9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act

9/11 RECOMMENDATIONS IMPLEMENTATION ACT -- (House of Representatives - October 08, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 827 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the further consideration of the bill, H.R. 10.

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

I rise in strong opposition to the Hostettler amendment. The Hostettler amendment amends the ill-considered and counterproductive torture provisions in H.R. 10 in a way that still allows foreigners to be subjected to torture.

How does it do this? The Hostettler amendment gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to detain certain foreigners that, "in the Secretary's unreviewable discretion," the Secretary has determined to be a specially dangerous alien that should be detained until removed. Such persons would be held behind bars indefinitely with no recourse to a court or another independent fact finder empowered to review the basis for the Secretary's decision. Any foreign person that the Secretary of Homeland Security decides is "especially dangerous" can just be locked up forever with no trial or just deported.

And the Hostettler amendment stipulates that the "Secretary of State shall seek diplomatic assurances that such alien shall be protected if removed from the United States." That means that the State Department is supposed to seek diplomatic assurances from a country that it will not torture somebody after a U.S. judge already has found that this country likely would, in fact, torture that person. Are we really going to trust the assurances of the countries that our own State Department says torture detainees?

Mr. Chairman, we should really call this the "In Syria we trust" amendment or perhaps the "In Sudan we trust" amendment. The assurances that these countries have provided that they would not torture have proved completely unreliable in practice.

In 2002, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born citizen, was intercepted at New York's JFK Airport and deported to Syria, where he was detained and reportedly tortured. The Washington Post has reported that while Syria provided "diplomatic assurances" that Arar would not be mistreated, these assurances proved worthless. Maher Arar was tortured anyway.

America should not be outsourcing torture to countries like Syria and the Sudan. America should be relying not on diplomatic assurances from countries that we already know practice torture, particularly when a U.S. judge has already found that it is more likely than not that the deported person would be tortured if they were sent there.

We as America cannot preach temperance from a bar stool. If we want to protect our own Marines and soldiers from torture, we must have the same standard for protecting prisoners that we have under our control from torture. We cannot build a new generation of nuclear bunker busters and then tell the Muslim nations they should not want nuclear weapons, and we cannot tell the Muslim world not to torture American prisoners at the same time we are sending Muslim detainees to countries that we know are going to torture those prisoners.

We cannot exist in a world where the United States is not the moral leader. This amendment must be defeated.

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