000 people have died since, and there are 221,000 claims of disability in the Veterans Administration due to depleted uranium and other toxins that were experienced by our troops. That was not reported at the time. It was not reported now. You have to go to the foreign press.

I would say to all Americans, you should be watching the BBC. Read the French papers, the German papers, any other paper besides the United States. The reporters in the White House are lap dogs to the White House. They stood up there in a press conference the other day and watched the President of the United States with a script on the podium saying, I will call on Joe. Joe. I will call on Sally. Sally.

He knew what the questions were that they were going to ask and he took exactly what he wanted. He would not take any question that was off his list. That is what the American people are supposed to make a decision about. You cannot have a democracy when the people are ignorant. They have to have information, and this administration is determined not to tell people what is going on. America better wake up quickly.

[From GuluFuture.com, Mar. 10, 2003]

Pentagon Threatens To Kill Independent Reporters in Iraq (By Fintan

Dunne)

The Pentagon has threatened to fire on the satellite uplink

positions of independent journalists in Iraq, according to

veteran BBC war correspondent, Kate Adie. In an interview

with Irish radio, Ms. Adie said that questioned about the

consequences of such potentially fatal actions, a senior

Pentagon officer had said: ``Who cares. . . . They've been

warned.''

According to Ms. Adie, who twelve years ago covered the

last Gulf War, the Pentagon attitude is: ``entirely hostile

to the free spread of information.''

``I am enormously pessimistic of the chance of decent on-

the-spot reporting, as the war occurs,'' she told Irish

national broadcaster, Tom McGurk on the RTE1 Radio ``Sunday

Show.''

Ms. Adie made the startling revelations during a discussion

of media freedom issues in the likely upcoming war in Iraq.

She also warned that the Pentagon is vetting journalists

according to their stance on the war, and intends to take

control of US journalists' satellite equipment--in order to

control access to the airwaves.

Another guest on the show, war author Phillip Knightley,

reported that the Pentagon has also threatened they: ``may

find it necessary to bomb areas in which war correspondents

are attempting to report from the Iraqi side.''

Audio Transcript follows below:

Tom McGurk: ``Now, Kate Adie, you join us from the BBC in

London. Thank you very much for going to all this trouble on

a Sunday morning to come and join us. I suppose you are

watching with a mixture of emotions this war beginning to

happen, because you are not going to be covering it.''

Kate Adie: ``Oh I will be. And what actually appalls me is

the difference between twelve years ago and now. I've seen a

complete erosion of any kind of acknowledgment that reporters

should be able to report as they witness.''

``The Americans . . . and I've been talking to the Pentagon

. . . take the attitude which is entirely hostile to the free

spread of information.''

``I was told by a senior officer in the Pentagon, that if

uplinks--that is the television signals out of . . . Bhagdad,

for example--were detected by any planes . . . electronic

media . . . mediums, of the military above Bhagdad . . .

they'd be fired down on. Even if they were journalists . . .

Who cares! `said . . . [inaudible].''

Tom McGurk: ``. . . Kate . . . sorry Kate . . . just to

underline that. Sorry to interrupt you. Just to explain for

our listeners. Uplinks is where you have your own satellite

telephone method of distributing information.''

Kate Adie: ``The telephones and the television signals.''

Tom McGurk: ``And they would be fired on?''

Kate Adie: ``Yes. They would be `targeted down,' said the

officer.''

Tom McGurk: ``Extraordinary!''

Kate Adie: ``Shameless!''

``He said . . . `Well . . . they know this . . . they've

been warned.' ''

``This is threatening freedom of information, before you

even get to a war.''

``The second thing is there was a massive news blackout

imposed.''

``In the last Gulf war, where I was one of the pool

correspondents with the British Army. We effectively had

very, very light touch when it came to any kind of

censorship.''

``We were told that anything which was going to endanger

troops lives which we understood we shouldn't broadcast. But

other than that, we were relatively free.''

``Unlike our American colleagues, who immediately left

their pool, after about 48 hours, having just had enough of

it.''

``And this time the Americans are: a) Asking journalists

who go with them, whether they are . . . have feelings

against the war. And therefore if you have views that are

skeptical, then you are not to be acceptable.''

``Secondly, they are intending to take control of the

Americans technical equipment . . . those uplinks and

satellite phones I was talking about. And control access to

the airwaves.''

``And then on top of everything else, there is now a

blackout (which was imposed, during the last war, at the

beginning of the war), . . . ordered by one Mr. Dick Cheney,

who is in charge of this.''

``I am enormously pessimistic of the chance of decent on-

the-spot reporting, as the war occurs. You will get it

later.''

Mr. Speaker, this House reached a new level of buffoonery yesterday when one of the Members here used his authority to require vendors to rename French toast and that famous Belgian delicacy, French fries, saying this would ``show support for the American troops protecting freedom abroad.''

Now, Mr. Speaker, having been a ``troop,'' I do not think many people are going to have their morale raised much by us calling it ``freedom toast.''

President Chirac's efforts to find a way to disarm Saddam without getting American troops killed is not an act of effrontery or hatred toward the United States.

I could recite a whole long litany of French contributions to our military goals, from providing the majority of troops at Yorktown, to voting with us more than 98 percent of the time in the Security Council, and we all know that France has been our longest and strongest ally.

We could take that picture down over there of Mr. Lafayette. He fought at Yorktown. Why not really be silly and make ourselves laughingstocks?

Mr. Speaker, let us stop putting this kind of silliness out and demeaning our relationship with the French.

Madam Speaker, I come to the House floor tonight to talk about an issue which I think is of grave concern to this country.

I recently read an article published in the Sydney, Australia, Morning Herald entitled ``Foundations Are in Place for Martial Law in the United States.''

The author is a man named Ritt Goldstein, an investigative reporter for the Herald, and he said that recent pronouncements from the Bush administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States.

When President Ronald Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua, he issued a series of executive orders which provided FEMA with broad powers in the event of a crisis, such as the violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition against a U.S. military invasion abroad. They were never used.

But with the looming possibility of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, recent pronouncements by President Bush's domestic security chief, Tom Ridge, and an official with the Civil Rights Commission should fire concerns that these powers could be employed or a de facto drift into their deployment in the future.

On the 20th of July, the Detroit Free Press ran a story entitled ``Arabs in U.S. Could Be Held, Official Warns.'' The story referred to a member of the Civil Rights Commission who foresaw the possibility of internment camps for Arab Americans. FEMA has practiced for such an occasion.

FEMA, whose main role is disaster response, is also responsible for handling U.S. domestic unrest.

From 1982 to 1984, Colonel Oliver North assisted FEMA in drafting its civil defense preparations. Details of those plans emerged during the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal. They included executive orders providing for suspension of the Constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the President and FEMA.

A Miami Herald article on the 5th of July, 1987, reported that the former FEMA director's, Louis Guiffrida's, deputy, John Brinkerhoff, handled the martial law portion of the planning. The planning was said to be similar to one Mr. Guiffrida had developed earlier to combat a national uprising by black militants. It provided for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps. Today, Mr. Brinkerhoff is with the highly influential Anser Institute for Homeland Security. Following a request by the Pentagon in January that the U.S. military be allowed the option of deploying troops on American streets, the institute in February published a paper by Mr. Brinkerhoff arguing the legality of this. He alleged that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which has long been accepted as prohibiting such deployments, had simply been misunderstood and misapplied. The preface to the article also provided the revelation that the national plan he had worked on under Mr. Guiffrida was approved by Reagan and actions were taken to implement it.

By April, the U.S. military had created a Northern Command to aid homeland security. Reuters reported that the command is mainly expected to play a supporting role to local authorities. However, Mr. Ridge, the Director of Homeland Security, has just advocated a review of U.S. law regarding the use of military for law enforcement duties.

Disturbingly, and it just really should disturb people, the full facts and contents of Mr. Reagan's national plan remain uncertain. This is in part because President Bush took the unusual step of sealing the Reagan Presidential papers last November. However, many of the key figures of the Reagan era are part of the present administration, including John Poindexter, to whom Oliver North later reported.

At the time of the Reagan initiatives, the then-Attorney General, William French Smith, a Republican, wrote to the National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane: ``I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised executive order exceeds its proper function as a coordinating agency for emergency preparedness. This department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an emergency czar role for FEMA.''

Criticism of the Bush administration's response to September 11 echoes Mr. Smith's warning. On June 7 of last year, the former Presidential counsel, John Dean, spoke of America sliding into a, quote, ``constitutional dictatorship,'' close quote, and martial law.

The reason I raise this issue is that I come from a State where in 1941 under executive order by the President, 9661, we rounded up all the Japanese Americans in this country and put them in concentration camps. We have set in place the mechanism to do that again and we must not, we cannot sacrifice the Constitution in this rush to war that we are doing in Iraq.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I appreciate the opportunity to talk here today on an issue which I think is very timely and very important.

Today I dropped in H.R. 1200, which is a bill that I have dropped in for 12 years, providing universal health care insurance for the entire country. We are all one family. We are not this group or that group or another group or whatever. We are all together in this. We ought to have a plan that covers everybody, no matter where you live, no matter what color your skin is, no matter what ethnic background you come from, what kind of money you have or anything. It should be a system that covers everyone.

Now, today I just took this out of my wallet. I am covered because I have got this piece of plastic in my wallet. If I get in an accident or get sick and they haul me in the emergency room, they will find out I got this piece of plastic and I am covered. I can go for preventive care. I can go for all kinds of things. But if you do not have this piece of plastic, you will have to wait until you are really sick, because you cannot afford to pay for it; and you go into the emergency room, you get health care, but in the most inefficient way possible and the most inhumane way possible, at the end, when you should have been having preventive care before.

Now, this country, for reasons which totally escape me, cannot accept that it is a right for everyone to have health coverage. In Germany, we say, you know, what could the Germans know? In 1883 they put in a universal health care system. If you go to work tomorrow in Germany, you will have insurance tomorrow. They take in Turkish workers, they take in Kurds, they take in Bosnians. All these people come into their country, and they give them health care coverage from the very first day.

The United States has lots of people who come into this country to work. They come here to pick our vegetables, to work in the fields, to do the hard labor in this country. The fact is that of the 42 million people in this country who do not have insurance, 72 percent of them work full-time. They are not lazy. They are pulling their weight. They are doing what you have to do in a society to feed their family. But they do not have health insurance, and it is wrong. I think that the members of the Hispanic Caucus are absolutely correct in bringing this up, that everybody in this country should be covered.

The fact that Hispanics are in fact the least insured in this country is a travesty. If they were not doing the work they do in this country, we could not have the standard of living we have.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak about the need to address domestic violence against women within the context of our welfare system.

One in every three welfare recipients has experienced domestic violence in the 12 months prior to receiving welfare assistance. Making women choose between financial security and physical safety is appalling. The provisions in the bill which urge marriage and have programs to get people married, which will encourage some women either to stay in a abusive relationship or marry an abuser, is not the way welfare should be moving for economic security. This is no way to promote that.

Women have the right to financial stability and physical safety for themselves and for their children. Welfare's means for promoting success and economic stability should come through education and training and other responsible ways.

Education is the number one predictor of future opportunities in the work force. We should be putting our limited and valuable resources toward these proven vehicles of helping women, instead of throwing it away on unproved programs to urge people to get married. There is no question we are going to put more women in harm's way with those kinds of programs.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney).

Mr. Speaker, I am here to talk on behalf of three doctors and myself. I was a physician during the Vietnam War. I was in Long Beach. I saw the troops coming back from the Vietnam War, and I saw what the war did to them. I also have been in government since then and have seen how our government for many years denied that

Agent Orange had any effect whatsoever on the troops.

In 1984 we settled a claim for all of the problems created by Agent Orange, which we finally admitted. Now we have a case before the Supreme Court at this very time where they are trying to reopen that claim on behalf of people who are suffering even 40 years after the war.

It is for that reason that I raise the issue today of depleted uranium in Iraq. I was there. I was in Iraq in 1991, and I was there again this year; and the evidence is overwhelming of the impact of what Iraq has suffered from depleted uranium and what we, the United States, are about to suffer.

Dr. Al-Ali said that before the Gulf War they had only three or four deaths a month from cancer. Now it is 30 to 35 patients dying every month, and that is just in his department. That is a 12-fold increase, 1,200 percent increase in cancer mortality. Studies indicate that 40 to 48 percent of the population in that area will get cancer in 5 years. That is almost half the population.

A woman doctor, Dr. Ginan Hassen, said, ``I studied what happened in Hiroshima. It is almost exactly the same here. We have an increased percentage of congenital malformaties, an increase of malignancy, leukemia, brain tumors, and the rest.'' Under the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council, now in its 14th year, Iraq is denied the equipment and expertise to decontaminate its battlefields from the 1991 Gulf War.

These are two Iraqi doctors talking. Let me quote an American doctor, Dr. Doug Rokke, who was appointed by Norman Schwarzkopf to go in as a part of the decontamination team and clean up what we did. We dumped 300 tons of munitions with depleted uranium in this area that he was sent in to clean up. He says: ``I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. Most of my team are now dead.'' Eighteen out of 24 people, American soldiers sent in to clean that up, are now dead.

Dr. Rokke says, ``We face an issue to be confronted by the people in the West, those with a sense of right and wrong.'' First, a decision by the United States and Britain to use weapons of mass destruction, depleted uranium. When a tank fired a shell, each round contains 4,500 grams of solid uranium. What happened to the Gulf was a form of nuclear war. That was 1991. We are about to do it again. People are talking about 3,000 missiles into Baghdad in the first day and 3,000 on the second day, all with depleted uranium on the point. Why is that used? Because it is so penetrating, when it explodes, it creates a white dust, uranium oxide, and people walk around, it gets in their lungs and reproductive organs. Children died. That is where those figures come from for the children. That is why we have so many malformations at birth among Iraqi women. It is to the point today where Iraqi women say, Is my child normal?

Mr. Speaker, we did that once to them, and we are about to do it again. We are about to do it again, and we are about to do to our own troops, hundreds of thousands of them, what we did to Doug Rokke. Dr. Rokke marched in there and did his duty. I am here talking for the veterans of our country and for the women and men who are on the line for us out there. I do not want them sent into that.

We are going to march troops right through the very place where this happened to the Iraqi people. Will our government admit what they are doing? No. They will not talk about what is going on with depleted uranium.

Here is the issue. The Secretary of VA, Mr. Principi, remember the Bush administration, writes a letter to the Department of Defense and says please do preservice evaluations on all of the men and women so we can look at, when it is over, what the difference is.

How can we send 300,000 American people into war that kills Iraqis left, right and center with impugnity? This is an unjust war. There are many reasons to be against this war; but this reason, the soldiers and Marines and sailors of the United States are the major reason we should not be doing it. We are exposing our own people to something that we will not admit we are doing.

Mr. Speaker, I was unable to vote on yesterday's suspension bills. Had I been capable of voting, I would have voted in support of:

H.R. 46--Honoring the life of Al Hirschfeld.

H.R. 40--Permitting the use of the rotunda of the Capital for a ceremony in remembrance of victims of the Holocaust.

Mr. Speaker, I commend this speech by the leader of the liberal party in the House of Lords.

Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, I too thank the

Deputy Leader of the House for the very forceful, although

not at all untypical, way in which she addressed the House.

We on these Benches share completely the objective of the

disarmament of Iraq. There is no question about that.

I want to remind the noble Baroness of the second part of

Resolution 1441. It states that Iraq should have, ``a final

opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations under

relevant resolutions of the Council'', and that it has been

accordingly decided, ``to set up an enhanced inspection

regime with the aim of bringing to full and verified

completion the disarmament process''.

The difference between these Benches, the noble Lord, Lord

Howell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, is

straightforwardly that we believe that the present draft

resolutions pre-empt that process, that it is not yet

completed, and that there is still an opportunity to avoid

war. Let me say very clearly, in case there is any

misunderstanding, that we believe that we, as powerfully as

any other part of this House, have an obligation to our

troops to make absolutely certain that men and women are not

put into war, risking their lives, unless it can be shown to

be absolutely necessary to do so. It is to that that I intend

to address my remarks. The first question is whether we are

convinced that Iraq is an imminent and present threat. There

is no question but that it could be a potential threat,

although I must dispute briefly with the noble Lord, Lord

Howell of Guildford. Not only the CIA in the United States

but Ministers in this House have on more than one recent

occasion admitted that there is no clear evidence to link

Al'Qaeda to the Government of Iraq, much as we might find

things easier if that were so. That must be stated very

explicitly, because repeating a misconception over and again

does not turn that misconception into a truth. Therefore, I

doubt whether we can show that Iraq is an imminent threat.

If we are seeking imminent threat, I need only quote from a

very senior colleague of mine who is the head of the security

unit in the Belfer Center at Harvard University. Ash Carter

is a former National Security Agency assistant secretary. He

said: ``News reports late last week indicated that . . .

North Korea is trucking the fuel rods away where they can

neither be inspected nor entombed

by an airstrike . . . as this loose nukes disaster unfolds

and the options for dealing with it narrow, the world does

nothing''.

That is a much more imminent threat.

Secondly, we are not convinced that containment has failed.

I can quote from an authoritative source. These are the words

of the Prime Minister himself in November 2000: ``We believe

that the sanctions regime has effectively contained Saddam

Hussein in the last 10 years. During this time he has not

attacked his neighbours, nor used chemical weapons against

his own people''.--[Official Report, Commons, 1/11/00; col.

511 W.]

Nor has he done either in the past three years--since that

statement.

Another authoritative source said: ``Through a process of

inspection and verified destruction, the UNSCOM inspectors

have demolished more weapons capability than was destroyed by

the allied forces during the Gulf war''.--[Official Report,

Commons, 17/2/98; col. 900.]

Those are the words of Robin Cook, then the Foreign

Secretary. Even much more recently, it has been restated more

than once that containment has proved more effective in

destroying weapons of mass destruction than any war at any

time in the past few years. The third issue is whether we

believe that the peaceful options have been exhausted. Again,

I quote from two unimpeachable sources. The first is the

Congressional Research Service of the United States Congress,

which said: ``In meetings with Blix and ElBaradei in Baghdad

on February 8 and 9, 2003, Iraqi officials handed over

documents on anthrax, VX, and missile programs . . . On

February 10, Iraq notified the UN that it would permit

overflights of American U-2, French Mirage, and Russian

Antonov aircraft''.

Let us add to that the report in the Independent today,

which said: ``Mr. Blix said the details of the weapons''--

I have described when they were handed over to the

inspectors--``were `positive steps which need to be explored

further'. Asked if there was any indication by the Iraqis of

`substantive progress or proactive co-operation' '', which

are exactly the requirements mentioned by the noble Baroness,

Lady Symons, Mr Blix, a man of few words, replied, ``Yes''.

That was only yesterday. We on these Benches are not

persuaded that all peaceful options have been exhausted. We

point, not to illusions or statements by Members on these

Benches, but to clear and unimpeachable sources such as the

Congressional Research Service and the chief inspector, Mr

Blix himself. None of this would matter so much if the

consequences of war were less serious than they are. I wish

to say a few words about them. First, the Financial Times

states: ``The coalition of the willing, sounds ever more like

a coalition of the reluctant''.

Huge pressures are being brought to bear, not least on

moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and

others, to subscribe to being part of an alliance to destroy

the Iraqi regime. Those countries have protested over and

over again that they do not wish to be involved in the war.

Let me give two examples. There was a great deal of

controversy over Turkey because it was argued that it had

been refused Patriot missiles as a result of a disagreeable

coalition between France and Germany. It later emerged that

Turkey had never asked for Patriot missiles or for any of the

other equipment that was sent to it. Turkey had asked for

consultation under Article 4 of the NATO treaty. It had not

invoked Article 5, which is the article concerning mutual

defense. Even now, Turkey is driving a colossally hard

bargain. Members of the House will have seen that one part of

the bargain is that Turkey should be allowed to bring 55,000

troops into northern Iraq--the Kurdish area, much of which is

protected by a no-fly-zone--a situation which, at the very

least, is likely to foment great anger and, at worst, could

lead to civil war and the disintegration of Iraq. It has

also--incidentally, almost--helped to destroy the real

prospect of a united Cyprus entering the European Union some

time in the next seven or eight years.

The International Crisis Group--I declare an interest as a

board member--has discovered that there is tremendous public

concern about the possibility of a war against Iraq in the

Middle East. In its report, it states: ``ICG interviews

throughout the region, in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait,

Jordan, Egypt and Algeria, indicate that there exists wide

and deep scepticism about US motives''. That may be unfair,

but it is a fact that we have to take into account when

deciding whether the price of war is too high. It also

emphasizes the importance of pursuing every other possible

alternative.

I need not add the special complication of the wretched

situation in the Middle East, referred to in another place

yesterday by that distinguished and brave Member of

Parliament, Gerald Kaufman, as the daily almost casual

slaughter of Palestinians by the IDF and the daily almost

casual slaughter of Israelis by terrorists from the West Bank

and Gaza. We cannot pretend that this is not a desperately

serious complication. With great respect to the noble

Baroness, Lady Symons, she and I both know that the reason

why the UN resolutions are mandatory on Iraq, and not

mandatory on Israel, which has also broken many of them, is

because the United States refuses to agree to their being

made mandatory on Israel.

I have the greatest respect for the Prime Minister. He has

virtually ripped himself into pieces trying to hold the

Administration in the United States to the UN process. He is

the reason why George Bush went to the United Nations: I pay

the Prime Minister great credit for that. But the distinction

I have just drawn between Israel and Iraq shows all too

clearly that it is not the Prime Minister who is in the

driving seat. It is concern about who is in the driving

seat that underlies much of the scepticism.

I do not need to mention at length the possible

humanitarian consequences of a war. That has been done

effectively by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. But

they are extreme. One has only to consider the desperate

plight with regard to food. According to a leaked UN

document, 30 per cent of children under five will be at risk

of death from malnutrition if the war lasts more than a week

or so. There are also warnings about cholera and many other

extreme diseases. The warnings come from a United Nations

leaked document, called the ``Humanitarian Consequences of

the War''.

Before I come to my conclusion, I shall say in the words of

a famous politician whom many Labour Members of this House

will remember, ``You don't need to look at the crystal if you

can read the book''.

What is the book? The book concerns Afghanistan. I shall

quote again from two sources, the first of which is The Times

of 13 February, which states that ``large parts of the

country are once more on the verge of anarchy''.

An article by the senior fellow at the American Council on

Foreign Relations--I declare an interest as a member of its

international advisory council--states: ``Basic security and

stability have still not been achieved''. Worst of all, when

the President drew up his budget for 2004, he forgot to put

even a penny for the reconstruction of Afghanistan into it.

Paul Krugman, of the New York Times, states: ``The Bush team

forgot about it. Embarrassed Congressional staff members had

to write in $300 million to cover the lapse''.

So much for Afghanistan, already largely forgotten, coming

back to anarchy, and neglected by the international

community.

I conclude with two thoughts. First, there is clear

evidence that the obsession with Iraq is drawing us away from

what should be our first priority, which is to attack

international terrorism. For that we need the widest possible

support. I shall not go on quoting, but it was President

Jimmy Carter who said a few days ago that the obsession with

Iraq had essentially diverted the American Administration

from concern about terrorism. There is more evidence that we

are beginning to neglect the remnants--not dead remnants, but

live ones--of Al'Qaeda in many other parts of the world.

Finally, there is a fundamental thought, to which my

colleague Lord Wallace of Saltaire will address himself.

There is undoubtedly among European opinion, including the

United Kingdom, more than 80 per cent opposition to a war

without UN support and considerable opposition to a war even

with UN support. That does not reflect anti-Americanism,

except perhaps among a small minority. Many of us regard

America as one of the most enterprising, imaginative,

democratic and open societies in the world. What it reflects

is concern with an Administration propelled to some extent by

what I can only describe as a fundamentalist Christian and

fundamentalist Jewish drive that is almost as powerful as

fundamentalist Islam itself. The Administration has set aside

the structures of the multilateral community by removing

themselves from treaties and conventions, by refusing to sign

the Kyoto agreement or agreeing to the biological weapons

convention being resumed, and now by embarking on nuclear

plans that threaten even the nuclear proliferation treaty. It

is who is in the driving seat that frightens many of us;

certainly not that great country the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, I am not going to talk about the bill. I am going to talk about

the process, because that is what is really wrong with what happened here.

When we organized the Committee on Ways and Means, I asked the chairman in open committee whether we would have hearings on this bill. The chairman said that is what he wanted. But it is pretty clear that this House is being run by a politburo run by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay).

The gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) obviously told the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, which is supposed to be the most powerful committee in Congress, you cannot have hearings on this; we are dealing with this on the floor without any discussion, no debates.

Now, if this were a good rule and you made it an open rule and let us put any amendments forward we wanted to, if we could have the debate out here in public, that would be okay. But you closed that off, as well as having any kind of public discussion in the committee system.

Now, this Congress, I am sure, is going to do more and more of that, because it is clear what you are trying to do is run stuff through here so quickly that we will be out of town when some war begins, and there will not be any Members of Congress around here. You will have done all the business, you will not have any hearings anyplace, and you will simply pass the legislation over to the Senate and go home. That is a travesty on the process that has been in place in this country for 200 years.

This is not a minor little bill. This is not ``shall we name the post office in Oologah, Oklahoma, after Will Rogers?'' This is about what we do with the poor people of this country. And for Members elected not to have an opportunity to debate amendments and discuss the issue, I know what they are going to say when we get out here with the regular bill; they are going to say we did it last year.

Listen, things have continued down the drain. We have got higher and higher unemployment, and more and more of us are facing problems in State legislatures that cannot respond to this.

The President has made no proposal to deal with the problems of the States in dealing with people who are on welfare, who are in trouble, kids. The President says, ``Leave no child behind.'' Well, I guess he means they can go to school on an empty stomach. That is okay with him. Okay, that is good. But why not have a kid with a stomach with some food in it so he can pay attention to the books?

But if we had this debate and we had all these amendments put out here and we argued about whether you could actually get 30 hours of work, or should you count training or whatever, all those issues would then make it very clear what you are doing to poor people. You do not care whether they have a livable wage; just shove them off the rolls and leave them out there. And when we start to get the kids, we are going to get the kids from the programs in every State that deal with child abuse. People are going to say, these parents are not taking care of these children. We have to take those children away from them.

It will be created by a bill that never had a hearing. Shame on the Republican leadership.

Mr. Chairman, my remarks should not be taken as any kind of a statement about the Committee on Ways and Means, because we had nothing to do with this. But I remember the verse in the Bible where they were asking Christ how you would know if you were really a good Christian, and he said, well, it is how you take care of the least of these, meaning the poor people and the sick and all of the rest. This bill is an absolute travesty. Nobody wants to talk about it.

Now, let me tell my colleagues what Republicans say. Mark Schweiker, the

former Republican Governor of Pennsylvania said, ``Meeting the work requirements in the House bill would require us to dismantle much of our time-tested and effective welfare program and replace it with costly programs with little utility. These changes, including significant new child care costs, would cost the taxpayers of Pennsylvania more than $300 million.'' That is a Republican Governor talking.

Or we could take the Republican Senate chairman in Iowa. Her name is Mary Cramer. She said, ``We are concerned that the proposals such as the legislation passed by the House will restrict Iowa's successful efforts to provide training to welfare recipients and meet the needs of local businesses. We urge you not to take a step backwards and further restrict education and training options.''

I could go on like this. Anybody outside the Beltway, outside of the office of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), knows that this bill is not going to make it better; it is going to make it worse.

Now, I have a whole long list of things. The GOP will say today that welfare reform has been a great success. If that is, why have 41 out of the 47 States said, the Republican plan would force fundamental change in their current welfare program? Why are we changing it if it is not broken? What is the point? The point is to squeeze poor people.

We heard earlier that child poverty has fallen dramatically because of welfare reform. No, that is not what everyone else who is an economist says. It is a good economy, and it has been the earned income tax credit, and we still are forcing families, with a family of three living on $2,500 a quarter. Now, that is 70 percent of the Federal poverty line. We call that success? That is what we are being led to believe out here, that we have a success and we ought to squeeze them more. They got too much. That family of three with $10,000 for a year ought to be squeezed some more.

We will also hear, and we did hear, that this bill gives more flexibility because we allow States to define 16 of the 40 required work hours in the bill. This bill increases the current law direct-work requirement from 20 to 24 hours and eliminates job search. Looking for a job does not count anymore; you only get credit for working. So if you have a job making $6 an hour and you spend a little bit of time out looking for a job, you do not get any credit whatsoever for that.

The CBO estimates that the paperwork involved in this is going to be a cost of $6.2 billion over the next 5 years. So we will pay for $6.2 billion worth of paperwork; but we will not think about the people, because we need to pass the committee, we need to get it right out here and get it passed because TANF expired on March 31. What they did not say when they came out on the floor was, the Senate Republicans included a 6-month extension of the current law through September 30 in the Omnibus Appropriation Act we are about to take on.

Now, that extension is supported by the National Governors Conference, so Republican legislators are going out and sticking their thumb in the eye of Republican Governors.

Now, if the House negotiators would withdraw their objections to that extension, we would have plenty of time for thoughtful consideration of their program. We would have the next 6 months to think about it. The thing I really like best is, we had plenty of debate last year so we do not need to debate it this year, as though, if you discussed it in 1941, it is good enough; we do not need to discuss it again, right?

Well, do things change? Did we have a new Congress elected in November? We have got new people here. Some of these people have never, ever considered these issues, a lot of them. There has been no public debate whatsoever, and we passed last year's bill on a party line vote, and no attempt was made to work it out with the minority then. This is more of the same. This is just rubber-stamping George Bush's proposals, and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) leads the politburo, and he keeps sending things up here.

Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we are going to pass the welfare reform act without a single hearing in the subcommittee or in the full committee. It simply went to the Rules Committee and will come to the floor without debate in this House.

I implore you, Mr. Speaker, to bring the domestic security enhancement bill to the committee and then to the floor with full debate before you try and run it through in the confusion around some terrorist act.

I give two quotes and let people decide who said what. The first is: ``The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.''

The second quote is: ``To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: `Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.' ''

The first is a quote from Hermann Goering, the propagandist for the Nazis. The second is John Ashcroft. Consider the similarity. We do not need to lose more of our liberties to defend ourselves in this country.

Well, I want to thank the gentleman from Oregon for yielding to me.

I wish that tomorrow night we were going to have a speech like John Kennedy gave in 1961, when he came and said, we are going to go to the moon. He gave the American people a goal. He gave them hope. He gave them a vision of what they could be as a country. Unfortunately, I am sitting here preparing myself to come tomorrow and not hear any of that.

I wish that the President were going to say tomorrow, when he stands up here behind me, that in 10 years the United States is going to be off their oil addiction; that they are going to break the oil addiction that is killing us. They are going to do the things necessary to get off an addiction. The United States is just like somebody who is on heroin or cocaine in terms of oil. We use oil in tremendous amounts, although we have scarcely any of it left in our own country. The President wants to drill everywhere in sight, but we still are not going to get enough oil from the United States. So we are forced to get our oil from Venezuela and from Nigeria and from the Middle East, and it is not necessary for this addiction to continue.

If the President of the United States would set a goal tomorrow night for us to move to oil independence in the world and begin to push solar and wind and hydrogen cells as a way of solving our transportation problems and the energy needs of this society, we could do it. San Francisco has already started to move. They got burned by Enron, so San Francisco said, this is never going to happen again to us, and they passed a $100 million bond issue, and they are putting solar panels on every public building in San Francisco.

Now, if the President of the United States said that we are going to do it all over the country, we would absolutely change our relationship to the Middle East. This misbegotten proposal to go to war to get 20 percent of the world's oil reserves from Iraq would be irrelevant. They could do it in San Francisco, yet our President cannot say let us do it in the whole country.

California, every single day, has fallout of the sky seven times the energy they use in California. All they have to do is catch it and turn it into electrical energy, and they can do what needs to be done. Now, that is true in many parts of the United States. Even in my State of Washington there are areas where this makes good sense.

Now, let us talk about hydrogen cells. People say we are talking about something that is way, way, way out there somewhere. Most people do not realize Honda and Toyota delivered to the Los Angeles mayor hydrogen cell cars within the last 2 months and said, we want you to use these over here and see how they work and what the problems are. The Japanese are, once again, miles ahead of us. They did it with little cars, then they did it with hybrids, and now they are doing it with hydrogen cells. But our President says, no, we have to stick with that oil, and we have to put it in the gasoline engines, and we have to do the same old thing.

Now, as a psychiatrist, one of the things I learned was that people who do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, that is really a sign of sickness. We have been doing this for 100 years. We have been putting gasoline in cars and sending up clouds of pollution, which is the second thing the President could be dealing with. If he gave us this goal of energy independence, he would stop the process of us polluting the air and destroying the ozone and global warming.

All you have to see is pictures of glaciers all over this country and north of this country that have been melted by the global warming. It is absolutely without question going on. Yet our President says, no, we cannot have anything to do with that Kyoto Accord, because that would mean we would have to stop using our oil. But I wish the President were coming tomorrow to say to us that we are going to get off that because we are going to do something about the energy and how we are killing the environment.

Mr. Speaker, I heard a story on NPR recently which disturbed me, having been a child psychiatrist for a number of years. Every child born in this century has a 100 percent chance of getting skin cancer if they are not protected because of the destruction of the ozone level; they are being subjected to rays of the sun that is going to make them develop skin cancer.

The President of the United States could do all of this if he could simply say we are not going to go to war to get 20 percent of the world's oil reserves; we are going to go in another direction. We are going to change the direction of this country. Unfortunately, the President of the United States is going to stand up on the podium and beat the war drum for an hour and tell us we must go after Saddam Hussein, and he has never made it clear what we are going for, but it is really about oil.

What makes me sad about what is going to happen tomorrow night is that the American people are going to listen to the speech and think that their only solution is to take Saddam Hussein out; and if we do that, we are going to be really safe. All of the security will be settled; we will be safe forever.

Mr. Speaker, does anybody really think that the American public is going to believe that? I do not. I wish the President would come tomorrow and talk about energy independence.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter) for yielding me time.

The President is intent on going to war. He continues to take us down a path to war. The papers carry today the story that the stimulus package is going to be eaten up by the war. You can pour that $700 billion into the economy, and it will not do any good because nobody is going to invest, which means we are going to continue to have long-term unemployment.

My State has the highest rate of unemployment. The distinguished gentleman from California says, well, they are going to get some money from the stimulus package when they get their capital gains excuse there.

I am going to tell the 30,000 people in my State that are not covered by this bill that we will try to get an address where they can go and get their money for their non-existent tax benefits.

This is a travesty, and what you are doing is you are putting a little Band-Aid on it today because you have got public pressure. You will be back. I guarantee you will be back in March. You will be out here saying, well, amazingly, the economy has not picked up. We do not know what to do, so we have to give a few more benefits, a few more nickels and dimes out the door.

If you continue down this path to war and spend the money out of the Treasury of the United States in a stupid tax giveaway to the wealthy, 70 percent of the people in this country will not get more than a $100 out of it. If you think that is a stimulus to the economy, you do not understand ordinary people.

So you are wasting $700 billion. You are taking us into a senseless war, and you will not take care of people who are sitting in your own districts. And you will not let us debate it. You say, well, we have the budget, we have the budget, you know, we have to keep the budget in balance. You gave that up and you are going to give it up.

The President says we are having a wartime budget. So in a wartime budget you do not have to worry about what is going on. You can just spend money on all kinds of things but not on the unemployed, even though the $25 billion is sitting right in the account right now, and they will not acquire a damn dime.

Announcement By The Speaker Pro Tempore