[国会记录：2008年2月13日（参议院）] [第S927-S936] CIA审讯和陆军野战手册范士丹女士。主席先生，昨天是参议院前的大日子。我们有外国情报监视法法案。今天是一个更大的日子，因为情报授权法案将成为参议院之前，今天我们将带的东西，我想应该是在我们的意识主要和主要在我们的审议斗争。这是中央对我们作为一个国家谁。现在的问题是，美国是否应该继续去``阴暗面“”下酷刑的道路，并继续允许美国中央情报局和其他情报机构的做法或外包国家批准的折磨。对我来说，答案是清楚的，我希望这是给大家。答案应该是。今天，我们生活在一个法律的中间状态，那里的规则是由不确定性所笼罩。时间已经到了改变这种一劳永逸。 The way to do it is to support the fiscal year 2008 intelligence authorization bill, which would prohibit all interrogation techniques by the CIA and place the intelligence community under the uniform standard of the Army Field Manual. If that bill passes, and it has passed the House of Representatives, if it passes here today, we have a uniform standard for the entire American Government with respect to coercive interrogation techniques. The Army Field Manual, which looks like this, has 19 interrogation protocols. They are proven, they are flexible, and they are effective. The CIA interrogation program, on the other hand, I believe, is immoral, illegal, sometimes ineffective, and often counterproductive. I wish to simply read something which appeared in the newspapers, and what this says is: The book on interrogation has been written. We just need to follow it. And they refer to this book, Mr. President. Cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners under American control makes us less safe, violates our Nation's values, and damages America's reputation in the world. That is why, in 2004, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission called for humane treatment of those captured by the United States Government and our allies in the struggle against terrorism. Congress and the Pentagon responded with clear and comprehensive new rules for the military so that interrogation techniques practiced by the military today are both humane and effective. But not all United States agencies are following these rules. Congress should require the entire U.S. Government and those acting on its behalf to follow the Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations. Doing so will make us safer while safeguarding our cherished values and our vital national interests. This was signed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Warren Christopher, Lawrence Eagleburger, Slade Gorton, Lee Hamilton, Gary Hart, Rita Houser, Karla Hills, Thomas Kean, Anthony Lake, John Lehman, Richard Leon, Robert McFarlane, Donald McHenry, Sam Nunn, Thomas Pickering, Ted Sorensen, and John Whitehead. It is a bipartisan group that has come out with this, and I believe we should absorb it and use that information. The Army Field Manual provision has the support of the Intelligence Committees. I offered the amendment in the conference between the House and the Senate on the intel authorization bill. It was passed by the Senate and it was passed by the House, and it is part of the bill, and as I said, the House has passed their bill. The amendment was the subject of passionate and considered debate in Congress. It has unique support--18 former security officials, as I have said--and this Army Field Manual was issued in its current form by the Department of the Army in September of 2006. It followed the requirements of the Detainee Treatment Act, and it applies uniformly across all elements of the military and civilian elements of the Department of Defense. The manual was published after more than 3 years of drafting and coordination. This was the most scrutinized field manual the Army has ever produced, including reviews and comments by every relevant Pentagon office, every combatant commander, the White House, the DNI, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Departments of Justice and State have also concurred with the manual's guidance. For the first time ever, the Army consulted with Congress in the persons of Senators McCain, Warner, and Levin in drafting the manual. The manual complies with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Conventions, and the Detainee Treatment Act. There is perhaps no more authoritative figure on the manual than our commanding officer in Iraq, GEN David Petraeus. In a response to a survey showing that American troops in Iraq would consider torture in order to save their comrades, Petraeus wrote to the entire multinational force on May 10, 2007, and here is some of what he said: Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone ``talk''; however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees. Now, what does the manual do? It specifically authorizes 19 approaches--you could call them interrogation techniques--and they are well thought out and each one is several pages on how to apply it. One of them can only be used on unlawful army combatants with the prior approval of the combatant commander. These techniques describe ways to build rapport with the detainee in order to get him or her to share information. GEN Michael Maples, the Director of the DIA, recently rebutted the contention that the Army Field Manual wouldn't have covered the interrogation method used by an FBI special agent to get Saddam Hussein to finally come clean that he had no weapons of mass destruction. So the manual specifically prohibits eight techniques, and here is what they are: Forcing a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts, pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over the [[Page S928]] head of a detainee; using duct tape over the eyes; beatings, electric shock, burns, or other forms of physical pain; waterboarding--very much the talk of the Nation; use of military working dogs; inducing hypothermia or heat injury; conducting mock executions; depriving detainee of necessary food, water, or medical care. Those are the eight prohibited techniques in the Army Field Manual. It also incorporates what is called the ``golden rule,'' and this is important. It is an approach to interrogation. It requires military personnel to ask this question: If an interrogation technique were to be used against an American soldier, would I believe the soldier had been abused? Adopting this conference report would extend that ``golden rule'' to CIA interrogations, to station agents all across the globe, and make sure that no coercive technique could be used if we would not be comfortable with the same technique being used against an American citizen. Now, here are some facts about the CIA program. The CIA has used coercive techniques on detainees since September 11, 2001, under the President's authorization and approval of the Department of Justice. The CIA has waterboarded three detainees--Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The White House believes that waterboarding could be used in the future, even though General Hayden has recently publicly questioned its legality. The CIA has used contractors for interrogations, as General Hayden admitted in an open, public hearing this past week. So the CIA has outsourced what is an inherently governmental function of questionable legality and morality. More importantly, the CIA's interrogation techniques change. There is no uniform standard. There is no standard as to how they are to be combined, what the circumstances are. Think about this. Done with cold calculation, any interrogation technique, when applied over the course of hours or days or months, and in combination with other techniques, can cross the line into illegality. An interrogator can choose from a menu of coercive approaches, pick several of them, and go to work. So don't be fooled. Even the least coercive-sounding technique, when used relentlessly or in combination, can be torture. Now, in addition to being immoral, I believe the CIA interrogation program is illegal. I say this as a member of the Intelligence Committee, and I say this as one who has been briefed several times on these techniques. These techniques have violated the Convention Against Torture and the U.S. torture statute by inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering to others. It has violated Geneva Convention common article III, which prohibits outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. The medical research is clear. Coercive techniques cause severe pain and suffering. That is why both the AMA and the American Psychological Association have passed resolutions against their members participating in such interrogations. In a letter dated September 13, 2006, retired General and former Secretary of State Powell wrote this: The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. I think that says it in a nutshell. As every Member knows, we will never win the war on terror by capturing or killing or torturing all our enemies. We will only win the war by our ideals and by removing any public support for al-Qaida's vision. Using torture cuts away from our moral high ground. It takes America into the ``dark side,'' and thus it reduces our ability to win this war. I believe we should end this now. The military is the segment of the U.S. population most likely to be captured and interrogated by our enemies. They know any technique we authorize can be used against them, and that is the point. If the United States uses waterboarding, you can be sure that waterboarding will be used against our station agents, against our military. It is a mistake to do so. That is why 43 retired generals and admirals, including 10 four-star officers, have signed a letter to Congress denouncing coercive techniques and supporting the single unified uniform standard for the entire Government, the Army Field Manual. Here is what they wrote: We believe that it is vital to the safety of our men and women in uniform that the United States not sanction the use of interrogation methods it would find unacceptable if inflicted by the enemy against captured Americans. That principle, embedded in the Army Field Manual, has guided generations of military personnel in combat. And the letter goes on. I have listened to the experts such as FBI Director Mueller and DIA Director General Maples. They all insist that even with hardened terrorists you get more and better intelligence with the gloves on than when you take them off. The CIA cannot show that coercive techniques are more effective than noncoercive techniques. And I wish I could say what I know from a classified setting, but I cannot. They point to the anecdotes they have declassified, while the counterexamples remain classified. So I can only summarize and say this: This is the moment where the Senate stands up. The House has stood up. They have passed a bill. If we want to ban waterboarding, if we want to ban the eight techniques banned by the Army Field Manual, this is our moment to do so. I think we should stand tall. I think we should adhere to our principles. I think we should raise what we say internally and once again regain the world's credibility. I hope we maintain the Senate bill as it is. I yield the floor. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from West Virginia is recognized. Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, action on the fiscal year 2008 authorization bill for intelligence is so long overdue I do not even know how to explain it. It is over 2 years overdue. It is a very important bill. Beginning in 1978, after the two congressional intelligence committees were established, the Congress passed an annual intelligence authorization bill every year. It does not sound interesting, but it has a great deal to do with how the intelligence community operates. We passed it for 27 consecutive years. And there was no exception to that. This legislation was one of very few nonappropriations measures that Congress has always considered ``must pass.'' Yet we have failed to pass it for the last number of years, and it is a matter of consternation. The importance of our intelligence programs to our national security has always been very obvious. The importance of strong congressional oversight of the intelligence activities has been equally obvious; although it has been spottier in the recent past, it no longer is. Then in 2005 and 2006, the bills reported out of the Senate Intelligence Committee were never brought to the Senate for consideration. There were internal reasons for that. I will spare the Presiding Officer from a discussion of those matters, and it is no longer important why. But we have to do this bill. The intelligence authorization bill is the tool the Congress uses to provide direction, specific direction, and to enforce the oversight that we do. It involves many of the most sensitive national security programs conducted by the U.S. Government. The 2008 authorization bill includes provisions to improve the efficiency of the intelligence community. It is a bland statement, but it is a very important series of parts. The bill produces better intelligence. We provided flexibility and authority to the DNI. We gave him a tremendous responsibility and then did not give him enough flexibility to exercise that responsibility. We do that in this bill. We require much greater accountability from the intelligence community. That is oversight. We require greater accountability from the intelligence community and its managers. We improve the mechanisms for conducting oversight of intelligence programs and we reform intelligence program acquisition procedures. All of that is oversight. Many of the provisions were included at the request of the National Intelligence Director in this bill. I always believe in reaching out to the professionals in doing this. The creation of the DNI position was the result of the most significant reform of the intelligence community in 50 years. And the current DNI, ADM [[Page S929]] Mike McConnell, is absolutely superb. The Office of Director of National Intelligence has now existed for 2\1/2\ years, and we have begun identifying ways to help the DNI better coordinate the 16 elements of the intelligence community, which are scattered around the Government, some of which do a very good job and some of which do not. Now he is pulling all of this together and he is doing a good job. Starting with personnel authority, this bill uses a much more flexible approach to authorizing personnel levels. Those are very delicate. We also give the DNI the ability to exceed personnel ceilings by as much as 3 percent because he needs to have that. He is in the process of trying to figure out how to adjust all of this and work it right. He needs flexibility. It also provides additional flexibility to encourage the DNI to convert contractor positions to Government employees when appropriate. Every Member knows the real power is the power of the purse. It is the same with the DNI. And this bill changes reprogramming requirements to make it easier to address, as they say, emerging needs in critical situations, a crisis. We give him the financial flexibility to do that. He needs that flexibility, and he now will have it if we pass this bill. It authorizes the DNI to use interagency funding amongst his various agencies that he oversees to establish national intelligence centers if he so chooses. The bill also allows the DNI to fund information-sharing efforts across the intelligence community. That was the whole point of the 9/11 Commission. That is the whole point of reducing stovepipes. Finally, it repeals several unneeded and burdensome reporting requirements. Frankly, we can use up a lot of people's time on something that we no longer need. We reduce some reporting requirements without in any way compromising accountability because oversight is the whole point of this bill. As it increases the authority of the DNI, the bill also improves oversight of the intelligence community in other ways. The bill creates a strong independent inspector general in the office of the DNI. It has to be confirmed by the Senate. That is called oversight. Confirmed by the Senate. That means it has to report to the committee. Accountable to the committee. It has to tell us the truth. Confirmation allows inspectors general to do very difficult things within their own departments that maybe some of the leaders will not do. It establishes statutory inspectors general in the National Security Agency, the NRO, the NGA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. So these are all there. They are all accountable. They are all oversight tools that we want. The bill also gives the Congress more oversight of the major intelligence agencies by requiring Senate confirmation of the Directors of NSA and NRO. Right now we do not have to confirm them. If we do not confirm, that means they do not have the same relationship with the Senate. We confirm the CIA, but we do not confirm the NSA. You tell me, particularly after we passed the FISA bill yesterday, how is it possible that we would not be able to confirm the head of the National Security Agency as well under this bill? We can, which makes him accountable to us, which means he reports to us, which means we can do oversight over him much more aggressively. As we describe in our conference report: . . . of the need for NSA's authorized collection to be consistent with the protection of the civil liberties and private interests of U.S. persons. Through confirmation of the NSA Director, we can ensure that continues or starts to be so. As we increase the DNI's flexibility to manage personnel, we require an annual assessment. That sounds boring, but, no, it is not. It is very important--an annual assessment of personnel levels across the intelligence community: How are they distributed? Are they in the right place? Are people protecting their turf? The DNI is in charge of this. We want to give him all the support, and we want this all reported to us in our committee so we can watch it. We also required the inclusion of a statement that those levels are supported by adequate infrastructure, training, funding, and a review of the appropriate use of contractors, which has become a very interesting subject in these months and years. This bill also addresses an issue that has concerned the committee for a long time, the lack of accountability for failures and programmatic blunders. That is called oversight. We want accountability. We want it in front of us. We want our hands on it. The bill gives the DNI the authority to conduct accountability reviews across the intelligence community if he deems it necessary or if we request it in our committee. It is called oversight. This also improves financial management by requiring a variety of actions related to the production of auditable financial statements. That sounds pretty boring, but, no, it is not. When you get into the intelligence community, when you get to classified numbers, things of that sort, it is very important to have someone watching. That is oversight. We will have that if this bill passes. The final major theme in the bill is the reform of the acquisition process. The bill requires a vulnerability assessment of all major acquisition programs. Well, acquisition is a very large word in intelligence and a very expensive word. We have made some very big mistakes, we have not been able to correct them. But that is a discussion for another day. So we have a classified annex. Any Senator who wants to look at what is behind all of those numbers can do that very easily. I have other things I wish to talk about, particularly the Army Field Manual. But I have a whole different speech awaiting my colleagues on that later in the day. Mr. President, I yield the floor. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Missouri. Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I thank my colleague with whom I have worked closely on this and many other matters. One of the most important means that Congress has for conducting oversight of the intelligence community is through the annual authorization bill for the intelligence agency. Regrettably, we can't call it an annual Intelligence Authorization bill because Congress was unable to pass a bill in 2006 and 2007. Unfortunately, it appears we are on a path that may prevent us from getting an authorization bill signed for fiscal year 2008. When I assumed the duties as vice chairman of the select committee at the beginning of this Congress, one of my top priorities--and that of the committee--was to get an Intelligence Authorization bill signed into law. During the first month of our tenure, we tried to resuscitate the fiscal year 2007 bill but could not get it out of the Senate. When the time came to fashion a bill for fiscal year 2008, we had better luck. But as Louis Pasteur once said, ``Chance favors the prepared mind.'' The committee worked hard to include in the chairman and vice chairman's mark only those provisions that had strong bipartisan support. Our rule was if either side objected to a provision, it would not be included. After our markup, we added a number of other good government provisions that had strong bipartisan support. Unfortunately, the committee also added a number of problematic provisions that caused our bill to stall on the floor. I believed we had largely succeeded in our process of accomplishing the goals of a bipartisan bill. We worked closely with the administration to address some of their concerns. Some were easier to resolve than others. We all know there is one very problematic amendment relating to the Army Field Manual that was added during the conference between the House and the Senate. I will address that later. But now I wish to talk about some of the good things in this conference report. First, I have often said--and I believe responsible observers now agree--that in creating the Director of National Intelligence, we gave him a tremendous amount of responsibility but darn little authority to get the job done. This conference report attempts to address that problem by giving the DNI clearer authority and greater flexibility to oversee the intelligence community. For example, section 410 gives the DNI statutory authority to use national intelligence program funds quickly to address deficiencies or needs relating to [[Page S930]] intelligence information or access or sharing capabilities. The DNI may also use funds to pay for non-NIP--national intelligence program-- activities and to address critical gaps in those areas. Section 409 expands the number of officials in the office of the DNI who can protect sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure. This authority may now be delegated to the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence and the chief information officer of the intelligence community. These are all good things, all things the administration needs. We also included provisions that will ensure that the men and women of our intelligence community who must work undercover may do so at less risk of disclosure and, consequently, less risk to their personal safety. Section 305 allows the DNI to delegate the authority to authorize travel on any common carrier for purposes of preserving cover of certain employees. Section 325 extends to the head of each intelligence community element the authority to exempt certain gifts from otherwise applicable reporting requirements. Without this exemption, detailed information about the receipt of gifts from foreign governments must be published in the Federal Register. Imagine if an undercover agent receives a gift from one of the targets he is working and has to report it in the Federal Register. That not only blows his cover, it probably ends his life. That is a great national security concern to operatives who have received such gifts as part of their covert actions. One particular provision will reduce the personnel and resources used to respond to many congressional reporting requirements. In section 330--again, in response to a request of the DNI--we eliminated a number of reporting requirements. It is a small step but an important one, as each reporting requirement diverts valuable resources from the intended purpose. I hope, within the 2009 Intelligence Authorization bill, we can make even greater progress in reducing unnecessary and duplicative reporting requirements that burden the intelligence community. There are a number of provisions in this conference report that are essential for promoting good government. Too often we have seen programs or acquisitions of major systems balloon in cost and decrease in performance. That is unacceptable. We as taxpayers are spending substantial sums of money to ensure that the intelligence community has the tools it needs to keep us safe. If we don't demand accountability in how these tools are operated or created, then we are failing the taxpayers. We are failing the intelligence community. We are failing the mission I would hope we all agree is essential. I sponsored several amendments that require the intelligence community to perform vulnerability assessments of major systems and to keep track of excessive cost growth of major systems. This latter provision is modeled on the Nunn-McCurdy provision which has guided Defense Department acquisitions for years. I believe these provisions will encourage earlier identification, the solving of problems relating to the acquisition of major systems. Too often such problems have not been identified until exorbitant sums of money have been spent. In some cases, several billions of dollars have been blown before the waste stopped. Unfortunately, too often, once they have sunk a bunch of money into a project, they refuse to cancel it, even though they are continuing to throw good money after bad. Similarly, the intelligence community must get a handle on their personnel. I don't share the belief some have that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is too large. In fact, I think we need to make sure our National Counterterrorism Center and National Counterproliferation Center have more resources, not less. They are the ultimate idea for creating a centralized intelligence community, bringing analysts and collectors together from all of the 16 different elements of the community. I am concerned about the number of contractors used by the intelligence community to perform functions better left to Government employees. There are some jobs that demand the use of contractors--for example, certain technical jobs or short-term functions--but too often the quick fix is to hire contractors, not long-term support. So this conference report includes a provision calling for an annual personnel level assessment for the intelligence community. These assessments will ensure that before more people are brought in, there are adequate resources to support them and enough work to keep them busy. Finally, we have included section 312, which requires the DNI to create a business enterprise architecture that defines all intelligence community business systems. The endgame is to encourage implementation of interoperable intelligence community business systems, getting everyone on the same page; in sum, making sure everybody is talking to each other and everybody who needs to know can listen in, a simple but not-yet-achieved objective. Given the substantial sums of money we are spending on these systems, we should be making certain the systems are efficiently and effectively coordinated; again, a good government provision. There were a number of adjustments we had to make. We responded to concerns of the administration, and I worked particularly with my Democratic colleagues--and I thank them for their support--to make adjustments that would allow the bill to clear the Senate for the first time in 2 years. Let me highlight some of those adjustments because it is important to remember how much effort it took to return the bill to a bipartisan state. No. 1, we struck a section that would have required the President to provide Congress with any President's daily brief involving Iraq during a certain time period. The PDBs have not been disclosed. As a matter of fact, they only came to light when a former official in the previous administration put some PDBs in his BVDs and stuck them out at the archives for reasons no one has adequately explained. We struck two sections that contained controversial notification and funding restrictions. We struck a provision requiring declassification of the budgetary top line of the national intelligence program because it had already passed Congress in S. 4, the so-called 9/11 bill. We struck a section that required the CIA Director to make available to the public a declassified version of a CIA inspector general report on CIA accountability related to the terrorist attacks. That was also required by S. 4. It was about time the CIA internal IG report be made available. Everybody else had to air their failings, and it was time the CIA did so as well. We struck a section that would have allowed the public interest declassification board to conduct declassification reviews at the request of Congress, regardless of whether the review is requested by the President. We also struck a provision that would have required a national intelligence estimate on global climate change, largely because the DNI, which is not equipped to conduct an NIE on climate change, had outsourced the responsibility for putting together an assessment, and there was no need to mandate this in law. Finally, we made modifications to at least seven other provisions to address concerns raised by the administration and by our Senate colleagues. The end result was, we get a fiscal year 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill passed out of the Senate by unanimous consent in early October 2007. I thank my colleagues for allowing us to do that. It was long overdue, and it was a badly needed action. Then, however, we went to conference. I urged my conferees to avoid inclusion of controversial provisions. We kept our negotiations to the base text of both bills. Given that we hadn't had an intel bill during the past 2 years, there were a lot provisions to negotiate. I guess you could say there was a lot of pent- up oversight. After a lot of hard work, we were able to merge the two bills in a manner we believed would receive strong bipartisan support. Unfortunately, despite my warnings, history again repeated itself. During the conference markup, the Senate adopted, by a one-vote margin, a controversial provision that limits the intelligence community to using only those interrogation techniques authorized by the U.S. Army Field Manual on human intelligence collector operations. As I will discuss later, to adopt that provision and put it into law [[Page S931]] would, according to the Director of the CIA, shut down the most valuable intelligence collection program the CIA has, a program that has protected our homeland and our troops abroad from terrorist attacks. Because it was adopted, I couldn't sign the conference report that I and my colleagues worked so hard to enact. Another consequence of that vote was it caused the conference report to languish in the Senate for more than 2 months now. Shortly after the passage of the conference report, the administration released a statement of administration policy and--certainly not to my surprise-- at the top of their list of objectionable provisions was the limitation on interrogation techniques provisions. We have heard some misstatements on this floor about interrogation and the techniques used. Frankly, I share some of the same concerns raised by the administration with respect to this provision. Statements made about the interrogation program of the CIA are not accurate. They have been blown totally out of context, and they deserve a response. This section, if it were enacted in law--and it will not be--would prevent the intelligence community from conducting the interrogation of senior al-Qaida terrorists to obtain intelligence needed to protect the country from attack. During its consideration of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, Congress wisely decided that while the Army Field Manual was a good standard for military interrogators who number in the tens of thousands, with limited supervision and limited training, it was not the standard that should be used by the CIA. CIA interrogators are highly trained, operate under tremendous oversight and rules and supervision in interrogating those top hardened terrorist leaders, who have information on how the system operates and who the major players are. They do not outsource this job to contractors such as Blackwater or others. It is my understanding if they use contractors, it is former interrogators who are brought back in because of their experience. They are subject to the supervision of the CIA, with multiple layers of supervision and oversight by video cameras. It is highly irresponsible to say the CIA has outsourced torture. We do not do torture. Now, a lot of people say we have lost a lot because of our inhumane treatment. They are referring to Abu Ghraib. We all agree that what was done at Abu Ghraib was inhuman and degrading. But it was not done by anybody in the intelligence field or for intelligence purposes. It was done by renegade troops who have been prosecuted, punished, and imprisoned for the violations of basic decency. Yes, that has hurt us worldwide, but that is not the standard which is allowable, permissible, or acceptable by any of our interrogators. Mention has been made of eight techniques that are banned in the Army Field Manual. I agree, those techniques that are banned in the Army Field Manual should be banned. Those are not techniques that should be used. The Army Field Manual was meant for the Army in limiting the number of techniques that can be used. It applies to them only for the Army, for the Army's use. There are quite a number of techniques that fall within the same category that are not torture, inhuman, degrading, or cruel. If they are not included in the Army Field Manual, then they would not be permitted to be used, if this were made law, by the CIA, the FBI, or anybody else. But to apply the Army Field Manual--it says you can only use these interrogation techniques if you get authorization from ``the first 0-6 in the interrogator's chain-of-command''--well, that would mean the CIA would have to go over to the Army and say: Do you have an 0-6 who can come over and look over the shoulders of our interrogators? Well, you do not have to worry about that because the CIA program would be ending. It allows the Army to set the interrogation standards for the entire intelligence community. It is important that my colleagues recognize this interrogation provision is not an antitorture provision. The previous speakers have said we need to pass this law to outlaw torture. It is outlawed. The law prohibits the United States from using torture. This provision prevents the intelligence community from engaging in other lawful interrogation techniques that fall outside the scope of the Army Field Manual. Why is that important? Because everything in the Army Field Manual has been published in the al-Qaida manuals. The top officials of al- Qaida know those techniques better than the interrogators know them. They know how to resist them, and they are ineffective. Now, some on the other side of the aisle would like to frame this provision as being about waterboarding. It is not. The Attorney General has publicly stated that the CIA no longer uses waterboarding. The technique is not one of the approved techniques. The Director of the CIA has publicly stated that there were only three individuals waterboarded and the technique has not been used since 2003. It was used in the crisis right after 2001, when tremendous amounts of valuable information were gained from the three individuals waterboarded. What we are talking about here is not waterboarding. Some of my colleagues have said that the EITs are not effective--enhanced interrogation techniques. Well, that is absolutely not true. That is precisely the opposite of what the CIA Director has told us in our classified hearings and explained it. Now, the CIA Director has said they have held less than 100 people in their custody, and less than one-third of those have been submitted to enhanced interrogation techniques. These are the hardened terrorists who have the most information that is needed to protect our troops, our allies abroad, and those of us here at home. Those techniques--which are different from but no harsher than the techniques that are in the Army Field Manual--are unknown to the detainees. Those detainees on whom the EITs--not including waterboarding--have been used have produced the most productive information and intelligence. Literally thousands upon thousands of the most important intelligent collections have come from the cooperating detainees who did not know what was going to happen to them, even though no torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading techniques were used on them. Many of the techniques that are used--and I have reviewed them--are far less coercive or strenuous than what we apply to our military volunteers: young men and women of America who join the Marines, the SEALs, the Special Operations Forces, or pilots who go through the survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training, or the SERE training. We do not even use the most strenuous of those techniques on our detainees. Those who say we do not want our enemies to use any more harsh techniques than we use on them--well, good luck. You have seen Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheading people. Those are not techniques that anybody would suggest. A beheading probably eliminates a source of further information. But the problem is, the techniques that are used would be banned. The techniques--that are not cruel, that are not inhuman, that are used on our own voluntary military enlistees--are prohibited because they are not included in the Army Field Manual. One good reason they are not is because we do not want to publicize them or they would no longer be effective in use against those high-value detainees who will not cooperate otherwise. I cannot support a bill that contains that provision. So here we are on the floor--the farthest we have gotten in 3 years. It looks as though history is going to repeat itself. No wonder congressional ratings are at an all-time low. I believe our inability to work in a bipartisan fashion on a consistent basis may be harming us. Yesterday's success with the FISA Amendments Act is a model example of what can be accomplished when we work together. For the most part, the committee's work on the Intel bill followed that model, although we were unable to protect the bipartisan compromise in the end. As the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have invested a very significant amount of time and effort to provide meaningful [[Page S932]] oversight of the intelligence community through this bill. I know my distinguished chairman, Senator Rockefeller, has made those same efforts and shares the goal. However, I have often said that no bill is better than a bad bill. Right now, with this provision in it, this is a bad bill because what it would do, according to the Director of National Intelligence, is to shut down the most effective interrogation program the CIA has to use to induce cooperation from those leaders of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations who know about the plots to attack the United States and to attack our allies. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support cloture so we can move forward on the process on this legislation, but the President has stated he will veto the bill and, regrettably, I must say that despite all the good things in the bill, he is correct. We cannot afford the risk to this country, to our personal safety, to our desire to avoid another 9/11, by saying we can no longer allow the CIA to use the acceptable techniques that are not published but that are very effective in assuring cooperation of high-value detainees whom we in this country capture through the CIA. Regrettably, while I urge my colleagues to support cloture, I cannot urge them to pass this measure. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Menendez). The Senator from Oregon. Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining at this time? The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 3 minutes. Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President and colleagues, I ask unanimous consent to have my time--you said I have 3 minutes; I see my friend on the floor-- to have my time extended by 3 minutes so I would have a total of 6 minutes. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Mr. BOND. That is acceptable. No objection. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 2 additional minutes after that, if that could be part of the request. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, thank you, and I thank my friend from Missouri as well. I especially want to express my appreciation for the outstanding work of Senator Feinstein, my seatmate on the Intelligence Committee, who I think understands it is possible in this country to fight terrorism ferociously and still be sensitive to American values and the rule of law. That is what I want to spend a few minutes talking about because I think under the approach developed by Senator Feinstein this legislation does that. I start by responding to the point my friend from Missouri has made about the most dangerous terrorists whom we are involved in interrogating. It seems to me these individuals are literally human ticking timebombs. They have information, for example, about operations we absolutely must have information on in order to protect the American people. But I have come to the conclusion it is possible to get this essential information we need from these human ticking timebombs--the time-sensitive threat information--without practices that violate our values and violate the rule of law. The reason I have come to that conclusion--and why I so strongly support what Senator Feinstein is doing--that is what some of our key officials tell us in the executive branch. For example, this week, I asked FBI Director Mueller about whether it was possible to use noncoercive techniques effectively in terms of getting this information from human ticking timebombs, and the Director said, to his credit, yes, it was possible to use noncoercive techniques to get the information necessary to protect the United States of America. The fact is, the military has said it as well. It is that core principle Senator Feinstein has picked up in her work. She believes, as I do, we will take no backseat to anyone in terms of fighting the terrorists relentlessly, but we can do it, as Director Mueller and the military have said, in line with the rule of law and in line with American values. With respect to the role of the military, they already abide by interrogation rules that are flexible and effective. They have been used by professional military interrogators with many years of experience, and they are clearly effective. Some have suggested, incorrectly in my view, that the military rules make better interrogators, follow the same rules as new recruits, but that is not right. The Army Field Manual actually makes it quite clear which techniques are authorized for all servicemembers and which require special permission to use. It is my view that our country has paid dearly for this secret interrogation program. My friend from Missouri has indicated, in his view, you cannot torture, but the case was strong for the Feinstein amendment a couple months ago, and it is even stronger today because General Hayden has said that in the past, waterboarding has been used and, in fact, my view is that the need for this legislation, just on the basis of the developments over the last few weeks, is even more important than it was because these practices that have come to light in the last few weeks have damaged our relations, damaged our moral authority. The tragic part of this, on the basis of the answers from Mr. Mueller in open session this week and the military is that these coercive techniques are not effective or even necessary. I share the view of my friend from Missouri about how important it is to get this time- sensitive threat information. He and I have talked about this on many occasions. Of course, we cannot get into any of the matters that are classified. I share his view, but it is possible, I say to my colleagues, to get that information without breaching the values Americans hold dearly and the rule of law. I hope my colleagues will support the important work by the Senator from California. This is an issue we have looked at. It has had bipartisan support in the past. I am very appreciative of what Senator McCain, who knows a little bit about this, has had to say in the past about fighting terrorism relentlessly and protecting our values. I hope my colleagues will support the efforts of the Senator from California. If her case was strong several months ago, I think it is even stronger today on the basis of what we have learned in open session. Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, I support the intelligence authorization conference report, which is so important to Congress's efforts to conduct oversight of the intelligence community. The administration's illegal actions and its relentless efforts to obtain vast new eavesdropping authorities make oversight more important than ever. I particularly support the provision limiting interrogation techniques to those authorized by the Army Field Manual. I was a cosponsor of this amendment when it was offered in conference, and I am pleased that it has the support of bipartisan majorities of both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. It represents, at long last, an important step toward bringing this administration into conformity with the law and with our national principles. It also represents a clear decision by the very Members of Congress who have been briefed on the CIA's interrogation program that the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques is not in our country's best interests. When the intelligence authorization bill was marked up by the committee in May, I made my position clear. I could not support the CIA's program on moral, legal, or national security grounds. When I was finally fully briefed on the program, it was clear that what was going on was profoundly wrong. It did not represent what we, as a nation, stand for, or what we are fighting for in this global struggle against al-Qaida. And it was not making our country any safer. I also concluded that if the American people knew what we in the Intelligence Committee knew, they would agree. The program also cannot stand up to any serious legal scrutiny. To take just one interrogation technique that the administration has acknowledged using in the past, waterboarding is torture, pure and simple. Everyone knows this. The rest of the world knows this. And, in every other context, our own government knows this. What Orwellian [[Page S933]] world do we inhabit in which the administration attempts to argue otherwise? And in what world does waterboarding not ``shock the conscience,'' the test required by the Detainee Treatment Act? I suspect that the administration knows full well that its legal justifications for the program are empty, and that is why the Attorney General has refused to tell Congress why he believes the program is legal and has instead referenced Justice Department analyses that have also been withheld from Congress. The CIA's interrogation policy is undermining our ability to fight al-Qaida. It has diminished our standing in the world, precisely when we should be providing global leadership against this growing threat. And it has denied us the moral high ground that is so critical if we are to reach out to parts of the world in which al-Qaida seeks to operate and recruit. By passing this conference report, we can begin to reverse this damage. We can also, finally, reassure our troops that torture is torture and that if you are captured by the enemy, the American government will not equivocate about the Geneva Conventions protections to which you are entitled. The administration has repeatedly attempted to sell this program by arguing that Members of Congress have been briefed, as if the mere fact of telling members of Congress means that the program must be legal. The President made this argument last fall. And the Director of the CIA did so again last week. But, what the administration always fails to mention is that as members of the Intelligence Committees have learned about the program, opposition has steadily increased. I have sent a classified letter detailing my serious concerns and so, too, have others. And now, we have bipartisan majorities of both intelligence committees saying ``enough is enough.'' It has long been my position that interrogation techniques should be limited to those authorized by the Army Field Manual. This approach brings the CIA into conformity with the rules by which our men and women in uniform defend our nation and themselves. We fought Nazi Germany and the battles of the Cold War without resorting to government-sanctioned torture. We can surely defend America and defend our principles now. It is time to bring an end to this stain on our Nation, and to make the American people proud again. Mr. LEAHY. Mr. Presdient, this Report contains a provision that reinforces the prohibition against our Government engaging in torture. It expressly prohibits interrogation techniques that are not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual. By passing this bill, we will not only respond to this administration's ambiguity about torture by reiterating that it is off the table, we will be sending a message to the world that the United States is a country that does not tolerate torture. Whether waterboarding is torture and illegal does not depend on the circumstances. When it comes to our core values--that which makes our country great and defines America's place in the world--it does not depend on the circumstances. America, the great and good Nation that has been a beacon to the world on human rights, does not torture and should stand against torture. Let me be clear. This provision should not be necessary. Waterboarding, and other forms of torture, are already clearly illegal. Waterboarding has been recognized as torture for the last 500 years. President Teddy Roosevelt prosecuted American soldiers for waterboarding more than 100 years ago. We prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding Americans during World War II. I support this provision, despite the fact that there is no question that waterboarding is already illegal, because this administration has chosen to ignore the law. They have admitted they have engaged in waterboarding, otherwise known as water torture, and they refuse to say they will not do it again. The positions they have taken publicly on this subject are, I believe, so destructive to the core values of this Nation and our standing in the world, that this Congress should say, again--very clearly--that our Government is not permitted to engage in these shameful practices. Tragically, this administration has so twisted America's role, laws and values that our own State Department and high-ranking officials in our Department of Justice cannot say that waterboarding of an American is illegal. If an enemy decided to waterboard an American soldier, they can now quote statements from high officials in our own Government to support their argument that the technique breaks no laws. That is how low we have sunk. Our top military lawyers and our generals and admirals understand this issue. They have said consistently that waterboarding is torture and is illegal. They have told us again and again at hearings and in letters that intelligence gathered through cruel techniques like waterboarding is not reliable, and that our use and endorsement of these techniques puts our brave men and women serving in the armed forces at risk. That is why they have so explicitly prohibited such techniques in their own Army Field Manual, and it is an example that the rest of the Government should follow. So, despite the fact that the law is already clear, I urge the Senate to pass this provision, and I urge the President to promptly sign it into law, making the policy of our Nation clear. Our values cannot permit this to be an open question. We must put an end to the damage that this administration's positions have caused to our standing and the risks that they have taken with the safety of American citizens and soldiers around the world. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support the intelligence authorization conference report which includes a requirement that all Government agencies, including the CIA, comply with the Army Field Manual on Interrogations in the treatment and interrogation of detainees. The result will be a single standard of treatment for detainees, a standard consistent with American values and international standards. The Army Field Manual is consistent with our obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits subjecting detainees to ``cruel treatment and torture.'' This is the standard to which our soldiers are trained and which they live by. Consistent with this standard, the Army Field Manual specifically prohibits certain interrogation techniques. These include: forced nudity; ``waterboarding,'' that is, inducing the sensation of drowning; using military working dogs in interrogations; subjecting detainees to extreme temperatures; and mock executions. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has insisted that it reserves the right for the CIA to engage in certain ``enhanced interrogation techniques.'' It has been reported that these CIA techniques include ``waterboarding.'' While this Justice Department continues to refuse to say one way or the other, let there be no doubt: waterboarding is torture. The Judge Advocates General of all four services have told us unequivocally that waterboarding is illegal. Requiring that all Government agencies comply with the standards of the Army Field Manual is not mushy intellectualism. It is hard-headed pragmatism. When we fail to live up to our own standards for humane treatment, we compromise our moral authority. Our security depends on the willingness of others to work with us and share information, information which could prevent the next attack. When we project moral hypocrisy, we lose the support of the world in the fight against the extremists. Requiring a single standard for the treatment of detainees consistent with the Army Field Manual protects our men and women in uniform, should they be captured. It strengthens our hand in demanding that American prisoners be treated humanely, consistent with values embodied in the Field Manual. I urge my colleagues to support the intelligence authorization conference report with the provision that standards in the Army Field Manual for treatment of detainees will apply to all elements of the intelligence community. Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I oppose the conference report on the intelligence authorization bill. I was troubled to learn the Intelligence Committees inserted in the conference report a provision to apply [[Page S934]] the Army Field Manual to the CIA program. This was done without any hearing or vote in either the House or the Senate. I strongly regret the committee chose this course of action since it denies the Senate the opportunity to fully appreciate the implications of such a restriction on the CIA program. It would be a colossal mistake for us to apply the Army Field Manual to the operations of the CIA. I have been briefed on the current CIA program to interrogate high value targets. It is aggressive, effective, lawful and in compliance with our legal obligations. Unfortunately, the intelligence authorization bill as currently drafted will destroy the CIA program. I believe in flexibility for the CIA program within the boundaries of current law. The CIA must have the ability to gather intelligence for the war on terror. In this new war, knowledge of the enemy and its plan is vitally important and the Army Field Manual provision will weaken our intelligence gathering operations. It is regrettable that the debate on the intelligence authorization bill has become a debate about waterboarding. Waterboarding is not part of the CIA program. However, waterboarding, under any circumstances, represents a clear violation of U.S. law and it was the clear intent of Congress to prohibit this practice. In 2005 and 2006, the Senate overwhelmingly and in a bipartisan fashion stood up against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and abided by the Supreme Court's decision in the Hamdan case that that those in our custody are protected by the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, senior administration officials assured us that the language contained in the Military Commissions Act clearly outlawed waterboarding. Imagine my surprise when the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence stated that waterboarding may be legal in certain circumstances. I cannot understand what legal reasoning could possibly lead them to this conclusion. Given the Attorney General's recognition during his nomination hearing that the President cannot waive congressionally mandated restrictions on interrogation techniques, including those included in the McCain amendment and the Military Commissions Act, it is inexplicable that the administration not only has failed to publicly declare waterboarding illegal, but has actually indicated that it may be legal. During the past several weeks we have heard many justifications for the administration's incomprehensible legal analysis. At the end of the day, it appears it is the view of the administration is that the ends justify the means and that adhering to our values, laws, and treaty obligations will weaken our nation. I strongly disagree. I support aggressive interrogation of detainees in the in the war on terror. And the CIA program is a vital component in securing our Nation. As we interrogate and detain those who are intent on destruction of our country and all those who fight for liberty, we can never forget that we are, first and foremost, Americans. The laws and values that have built our Nation are a source of strength, not weakness, and we will win the war on terror not in spite of devotion to our cherished values but because we have held fast to them. Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I oppose passage of the intelligence authorization conference report in its current form. During conference proceedings, conferees voted by a narrow margin to include a provision that would apply the Army Field Manual to the interrogation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The sponsors of that provision have stated that their goal is to ensure that detainees under American control are not subject to torture. I strongly share this goal, and believe that only by ensuring that the United States adheres to our international obligations and our deepest values can we maintain the moral credibility that is our greatest asset in the war on terror. That is why I fought for passage of the Detainee Treatment Act, DTA, which applied the Army Field Manual on interrogation to all military detainees and barred cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of any detainee held by any agency. In 2006, I insisted that the Military Commissions Act, MCA, preserve the undiluted protections of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions for our personnel in the field. And I have expressed repeatedly my view that the controversial technique known as ``waterboarding'' constitutes nothing less than illegal torture. Throughout these debates, I have said that it was not my intent to eliminate the CIA interrogation program, but rather to ensure that the techniques it employs are humane and do not include such extreme techniques as waterboarding. I said on the Senate floor during the debate over the Military Commissions Act, ``Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA's interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act.'' This remains my view today. When, in 2005, the Congress voted to apply the field manual to the Department of Defense, it deliberately excluded the CIA. The field manual, a public document written for military use, is not always directly translatable to use by intelligence officers. In view of this, the legislation allowed the CIA to retain the capacity to employ alternative interrogation techniques. I would emphasize that the DTA permits the CIA to use different techniques than the military employs but that it is not intended to permit the CIA to use unduly coercive techniques--indeed, the same act prohibits the use of any cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. Similarly, as I stated after passage of the Military Commissions Act in 2006, nothing contained in that bill would require the closure of the CIA's detainee program; the only requirement was that any such program be in accordance with law and our treaty obligations, including Geneva Common Article 3. The conference report would go beyond any of the recent laws that I just mentioned--laws that were extensively debated and considered--by bringing the CIA under the Army Field Manual, extinguishing thereby the ability of that agency to employ any interrogation technique beyond those publicly listed and formulated for military use. I cannot support such a step because I have not been convinced that the Congress erred by deliberately excluding the CIA. I believe that our energies are better directed at ensuring that all techniques, whether used by the military or the CIA, are in full compliance with our international obligations and in accordance with our deepest values. What we need is not to tie the CIA to the Army Field Manual but rather to have a good faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program. This necessarily brings us to the question of waterboarding. Administration officials have stated in recent days that this technique is no longer in use, but they have declined to say that it is illegal under current law. I believe that it is clearly illegal and that we should publicly recognize this fact. In assessing the legality of waterboarding, the administration has chosen to apply a ``shocks the conscience'' analysis to its interpretation of the DTA. I stated during the passage of that law that a fair reading of the prohibition on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment outlaws waterboarding and other extreme techniques. It is, or should be, beyond dispute that waterboarding ``shocks the conscience.'' It is also incontestable that waterboarding is outlawed by the Military Commissions Act, and it was the clear intent of Congress to prohibit the practice. The MCA enumerates grave breaches of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that constitute offenses under the War Crimes Act. Among these is an explicit prohibition on acts that inflict ``serious and non-transitory mental harm,'' which the MCA states ``need not be prolonged.'' Staging a mock execution by inducing the misperception of drowning is a clear violation of this standard. Indeed, during the negotiations, we were personally assured by administration officials that this language, which applies to all agencies of the U.S. Government, prohibited waterboarding. [[Page S935]] It is unfortunate that the reluctance of officials to stand by this straightforward conclusion has produced in the Congress such frustration that we are today debating whether to apply a military field manual to nonmilitary intelligence activities. It would be far better, I believe, for the administration to state forthrightly what is clear in current law--that anyone who engages in waterboarding, on behalf of any U.S. Government agency, puts himself at risk of criminal prosecution and civil liability. We have come a long way in the fight against violent extremists, and the road to victory will be longer still. I support a robust offensive to wage and prevail in this struggle. But as we confront those committed to our destruction, it is vital that we never forget that we are, first and foremost, Americans. The laws and values that have built our Nation are a source of strength, not weakness, and we will win the war on terror not in spite of devotion to our cherished values but because we have held fast to them. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri. Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I have enjoyed a good working relationship with my good friend, the Senator from Oregon, but, unfortunately, he did not listen to all the testimony we had from the leaders of the intelligence community. While he suggests we must fight terrorism and uphold our values, that is precisely what the CIA program is designed to do. Going forward, that is the program that will comport with all our values and our views, but it will be necessary. The CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, on which he and I have had the opportunity to be briefed, are different from but not outside the scope of those included for use in the Army Field Manual. As I stated previously, the difference is that since they are not published, as the Army Field Manual is, they are not included in the al-Qaida handbook, they are not known to high-value targets with whom we may come in contact and be able to capture. We are talking only of a couple or three dozen at the most who require those techniques. He said the FBI Director does not use any harsh techniques. But if you recall, in answer to one of my questions describing one of the techniques one of the FBI interrogators used, it is not in the Army Field Manual. They use different techniques. They use different techniques, but they would be limited to the Army Field Manual. I suggest that when they are dealing with the criminals who may not be part of an organized terrorist conspiracy, they would not necessarily need to use them. General Hayden did say that waterboarding was used three times in the past. He has stated clearly it is not being used now. He stated the different enhanced interrogation techniques that are similar to, but different from, the Army Field Manual are only used in very limited circumstances, and those circumstances are the circumstances in which high-value detainees, with knowledge of the organization, the threats they pose, the plots they are planning to undertake, will not talk as long as they are subjected only to techniques they are familiar with in the Army Field Manual. Yes, the CIA, a couple, three dozen, somewhere in there, may have used enhanced interrogation techniques. Almost 10,000 valuable pieces of information have come from the CIA's program. We are safer in the United States because we have disrupted plots from Fort Dix to Lackawanna to Chicago to Torrance, CA--across this Nation--because of good intelligence--electronic surveillance and enhanced interrogation of high-value detainees. If we take this step in the Congress, I believe the President will veto it, as he should, because to say that the CIA should be fitted into the Army Field Manual standard is, I believe, a real threat to the effectiveness of our collection. Regrettably, discussions that imply on this floor that we continue to use or will continue to use any techniques that are cruel, inhumane, degrading or torture is not only simply wrong--flat wrong--but it is irresponsible because there are ears and eyes out there in the world, Al-Jazeera's and others, who will be picking them up, who will be transmitting them, and who will use that to tar the reputation of our intelligence collectors. They do not deserve that. Our security does not deserve that. Let's be clear, we are not talking about any cruel, inhumane, degrading or torture techniques. They are different than what is published in the Army Field Manual. That is the only reason they are effective. I regret the measure before us has this ban that will shut down the most valuable source of information our intelligence community has. I cannot urge my colleagues to support final passage of this conference report. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader. Mr. REID. Mr. President, I will use leader time to make a statement. We are going to vote in a few moments whether to invoke cloture on the intelligence authorization conference report. It is my understanding the minority is going to support us on this vote. I appreciate that very much. America has been without an intelligence authorization bill for almost 3 years. That is certainly long enough. The bill before us contains many important provisions that will strengthen our intelligence capabilities to fight terrorism and keep our country safe. The bill includes a number of provisions that will begin to restore proper congressional oversight and includes a provision sponsored by Senator Feinstein that will require all intelligence professionals in the U.S. Government to adhere to the interrogation standards included in the Army Field Manual. I appreciate the work of Senator Feinstein, who has dedicated much of her life to making our country safer. She spends untold hours, along with other Intelligence Committee members, in the Hart Building, listening to and evaluating what is happening in the intelligence community in our country and around the world. She is a good Senator, and her insight into what needs to be done in this instance speaks volumes. I underline and underscore my appreciation for her work. I urge all my colleagues to join with me in voting to support her in this effort. We will have that opportunity because cloture is going to be invoked. It is my understanding a Republican or a Democrat will raise a point of order regarding the Feinstein amendment. The reason a Democrat would do it is to move this along, to get this over with. There is no reason to wait 30 hours postcloture, with everyone wondering when it will come up. We should do it, get it out of the way, work out some agreeable time with my colleagues, or we will go ahead and do it ourselves. There is an hour under the rule to debate the motion. There will be an effort to waive this point of order which, under the rules, requires 60 votes. Should Republicans force a vote to waive the point of order, I urge all my colleagues to waive the point of order. This is a question of moral authority. The Senate should stand as one to declare that America has one standard of interrogation. We are living as Americans in a world where everything we do is watched and watched very closely. We are asking other countries to follow our moral lead, to embrace our way of life, to aspire to the American standard of liberty. Yet I fear too often this administration's actions betray those goals. A couple weeks ago, Attorney General Mukasey refused to say that waterboarding is legal. What is waterboarding? We know what it is. It came from the Inquisition and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. That is where it originated. It is nothing new. It has been going on for centuries, and it is torture at its worst where you, in effect, drown somebody and revive them after they can no longer breathe. Last week, CIA Director Hayden publicly confirmed the United States had waterboarded individuals who were in our custody. The next day, the White House affirmatively declared waterboarding is legal and President Bush is free to authorize our intelligence agencies to resume its use. President Bush may not care much what we in Congress, Democrats or Republicans, think. For 6 years, he had carte blanche to do what he wanted. [[Page S936]] The last year has not been that way. We are an equal branch of Government, and it is time we made him understand this. The administration can develop as many novel and convoluted legal theories as it wishes, but they cannot change the simple fact that has long been settled law, that waterboarding is torture and it is illegal. It is illegal in America, and it is illegal throughout the world. In decades past, America has prosecuted our enemies and even our own troops for waterboarding. This debate is not just about one kind of torture. It is not just about waterboarding. It is about ensuring that no form of torture, cruel or inhumane interrogation techniques that are illegal under the Geneva Conventions and prohibited by the Army Field Manual, are used. This includes beating prisoners. This includes sexually humiliating prisoners. It includes threatening them with dogs, depriving them of food and water, performing mock executions, putting electricity charges on various parts of their body, burning them. These techniques are repugnant. They are repugnant to every American. They fly in the face of our most basic values. They should be completely off limits to the U.S. Government. We have already seen the damage these torture efforts can cause. The world saw it in the Abu Ghraib prison situation. The revelation that American personnel had engaged in such terrible behavior, behavior we have always strongly condemned when used by others, caused tremendous damage to our Nation's moral authority. The recruiting opportunity it provided our terrorist enemies cannot be understated and cannot be undone. This is not a Senator saying this. Forty-three retired military leaders of the U.S. Armed Forces have written us a letter strongly stating that all U.S. personnel, military and civilian, should be held to a single standard. These honored leaders wrote: We believe it is vital to the safety of our men and women in uniform that the United States not sanction the use of interrogation methods it would find unacceptable if inflicted by the enemy against captured Americans. They stated the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual ``have proven effective'' and that they ``are sophisticated and flexible.'' My friend, the ranking member of this committee, says these horrible techniques are necessary. They are not. They are not necessary. There are many things that have been used and can be used, as indicated by these 43 leading military experts. They say present interrogation techniques, setting these others aside, are sophisticated and flexible and they work. They explicitly reject the argument that the field manual is too simplistic for civilian interrogators. Our commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, a four-star general, whom we like to throw around here as knowing all and has done a wonderful job in Iraq, wrote an open letter to the troops in May. He had this to say: Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture and other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. He went on to say: They would be wrong. . . . [H]istory shows that [such actions] are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone ``talk;'' however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. We all know that. In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual . . . shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees. So says General Petraeus. Mr. President, just yesterday, a bipartisan group of foreign policy experts joined to call upon Congress to endorse the application of the Army Field Manual standards across all U.S. agencies. The group included, but was not limited to, the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Governor Keane and Congressman Hamilton; two former Secretaries of State; three former national security advisers; a former Secretary of the Navy; and other highly regarded officials from both parties. The Bush administration's continued insistence on its right to use abusive techniques gives license to our enemies abroad, puts at risk our soldiers and citizens who may fall into enemy hands, and serves as an ongoing recruiting tool for militant extremists. Meanwhile, the widespread belief that our country uses abusive interrogation methods has weakened our ability to create coalitions of our allies to fight our enemies because other countries have at times refused to join us. Mr. President, many of us thought the Congress had addressed the issue of torture once and for all when we overwhelmingly passed the McCain amendment in 2005. But President Bush immediately issued a signing statement casting doubt on his willingness to enforce a ban on torture, and his administration has worked ever since to undermine what Senator McCain offered and was passed here overwhelmingly. This vote today gives Congress the chance to show President Bush that we meant what we said 3 years ago when we passed the McCain amendment. Today, we have an opportunity to begin to rebuild America's precious and diminished moral authority. Today, we can strengthen the war on terror. I urge us to stand together to support cloture and, if necessary, to vote to waive the point of order on the Feinstein amendment, which is part of the very good conference report dealing with intelligence authorization. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri is recognized. Mr. BOND. Mr. President, how much time do I have? The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 1 minute 23 seconds. Mr. BOND. Mr. President, regrettably, the record doesn't meet the issue before us. Waterboarding is not an issue here. Waterboarding is not banned. The techniques that are being used are in compliance with all of the convention. They are not torture, cruel, or humanly degrading. The only reason to have a separate program, which Congress recognized in the 2005 Military Detainee Act, for having a different standard was for a few high-value targets who needed different techniques--not more harsh techniques but techniques that are less severe than the training techniques we put our enlisted Marines, SEALs, Special Forces, and the pilots through. If they are not published in the Army Field Manual, they don't know about them, and that leads them to cooperate. The most successful intelligence collection program that the CIA has does not involve torture or any kind of unlawful conduct. It is unfortunate--and I regret to say very harmful--to the United States to suggest that it does. I strongly believe we cannot afford to shut down the CIA's interrogation of high-value detainees. I yield the floor. Mr. REID. Mr. President, don't you think this great country of ours-- the moral authority of the world--can continue our work, our interrogation of prisoners, both military and civilian, by not beating them, sexually humiliating them, bringing dogs and having dogs chomp at them, like at Abu Ghraib? Do we need to deprive them of food and water, provide mock executions, shock them with electricity, as was done during the first gulf war to American prisoners who were captured by the Iraqis, one of whom was from Nevada? We don't need to do that. We don't need to burn them. We don't need to cause them other types of pain that are listed in field manuals. Mr. President, we have 43 leading military experts who have told us that. We have had the two people who led the 9/11 Commission who have told us that you don't need that, along with former Secretaries of State and national security advisers to various Presidents, Democrats and Republicans. America is better than this. We don't need to do this. The CIA can get along without having to do all these terrible things. We are told by General Petraeus that these techniques don't work anyway and that any of the information you get is unreliable. Listen to General Petraeus. Let's do the right thing on this issue when it comes up, Mr. President. ____________________ [Congressional Record: February 13, 2008 (Senate)] [Page S937-S957] INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008--CONFERENCE REPORT--Resumed Cloture Motion The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state. The bill clerk read as follows: Cloture Motion We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the conference report to accompany H.R. 2082, Intelligence Authorization Act. John D. Rockefeller IV, Dianne Feinstein, Kent Conrad, E. Benjamin Nelson, Russell D. Feingold, Barbara A. Mikulski, Ron Wyden, Ken Salazar, Mark Pryor, Patty Murray, Benjamin L. Cardin, Frank R. Lautenberg, Jack Reed, Sheldon Whitehouse, Harry Reid, Carl Levin, Bill Nelson. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the conference report to accompany H.R. 2082, the Intelligence Authorization Act, shall be brought to a close? The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk called the roll. Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from New York (Mrs. Clinton), the Senator from Missouri (Mrs. McCaskill), and the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Obama) are necessarily absent. Mr. KYL. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham). The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber desiring to vote? The result was announced--yeas 92, nays 4, as follows: [Rollcall Vote No. 21 Leg.] YEAS--92 Akaka Alexander Allard Barrasso Baucus Bayh Bennett Biden Bingaman Bond Boxer Brown Brownback Bunning Byrd Cantwell Cardin Carper Casey Coburn Cochran Coleman Collins Conrad Corker Cornyn Craig Crapo Dodd Dole Domenici Dorgan Durbin Ensign Enzi Feingold Feinstein Grassley Gregg Hagel Harkin Hatch Hutchison Inhofe Inouye Isakson Johnson Kennedy Kerry Klobuchar Kohl Kyl Landrieu Lautenberg Leahy Levin Lieberman Lincoln Lugar Martinez McCain McConnell Menendez Mikulski Murkowski Murray Nelson (FL) Nelson (NE) Pryor Reed Reid Roberts Rockefeller Salazar Sanders Schumer Sessions Shelby Smith Snowe Specter Stabenow Stevens Sununu Tester Thune Voinovich Warner Webb Whitehouse Wicker Wyden NAYS--4 Burr Chambliss DeMint Vitter NOT VOTING--4 Clinton Graham McCaskill Obama The motion was agreed to. The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 92, the nays are 4. Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn having voted in the affirmative, the motion is agreed to. Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Tester). Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, while we are waiting here for some of the determination of a time agreement with regards to the consideration of the conference report, I want to go ahead and lend my support and acknowledge to the rest of the Senate that this is a bill that is very necessary to pass. Because, what this bill does, by authorizing the activities of the intelligence community, it continues to make the oversight function of the Congress--in particular, the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees--poignant and relevant to a community that is not accustomed to having oversight. Our committee leadership, chairman and vice chairman, Senators Rockefeller and Bond, as we say in the South, they have cracked the whip with the intelligence community to get them to realize that this is a constitutional government of shared powers; that the executive branch doesn't just run the show--particularly on something as sensitive as the collection of intelligence. Rather, it needs to be done within the law, and one of the ways of ensuring that is through the sharing of powers between two different branches of Government who have checks and balances upon each other. We in the legislative branch oversee the activities of the executive branch--in this case, all of the intelligence community and their activities, which are absolutely essential to the protection of our country. This conference report is a very important bipartisan document, which increases the accountability in the intelligence community, and it authorizes dozens of critical intelligence programs to keep us safe every day. The conference report includes a new, strong inspector general in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Inspectors general are increasingly important in the intelligence community, where billions of dollars are spent outside of public view. Our committee, as well as the American public, has to rely on the inspector general as an important part of the oversight of the intelligence community. As we look back, several years ago, we completely reorganized the intelligence community. A Director of National Intelligence was set up to integrate the disparate elements of the intelligence community. But there is a lot more that needs to be done, and a strong inspector general at the DNI is another step in the right direction. The conference report also includes a provision that makes the Director of the NRO--the National Reconnaissance Office--and the NSA-- the National Security Agency--subject to Senate confirmation. Now, why is that important? That is important because, again, it is part of the checks and balances of the separate branches of Government. Both of these agencies, outside of the public view because of the top-secret nature of this work, oversee large programs that cost vast amounts of money, and not every program has been a success. So by having the confirmations of the Directors of the NRO and the NSA come to the Senate, it improves that accountability and responsiveness to the legislative branch of Government. The authorization bill also requires an assessment of the vulnerability of the intelligence community's major acquisition programs. We have to assess that the program is going to stay on track and that it is not going off the rails with regard to cost. We are talking about billions of dollars on some of these programs. By keeping them on track, by knowing what to anticipate, it is much easier to plan ahead. This bill also provides an annual reporting system which will help us keep in focus, curbing these cost overruns and these schedule delays. If you don't do that, things are going to get out of control. As the intelligence community continues to be more and more sophisticated because of the technical means it employs, it is more and more important that our oversight tools be in place and effective. Now, that is enough alone to pass this bill, but we have an area of disagreement coming up. We are expecting the minority to offer a point of order that would remove a provision in the conference report. This provision requires the Army Field Manual to be used as the standard for interrogation methods. This Army Field Manual was released over a year ago. It specifically prohibits cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. There are eight techniques in the Army Field Manual that are specifically prohibited from being used in conjunction with intelligence interrogations: forcing the detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over the head of a detainee; using [[Page S938]] duct tape on the eyes; applying beatings, electric shock, burns, or other forms of physical pain. The fourth is waterboarding. That is prohibited. The fifth is using military working dogs. The sixth is inducing hypothermia or heat energy. The seventh is conducting a mock execution. The eighth is depriving the detainee of necessary food, water, and medical care. Now, haven't I just described what America is all about? Is that not the standard by which we, as the leader of the world, have to announce to the world what we believe in and how we are going to conduct ourselves, and that is how we are going to conduct ourselves not only among our own people and how we treat them but how we are going to treat others? The manual provides that three interrogation techniques may only be used with higher level approval. The good cop-bad cop interrogation tactic; the false flag tactic, where a detainee is made to believe he is being held by another country; or separation, by which the detainee is separated so he can't coordinate with other detainees on his story-- those techniques can be used, but it has to be approved at a higher level. Mr. President, there is something that is going to worry everybody, and it has worried this Senator personally and as a member of the Intelligence Committee. What if all of this doesn't work and the country is in imminent peril? Well, along with the standards we are going to set, which I hope we are going to pass into law--these standards in the Army Field Manual which will state clearly what the standards are for our country and how we are going to conduct ourselves--there is always the constitutional authority under article II. As Commander in Chief, the President can act when the country is in immediate peril. And if he so chooses, as Commander in Chief, to authorize activities other than what the Army Field Manual allows, then the President would be accountable directly to the American people under the circumstances with which he invoked that article II authority as Commander in Chief. What we are saying today does not relate to the President's article II power. We are setting statutory power. It is important that we tell the rest of the world the standards of how we interrogate detainees. We are putting these standards into law and we will ensure that these techniques are in compliance with the humane treatment that we would expect and hope our Americans would also receive. I think there should be no confusion. We have an obligation to set these standards into law. If that dire emergency ever occurred in the future, the President has his own authority under article II of the Constitution. But that is not the question here today before us. The question is: What do we set as the standard of interrogation, and that has to be that there is no torture allowed under this statutory law. Therefore, when the point of order is raised that would take the Army Field Manual standards for interrogation techniques out of the conference report, I urge the Senators not to take this provision out of this important intelligence reauthorization bill. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts. Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, the Senate will soon vote on the intelligence authorization bill, which contains a provision requiring all U.S. governmental agencies, including the CIA, to comply with the Army Field Manual's prohibition on torture. This reform is urgently needed. I commend the Intelligence Committee for adopting this provision. Its enactment will ensure that the Government uses only interrogation techniques that are lawful and those provisions should be retained. In the Detainee Treatment Act passed in 2005, Congress attempted to reaffirm our commitment to the basic rights enshrined in the Geneva Conventions and restore America's standing in the eyes of the world as a nation that treats detainees with dignity and respect. These rights reflect the values we cherish as a free society, and also protects the lives of our service men and women. Today, however, we know that the 2005 act has fallen short of our goals. By not explicitly applying the Army Field Manual standards to all Government agencies, we have left open a loophole that the Bush administration promptly drove a Mack truck through. The so-called enhanced interrogation program carried out in secret sites became an international scandal and a profound stain on America in the eyes of the world. The administration issued an executive order last year to try to minimize the outcry, but the order failed to renounce abuses such as waterboarding, mock executions, use of attack dogs, beatings, and electric shocks. The disclosure of secret opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel gave further evidence that the administration had interpreted the Detainee Treatment Act and other antitorture laws in an unacceptable, narrow manner. Attorney General Mukasey's refusal at his confirmation hearings to say whether waterboarding is illegal gave us even more reason for concern. The outrages do not end there. Two months ago, the New York Times reported that in 2005 the CIA had destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the use of abusive techniques on detainees in its custody. These videotapes have been withheld from Federal courts, the 9/11 Commission, and congressional committees. Two weeks ago in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Attorney General flat out refused to consider investigating possible past acts of torture or to brief congressional committees on why he believed the CIA's enhanced interrogation program is lawful. Last week, we received official confirmation that the CIA had used waterboarding on three detainees. At the same time, the White House made the reckless claim that waterboarding is legal, and that the President can authorize its use under certain circumstances. The White House position is directly contrary to the findings of courts, military tribunals, and legal experts that waterboarding is a violation of U.S. law and a crime against humanity. In the words of a former master instructor for U.S. Navy SEALs: Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Waterboarding has a long and brutal history. It is an ancient technique of tyrants. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it was used in the Spanish Inquisition. In the 19th century, it was used against slaves in this country. In World War II, it was used against our troops by Japan. We prosecuted Japanese officers for using it and sent them to years and years of jail for following that procedure. In the 1970s, it was used against political opponents by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. Today it is being used against pro-democracy activists in Burma. That is the company we keep when we fail to reject waterboarding. In fact, Attorney General Mukasey could not even bring himself to reject the legal reasoning behind the infamous Bybee torture memo of the Office of Legal Counsel which stated that physical pain amounts to torture only if it is: equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. According to that memo, anything that fell short of that standard would not be torture. This Bybee memorandum was in effect for 2\1/2\ years before it was ever effectively suspended. It was suspended then by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for the Judiciary Committee, quite frankly, in order that his nomination could be favorably considered. Included in the Bybee memoranda was a provision that was an absolute defense for any of those who would be involved in this kind of torture, unless prosecutors could prove a specific intent that the purpose of the torture was to harm the individuals rather than to gain information, therefore effectively giving carte blanche to any of those who would be involved in torture. When Attorney General Gonzales appeared before the Judiciary Committee [[Page S939]] and effectively repealed the Bybee memoranda, he did so for the Department of Defense but not for the Central Intelligence Agency, even at that time a clear indication of what the administration was intending to do with the Central Intelligence Agency. It should not be any surprise to anyone that this has been ongoing and continuous. According to that memo, again the Bybee memorandum, anything that fell short of this standard would not be torture. CIA interrogators called the memo their ``golden shield'' because it allowed them to use virtually any interrogation method they wanted. When the memo--this is the Bybee memo--became public, its flaws were obvious. Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School testified that in his professional opinion as a law professor and a law dean, the Bybee memoranda is ``perhaps the most clearly legal erroneous opinion I have ever read [because of all of the previous statutes and laws that have been passed to prohibit torture by the Congress of the United States and those initiated and supported by Republican presidents, by Ronald Reagan, as well as Democratic presidents''.] This was not a partisan series of statements about what the United States position has historically been. The Bush administration was embarrassed into withdrawing the memo. To this day, no one in the administration has repudiated its content. The torture memo continues to haunt this country. I have asked the Attorney General several times to reject its legal reasoning, but he continues to refuse to do so. The only solution is for Congress to apply the Army Field Manual's standards to the entire Government. There has rarely if ever been a greater need to restore the rule of law to America's interrogation practices. The field manual represents our best effort to develop the most effective interrogation standards. The manual clearly states that: Use of torture is not only illegal but also it is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. We have on trial in military courts six of those who are going to be tried because of 9/11. There is no question there is going to be a whole series of appeals because of the use of various techniques against them. It may very well be that some turn out--because of the violations of basic and fundamental, some constitutional rights, there will be a question about what the outcome is going to be with regard to those individuals. Why not get it right from the start? The manual gives our interrogators great flexibility, provides all the techniques necessary to effectively question detainees, but it makes clear that illegal and inhumane methods are not permitted. In a letter to our troops dated May 7, 2007, General Petraeus stated: Our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual . . . shows that the techniques in the Manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting the information from detainees. Applying the field manual's standards throughout our Government will move us closer to repairing the damage to our international reputation in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. It will once again commit the United States to be the world's beacon for human rights and fair treatment. It will improve the quality of intelligence gathering, and protect own personnel from facing punishment, condemnation, or mistreatment anywhere in the world. It will make us more, not less, safe. Torture is a defining issue. It is clear that under the Bush administration we have lost our way. By applying the field manual standards to all U.S. Government interrogations, Congress will bring America back from the brink, back to our values, back to basic decency, back to the rule of law. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island. Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today's debate goes to the heart of what our country is and what we wish it to be, by asking this: Will the United States of America condone torture? Is there, at America's heart, a heart of darkness? This authorization bill for America's intelligence community offers us the opportunity to answer that question decisively. It contains provisions for which I have fought from my initial amendment in committee, and which I am proud to support today, that would prohibit members of the intelligence community from using interrogation techniques beyond those authorized in the Army Field Manual. By adopting this amendment, the two Intelligence Committees, Congress's experts on these matters, have sent a clear signal to America and to the world that in this country the rule of law is our strongest bulwark against those who would do us harm. I hope that today the Senate will have the confidence in our values to reaffirm that signal and pass this legislation with the Army Field Manual provision included. Over the past several months, the American people have become all too familiar with the issue of torture. I want to discuss one technique in particular today, waterboarding, or water torture, or the water cure, which dates back to the Spanish Inquisition of the 14th century. Waterboarding was a favorite of torturers, because its terrible effects could be generated without the visible damage accompanying the rack, the screw, the iron, the whip, or the gouge. It could be done over and over. In the 20th century, waterboarding was done in the Philippines, where colonizers wielded it against indigenous peoples. It has been used in Sri Lanka, in Tunisia, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia--we are in the tradition of Pol Pot--by the French in Algeria, by the Japanese in World War II, and by military dictatorships in Latin America. The technique ordinarily involves strapping a captive in a reclining position, heels above head, putting a cloth over his face and pouring water over the cloth to create the feeling of suffocation and drowning. It leaves no marks on the body, but it causes extreme physical and psychological suffering. A French journalist, Henri Alleg, was subjected to this method of interrogation during the struggle for Algerian independence. He wrote in his 1958 book ``The Question'': I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn't hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. Waterboarding is associated with criminal, tyrant, and repressive regimes, with rulers who sought from their captives not information but propaganda, meant for broadcast to friends or enemies whether true or false. Regimes that employed the technique of waterboarding generally did not do so to obtain information; rather, to obtain compliance. But no matter the purpose or the reason, its use was and is indefensible. Water torture was not unknown to Americans. A 1953 article in the New York Times quotes LTC William Harrison of the U.S. Air Force, who said he was ``tortured with the `water treatment' by Communist North Koreans.'' In testimony before a U.S. military tribunal, CAPT Chase Jay Nielsen described being waterboarded by his Japanese captors following the 1942 Doolittle raid by U.S. aviators. From all this, America's military knew there was a chance our servicemen and servicewomen would be subjected to water torture. The Defense Department established the SERE program--survive, evade, resist, and escape--to train select military personnel who are at high risk of capture by enemy forces or isolation within enemy territory. The program has also subjected certain service personnel to extreme interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, in an effort to prepare them for the worst--the possibility of capture and torture at the hands of a depraved or tyrannical enemy. According to Malcolm Nance, a former master instructor and chief of training, at the U.S. Navy SERE school in San Diego: [O]ur training was designed to show how an evil totalitarian enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. Those who have experienced this technique, even at the hands of their own brothers in arms, are unequivocal about its effect. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who underwent waterboarding during SERE training, said this: [[Page S940]] As a human being, fear and helplessness are pretty overwhelming. . . . this is not a discussion that Americans should even be having. It is torture. Our colleague in this body, Senator John McCain, has said the same. Yet it was to this relic of the dungeons of the inquisition, of the Cambodian killing fields, and of the huntas of the Southern Hemisphere that the Bush administration turned for guidance. I will speak later about how our Department of Justice came to approve this. But for now, we know that last week, in a stunning public admission, the CIA Director General, Michael Hayden, admitted the United States waterboarded three detainees following the September 11 attacks. The virus of waterboarding had traveled from tyrant regimes, through the SERE program, and infected America's body politic. Retired BG David Irvin, of the U.S. Army Reserve, a former intelligence officer and instructor in interrogation, and Joe Navarro, interrogator with the FBI, recently wrote: [T]here is considerable evidence that the CIA had to scramble after 9/11 to develop an interrogation program and turned to individuals with no professional experience in the field. . . . Given the crisis atmosphere of the day, it is all too easy to believe the comment of an intelligence insider who said of the secret program to detain and interrogate al Qaeda suspects that ``quality control went out the window.'' Don't let us jump out the window after it. America's military is expressly prohibited from using torture because intelligence experts in our Armed Forces know torture is an ineffective method of obtaining actionable intelligence. Again, I will speak later about the false assertion that this program was designed for 18-year- old novices. Some of the most sophisticated intelligence interrogations are done by our military after intense training. Our military adheres to the Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations. At a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on which I serve, I asked COL Steven Kleinman, a 22-year veteran of interrogations, a senior intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, and a veteran interrogator with plenty of experience overseas in the Middle East, about his experience conducting interrogations using the Army Field Manual. He said: I am not at all limited by the Army Field Manual in terms of what I need to do to generate useful information. . . . I've never felt any necessity or operational requirement to bring physical, psychological or emotional pressure on a source to win their cooperation. A significant number of retired military leaders have written to the chairman and vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee saying: interrogation methods authorized by the field manual have proven effective in eliciting vital intelligence from dangerous enemy prisoners. . . . And the principles reflected in the Field Manual are values that no U.S. agency should violate. And GEN David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces serving in Iraq, reiterated this point when he wrote last year to every soldier serving in the Iraq theater: Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. . . . our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published last year shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees. The cochairs of the 9/11 Commission emphatically agree. On Monday, the chairmen, together with two former Secretaries of State, three former National Security Advisors, and other national security experts, wrote that ``[c]ruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners under American control makes us less safe, violates our national values, and damages America's reputation in the world.'' Torture is ineffective. It is wrong. It is dangerous to all those who serve the United States of America in harm's way. It should never, ever be used by any person who represents the United States of America or any agency that flies the American flag. I was proud last July to introduce an amendment in the Intelligence Committee that would write this rule into law. When that effort did not succeed, I was proud again last winter to support Senator Feinstein's amendment in conference. I call on all my colleagues to support this legislation. We can journey no longer down Winston Churchill's stairway which leads to a dark gulf. As Winston Churchill said: It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit, the carpet ends. A little farther on, there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet. The United States of America--the city on a hill, the light of the world, the promise of generations--must not ever condone torture. Torture breaks that promise. Torture extinguishes that light. Torture darkens that city. I hope by our actions today, we in the Senate will help turn this country back toward our centuries-old promise. I hope we will turn toward the light. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia. Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, I almost have no words to praise the Senator from Rhode Island for the eloquence and strength of his speech, which was not only grounded in very deep substance but was delivered with elegiac nature that both culled the human spirit as well as grounded the futility of torture. I congratulate him. I also rise strongly in support of section 327 of the intelligence authorization conference report. I recognize it will be controversial. I don't care. It is important that some background on this section be provided. Some of it has been this morning. During the conference on the authorization bill, the conferees adopted an amendment that would require the intelligence community to conduct its interrogation in accordance with the terms of the U.S. Army Field Manual. The full membership of the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee served on the conference committee. So it was a majority of those two committees that came to that conclusion. Section 327 of the intelligence authorization conference report directly parallels the provision in the Detainee Treatment Act that forbids subjecting anyone in Department of Defense custody to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the U.S. Army Field Manual on intelligence interrogation. Section 327 applies these same restrictions to the intelligence community at large. The effect of section 327 is, therefore, to require all of the U.S. Government operate their interrogation programs under a single interrogation standard, the standard set by the U.S. military. Adopting the military standard for interrogation as the universal standard makes sense, and I hope some of my colleagues are listening. It is the members of the military who most benefit from reciprocal obligations of the Geneva Convention requiring humane treatment of prisoners and who are most likely to be subjected to retaliation based on the failure of the United States to follow those obligations. That statement is frequently made, and then it is frequently absorbed and discarded. Think about it. Retaliation is the way of the world, and it will be no different here. What we do to others, they will do to us. The U.S. Army Field Manual on interrogation was revised in September 2006 after significant interagency review. This included a review by the Central Intelligence Agency. By providing a number of approach strategies such as the incentive approach, emotional approach, and the Mutt-and-Jeff approach, the Army Field Manual gives interrogators significant flexibility to shape the interrogation. It doesn't delineate exactly how. It gives them a lot of flexibility. The Army Field Manual also explicitly prohibits, as we know, waterboarding, forcing detainees to be naked, inducing hypothermia or heat injury or subjecting a detainee to beatings, as well as a number of other things. All this raises the question at the heart of this debate: Should the Central Intelligence Agency, the well-known CIA, be allowed to use coercive interrogation techniques to obtain information from al-Qaida detainees? This debate is about more than legality. It is about more than ensuring [[Page S941]] that the intelligence community has the tools it needs to protect us. It is also about morality, the way we see ourselves, who we are, who we want to be as a nation, and what we represent to the world. What we represent to the world has a direct effect on the number of people who determine they want to join the jihadists movement and come after us. It is a decision that can and should be left to Members of Congress who are the representatives of the American people. In the early period of the CIA program's existence, I repeatedly called--and I am extremely frustrated by this, extremely frustrated--for an Intelligence Committee investigation into the Agency's detention interrogation practices. That was in the committee. I was, at that point, vice chairman and could not control, obviously, the vote. So on vote margins of one, we lost. We could not get anything going in the way of studying the subject and investigation of the subject. Then I moved to the floor and once again could not get the committee to investigate the subject. I also tried to have the CIA brief all the members of the committee on the interrogation program. That also did not happen. I recognized that assessing the need for the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, the intelligence obtained from detainees, and the importance of maintaining America's position in the world were issues that we in Congress needed to debate and discuss, and, unfortunately, we did not. About a year and a half ago, the full membership of the Intelligence Committee was finally provided information about CIA's interrogation program. It is the whole point of oversight. They are not accustomed to us doing that--not just the CIA, but the intelligence community--having representatives of the people asking questions. They think it is an elite field for them. They are proud of their traditions. They fight among themselves, and they do not build into their thinking what it is that the Congress might feel about this. About a year and a half ago, as I say, we were brought into their interrogation program. Since that time, our committee has held multiple hearings on that subject. We have done our best to learn as much as possible about the basis for and the consequences of CIA's program, as well as interrogation in more general terms. These briefings and hearings have led the committee to conclude that all agencies of the U.S. Government should be required to comply with a single standard for interrogation of detainees. The Army Field Manual provides a standard of humane treatment that indisputably complies with our international obligations under the Geneva Conventions, as well as with U.S. laws. The CIA has briefed the committee on several occasions about its interrogation of al-Qaida detainees. The CIA has described the basis for the program, and why they think it should be allowed to continue. Although the CIA has described the information obtained from its program, I have heard nothing--nothing--that leads me to believe that information obtained from interrogation using coercive interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack. This is true for a very simple reason. Once a terrorist is captured, his fellow plotters, understandably, change their plans. In other words, I do not believe the CIA has ever been in an actual ``ticking timebomb'' scenario, nor do I think it is ever likely to be placed in that situation. That does not mean the information obtained from the program has not been valuable. Of course information about al-Qaida is exceedingly valuable from an intelligence standpoint. It is bits and pieces of information that allow our intelligence professionals to assess al-Qaida's capabilities and to determine how best to protect ourselves as a nation. But, more to the point, I have not heard nor have I seen any evidence that supports the intelligence community's claim that using enhanced interrogation techniques is the only way to obtain this type of intelligence; that is, to get what they need to get. After 9/11, the intelligence community decided that coercive interrogation tactics were the best way to obtain intelligence. It was perhaps a little bit understandable then in terms of the general panic of the Nation. But the intelligence community--I say this gravely--did not take the time to research what interrogation techniques might be most effective to come to this conclusion, nor did they reach out to the interrogators with experience, particularly those questioning Islamic terrorists. They did not do that. They were going to do it their way. They simply assumed--and they simply still assume--that coercive interrogation techniques were the best way to obtain information. To this Senator, this was clearly a flawed approach. But at this point, the administration is so invested in the use of these techniques they can no longer psychologically or otherwise step back to assess what methods are most effective to obtain intelligence. They go by the mantra, they go by what has been done before. To address this question, the committee explored how other Government agencies conduct interrogation. The committee considered critical interrogations of individuals who do not want to disclose information-- people who are hardheaded and do not want to talk--interrogations where obtaining information can prevent widespread injury or death. Every day, military interrogators in Iraq and Afghanistan question individuals with information that can save lives--every single day-- questions about where explosive devices are hidden, where captured soldiers have been taken, or where caches of weapons are stored, and a lot more. Now, the CIA loves to argue: Oh, but they are just 18- to 20-year-old kids. They don't have the experience. We have experience. We have experience. We have been at it. We are the professionals. They did that at our public, open threats hearing a week or so ago. Now, there is something called the FBI. They deal with pretty bad people, too. Their agents face life-and-death situations in both the world of terrorism and every-day criminality. Some of the individuals the FBI interrogate are senior leaders, individuals who are committed to staying silent and not sharing the information they possess. In fact, FBI agents recently questioned the top al-Qaida leaders who were formerly in CIA custody, gathering enough information from those al- Qaida leaders to build cases for trial, which we have recently read about. Some of these FBI agents have been conducting interrogations for two or three decades. That does not sound like 18- to 20-year-olds. They are, without question, recognized experts in their field, and they are remarkably effective at obtaining the information they need. Yet both the FBI and the military have told us they do not need enhanced interrogation techniques. Are these naive organizations? Are these people who do not know what they are talking about? Are these people who do not have stakes at hand? They are out on the battlefield. They are not only at Guantanamo. They are out on the battlefield. They have told the committee the interrogation techniques included in the Army Field Manual provide them with flexibility they need to obtain the information they need. Indeed, representatives from both the military and the FBI--both-- stated emphatically they have the tools they need to obtain necessary and reliable intelligence. After considering the CIA's arguments, and those of the FBI and the U.S. military, I am simply not convinced that harsh CIA tactics are necessary to obtain intelligence information. We also had people who were neutral who had experience in interrogation but were not currently in the practice of it. Their information to us also was that to terrorize, to torture, to manhandle, to do whatever, does not work. Human beings are human beings, and there are ways to get at them. In fact, coercive interrogation techniques can lead prisoners--and probably will in many cases--to say anything at all for the purpose of stopping the interrogation. As a result, coercive techniques can produce information that is fabricated and ultimately lead to flawed and misleading intelligence reports. This is not academic or hypothetical. Bad intelligence is a real danger. [[Page S942]] In the early years and months after 2001, we were awash with bad intelligence in Washington, DC, not all of it coming out of coercive techniques, but out of a complete misunderstanding of what intelligence is all about. In fact, there was a condescension from the administration about the role of intelligence in providing reliable information. So this is not an academic or hypothetical point. Bad intelligence is a real danger when employing coercive interrogation techniques. Intelligence reporting from an al-Qaida detainee--a very famous one named al-Libi he said Iraq was providing al-Qaida training in chemical and biological weapons prior to the war, which was publicly trumpeted by the President of the United States, by the Secretary of Defense, by the Secretary of State, and other senior administration officials as proof of operating links between Iraq and al-Qaida and, therefore, as a basis for going in to invade Iraq. Of course, basically all of us feel now that what the President said on March 23 in the other body, in his speech which gave him the authority to go to war, was based on intelligence which was almost entirely incorrect, and virtually everything he said, other than some rhetoric here and there--everything he said turned out to be wrong, and, therefore, was one of the most extraordinary disservices to the American people, not to speak of the dead and the wounded, that I can remember in my lifetime. But the Nation was inspired by the thought of fighting terror, and so on they went. Ultimately, al-Libi, who said these things, recanted. He recanted, and it was determined by the CIA that he had fabricated this central allegation of this link between al-Qaida and Iraq and other information based on his claim of mistreatment during the interrogations. So this is not an academic point. America went to war based on an alleged threat that was partially based on fabricated information produced under coercive interrogation. Apart from the question of efficacy and the risk of bad intelligence, the committee has explored the consequences of having a different, secret standard of interrogation for the intelligence community. This is where the need for section 327 becomes clear. Since the disclosure of information about the existence of secret prisons, and the use of harsh interrogation techniques, the reputation and moral authority of the United States have suffered dramatically. It is not a casual statement. One can say, yes, a lot of people have said that. But when that is true, that means that in Africa and Southeast Asia and South America and in the Middle East it becomes much easier for al-Qaida and those who would do us ill--and people within the United States who may belong to no formal organization like that at all--to develop anger, to develop a search for meaning to their lives because they do not see hope in their lives, and so they join. They join a group that will do damage. Some of our techniques have significantly increased the likelihood of that happening. Rather than being a world leader in human rights, we have become known for the unapologetic use of aggressive interrogation techniques. Indeed, even Canada has included us on a list of countries that engage in torture. Allowing the CIA to continue to use coercive interrogation techniques that are not part of the Army Field Manual is another piece of fodder for terrorist propaganda that cannot be underestimated. It is not just a rhetorical statement. It cannot be underestimated. It is no way to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. Ultimately, the war on terrorism is a war of ideas. Without a public standard of humane treatment, it is impossible to convince the world that we take our international obligations seriously, that we treat people humanely, and that we are a country of laws and we adhere to these laws. We must uphold those standards that differentiate us from the terrorists whom we are fighting. If our Government continues to use secret interrogation techniques that many are convinced constitute torture, America's standing in the world will continue to go down even more. Every time it goes down, there are more people who sign up to do us harm. The Israeli Supreme Court concluded, when it forbade the use of harsh interrogation techniques, the following: This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the rule of law, and recognition of an individual's liberty, constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and its strength and allow it to overcome its difficulties. So in closing, passing section 327 is critical to regaining our moral authority in the world--which is a little bit too easy to say; it is going to take a lot more than that but it is a start--and convincing people that the United States believes in due process and human rights rather than fear. Having a separate standard of interrogations for the CIA--as much as it may want to have it, as much as it may have pride in having their secret standard, as much as they talk about 18- to 20- year-olds--is simply not worth the cost. I, therefore, urge my colleagues to support section 327. But no matter how the Senate votes on this motion, if it comes up, the CIA should very carefully consider the actions of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee. All Members need to consider what this large group concluded. The members of our committees are the only Members of Congress who have been briefed on the program and who are privy to the administration's best arguments in support of the program. That has to be said from time to time, and it sounds a bit arrogant, but there are people on the Intelligence Committees, both in the House and the Senate, who get briefings, and they know things that are not necessarily known to the rest of the Congress. Yet despite those briefings, a bipartisan majority of both the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees have determined that it is in the Nation's best interest to have only one standard of interrogation, a standard that can be publicly judged by the entire world, and this judgment by the representatives of the American people--that is, what we did in the conference committee--cannot be ignored. Mr. President, I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah is recognized. Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I compliment my distinguished friend from West Virginia. He has been a very bipartisan worker on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I have been on that committee for an awfully long time, and I have a lot of respect for him. I just want to make that point for the record. I know he spends a lot of time trying to do his job well. We don't always agree, but we do agree on an awful lot. I particularly appreciate his work on the FISA bill. I know it is a very difficult position for him to be in. It is a very technical, very difficult bill, a complex bill, with a lot of matters conducted in public. I think he did a terrific job in seeing this bill through to the Senate floor. I also would like to take a moment to thank my colleague and friend who works with me, Jesse Baker. He is a Secret Service detailee on my staff who has been invaluable in helping me prepare for the important FISA debate. I also thank the very able counsel of the Intelligence Committee, Kathleen Rice, along with Jack Livingston, Mike Davidson, and Chris Healey, all of whom I think played a significant role in the FISA bill, among so many other things as well. I also would like to pay tribute to my colleague on the Intelligence Committee, my staffer who works with me, Paul Matulic, who is one of the most articulate and knowledgeable foreign policy people in government today. I am very grateful for his work and the effort he has put forth to try to assist me in these very difficult times and very difficult jobs. This might be a historic week for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, at least in comparison with the last 3 years. Last night, we passed, after over a year of work and preparation, including the 6- month interim Protect America Act, the FISA modernization bill. I truly hope our House colleagues can expedite this bill and get it to the President for his signature before the legal regime governing our essential technical capabilities expires this weekend. I wish to congratulate both the chairman, as I have said here earlier, [[Page S943]] and vice chairman, Senator Bond, for their sustained efforts on this issue. It wouldn't have been passed without their sterling leadership and their willingness to make some tough calls and to stick to them. I have often said I am metagrobolized--confounded, you might say-- that we have heard about the asymmetrical advantages that our terrorist enemies have, while we are reluctant to use our own significant asymmetrical advantages to defend ourselves from these terrorists' intentions. The terrorists do have asymmetrical advantages, to be sure: They are substate actors, and they do not operate according to any national or international law, including the law of war. They hide among civilians, target civilians, and terrorize civilization. If al- Qaida could get its hands on a weapon of mass destruction, everything we know about them suggests they would use it against the West. But we in the West also have asymmetrical advantages as well. Two significant advantages are our technological prowess and our adherence to the rule of law. Our technology, as we have revealed in more ways than I think prudent in our open debate, provides us unparalleled advantages in tracking the enemy. Our collection has prevented terrorist attacks against us, and our continued collection makes the enemy dedicate a significant amount of its time to avoiding us--time that it would use plotting against us. In this sense, our technological collection is not just a defensive tool but an offensive tool as well. Americans and their leaders are right to expect that all of this Nation's activities should adhere to the rule of law, and this long debate over FISA modernization should, at the very least, assure everyone that we adhere to a legal regime, even when it seems aggravatingly slow to adjust it to modern technology and threats unimagined in the 1970s when the original FISA Act was enacted. So I again wish to congratulate the chairman and the vice chairman for their leadership in getting this important piece of legislation passed, finally, last night. It was a major banner day for us. This bill was long overdue, and I give credit to those who have worked so hard--long and hard--to see that it was done. The passage of an intelligence authorization bill is also an important measure of how we advance the rule of law. The balance of powers so beautifully articulated in our system of government requires an active role for this body and, since the 1970s, we have institutionalized a role of oversight for intelligence in the two committees of the Senate and the House. Our principal vehicle is the authorization bill. This process has been derailed for several years now, as Members operating with individualized agendas have created a dynamic that has thwarted the institutional need for authorization. It is a fact that, if some concede that an authorization bill is not essential, the self- moderating dynamic that keeps one from offering controversial amendments on a bill is removed. We have seen this with the foreign relations authorization bills. I don't want to see it happen with the intelligence authorization bill. This year's bill has some very important measures in it, most of them in the classified annex and therefore not subject to discussion now. It is, after all, an authorization for the intelligence community--or IC-- which does, after all, require a minimum of secrecy to function effectively. The bill does have measures in the unclassified annex worthy of passage, however, to include additional and needed authorities for the Director of National Intelligence, directions on personnel level assessments for the IC, directions on business enterprise architecture modernization, and limits on excessive cost growths of certain systems. The bill, however, has been strapped by a provision added during conference that was not a part of either the House or Senate bills going into conference that would in this case limit all IC interrogation techniques to the Army Field Manual. Now, this provision is widely seen as a prophylactic against the use of torture, and there begins the misconceptions. The United States does not torture. Whether the process known as waterboarding constituted torture when it was used in three cases in the past--and we cannot discuss exactly how it was used here--is a debate to be held among historians and scholars of the law. I do not wish to inhibit that debate. I also do not wish to violate U.S. domestic law or international law to which we are committed as a nation. The rule of law serves our advantage. But the conflict over what was lawful in interpretation in the first 2 years after the 9/11 attacks recognizes, to the honest analyst, that there is murkiness at the intersection of law, policy, and legal interpretation. That has always been the case. As I say, I do not want to inhibit this debate. I also do not wish that historic debate to inhibit any techniques we need to use for interrogation today. Last week, in an open session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Director Mike Hayden-- General Hayden--spoke forcefully, openly, and articulately about the issue of waterboarding. He said in public that, No. 1, less than one- third of less than 100 detainees held by the CIA since 9/11 have ever been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. No. 2, of that small sample, only three have been subjected to waterboarding. No. 3, waterboarding has not been used for almost 5 years. Yet we have heard nothing but screaming about this issue, as though it was relevant today. As Director Hayden went on to state, there is a universe of lawful interrogation techniques. This includes FBI procedures, the Army Field Manual, and the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA, but which, I repeat, does not include waterboarding today. The DCI made it plain--the Director of Central Intelligence made it plain that the CIA will play to ``the edges that the American political process allows us. It is our duty to play to that edge.'' The DCI also made it clear that if the Congress directs that line is set by the Army Field Manual, then that will be the line in law that CIA officers will respect and adhere to. So Congress must act soberly and responsibly in addressing the question of enhanced interrogation techniques. As the hearing last week made clear to anyone listening, the various approaches--FBI techniques, DOD's Army Field Manual, and CIA's enhanced techniques--address various subjects under different circumstances with different sets of goals. Director Maples told me he could not imagine that anyone would have objected to the use of current enhanced techniques if they could have gained the intelligence that would have prevented the attack on the USS Cole. In my mind, the greatest advantage of the enhanced interrogation techniques is the public ambiguity surrounding the fact that they are classified. I don't want an al-Qaida operative we have just wrapped up to know what is in our playbook. But I want to make clear, ambiguity is not--I repeat, not--a cloak for torture. I can't go into details here, but I can say I have been constantly amazed as I have studied this issue in the Intelligence Committee over some of the sanctimony that has been used by some people on the Senate floor addressing this issue, and off the Senate floor as well. I can quite comfortably say there are actions the American public has routinely witnessed on some of our most popular television police shows over the past two decades that would exceed anything in the enhanced interrogation techniques allowed by the CIA. I find this to be ironic. I cannot support this conference report if it has the language limiting interrogation to the Army Field Manual. This is a manual written for our soldiers, all of whom I think we all agree are brave, dedicated warriors, but most of whom are young and inexperienced in the needs of interrogation. They should have their manual. I must point out, however, that Army Field Manuals are subject to revision by the Executive at any time, so that we in Congress are acting a little too self-satisfied by this simple gesture if we actually believe we are rectifying the rule of law. I say, let's have this debate and let's really define what it is we wish to proscribe, and let's understand the needs of our intelligence and the consequences for our actions--consequences that could be very grave if we keep playing games with these issues--or should I say political games. Both would be wrong, in my opinion. [[Page S944]] Much of this debate must be classified, but the Senate has procedures for closed sessions, and, after all, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created for just this need. I serve on that august committee, and I have served on it for a long time. Sometimes I feel as if I am on the corner of sanctimony and righteousness. Sanctimony has popular appeal--it gains the approving tut-tutting of the chattering masses. Often it is more bombast than substance, more Babbittry than bravery. Righteousness is not always a function of the approval of the masses. Those who go to war to defend do things that are lawful but sometimes unpleasant--sometimes very unpleasant. In the choice between sanctimony and righteousness, I will choose the latter. I do not wish to calumniate anyone in this debate. I presume that people are motivated by the purest of motives, as is always the case in the Senate--or should I say I hope it is always the case in the Senate. I wish, however, that we had more substantive debate on some of these difficult questions. So because this conference report includes a measure limiting interrogation techniques for our intelligence professionals in the Army Field Manual--a measure added at the last minute in conference, something that was in neither bill, the House's or the Senate's--I will vote against the conference report and urge us all to reengage in this debate so that the lines of law we draw, that our intelligence professionals will respect, are lines that also maintain our best defenses within the rule of law. I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Menendez). The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak for 15 minutes as in morning business and to yield some of that time to the distinguished Senator from Pennsylvania who joins me on the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Nomination of David Dugas Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, I come to the floor with welcome support of the distinguished Senator from Pennsylvania, who serves so ably on the Judiciary Committee, to talk about the pending nomination of David Dugas to fill a vacancy in the Middle District of Louisiana. This is a vacancy that has existed for over a year, and, in fact, coming up very soon in March will unfortunately, if we do not act before then, will be noting the 1-year anniversary of the nomination of David Dugas to fill this vacancy in the Middle District of Louisiana, of course nominated by President Bush. Mr. Dugas is currently U.S. attorney in that same district. In that capacity, of course, he had to come before this Senate and be confirmed; and he was by unanimous consent. So that was a very resounding confirmation of him, which included support by my colleague from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu. In terms of this judicial nomination, Mr. Dugas has received the highest rating possible by the American Bar Association. He is eminently qualified. There is nothing in his background or his dealings or his job as a U.S. attorney that remotely suggests otherwise. Yet there has been great delay and obstructionism, in my opinion, in terms of considering this worthy nomination. In fact, even though we are coming up on the 1-year mark of President Bush's nomination of him, he has yet to receive a hearing before the Judiciary Committee because my colleague, Senator Landrieu, has not turned in her so-called blue slip. I rise to make note of this, and in a few minutes I will have a unanimous consent to propose to the Senate to remedy this situation. I have also specifically invited Senator Leahy, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Landrieu, my colleague from Louisiana, to join us on the floor for an appropriate colloquy. With that introduction, I yield such time as he would consume to my distinguished colleague from Pennsylvania, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I join the Senator from Louisiana in his request to have a hearing and then proceed with an up-or-down vote. I have reviewed the record of the nominee. It appears to me that the nominee is qualified for the position. In his service as a U.S. attorney, he has already had Senate confirmation. But the basic proposition of having a hearing and a vote, I think, is very fundamental to so many pending nominees beyond the nominee addressed by the Senator from Louisiana today. I have discussed this issue on a number of occasions with the senior Senator from Louisiana, and she has been of the view that she ought not to return the blue slip, and I respect her decision. But I also respect the position of Senator Vitter in trying to move forward. It would be my hope that we could come to some accommodation, that we could find some way to set a timetable for a hearing, at least on that. Senator Vitter has advised me that he has written to both the distinguished chairman and the senior Senator from Louisiana and that there is to be a unanimous consent request. I know Senator Vitter will await the arrival of someone who can object because my expectation is a unanimous consent request will be objected to. But the issue involved is to raise the issue and to make the point as to what has happened and to try to see if there can be some accommodation, as noted by the floor discussion today. I see Senator Vitter nodding in the affirmative. In my capacity as ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, I would like to get these nominations to move forward. I yield the floor. Mr. VITTER. I thank the distinguished Senator from Pennsylvania, first for his service on the Judiciary Committee; it has been very distinguished, to serve there as many years very ably, now-ranking member, and specifically for his support on this nomination and others to try to break through the gridlock, break through the partisanship, move forward in a positive way for the country. I believe that is absolutely necessary in a number of cases, but the one that surely hits closest to home for me is this nomination of David Dugas to a judgeship in the Middle District of Louisiana. So I thank the ranking member for all his help and support; I know it will continue. Again, let me note I wrote to Chairman Leahy that I would be taking the floor this week to make the upcoming unanimous consent request. I did the same to my colleague from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu. As soon as we figured out the time that would be available, we sent them word, and I sincerely hope they can both join me on the floor because I think it would be very useful and very informative to have an appropriate discussion and colloquy about this case. So I certainly invite that. I would encourage them to accept the invitation to join me on the floor. Let me point out and reiterate some very important points about this nomination. President Bush made the nomination some time ago. That was March of last year. We are coming up quickly on the 1-year mark of this nomination. The vacancy in the Middle District has been open even a little bit longer, over a year. Because of that, a backlog of cases is quickly mounting in the Middle District. The Middle District is an area surrounding Baton Rouge, LA, the capital of the State. It has felt a huge influx of people, of residents, and of litigation, largely because of Hurricane Katrina. Because of that, because of this vacancy, judicial backlogs have been mounting and mounting. We are not quite to the point--and this is defined in law and by rules of the court--we are not quite to the point that it is defined as a ``judicial emergency,'' but we are quickly coming up to that line. So the people of Louisiana, the people of the Middle District are not being served well and properly and as quickly as they should be. This vacancy needs to be filled for that reason. Now, let us look at the man who President Bush has chosen to fill the [[Page S945]] vacancy. By all accounts, he is eminently qualified. Mr. Dugas is the sitting U.S. attorney in the Middle District. He has done a very fine job in that position, has won praise from many different quarters, particularly from law enforcement. He has many admirers and allies in the law enforcement community: Sheriffs across the State, chiefs of police, district attorneys, many others. They have written in to many of us about this nomination in strong support. Mr. Dugas was already considered by the Senate, of course he had to be, for his present job of U.S. attorney. He was considered very favorably. In fact, it was considered completely noncontroversial, and he was confirmed swiftly by unanimous consent. In that process, of course, my colleague, Senator Landrieu, was here at the time and was part of that very positive sweeping confirmation. As I said, for this judicial vacancy, Mr. Dugas has received the highest rating possible by the American Bar Association. That is a distinguished professional organization, it is not political, it is certainly not leaning to the right. Nobody would think that. They have rated this nominee of President Bush with their highest rating possible for a judicial nomination. Yet this languishes and languishes. In another month's time, we are going to be on the 1-year mark of the nomination, with this backlog of cases mounting, as we near a judicial emergency in the district. I do not think that is right. I do not think that is serving the people of Louisiana at all. I do not think that is serving the people of the country at all. Mr. Dugas deserves better. More importantly, the people of Louisiana deserve better. The people of Louisiana and of the country want us to act as grownups and to come together and do our work in a timely, respectful way. They don't think this sort of partisanship and obstructionism, particularly over judgeships, falls into that definition. This got particularly bad a few years ago. I was hopeful. Since I have been here, not because of my influence but just in general, since I got here, the Senate has become more responsive and more responsible about nominations, particularly judicial nominations. Unfortunately, this is a clear example in the other direction. Let's clear up this example. Let's move it off the list of those examples of partisanship and obstruction. Let's act in a reasonable--late, by now, but reasonable way, finally moving forward with this highly qualified nominee before this district gets to a state of judicial emergency, which is looming. That is my simple and reasonable request. With all that background, I will now propound a unanimous consent request. I ask unanimous consent that if the Committee on the Judiciary has not held a hearing on PN 349, the nomination of David Dugas of Louisiana to be U.S. district judge for the Middle District of Louisiana, and reported the nomination to the Senate by March 19, 2008, which would be the 1-year anniversary of his nomination being transmitted, that on the next calendar day the Senate is in session, the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of the nomination; that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the nomination; that there be 1 hour of debate equally divided between the chairman and the ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary or their designees; that upon the use or yielding back of such time, the Senate immediately proceed to a rollcall vote on the nomination; that if the nomination is confirmed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's actions; and that the Senate then resume legislative session. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair, in my capacity as a Senator from the State of New Jersey and on behalf of the majority leader, objects. Mr. VITTER. Of course, I am disappointed--not surprised but disappointed--at the objection. I resume my plea specifically to Senator Leahy, chairman of the committee, and to Senator Landrieu, who has not turned in her blue slip and is thus the reason for the committee not even holding a hearing, that we move beyond this, that we have a hearing on this eminently qualified nominee. If there is a reason to stop the nomination, surely a hearing is the best venue and the best vehicle to illustrate that and talk about it. I hope we move beyond the pure obstructionism and partisanship that has us stuck in the mud with a judicial emergency in the Middle District looming. This is exactly the sort of obstruction the American people are tired of. They spoke clearly to this over the last several years about judicial nominees. Maybe we got a little better, but here we are again in terms of this matter and this case which is surely important to Louisiana. I urge all of my colleagues to work beyond this. Specifically, I urge the chairman of the Judiciary and Senator Landrieu to work beyond this. It is unfortunate that they couldn't accept my invitation to have a useful, informative dialog and colloquy on the issue on the floor. There has been no good explanation for inaction that I have ever heard. A lot of people would like to hear some discussion and explanation. I hope we will hear that soon. I hope in the very near future we will move toward an appropriate resolution of this matter, which is a hearing and a vote in Judiciary and then on the floor of the Senate. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lautenberg). Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we are considering the intelligence authorization bill. My understanding is later this afternoon we will have, perhaps, a final vote on the bill. There are many important provisions in the bill. Many of us who have been here for some while-- from the destruction of the World Trade Center and the murder of thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11, where terrorists used airplanes loaded with fuel as guided missiles to bring down the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon and through the subsequent period leading up to the Iraq war--know we have had all kinds of difficulties with the intelligence community. We have a lot of men and women risking their lives all around the world every day collecting intelligence, and yet most of us have been through top secret briefings that we later find out to have been absolutely false, wrong, just standing facts on their head. So it is critically important for this country to have a good system of intelligence gathering and good analysis of intelligence if we are going to prevent the next terrorist attack against our country. It is a difficult world out there. We have terrorists who would like nothing more than to kill Americans and attack our country. So passing an intelligence authorization bill that provides the resources, provides a structure for a good system of intelligence is very important to the safety and the security of this great country. That is what the debate is about. That is what the upcoming vote is about. But there is one provision that has caused a special concern for some in this Intelligence reauthorization bill, and I want to talk about it a bit. That is the provision that deals with the subject of torture. One of the most important provisions in this legislation is one that makes the Army Field Manual provisions on interrogations applicable to all U.S. Government personnel. Right now, those provisions which forbid torture apply only to the military. Those provisions do not apply to some others that are conducting interrogations on behalf of our Government. That means that some others who work for the U.S. Government--the CIA, for example; contractors, for example--may use interrogation techniques which may constitute torture and which are forbidden in the Army Field Manual. This legislation incorporates the Army Field Manual provisions on interrogations and says it applies to all personnel from the United States. Now, why is that important? Because it makes a vote for this bill a vote [[Page S946]] against torture. It is a vote that says American values and torture are not in any way compatible. Voting for this bill is a vote for a country that has been looked up to throughout the world because of our system of values. It is that simple, and it is that important. Let me say that I acknowledge today there are tyrants and despots and dictators and a lot of evil people in this world and throughout history who have used and have always justified the use of torture--but not this country. We have not done that, with the exception of some recent disclosures I will talk about. Some people argue that this issue of torture is especially about waterboarding. Waterboarding is a more antiseptic term. It should be described as water torture. Some people say that: Well, we have waterboarded. In fact, it has been disclosed by administration officials that we have waterboarded--which is water tortured--three of the most dangerous, despicable terrorists who attacked this United States, and we only did it at a time when we thought they would provide information or had information that would allow us to avoid other catastrophic attacks, and we need to be able to do that again in the future, if necessary, if some despicable terrorist is planning an attack on this country. Let me talk a little bit about what we are describing here. waterboarding is a practice that has been around for centuries, and it has been known--widely known--as torture for a long time. In fact, waterboarding has been prosecuted as torture and as a war crime on many occasions in history. Trying now to claim it is legal, that it is not torture, or that it is something other than torture doesn't square with the facts. Second, history teaches us that torture is not effective. Aside from the question of morality, it is not effective. Those who know tell us that those being tortured will often tell you anything they think you want to hear in order to have the torture stopped. The provisions in the Army Field Manual set forth the many approved methods to get reliable information, but those methods do not include what is defined as torture. The question about torture is: If you decide that torture is appropriate and available as a tool for our country to use, why stop at waterboarding? There are many other forms of torture that are even more heinous, more abusive: putting people in boiling water, pulling out their fingernails, amputations, electric shock. Justifying torture is a very slippery slope that doesn't have a pleasant end for a country that cares about its system of values. We don't do that and haven't done that. We haven't been engaged in torture as a country for a couple of centuries because we don't belong to that group of people in the world who want to do damage and want to commit mayhem and want to kill others. We hold ourselves to a higher standard in this country--always have--a higher standard, a standard that all of us can be proud of. It is interesting when you think back to the Cold War. We won the Cold War, but we didn't win it with bombs and bullets; we won it with American values and American standards, and American rights. The other evening I saw a very large portion of the Berlin Wall that had been transported to the United States of America. It was a wall that kept the free world out and it was a wall that kept those in East Germany behind it, living in oppression, living in a circumstance where they were denied freedom. I was thinking again about the Cold War and the fact that we didn't win the war with bombs. I have in my desk something I have had there for a long period of time, if I might show it by unanimous consent. This is a piece of a wing from a Soviet Backfire bomber. This bomber very likely carried a nuclear weapon that would have been used against the United States. Actually, we sawed part of the wing off this Soviet bomber because when the Cold War was over, we reached an agreement to destroy delivery systems. I have also in my desk a hinge. This hinge used to be on a missile silo that held a missile with a nuclear warhead on its tip aimed at a U.S. city. It was in Ukraine. Where that missile used to sit, there are now sunflowers growing. It is now a sunflower field. The missile is gone, the warhead is gone. This bomber is now in pieces. We won the Cold War. And we have agreements with Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics under which we help destroy their Cold War weapons and delivery systems. But we didn't win the Cold War with bombs; we didn't blow up that Backfire bomber. We didn't blow up the Soviet missile silo with one of our missiles. We won the Cold War because of our values. American values won the Cold War. What are those values? Well, people are free. They believed what they said. They believed what they wanted. The Government had to respect the rights of everyone in this country. We were a country that had a government based on a Constitution that had a Bill of Rights that applies to all Americans. Our country stood for liberty, human rights, human dignity, the rule of law. That is what won the Cold War. Those values were so strong that in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, those values shone a light of hope into the darkest cells and the deepest part of the Soviet Union. In the gulag prisons, in the outermost reaches of Siberia, those values reached those cells. Millions of prisoners had been held, often in solitary confinement, simply for thinking and speaking freely. Many were there for years; some swept off the streets, never to reappear again; many tortured into false confessions, and many murdered. Some survived, however, and talked about their experience, and about how important the idea of America was to them, how important the idea of freedom was to those who had been detained and had not been able to experience freedom, and to those who had been tortured by a country that didn't want them to be free. It was a clear and vast difference between America and the Soviet Union. As imperfect as we are, the basic foundation and bedrock of values in this country is what shined so brightly in the middle of the Cold War. It wasn't the amount of bombs and bullets each country had; it was what we stood for. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Iron Curtain was lifted, all of those police states crumbled, and every single one of them became free countries that provided freedom to their citizens. Every single one chose freedom and democracy. That is how powerful the idea and the values of this country have been. What I say today is we have to regain the moral high ground and describe our values in circumstances that make it clear that we do not subscribe to some things others might. We do not support torture. We will not support torture. It is not what our country is about. From the very beginning in this country, America has held itself to a higher standard. George Washington, leading the Continental Army--think about it: 5,000 soldiers in the Continental Army going up against a British Army of 50,000 soldiers, and our 5,000 were shopkeepers and farmers; 5,000 against 50,000, and we prevailed over time. George Washington, after a large number of his troops were captured and slaughtered--he saw the Hessian mercenaries kill unarmed prisoners. After that, George Washington and his troops captured a large number of British soldiers, and many of the troops justifiably wanted revenge. They sought to execute them just as they had seen done to unarmed American prisoners. George Washington refused. He refused to treat the prisoners as his soldiers had been treated. He insisted America was different. He said: We are different, and we are going to treat people the way they should be treated, not the way they treated us, and that has been our birthright. That is why this discussion right now is so very important. It goes to the core of what we are and who we are as a nation. Quite simply, we have to say unequivocally: We are against torture. We, the Congress of the United States, must say that torture is un-American, simply because it is. No hair splitting, no fancy words, no legal distinction about what might or might not be torture. That will begin to restore, I think, our rightful place if we say we are against torture. Let me briefly continue to say that being against torture is being for an America that is better than its enemies. It is that simple. I said we fought and won the Cold War after many decades. We faced nuclear annihilation during that period. We faced a [[Page S947]] ruthless enemy all around the world, and yet we won that war. We did that with our reputation, our values, and our moral authority intact. It was and still is, I think, a beacon of hope around the world. Those values and that moral authority, I believe, are what is going to allow us to prevail in the battle against the terrorists who wish to do harm--not just here but in other parts of the world as well. We need--and I believe the world needs--an America that people respect and admire, an America that is different, that begins in a manner that is loud and clear saying: We do not torture. This will empower our country and make us stronger. I was very disappointed last week to hear the head of our intelligence service, and then to hear a spokesperson for the White House, say: Yes, we have waterboarded. They used the term--the right term--water torture; yes, we have done that. We did it because we must, and we reserve the right to do it again. It is exactly the wrong thing for this country. It is not just me saying that. I am not just quoting George Washington who has established the higher standard, and God bless him for doing so. Let me read what General Petraeus said, who leads the American troops in Iraq right now. Our most senior commander in Iraq, GEN David Petraeus, sent a letter to every Soldier, every Sailor, every Airman, Marine, and Coast Guardsman serving in Iraq. He said this: Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we--not our enemies--occupy the high ground. Continuing to quote: Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows us that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. That is General Petraeus, who leads our troops in Iraq, and says those who believe that torture is appropriate would be wrong. Mr. DURBIN. Will the Senator yield for a question? Mr. DORGAN. I am happy to. Mr. DURBIN. I thank the Senator for his comments, and I thank Senator Feinstein for the support language. Some argue that this language was not necessary, that the McCain amendment, which passed 90 to 9, made it clear that whether you are in uniform or not torture is not the policy of the United States. Others argue that the Geneva Conventions had already made that clear for decades before it was brought into question by this administration. I ask the Senator from North Dakota if he struggles with the same thought that I do. At some point after World War II, we prosecuted Japanese soldiers who tortured American prisoners of war using waterboarding and charged them with war crimes; and we are now at a point in our history, some 60 years later, where General Hayden testifies under oath before Congress that our Nation engaged in the same conduct, at least three times previously, when it came to waterboarding. I wonder if the Senator from North Dakota struggles with the same concept of justice as was applied after World War II and as it appears to be applied by this administration? Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, that is a significant contradiction for our country. I was as surprised and disappointed as the Senator from Illinois was to have one of the leading officials in this administration testify under oath that, yes, in fact, waterboarding had been used. It was in fact legal, they said, and it would be used again, if necessary, and could be sanctioned by the President of the United States. The Senator is correct that this Congress passed a piece of legislation that defined waterboarding as torture and prohibits it, and the President at the White House, in a signing statement accompanying the legislation, essentially said: It doesn't matter so much what the legislation says; what matters is what I will decide to do. Now, we have a disclosure--a public disclosure--to the world that this country has employed a technique that has, for hundreds of years, been described as torture. I know and understand the passions that exist. I understand what I would like to see done to Osama bin Laden when he is captured. I understand the passions. But I also understand that what has given this country a different standing in the world is our value system. Again, let me, if I might, for the Senator from Illinois, refer back to George Washington, which I described earlier before the Senator came on the Senate floor. When I think of the odds facing the Revolutionary Army, it is pretty unbelievable. The Senator from Illinois and I were at Mount Vernon recently, and we saw a display describing that at one point there were 5,000 soldiers in the Continental Army and 50,000 British soldiers. That was the fight. Our soldiers were shopkeepers and farmers, ordinary folks off the street. Theirs were trained British soldiers. So it was 5,000 to 50,000. George Washington and his soldiers saw members of the Continental Army captured and then, unarmed, murdered, executed by the British soldiers and the Hessians. Washington's soldiers, when capturing some British soldiers, wanted to do the same thing. But he said, nothing doing, we are not going to do that. George Washington said that we are different and we are going to treat people the way they should be treated, not the way they treated us. When you think of that set of standards and values and then wind your way through the discussion in recent days, and to have a top U.S. official say, yes, we have used waterboarding--and it is widely acknowledged as torture--we used it and it was legal and we intend to use it again if it is necessary. Mr. DURBIN. I am sure the Senator is aware that this questionable chapter in American history--which I think will haunt us for generations to come--also involves people other than the general who testified. There is an individual who has been nominated by the President to be head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury. He has been rejected four times by the Senate. The President said last week that he was the most important appointment. A month or two before, he told the majority leader he didn't want to talk about any other appointments until Mr. Bradbury was approved. Bradbury's tenure in the Office of Legal Counsel goes back to the period of time when this administration was rewriting torture policy in America--a policy which they at one point accepted and later rejected. Many of us have said if Mr. Bradbury is coming before us for consideration, we want to see those memos written--memos which James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General, said the United States would be ashamed if they ever became public. I say to the Senator from North Dakota that not only do we have to do our part, but this administration has to do its part as well. Those who were engaged in this questionable--if not embarrassing, if not shameful--conduct involving torture policy must be held accountable to the administration. They are certainly not deserving of a promotion, which is what they are suggesting for Mr. Bradbury. I ask the Senator from North Dakota, reflecting on what this administration has been through, the many times they have told us torture was not being used, that waterboarding was not being used, and now with this disclosure of at least three instances admitted under oath, I wonder if even this legislation--including the Feinstein amendment--would restrain this President in the future, in the next few months, as we face challenges that we cannot even imagine at this moment. Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, it is far more than disappointing to me, and I think to a lot of people in this Chamber and across the country, that the President received advice from people who work for him in the White House and have said this under oath and on television and in every other venue that under the Commander in Chief powers, the President has the power to do almost anything. He can put out a drift- net and collect every communication under every condition--e-mails and telephone calls. Go to the documentary recently done, entitled ``No Way Out'' and view the interviews by this administration's officials, who take the position that this President has the authority as Commander in Chief to do almost anything. That includes this issue of torture. [[Page S948]] The point I make is that we have a piece of legislation that we will vote on later this afternoon. Included in that legislation is a provision that says the Army Field Manual will describe the conditions of interrogation of enemy combatants. I just read what General Petraeus said to all of his soldiers--that torture is inappropriate and will not be allowed. The Army Field Manual prevents torture. What we are saying in the conference report that we will vote on in an hour or two is that the Army Field Manual's restrictions on torture apply to all U.S. Government officials and contractors doing interrogation. My concern about this administration--and I think it is echoed by the Senator from Illinois--is that they have decided they are not bound by the law, they are not bound by what the Congress enacts. They are doing other sorts of dances with signing statements and interpretations of the Constitution to say that under the Commander in Chief powers they can do almost anything if they believe there is some kind of a threat. That is a very dangerous mind set, in my judgment, for any administration at any time. Mr. DURBIN. If the Senator will yield for one last question, I thank him for that quote from President Washington which talked about the terrible circumstances the Continental Army faced and how, in those days before there even was an America, they would establish a different set of values in this part of the world. He admonished his troops to live by those values. I am sure the Senator knows that each year our State Department publishes a report card on human rights of nations around the world. We are critical of nations that engage in torture. We are critical of nations that engage in conduct that is inconsistent with our values. I say to the Senator from North Dakota, how can we maintain that moral status and moral authority if we are found compromising something as fundamental as torture and waterboarding and the Geneva Conventions, which guided us for decades? Mr. DORGAN. The Senator answers the question by phrasing the question. Let me conclude by saying this: We have 43 top retired military leaders of the U.S. Armed Forces who have written a letter. As one, they say: We believe it is vital to the safety of our men and women in the uniform of the United States not to sanction the use of interrogation methods it would find unacceptable if inflicted on our captured Americans. Today there are men and women fighting for this country. If captured, how would we react if the leader of a group that captured them says: We are torturing them because we feel we can get information, and we can only get it by torturing them, and we believe torture is legal. We are going to waterboard them, we believe it is legal. We have already done it, and we intend to do it again if we need to. How would we feel if that were somebody else talking about how they are going to treat American soldiers? That is unacceptable. We have a country with a higher moral purpose and standards that have served us for two centuries, and we should not obliterate that just because we have some people in this administration who believe it is appropriate. It is not. John McCain knows that. He led the fight to put a provision in law that prohibits torture. This President did a signing statement next to the legislation he signed, saying: I don't have to abide by it if I don't feel like it. That is a scary thought in a democracy. I hope this afternoon we will register a very strong vote in support of this conference report and against the concept of our country engaging in torture. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized. Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote on adoption of the conference report to accompany H.R. 2082, the Intelligence Authorization Act, occur at 4:30 p.m. today; that no points of order be in order; and that the time until then be equally divided between the two leaders or their designees. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. REID. So there is an equal balance of time in the next--we have 2 hours. I think it should work out fine. Either side will have approximately an hour, so that should work out well. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island is recognized. Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I want to follow the lead of the distinguished Senator from North Dakota and my friend, the Senator from Illinois, and continue on this question with the determination the Government has made that waterboarding is legal. It is a question that matters so much to wary and watchful nations, disheartened and distrustful in the wake of 7 years of failed leadership and broken promises. It is also a question that matters immensely to the billions of men, women, and children around the globe who look to this country, the United States of America, as a beacon of light that shows the way nations ought to act and the way the world ought to be. It is a question that matters to the American people who are sick of asking: Is it wrong? and being told: Well, it depends. The people of America still do not know how this came about--in particular, how the Department of Justice came to approve this sordid technique. I believe we are in a position where the concerns we have about torture overlap with some of the concerns we have had in this Chamber about the independence and integrity of the Department of Justice. Here is what we know. We know that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has said that ``the CIA sought advice from the Department of Justice, and the Department informed the CIA that [waterboarding's] use would be lawful under the circumstances and within the limits and safeguards of the program.'' We know in 2002, John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel drafted a memo, later approved by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, which reads, in part: There is a significant range of acts that, though they might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, failed to rise to the level of torture. As Evan Wallach of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law has written: None of the Memo's analysis explains why waterboarding does not cause physical or psychological pain sufficient to meet the criminalization standards it enunciates. We have asked for further clarification, but in a hearing before the Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Mukasey refused to comment on the legality of waterboarding because the technique was not currently in use and because of what he described as ``the absence of concrete facts and circumstances.'' Even though the Department of Justice is now conducting an investigation into whether tape recordings of alleged waterboarding sessions were improperly destroyed, they would not look into whether the conduct on the tape was in and of itself improper. The argument is that no one who relies in good faith on the Department's past advice should be subject to criminal investigations for actions taken in reliance on that advice, which raises the question within the question: How did that advice come to be given in the first place? How did the best and brightest of the Department of Justice overlook the facts of the history of waterboarding prosecutions in which the United States was directly involved, and why was such guidance approved when contravening precedents appear clearly to be in evidence? Mr. President, I commend to my colleagues the article written by Evan Wallach, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, entitled ``Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts.'' The full cite is 45 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 468 (2007). Mr. President, the U.S. Government long considered waterboarding a form of torture, prosecutable as a war crime and punishable accordingly. This history includes war crimes prosecutions against Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American aviators in World War II, the use of water torture by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines, and even an incident of waterboarding by a local sheriff prosecuted by the Department of Justice itself. Let me start with that. I am reading from the Wallach law review article in which it reports: In 1983, the Department of Justice affirmed that the use of water torture techniques was indeed criminal conduct under U.S. law. [[Page S949]] A sheriff in a Texas county waterboarded prisoners in order to extract confessions. Count one of the indictment asserted that the defendants conspired to--and this is a quote from the Department's own indictment--``subject prisoners to a suffocating `water torture' ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate he was suffocating and/or drowning.'' The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted by a jury under count one. It didn't end there. The case then went up on appeal, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rendered a decision. I have in my hands United States of America v. Lee, 744 F.2d 1124, decided in 1984, in which they gave appellate review of these convictions. Finally, at sentencing, U.S. District Judge James DeAnda's comments, according to the article, were ``He told the former Sheriff that he had allowed law enforcement to fall into `the hands of a bunch of thugs. The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country.' '' That is the opinion of a U.S. district court judge at a sentencing on waterboarding. How is it that when the Department of Justice, the Office of Legal Counsel were asked for their opinion, they were able to write this opinion? I have it in my hand. This is the unclassified version. It has been substantially redacted. Even so, it is 50 pages long--50 pages long. They did 50 pages of legal research and could not find a U.S. Court of Appeals case in which the Department of Justice itself had brought the charges? Here is the case, United States v. Lee. It describes the facts: Lee was indicted along with two other deputies, Floyd Baker and James Glover, and the County Sheriff James Parker, based on a number of incidents in which prisoners were subjected to a ``water torture'' in order to prompt confessions to various crimes. Throughout the rest of the opinion, these are referred to as ``torture'' and ``torture incidents.'' All one has to have is Lexus or Westlaw and plug in the words ``water torture'' and find this case. How is it possible that the Office of Legal Counsel could not have found this? How is it possible that they could have also missed what the Columbia Law School was able to find--a telegram from Secretary of State Cordell Hull to the Japanese Government objecting to the mistreatment of American prisoners, which included specifically waterboarding and describing the ``brutal and bestial methods of extorting alleged confessions''? That is our Secretary of State in an official communication to the Japanese Government describing, among other tortures, water tortures as brutal and bestial methods to extort alleged confessions. How could they not have found that? How could they not have found the charges the Senator from North Dakota referred to in which Japanese soldiers were brought up on charges in front of military tribunals--military tribunals staffed with American judges, military tribunals staffed with American prosecutors--for waterboarding American prisoners? Here are some examples. One of the Japanese officers was named Hata and the article describes the charges and specifications against Officer Hata, which included this: . . . Hata did, willfully and unlawfully, brutally mistreat and torture Morris O. Killough, an American Prisoner of War, by beating and kicking him, by fastening him on a stretcher and pouring water up his nostrils. Similarly, Hata did willfully and unlawfully, brutally mistreat and torture Thomas B. Armitage, William O. Cash and Monroe Dave Woodall, American Prisoners of War, by beating and kicking them, by forcing water into their mouths and noses. . . . The charge and specifications against Officer Asano were: Asano did, willfully and unlawfully, brutally mistreat and torture Morris O. Killough, an American Prisoner of War, by beating and kicking him, by fastening him on a stretcher and pouring water up his nostrils. . . . Asano did, willfully and unlawfully, brutally mistreat and torture Thomas B. Armitage, William O Cash and Munroe Dave Woodall, American Prisoners of War, by beating and kicking them, by forcing water into their mouths and noses. . . . The charge and specifications against Officer Kita were again, ``willfully and unlawfully, brutally mistreat and torture John Henry Burton, an American Prisoner of War, by beating him and by forcing water into his nose.'' Over and over the testimony describes exactly what we know as waterboarding. The charges and specifications by this tribunal staffed by American officers describe that they did willfully and unlawfully commit cruel, inhuman, and brutal acts and atrocities and other offenses, including strapping them to a stretcher and pouring water down their nostrils, by holding the prisoner's head back and forcing him to swallow a bucketful of sea water over and over and over. How could they have missed it? How could they have missed it? How could they miss the decision on point by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit? What else do we know about the Office of Legal Counsel? We know that the conditions there were pretty ripe for abuse. We know they were doing this in secret, protected from public scrutiny, protected from peer review, protected from critical analysis under the veil of secrecy, deep secrecy in which they were operating, coming up with the theories as they pleased, thinking they would never see the light of day. So they did not have to do their homework. Somebody might have done a little research and found the Fifth Circuit decision on point, but, no, they did not need to. It is part of a pattern because, as the Presiding Officer will recall, when I was offered the chance to read the secret Office of Legal Counsel opinions related to the warrantless wiretapping program, I went and took some notes, and when I got back here, I eventually was able to get them declassified. They described other interesting theories that grew in that hothouse of legal ideology, protected from the glare of public scrutiny, ideas such as the President is not obliged to follow Executive orders. He is not obliged to give anybody notice that he is violating Executive orders. He can live in a parallel universe in constant violation of his own Executive orders and nothing is wrong with that, other than, of course, the fact that it completely degrades and destroys the entire structure of Executive orders as a law function of the United States of America. Another argument is that under article II, the President's power as Commander in Chief, he has the authority to determine what his powers are. Think about that for a moment. They assert article II gives them the authority to decide what the scope of his article II powers are. I seem to remember a decision called Marbury v. Madison saying it is ``emphatically the province of the judicial department to decide what the law is.'' The last one, my personal favorite, is that the Department of Justice is bound by the legal determinations of the President. It is a good thing that was not the case when President Nixon was the President and made the legal determination if the President does it, it doesn't violate the law. So what on Earth has been going on at the Office of Legal Counsel, an office that used to be distinguished for its probity, for its analysis, for its scholarship, an office on which the Department of Justice relies? Just as Americans rely on the Department of Justice to provide guidance in our Government, to provide a moral compass within the Department of Justice, the Office of Legal Counsel is supposed to be the place where they try to get it right. How could they try to get it right when they cannot even find a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision on water torture when you are looking up whether it is illegal? If I were a partner in a law firm and a junior associate came to me with a memo such as this that had missed the case on point, do you think he would have much of a career? I don't think so. It is a fatal failure of legal analysis. And yet, where there is supposed to be the very best at the legal counsel of the Department of Justice, they missed all of it. If there has been a systematic breakdown in this institution of Government long known for probity and scholarship, if it has been captured and behind a veil of secrecy rendered a political ideological tool, that is a matter of very legitimate public concern. I am pleased to say Senator Durbin and myself have written to the inspector general of the Department of Justice and to the Office of Professional [[Page S950]] Responsibility of the Department of Justice to look into exactly that matter. I thank the Presiding Officer for his patience with me. I thank the distinguished Senator from Florida for his patience. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida. Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, we have heard one of the best-- I cannot use ``oration'' because it was far superior. It was one of the best explanations of how the Department of Justice has gone awry by the Senator from Rhode Island. I commend the Senator from Rhode Island. I thank him for his legal analysis, and I wish to underscore what he has said, that the reason the Department of Justice was ignoring that Court of Appeals decision, the reason the Department of Justice was ignoring all of the history of the record that has been built over time, of which the Senator cited the statements from World War II, the reason all of that has been ignored or purposely missed is because the Department of Justice became politicized so that politics became the rule of the day instead of the rule of law. In a nation that recognizes it is a nation of law, not a rule of men, when politics is inserted for law, then we get into the trouble we have gotten into. That is what brings us here. I have already addressed this subject of why my conclusion, a long deliberative process of coming to the question, that we ought to etch into law the Army Field Manual as the standard by which the intelligence community will carry out their interrogations. That ought to be the law. I thank the Senators who have spoken in favor of this legislation. We are going to have a chance to vote on it pretty soon. Each of us can determine what we think ought to be representative of America, if it ought to be torture or not. We are clearly going to have an opportunity to say that because we are going to vote on a proposed law that says: Is torture going to be the standard for America? I wish to speak on another subject, so I guess the appropriate parliamentary procedure is for me to ask consent to speak as in morning business. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Rape and Sexual Assault Investigations Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, thus far, the Department of the Army has acknowledged that there have been 124 incidents of sexual assault against contractor and military personnel in Iraq which are currently under investigation. We know of only three of those cases that are now being considered by the Department of Justice and, therefore, the Department of Justice will not respond to my entreaties about this investigation because they say it is an ongoing criminal investigation. However, in other cases, we have gathered some facts, and these facts have been quite telling. There does not seem to be a standard to protect female contractors or military personnel from sexual assault in Iraq under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army. The 124 cases of sexual assaults of both contractors and military personnel have been acknowledged just under the Department of the Army. The question is, under the other branches of the service whose contracts are being administered by civilian contractors, how many are there; and are there similar cases in the other theater of operations--Afghanistan as well as in Iraq? What we also know from the facts we have gathered thus far is the problem is not within the U.S. military nearly so much as it is among contractor personnel because there is a nebulous set of regulations as to how it is to be handled on the reporting of a rape. Untold numbers of sexual assaults have been committed in Iraq, and the Departments of Justice, Defense, and State are providing very little information on whether they have been prosecuted. It is time we have this information. Last December, I wrote to the Secretary of Defense asking him to launch an investigation by DOD's inspector general into the rape and sexual assault cases in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I sent similar letters to the Secretary of State regarding the investigations carried out under the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and I requested that the Attorney General update me on the status of the related criminal investigations. I asked whether and why evidence in the sexual assault cases was turned over to the private firms. I got into this when one of my constituents in Tampa, FL, came forth and told about the assault case. This had followed a Texas case that had been elevated to the public sphere. Apparently, one of these women was assaulted, then went to see the doctor, and a rape kit was prepared by the military doctors. That kit would have the evidence of the rape, and it was turned over to the civilian contractor. Suddenly, the rape kit disappeared. So the question is, what steps has the Department of Defense taken to ensure the full investigation and prosecution of these cases? In the meantime, the Department of State has told our office that diplomatic security has investigated four cases. One of them was the Texas lady, and that was where a contractor personnel assaulted another contractor personnel. Another involved a State Department employee who allegedly assaulted a woman employed by a contractor--in this case KBR. Then another case involved two State Department employees. According to the State Department, three of the cases were referred to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution. Recently, our Senate staff met with representatives of the Department of Defense IG's office, and we asked them to brief us because of the response received from the Department of Defense, which certainly did not answer my questions. The inspector general's office stated that, and this is what blew our mind, the Army Criminal Investigation Command has investigated 124 cases of sexual assault. Now, that is just the Army, and that is just in Iraq. And that is just in the 3 years of 2005, 2006, and 2007. So what about the other services and what about Afghanistan? So this naturally leads me to question whether there could be hundreds of additional investigations going on about contractor personnel--specifically in the ones that have come to us, it was the contractor KBR--and it suggests that perhaps there could be many assaults that have not been investigated at all. And because the inspector general's office would not provide information on the disposition of these investigations, it certainly is unclear whether there has been any prosecution of these within the military or the criminal justice systems, or whether it has been dealt with administratively. Now, one of my Florida constituents was, and I will use the word advisedly, allegedly sexually battered in Iraq in 2005. And although the Naval Criminal Investigative Service was supposed to be investigating her case, they will not even say anything about the basic matters of the case because, the Navy says: Law enforcement records are exempt from disclosure at the time requested if it can be reasonably expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings. I think we in this Congress, we in the Senate, and those of us on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, certainly have an obligation to investigate. Because cases such as this can languish far too long without any information from the Government coming forth in order to protect these individuals. So I have asked that our office follow up with the Defense Department, with the following detailed questions: The actual numbers of the sexual assault cases reported since 2001 in Afghanistan and since 2003 in Iraq and the disposition of each case. I have asked to have the information of the service components or the Government agencies involved in each resulting investigation. I have asked for the status of the persons involved in each case--in other words, I want to know whether they are Active military, U.S. Government civilian employees, contractor employees or are they an Iraqi or Afghani national. I have asked for an explanation of the U.S. jurisdiction or the investigative authority for sexual assault allegations in both those areas in which we are engaged--Iraq and Afghanistan. And I have asked for a clear explanation of the rules, regulations, policies, and processes under which sexual assaults are investigated, evidence is obtained, and responsible individuals are held accountable. I have also asked [[Page S951]] for a clear explanation of how the Department of Defense divides authority among all its various investigative arms in these sexual assault cases. I have had to ask these questions because DOD and the Department of State have not been forthcoming. Yet what is being told by some of these assault victims is absolutely horrifying. For example: One female contractor employee, during cocktail conversation, suddenly, totally, passed out. Apparently, her drink had been spiked. She awoke to find out she had been assaulted many times. Upon seeing a military doctor, in fact, that was confirmed and the rape kit was prepared. But when the rape kit was turned over to the contractor, it amazingly disappeared. The evidence disappeared. That contract employee then, upon asking questions, was locked in a container and could not get out of the container to go and tell her story to other personnel of her contractor, and she only got out because she was able to persuade someone to let her use a cell phone to call her father back in the United States. That is how she got out of her confinement. Now, if all of that is true, there is simply no excuse for this. But what we need to determine is the truth. It is a shame that the senior Senator from Florida has to come to the floor of the Senate to elevate this issue in order to say to the Department of Defense and the Department of State that we want the answers to our questions. I have asked the questions. I expect, on behalf of the Congress of the United States, that we will get the answers. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time during the quorum be equally divided between the two sides. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cardin). Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mrs. FEINSTEIN. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 5 minutes. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mrs. FEINSTEIN. I spoke earlier this morning, so I will be brief. It would appear that the Senate is poised to pass a measure that would end the debate over torture in our Nation. It would require the CIA to follow the Army Field Manual when it comes to interrogations of detainees, and it would create a uniform standard for interrogation across the Government. It would prohibit waterboarding and certain other coercive interrogation techniques. I deeply believe it will go a long way toward restoring our Nation's credibility. I have spoken with experts on interrogation, numerous retired three and four star generals, and human rights leaders. From our discussions, I am absolutely convinced that we must have a uniform standard for interrogation of detainees across the Government. That is what putting the CIA under the Army Field Manual would do. This debate is about values. We are a nation of values, and we believe in the rule of law. It is fair to say that America has been diminished around the world. Our standing is at an all-time low, not only among our allies but also our enemies. This comes from Abu Ghraib. It comes from Guantanamo. It comes from renditions, and it comes from black sites. It comes from waterboarding, a technique used during the Spanish Inquisition to get religious dissenters to publicly disavow their beliefs. Let me give one example of why a clear, single standard for all detainee interrogation is needed. Until a couple of weeks ago, the executive branch refused to admit that it had waterboarded anyone. Then last week, at a public hearing, General Hayden stated that the CIA has waterboarded three detainees: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al- Nashiri, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. General Hayden said this was done in the past and would not be used in the future. In fact, General Hayden said that waterboarding itself was no longer necessary. These were two major revelations. The U.S. Government had, in fact, authorized waterboarding, and we weren't going to do it again. The very next day, a White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said the President could reauthorize the use of waterboarding at any time. At this point, we had returned to a state of confusion. The CIA was saying waterboarding was not authorized and not needed. The White House was saying waterboarding was still on the table. That was not the end. The very next day, General Hayden testified in open session again, this time in front of the House Intelligence Committee. Here is what he said: In my own view, the view of my lawyers and the Department of Justice, it is not certain that that technique-- Meaning waterboarding-- would be considered lawful under current statute. . . . So here you have a mix of views. Here you have unclear American policy. The bill which we have before us today clears up that confusion, and it states once and for all what the U.S. Government would do; that there would be 19 specific approaches documented over many pages for each approach in this volume, and 8 specific techniques that are banned, one of which is waterboarding. So we have the opportunity today to take a stand--to clear the air and to say that the U.S. Government follows uniform specific standards for interrogation of detainees as put forward by the Army Field Manual. I would like to quote a statement the President of the United States--President Bush--made on June 22, 2004. Here is his quote: We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being. President Bush, if you stand by these words, you will sign this intelligence authorization bill. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, how much time do I have left out of the 5 minutes? The PRESIDING OFFICER. A minute and a half. Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, if I may, I very much would like to thank a few people who have been very helpful in this whole thing. The first is David Grannis, my intelligence liaison, who has been with me all the way. I thank the Partnership for a Secure America and the 18 former national security officials who wrote in support of the Army Field Manual. I thank Senators Hagel and Snowe for taking a stand for what is right for America in the Intelligence Committee. I thank our chairman, Senator Rockefeller, for being willing to risk the passage of this legislation by supporting this very important amendment. I also thank Senator Whitehouse. He offered this amendment when it was in the Senate Intelligence Committee. I thank him for his tireless efforts in support of this conference report. I have seen him on the Senate floor at least twice today. He was a cosponsor of the amendment I offered in the conference, and I know his staff has been very effective in working on this amendment. I thank Senator Tom Carper of Delaware who has done a lot of work on this issue on the telephone. I thank my colleague and friend, Senator Ron Wyden, who came earlier to the floor to speak on this issue. So there have been many people working toward this vote, and it looks as if it may just happen. I would like them to know that we are very grateful for their support. Oh, one more: Senator Feingold. Senator Feingold was a cosponsor [[Page S952]] when I offered the amendment in the Intelligence Committee. I very much thank him for his steadfastness. Mr. President, I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican whip. Mr. KYL. Mr. President, we are going to be voting in about an hour or so on the conference report on the Intelligence Authorization Act. I would like to explain briefly the reasons I think we should vote against that reauthorization. There are two primary reasons. First has to do with the additional provision that was passed neither by the House nor by the Senate but was dropped into the conference report without Republican involvement; that is, the provision that Senator Feinstein authored that would substitute for the authority that agencies of the United States currently have--agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency--to interrogate foreign terrorists. It would substitute for the current rules under which they operate the U.S. Army Field Manual. The U.S. Army Field Manual is a document that is prepared for use for all of our military Armed Forces, to provide rules of the road for them in interrogating enemy prisoners of war. So when they capture someone on the battlefield, in order to ensure that the Geneva Conventions are adhered to, there is a set of guidelines set out in the Army Field Manual that very explicitly explain to our soldiers exactly how they need to treat these prisoners and what kind of interrogation in which they can engage. A couple of years ago, when the Congress and the administration got together and revised our procedures and the statute dealing with this subject, the explicit decision was made to not have the Army Field Manual govern the interrogations by other Government agencies. That was a wise decision then, and it is a wise decision now. There are reasons the U.S. Army would want to have a set of rules for soldiers capturing enemies on the battlefield. But there is quite a different situation presented when you have captured a terrorist and you want to interrogate that terrorist and you have at your disposal Central Intelligence Agency trained personnel or other special personnel who are trained in interrogation techniques that comply with the Geneva Conventions accords, are not torture, are authorized by law, but may be outside the particular scope of the Army Field Manual. This is a gross oversimplification, but for people to generally appreciate what I am talking about, you have all seen movies where a prisoner of war is captured, and they say: Give me your name, rank, and serial number, and that is pretty much all an enemy soldier is required to provide. You cannot torture them to get them to tell you anything beyond those three pieces of information, and that is as it should be. Interestingly, our terrorist adversaries know well the Army Field Manual, and if they are captured as enemy POWs on the battle ground by U.S. Army personnel, they know precisely what kind of interrogation to expect. In fact, we know they are trained on how to resist the interrogation techniques and not provide information. It would be a horrible mistake for us to assume that the techniques that are appropriate for Army battlefield capture interrogation should apply as well to situations in which a CIA person is interrogating a terrorist-- someone who is not fighting for another country in a uniform captured on the battlefield. That is the essence of the Feinstein proposal, and it is one of the reasons the President has made it very clear that were this conference report to pass, he will veto the bill; indeed, he should. There are other reasons for the President's decision to veto the bill as well. Let me just mention a couple of them. One of the things that relates to this interrogation matter is a requirement in the bill that a report to Congress must be made of the identity of each and every official who has determined that any interrogation method complies with specific Federal statutes, why the official reached the conclusion, and the related legal advice of the Department of Justice. This may seem benign on the surface but, I submit, is in the nature of harassment of officials who are trying to make decisions about the application of law. They come to judgments. They advise the people who are asking for the advice, and then action is taken on that basis. If Congress needs a report every time a Government official makes a decision, clearly that agency cannot function. Secondly, there are too many opportunities for second guessing, too much of an incentive for the people who are doing the work we ask them to do to not make any decisions, not engage in that work because they might make a mistake. This is exactly the kind of ethos we do not want in our intelligence community. Another requirement of the bill is the creation of another inspector general. We already have inspectors general for each of the elements of the intelligence community, but there would be a new one under the DNI. But his primary responsibility would be to report to Congress rather than the DNI. There are other requirements for reports that have already occupied far too much attention of our intelligence community. There are requirements for congressional confirmation of several new positions, positions that currently do not require congressional confirmation because they are not political offices. It is the head of the NRO, for example, the head of NSA. These are agencies that have been peopled with professionals, people who do not have anything to do with politics. They should not have to come to the Senate and get grilled by Senators--more importantly, Senators who then might hold them up. You have heard about the holds Senators place on nominees. I do not know how many executive nominees and judges we have waiting confirmation by the Senate right now, but there are a lot. What happens is, because Senator X does not like the administration's position on something, they decide to put a hold on an important executive branch nominee. As a result, too many positions are vacant today because of unrelated holds by Senators. It just presents the Senate with an additional way to hold up action on people, in effect, to blackmail an administration into doing what it wants. There are a variety of other problems the President has pointed to in this legislation that will require the President to veto it. But I want to conclude by simply saying that a great deal of credit goes to Senators Rockefeller and Bond for their work in trying to create an authorization bill for the intelligence community against great odds. There is a lot of disagreement among people on the Intelligence Committee itself, as well as others in this body, about what ought to be done, and they came to, in effect, an agreement that except for the Feinstein proposal--that, as I said, was added in the conference; it was not passed by either the Senate or the House--they came to an agreement on a bill that Senator Bond has described as pretty effective. Hopefully, with the President now indicating he will veto the legislation over the provisions I have identified, and some others, the other side will recognize it is important to fix those problems, clean it up, get a bill back to the President he can sign, and we can move forward. FISA Now, the last thing, Mr. President, I want to do is change the subject very slightly because we just had a conversation with the President, who reiterated his deep concern about the apparent unwillingness of the House of Representatives to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act so that we can engage in intelligence collection against this country's worst enemies: al-Qaida and other terrorists. This body, with a vote of 68 to 29--a very bipartisan vote--agreed on a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization for a period of 6 years. The key feature of it--different from the current law--is retroactive immunity for those telecommunications companies that might have assisted the United States in gathering this intelligence. That was following the Intelligence Committee's work--again, great work; 13 to 2 was the vote in the Intelligence Committee, bipartisan--supporting that legislation. It has now been sent to the House of Representatives. All the House of Representatives needs to do is to take this bill, which has bipartisan support in the Senate, pass it, and send it to the President for his signature. [[Page S953]] The President's point, just a few moments ago, to us was it would be an abdication of responsibility for the Congress not to accomplish this result before it leaves on a recess on Friday. This intelligence collection is critical to the security of the United States. The point of the most recent legislation is to provide retroactive liability protection for those companies that have aided the United States pursuant to its request. In effect, what happened was the President and the Attorney General requested various telecommunications companies to help us collect electronic information on people we have targeted as necessary for collection purposes. They did not have to do it. They volunteered to help us. They understood the threat to the United States and, like any good citizen would do when called upon by the Commander in Chief, they agreed to assist. Now, some of them have been sued. They are, of course, accountable to their boards of directors who have a responsibility under Federal law to protect shareholder interests. What some of these companies are finding is an increasing difficulty of assisting the United States and continuing to stay in business. They have their own business responsibilities. They have to engage in activities both in this country and in other countries sometimes. They have to get customers. They have to make business agreements with other parties. When too many other folks say: We don't want to do business with you because of the potential that you are going to be sued or that you have been sued, and then there is the question of whether we are going to be drawn into all that, then it makes it impossible for those companies to assist the United States. The point is this: There is an increasing concern that some of these companies are not going to be able to provide this assistance to us if we don't solve this retroactive immunity issue. Some people have said: Well, we will simply temporarily extend the existing law. The reason that doesn't solve the problem is because the existing law doesn't provide that retroactive immunity. That is the point of this legislation, and if this legislation doesn't provide that retroactive immunity pretty soon, there could well come a point in time when we don't have any telecommunications companies left doing this work for us to matter. Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, will the Senator yield? Mr. KYL. I am delighted to yield to the Senator from Virginia. Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I am delighted the Senator from Arizona brought this up because I have participated in a number of debates with our distinguished colleague from Missouri. What we always have to remind our colleagues of, as well as the American public, is that these companies have volunteered. They are not in this for a profit motive. There is some compensation for expenses. They are not unlike the men and women of the Armed Forces, all of whom today are in uniform because they raised their right arm and volunteered. We cannot ask these companies to subject themselves to the uncertainty and the threats associated with legal processes. We are going to lose a very important component of what I call the American spirit: voluntarism. Whether it is in the corporate world, whether it is in the Armed Forces or any other number of activities, we are a Nation known for people who step forward and volunteer. This is a clear example of how these companies cannot continue under the situation that persists today, because the directors of those companies, their corporate boards, have an obligation to their stockholders. It is a stretch to say to the stockholders, who are part of the voluntarism they are doing to serve the cause of freedom in the United States, that they should be subjected to a lot of court suits. So I appreciate the Senator bringing this up. It is important. We have to remind our colleagues about it. I am proud of what this Chamber did. They voted it through, very clearly. Mr. KYL. Madam President, if I could say to the Senator from Virginia, I hadn't thought of putting it quite the way he did. He is, exactly right. We have thousands of young men and women who volunteer to serve their country. What would we think if part of that service means getting sued by somebody? Wouldn't we provide them protection from those kinds of lawsuits? Obviously, we would. The companies that serve us every day when we pick up the phone to make a phone call--we want them to be there to help us--they step forward when the President asks them to volunteer to serve their country, at no profit, as the Senator makes clear, and then they get sued and we are not willing to provide protection to them. Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I couldn't agree more. Furthermore, the service they are doing by virtue of this voluntarism directly contributes to the safety and the welfare of the men and women in the Armed Forces who are engaged in harm's way beyond our shores. Mr. KYL. Madam President, that is another very good point. Mr. WARNER. At this point, we have about run out of time, and I wish to say a few words about the pending matter. Mr. KYL. Let me conclude these remarks then. The key point I am trying to make is we have related activities. We have the Intelligence Authorization bill on the floor, but we also have a couple of days before this recess to see that the great work the Senate did is adopted by the House of Representatives so the President can sign it. Having just come from the White House, the President asked us to please convey his sense of concern for the people of this country, for the security of those soldiers whom we sent to do a mission, if we can't get good intelligence on this terrorist enemy, and the only way-- the best way we can do that is through the interception of these communications. It cannot be done if there are no telecommunications companies willing to assist us. There could well come a point in time when, because we haven't done our job of providing them liability protection, there is nobody there to provide the help to us. So I thank the Senator from Virginia, and again I get back to my original point, which was I hope that in a few moments, knowing the President is going to veto this piece of legislation, we will support his position and vote no on the authorization conference report. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Klobuchar). The Senator from Virginia has 23 minutes remaining. Mr. WARNER. Fine. That is under the control of the distinguished Senator from Missouri, and I will ask for such time as I may need at this point. I have always considered myself, here in the Senate, to be most fortunate for the various assignments I have had through this being my 30th year. There have been periods when I have served on the Intelligence Committee. I was once the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee. Then, fortunately, I was selected to go back on the Intelligence Committee several years ago. It has been a part of my overall service to the Senate, and indeed to the Nation, to be on that committee. I was at first introduced to the world of intelligence in 1969 when I was fortunate enough to go to the U.S. Department of Defense at the Pentagon and serve the Navy, first as Under Secretary and then Secretary. So I have actively been involved in the work of the intelligence community for some many years. I am greatly concerned that we have before us today a piece of legislation which, even though a member of the committee and even though I worked with my colleagues to frame this legislation, I will have to vote against because of the actions that took place in the conference committee where an out-of-scope provision was put in--for the best of intentions, I am sure, but it wasn't carefully thought through, in my judgment, because this provision would say that henceforth, the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have to conduct their interrogation procedures in accordance with the Army Field Manual. I was privileged again to be one of a group of a small number of Senators who, in the year 2005, worked on the Detainee Act and then subsequently, in 2006, worked on other legislation to try to delineate carefully the responsibilities of various agencies and departments of our Government as it related to the all-important collection of our intelligence and a part of that collection procedure being the interrogation [[Page S954]] of detainees. Now, we decided, after a lot of careful deliberation of the 2005 act, that we would restrict that to the men and women in the Armed Forces. There was a very good reason for that. In the course of our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, detainees came into the possession of our field forces, operating in combat conditions most of the times when these detainees were caught, and relatively, so to speak, while the military people are magnificently trained throughout their careers to deal with these situations of combat and the like, very few of them have had the opportunity to get into the profession of interrogation. In order to give them the protection they needed in performing interrogation at what we call the field and tactical level, it was important to draw up this act and to prescribe very clearly for the men and women in uniform--I repeat that: only for the men and women in uniform--very clearly the procedures they must follow to accord the values of our framework of laws, the fact that this is not a nation that stands for torture, and to also give them protection in the event that somehow they were challenged in a court of law, be it a military court or other courts, as to their performance by virtue of their interrogating activities of certain detainees. So there were many reasons to put it all down and say that this is the Army Field Manual, prescribe the authorized techniques, and therefore allow the men and women of the Armed Forces to continue their operations militarily, tactically, and to follow that field manual in such instances where it is necessary to interrogate detainees. But in the course of that debate--and understandably and I think quite properly--attention was given to whether we should have this type of procedure applicable to all the Government agencies and departments of our Federal Government. The decision was made, and the answer was no--not quickly, no; it was a deliberate no reached after a lot of careful consideration--that this Detainee Act should be for the purpose of our military people, and we purposely did not include the CIA and the FBI. As time evolved into 2006, when we had that legislation, once again we reiterated we would not include either the CIA or the DIA and then in any way at that time legislate their program, other than to say that the conduct of the CIA program and the FBI program has to be in total compliance with all the laws of our land, which in no way sanctioned abusive treatment, torture or those sorts of things. It is not a part of it. Furthermore, that both the procedures by the CIA and the FBI had to be in compliance with the treaties, the treaty obligations we have, particularly article 3, common article 3, which has been debated so carefully on the floor of the Senate. So, in effect, what we have before us momentarily in this vote is overruling the decisions that were made by this body in the context of drawing up those two statutes, one in 2005 and one in 2006. So I, for that reason, feel very strongly that I cannot support this. I think it has been indicated that the President doesn't support it and that if this were to arrive at his desk, in all probability, we would have a veto, and that would be regrettable because a lot of work has been put into this bill. There are portions of it that the distinguished Senator from Arizona, Mr. Kyl, talked about which hopefully can be corrected. But we need an Intelligence bill. We have marvelous staff in the Senate and others who work on this problem of legislation year after year, and we are long overdue to have an Intelligence bill. It is unfortunate that in the last throes of the legislative process, in a conference, this provision, which we clearly know to be out of scope, was put into the bill, and it is for that reason that I will have to oppose the bill. There is another reason I would have to oppose it, and that is that the Army Field Manual, again, was for the military, but it is a manual. Certainly, under the current way it is framed and put together in the law, a manual can be changed. So while there are some 19 techniques that are detailed as approved for the use of our troops in the field and elsewhere, who is to say they couldn't add some more and that at that point Congress is not involved. So I am not sure people thought through the technical aspects of this thing, and to me, it is a very unwise decision. But I wish to reiterate to our colleagues that by virtue of taking the stance I take--and I presume a goodly number of individuals will join in this, unfortunately, and vote against this bill--this is not to say, in any way, that we are sanctioning that the Agency, the CIA, employ techniques which are in any way constituted as abusive treatment of human beings or torture or degrading. All of that is carefully spelled out in the framework of the laws of 2005 and 2006, and it cannot be done by the agency, nor the FBI--nor are they doing it. The Intelligence Committee has had a series of hearings. We have had the DNI, the Director of the CIA, the head of the FBI, and all of them have been carefully questioned and are on record saying that these procedures, which would be tantamount and antithetical to our laws of 2005 and 2006 are not employed now, and they will not be in the future. It is for that reason that I will have to oppose this bill. I urge my colleagues to do likewise because we will be taking away from the agencies the ability to perform a very limited number of interrogations, a very limited number--but they do them in an entirely different framework of circumstances, environment, than does the Army or other military members of our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps under the Army Field Manual. The techniques applied by the CIA are in compliance with the laws, but they are not all written up so that a detainee knows full well that if they are apprehended, they will be subjected to the interrogation procedures of the agencies; he would know all about it if it is written up as it is in the Army Field Manual. That would take away a good deal of the psychological impact of highly skilled interrogating procedures. We are about to throw those away, abandon them. This is a very dangerous and complex world. I sometimes think, in the course of this political campaign, as I listen to my good friends-- three of them Members of this Chamber--vying for the Presidency of the United States, the awesome framework of complex situations that is going to face the next President of the United States. I must say, I have a few years behind me, and I have seen a good bit of history in this country, but never before has the next President, whoever it may be--never before have they faced such an awesome, complex situation in the world that is so fraught with hatred and terrorism and threats to the basic freedoms of our Nation and many other nations. It is going to be a real challenge for that next President to shoulder the responsibilities of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States. And this set of procedures that we presently have in place, which complies with the law of our land, which complies with international treaties, must be left intact to enable the Intelligence Committee to conduct their interrogations and do so to produce facts which could very well save this Nation and facts that are, every day, helping to save the men and women of the Armed Forces in uniform wherever they are in the world--primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan--as they pursue their courageous responsibilities on behalf of us here at home. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri is recognized. Mr. BOND. Madam President, I believe it is important to clear up for the record, for the benefit of my colleagues and the American people, some statements that were made earlier today about waterboarding, interrogation techniques and the Army Field Manual. During the House and Senate conference for the fiscal year 2008 intelligence authorization bill, an amendment--section 327--was adopted that would prevent any element of the intelligence community from using any interrogation technique not authorized by the Army Field Manual. Earlier today, we heard that the full membership of the conference committee, the full membership of the House Intelligence Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee all came to the conclusion that all interrogations should be conducted within the terms of the U.S. Army Field Manual. [[Page S955]] Let's be clear: this particular amendment only passed by a one-vote margin. The conference was sharply divided on this issue, as reflected by the fact that no House Republicans signed the conference report and only two Senate Republicans signed the report. The problem with this provision is not that it says that interrogators cannot use certain techniques. Most of the techniques prohibited by the field manual are so repugnant that I think we can all agree they should never be used. In fact, this vote is not about torture, and it is not about waterboarding. We all think that torture is repugnant. And whether one believes that waterboarding is torture is really irrelevant because waterboarding is not in the CIA's interrogation program. The problem is that the provision in the conference report establishes a very limited set of techniques, and these are the only techniques that any interrogator may use. So the vote is really about whether the FBI and CIA should be restricted to a set of 19 unclassified techniques, designed for the Army, which have not been examined fully by some agencies. If this legislation passes and is signed into law, all of us need to understand fully that FBI and CIA interrogators may only use the 19 techniques authorized in the field manual. And all of us need to understand that no one can say for sure that this will not impact our future intelligence collection. As CIA Director Hayden has said: ``I don't know of anyone who has looked at the Army Field Manual who could make the claim that what's contained in there exhausts the universe of lawful interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Convention.'' If we are going to demand that all Government agencies must use only these techniques, we must make sure that the field manual does not leave out other moral and legal techniques needed by these agencies. And I don't believe that the Intelligence Committee has adequately pursued this issue. Having a single interrogation standard does not account for the significant differences in why and how intelligence is collected by the military, CIA, and FBI. Much has been made of the FBI saying that they do not use coercive techniques. That is accurate. The FBI operates in a different world-- where confessions are usually admitted into evidence during a prosecution. This means that they have to satisfy standards of voluntariness that do not bind either the military or the CIA. But significant concerns have been raised about whether the FBI would even be able to conduct ordinary interrogations using only those techniques authorized by the field manual. A time-honored technique, one that has led to countless successful prosecutions, is deception--for example, telling a suspect that his associate has confessed even though the associate has refused to cooperate. But, it's unclear where this type of deception is authorized in the field manual. So, under this amendment, the FBI could be barred from using this simple, yet invaluable, technique. FBI lawyers have told us that they need more time to conduct a full legal review of the field manual and determine along with their counterintelligence and counterterrorism divisions what impact using only the field manual would have on interrogations. We should give them time to do this review before we pass a bill that could severely undermine their interrogation practices. Aside from these concerns, the Army Field Manual on Interrogation was designed as a training document. It is changeable, which means the Congress--and the CIA and FBI have no idea what techniques may be added--or subtracted--tomorrow, next month, or next year. A moving document is not a sound basis for good legislation. There are also practical consequences to applying this unclassified military training manual to civilian agencies; as we heard earlier, having one standard that can be publicly judged by the entire world. We are talking about intelligence interrogations. We should not broadcast to the world, to our enemies, exactly what techniques our intelligence professionals may use when seeking information from terrorists. The wide availability of the field manual on the internet makes it almost certain that al-Qaida is training its operatives to resist the authorized techniques. Supporters of this provision also argue that the Army Field Manual gives interrogators sufficient flexibility to shape the interrogation. Yet, some of the techniques in the field manual are allowed only if the interrogator obtains permission from ``the first O-6 in the interrogator's chain of command.'' What that means is that an interrogator has to get permission from an Army or Marine Corps colonel or a Navy captain before proceeding. So in order to have any flexibility, will the CIA and FBI have to bring colonels and captains to all of their interrogations? These interrogations will get awfully crowded pretty quickly. We have been told that the field manual incorporates the Golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do to unto you is an admirable standard. But when dealing with terrorists who have shown no regard for morality, humanity, and decency, it is somewhat out of place. Do we really expect that if we restrict ourselves to techniques in the Field Manual that al-Qaida will do the same? While we are arguing about whether waterboarding is torture, they are chopping off heads and using women and children to conduct their suicide bombings. Now, I am not suggesting that we resort to their barbaric tactics. I am simply saying that we should not base this important decision that will bind all of our intelligence interrogations on the hope that al-Qaida will discover civility. Let me also clarify a comment from our distinguished committee chairman about the interrogation of Ibn Shaykh al-Libi. It was suggested that al-Libi lied to interrogators because of the CIA's ``coercive'' techniques. However, al-Libi was not in CIA custody--or foreign custody for that matter--when he made claims about Iraq training al-Qaida members in poisons and gases. In fact, it was only when al-Libi was interviewed by CIA officers that he recanted his earlier statements. I believe we still have a lot of work to do before we impose restrictions on CIA and FBI interrogations that could have severe consequences for our intelligence collection. Now, I want to make clear what my position is here today. For the past several months, I have worked hard to put together a reasonable bill that allows the Intelligence Committees to conduct necessary oversight, while cognizant of the administration's concerns about resources and executive branch prerogatives. I understand that no administration likes oversight. But oversight is essential to what Congress does: We have an obligation to the taxpayers to make laws and appropriate funds responsibly. And in order to do this, we have to know how the money is being spent and what activities are being conducted. I have reviewed closely the Statement of Administration Policy on this bill and I am confident that we have addressed or resolved all but one of the concerns listed there. One provision remains that merits a veto and that is the amendment before us: the Army Field Manual interrogation techniques. At the end of the day, if this provision is removed, I will support this bill. But in its current form, I cannot support it and I urge my colleagues to vote against the conference report. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from Virginia, who has played the lead in so many things, such as the Detainee Treatment Act and other major pieces of legislation, for his very thoughtful discussion of these issues. It has been very troubling to me to hear on the floor today some things about what the CIA does that are absolutely not true. We have heard all kinds of descriptions of techniques that are barred by the Army Field Manual. The techniques barred by the Army Field Manual, the horrors that were outlined, are not tactics the CIA uses. They do not use them. They would probably violate the Geneva Conventions and many other laws, which absolutely do cover interrogations by the CIA. When one raises the spectrum that the CIA may be torturing detainees, No. 1, it is not true; No. 2, for those who know what is going on, it is irresponsible; No. 3, it is the kind of thing [[Page S956]] that fuels the media of our enemies. I would not be surprised to see some of these comments reported in Al-Jazeera. What happened at Abu Ghraib was tragic. There were criminal acts by American troops. We punished them, but nobody talks about the fact that we punished them and sent them to prison. They went to the brig, as they should. Now we have heard discussions attributing to the CIA all manner of activities that are wrong, improper, not usable, and are not used. I think it is important we clear the record. I wish some of the people who know better would say I didn't mean to say that the CIA does these things, because the people on the Intelligence Committee know precisely what is done and what is not done. Mr. WARNER. Will the Senator yield for a moment? Mr. BOND. I am happy to. Mr. WARNER. As a Senator from Virginia, I am proud to have the CIA principal office in my State. I have been working with them for 30- some-odd years. I have gotten to know many of them through the years. They are not people who would set out to violate the laws of our Nation. They are just like you and me. They have families and the same values we share in the Senate and in our neighborhoods. They do go abroad and assume an awful lot of personal risk on a number of missions. But in terms of following the laws of our Nation, and the international laws, I think they stand head and shoulders, and they are to be commended. Mr. BOND. Madam President, I thank my distinguished colleague from Virginia. He is one of the real experts in this body on military and intelligence affairs. I can tell you that having talked with General Hayden and the other top officers of the Agency, getting to know Attorney General Mike Mukasey and those other responsible, high- principled officials who are overseeing it, it is not a danger that we are going to see torture or inhumane or degrading treatment used. Now, again, during the House-Senate conference for the fiscal year 2008 Intelligence authorization bill, an amendment--section 327--was adopted that would prevent any element of the intelligence community from using an interrogation technique not authorized by the Army Field Manual. Earlier today, it was stated on the floor that the full membership of the conference committee, the full membership of the House Intelligence Committee, and the Senate Intelligence Committee came to the conclusion that interrogations should be conducted within the terms of the U.S. Army Field Manual. Let me be particularly clear that this amendment only passed by a one-vote margin. The conference was sharply divided on the issue, as reflected by the fact that no House Republicans signed the conference report and only two Senate Republicans signed the report. The problem with this provision is not that it says the interrogators cannot use certain techniques. Most of the techniques prohibited by the Army Field Manual are so repugnant that I think we can all agree they should not be and would never be used. In fact, this vote is not about torture or about waterboarding. Despite what you have heard on the floor, it is not about waterboarding. Torture is repugnant. We have stated that time and time again--in the Detainee Treatment Act and in other laws we passed. Whether one believes it is torture is irrelevant because waterboarding is not in the CIA's interrogation program. The problem is the provision in the conference report establishes a very limited set of techniques, and these are the only techniques any interrogator may use. So the vote is about whether the FBI and CIA should be restricted to a set of 19 unclassified techniques, designed for the Army, which have not been examined fully by some agencies. I say ``19 unclassified techniques'' because those techniques not only have been published widely, but they are included in al-Qaida training manuals. So the al-Qaida high-value leaders--the people with the information--know precisely what it is all about. If this legislation passes, and were it to be signed into law--which all of us know it will not--we all need to understand fully that the FBI and CIA interrogators may only use the 19 techniques authorized in the field manual. According to the field manual, they would have to get a clearance from an OC-6, a military officer. That was designed for the military, not for the CIA, not for the FBI. When my distinguished colleague from Virginia passed the Detainee Treatment Act, he and the Senator from Arizona, Senator McCain, expressly left the CIA out of the limitations to the Army Field Manual. As CIA Director Michael Hayden has said: I don't know anyone who has looked at the Army Field Manual who could make the claim that what's contained in there exhausts the universe of lawful interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Conventions. He described a whole area of techniques. There are a whole group of techniques that we use on the volunteers who join our Marines, Special Forces, our SEALs, our pilots, which I described earlier today. Many tactics are far more difficult to withstand than the techniques that are used by the CIA in its interrogation. If we are going to demand that all Government agencies must use only these techniques, we must make sure the Army Field Manual doesn't leave out other moral and legal techniques needed by these agencies. I don't believe the Intelligence Committee has adequately pursued this issue. How many of those techniques do we want to publish so our al-Qaida targets will know how to resist them? Having a single interrogation standard does not account for the significant differences in why and how intelligence is collected by the military, CIA and FBI, and from whom it is collected. Much has been made of the FBI saying they do not use coercive techniques. That is accurate. The FBI operates in a different world-- where confessions are usually admitted into evidence during a prosecution. This means they have to satisfy standards of voluntariness that do not bind either the military or CIA. When they question somebody, they are trying to stop a terrorist attack from happening in the future. They are in the field. The FBI is investigating a crime that has been committed in the hopes of punishing those people. There are significant concerns about whether the FBI would even be able to conduct ordinary interrogations using the techniques in the Army Field Manual. A time-honored technique, one that has led to countless successful prosecutions, is deception--for example, telling a suspect that his associate has confessed even though the associate has refused to cooperate. But as I read the Army Field Manual, I don't see that that is authorized. So under this amendment, the FBI could be barred from using this simple, yet invaluable, technique. FBI lawyers have told us they need more time to conduct a full legal review of the Army Field Manual to determine, along with their counterintelligence and counterterrorism divisions, what impact using only the field manual would have on interrogations. We should give them time to do this review before we pass a bill that could severely undermine their interrogation practices. Aside from these concerns, the Army Field Manual on Interrogation was designed as a training document. It is changeable, which means the Congress--and the CIA and FBI--has no idea what techniques may be added or subtracted tomorrow, next month or next year. Are we really ready in this body to define something as a standard, a changing field manual? When do we ever do that, saying everybody has to follow the Army Field Manual, and the Army Field Manual can be changed when and if it is ready. There are practical consequences. The unclassified military training level is not applicable to questioning high-value detainees. This is, I suggest, a very bad measure. I believe the bill without this amendment would have been a very good one. I cannot urge my colleagues to vote for it. The PRESIDING OFFICER. All time has expired. The question is on agreeing to the conference report to accompany H.R. 2082. Mr. WARNER. Have the yeas and nays been ordered? The PRESIDING OFFICER. They have not been ordered. [[Page S957]] Mr. WARNER. I ask for the yeas and nays. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second? There appears to be a sufficient second. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk called the roll. Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from New York (Mrs. Clinton), the Senator from Missouri (Mrs. McCaskill), and the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Obama) are necessarily absent. Mr. KYL. The following Sentor is necessarily absent: the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham) would have voted ``nay.'' The result was announced--yeas 51, nays 45, as follows: [Rollcall Vote No. 22 Leg.] YEAS--51 Akaka Baucus Bayh Biden Bingaman Boxer Brown Byrd Cantwell Cardin Carper Casey Collins Conrad Dodd Dorgan Durbin Feingold Feinstein Hagel Harkin Inouye Johnson Kennedy Kerry Klobuchar Kohl Landrieu Lautenberg Leahy Levin Lincoln Lugar Menendez Mikulski Murray Nelson (FL) Pryor Reed Reid Rockefeller Salazar Sanders Schumer Smith Snowe Stabenow Tester Webb Whitehouse Wyden NAYS--45 Alexander Allard Barrasso Bennett Bond Brownback Bunning Burr Chambliss Coburn Cochran Coleman Corker Cornyn Craig Crapo DeMint Dole Domenici Ensign Enzi Grassley Gregg Hatch Hutchison Inhofe Isakson Kyl Lieberman Martinez McCain McConnell Murkowski Nelson (NE) Roberts Sessions Shelby Specter Stevens Sununu Thune Vitter Voinovich Warner Wicker NOT VOTING--4 Clinton Graham McCaskill Obama The conference report was agreed to. Mr. REID. Madam President, I move to reconsider vote. Mr. LEAHY. I move to lay that motion on the table. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. ____________________