Motion to Discharge--S.J. Res. 54

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, there was a classified briefing this morning that Members of the Senate were invited to on a bipartisan basis, Democrats and Republicans. It is rare. We don't do it very often. We do it when there is an important issue of national security and something else of great moment.

What we came to discuss today was Saudi Arabia, and that discussion really focused on our guests--the Secretary of State, Mr. Pompeo, and the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Mattis. They talked to us about our relationship with Saudi Arabia, for obvious reasons. Hardly anyone in the world could have missed what happened over the last several weeks when a man named Khashoggi went into the consulate for Saudi Arabia in Istanbul and never came out.

We have a videotape that shows the Saudi citizen and American resident entering that building. For the longest time, there was a debate as to what actually happened to him. All sorts of stories were manufactured and fabricated. It turned out that the Turks had access to audio recordings of what actually happened inside that consulate. They eventually made them public, released them to the Government of Saudi Arabia as well as to the United States, and we came to learn that Mr. Khashoggi, a frequent critic of the Saudi royal family, was murdered. He walked into that consulate and never walked out alive. Some group flew in from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, ambushed him, killed him, and, as hard it may be to believe, brought with them a bone saw so they could dismember him and take parts of his body out to be destroyed and buried somewhere in Turkey.

That story eventually emerged, and President Trump was confronted repeatedly: What are we going to do about this?

Saudi Arabia is supposed to be one of our allies. We have arms agreements with them. We are involved in a lot of things relative to energy and national security. For the longest time, the President was dismissive, saying: I have spoken to the royal family, and they have denied they had anything to do with it.

Well, that excuse worked for a while but not very long. Once the recordings were released by the Turks, once the world came to grips with what actually happened to Mr. Khashoggi, serious questions were raised about this outrageous abuse of human rights at the hands of the Saudi regime.

There is a lot of speculation back and forth about who ordered it and who knew about it. Those questions may never be answered. But we do know that some 15 to 17 people close to the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia have been implicated to the point where the Trump administration finally acknowledged that we have to do something. We have to take a stand even when it involves a country that has been our ally in many circumstances.

If you read the history of Saudi Arabia's relationship with the United States, it has a lot to do with oil. For the longest time, we counted on the Middle East for oil. We looked the other way. We helped them, and they made a fortune in the process. The opulence of the royalty in Saudi Arabia rivals any royalty in the modern world, and the lavish lifestyles of the Saudi princes as they travel around the world has been well documented.

The United States has looked the other way many times because we needed the oil or we needed them as a strategic ally or a strategic partner. Those times have changed in some respects. We are becoming more energy independent. We are not as dependent on Saudi Arabia as we once were for energy supplies to fuel our economy.

In the meantime, something else has happened within the Kingdom. There has been a transition of power to the Crown Prince, who is known as MBS. He is a young man in his thirties, and he announced when he came to power that he was going to make some real changes in Saudi Arabia. One big breakthrough he announced was that women would be allowed to drive cars. In the West, it is almost comical to think of that as a concession, but in Saudi Arabia, that is progress in a country that has been slow to give women recognition in roles they deserve.

Then he got engaged in foreign policy and started doing things that were hard to explain, one after the other. One of them was the decision to take the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Mr. Harari, and, basically, to put him under house arrest when he visited from Lebanon in the Royal Kingdom and, then, to have a confrontational relationship with Qatar, a country that we rely on for our military basing and support in the region. Then, of course, there is what brings us to the floor later this afternoon for an important--maybe historic--vote. He decided that the Saudis would invade Yemen because they believed the Iranians were establishing a power base there and because there was aggression from Yemen against Saudi Arabia.

That decision to begin this war in Yemen sometime in the recent past resulted in outcomes that no one could have predicted. There are about 28 million people who live in Yemen. We estimate that 14 million of them, half of the people living in that country, are subjected now to a famine that threatens their very lives. We know that over 80,000 children have been killed so far in the war in Yemen.

What is the role of the United States? Well, it is hard to define it in specific terms. At one point--I think it has been discontinued now-- we were fueling the bombers the Saudis sent into Yemen, releasing the bombs that killed civilian populations and other innocent people. At one point--I think it is still the case--we were assisting them in targeting the areas in Yemen where they were going to drop their bombs.

So the United States has not been on the sidelines. We have been involved. Our military, the best in the world, has been involved in helping the Saudis with this invasion of Yemen. They have discontinued, I understand, the fueling mission, but other things continue.

The question we have to ask ourselves now is this: Why are we there? By what constitutional authority? It is this little book here that is supposed to guide our conduct. By what constitutional authority is this administration and the Department of Defense waging a war in Yemen? It isn't because of any vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives, though the Constitution is explicit that the declaration of war is in the hands of Congress--really, in the hands of the American people through Congress. In this case, whatever is going on in Yemen has never been expressly approved.

What they hearkened back to was a measure that was passed on the floor of the Senate 17 years ago, and I remember because I was here. It was after 9/11. Who will ever forget that? Three thousand innocent Americans were killed by terrorists who crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York and into a field in Pennsylvania. Do you know the nationality of the terrorists who were on those planes, the ones who commandeered them and killed those innocent Americans? Saudis. They were all Saudis.

Yet we passed this resolution saying the United States can use force to retaliate against them, and I voted for it. We found them in Afghanistan. We went after them. But could anyone have possibly imagined that that vote 17 years ago gave authority to our government today to engage in a war in Yemen?

True, there are terrorists on the ground in almost every country in the Middle East, and you could justify our military involvement by saying we are fighting terrorism. But let's be honest. This Constitution did not want a generic declaration of war. It wanted us to be careful when we chose those battlegrounds.

So today we had a briefing by the Secretary of State, Mr. Pompeo, which I cannot recount in detail because it was in a classified setting, but we do know this. This morning, that same Secretary of State authored an article in the Wall Street Journal about this issue. It is entitled ``The U.S.-Saudi Partnership is Vital,'' by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. I would like to read the opening paragraph of Secretary of State Pompeo's statement. When it comes to our relationship with Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen, here is what he wrote:

The Trump administration's effort to rebuild the U.S.-Saudi Arabia partnership isn't popular in the salons of Washington, where politicians of both parties have long used the kingdom's human-rights record to call for the alliance's downgrading. The October murder of Saudi national Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey has heightened the Capitol Hill caterwauling and media pile-on. But degrading U.S.-Saudi ties would be a grave mistake for the national security of the U.S. and its allies.

It is a long article. Read it in its entirety and draw your own conclusions, but the first paragraph sets the tone. We are not discussing our role with Saudi Arabia in the salons of Washington. We are discussing them on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Why? Because we were elected to do just that.

The American people entrust us with the foreign policy of the United States and decisions that need to be made about whether we commit American tax dollars or American lives in a military conflict. It isn't some group of academics in a salon. It is Members of the U.S. Senate, duly elected, who are facing their responsibility to debate it today.

Listen to these terms that the Secretary of State uses: ``The October murder of Saudi national Jamal Khashoggi has heightened the Capitol Hill caterwauling and media pile-on.''

``Caterwauling''--you don't run into that word much, do you? I went to look it up to make sure I understood it. It is the shrieking of cats when they are in a fight.

So the national reaction--the international reaction--to the cold- blooded murder of an American resident, a Saudi citizen and the dismemberment of his body and its disposal in ways we couldn't even explain is ``caterwauling''? To me, it is a reflection of your values, and, rightfully, people around the world are protesting that this sort of activity could happen.

That is why we are bringing this measure before the Senate this afternoon. I see my colleague from Indiana is here. I thank him for his leadership.

I will close with this. I am reluctant to display this picture, though it was on the front page of a major newspaper in the United States. But I want those who wonder why we are in this debate and why we are caterwauling about this assassination of Mr. Khashoggi to understand what is really the issue that we are debating and voting on.

Amal Hussain died at the age of 7 in Yemen. ``My heart is broken,'' her mother said. She died just a few days after the picture was taken. She is a victim of famine in Yemen. This is what the decision is all about on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Will we continue to expend American taxpayer dollars--even American lives--in support of the Saudi regime and their invasion in the war in Yemen?

I understand the threat of Iran, and I understand we have to stand up to their aggression when and where it takes place. But did we enlist in this war? Did the American people have a national debate about this war? Did we vote in the Senate to engage in this war? The answer is, clearly, no.

I will be supporting this resolution that will be coming before us this afternoon. I thank my friend from Indiana for waiting an additional moment while I completed my remarks.

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