Howard P. "Buck" McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, this is the amendment that will enable us to eventually close the Guantanamo Bay prison. There are several compelling reasons to do this.

First of all, we have reached a point where we are now spending $2.7 million per inmate at Guantanamo Bay. To contrast that, an inmate at a supermax Federal prison facility here in the U.S. costs roughly $78,000 a year. This is only going to become more expensive as the temporary facility at Guantanamo Bay is forced to last longer and longer. So the cost alone is reason, I believe, to close it.

Also, we have the larger issue. President George W. Bush wanted to close Guantanamo Bay, as did Secretary Gates, as did Senator McCain. Many very conservative Republicans came out in favor of closing Guantanamo back in 2008. Why? Because the military told them that it was harming our ability to effectively fight al Qaeda and affiliated forces, that the presence of Guantanamo Bay was recognized as an international eyesore that undermined U.S. credibility with our allies abroad as we tried to prosecute that fight. There is no need for Guantanamo. So argument number one is all of the problems with it.

Argument number two is that there is no need for it, because what we could do would be--154 inmates who are in Guantanamo Bay, first of all, some number of them, I think it is roughly half, have been deemed not to be a threat to the United States. We just don't have anyplace to send them. So we can do foreign transfers, which we are beginning to work on. The rest of them that are a threat can be housed in supermax facilities in the United States of America.

Now, we constantly hear the argument that we can't bring terrorists to the United States. The way that argument is stated, it is like we are bringing them here and setting them free. We are not. We are going to lock them up and hold them. In fact, there was a recent ruling of the courts that made it clear those inmates would not be freed in the United States under any set of circumstances.

In addition to that, we have the ability in the United States of America to hold dangerous people. I will submit to you that if we didn't have that ability, we would be in a whole lot of trouble regardless of the people at Guantanamo Bay.

We currently house over 300 terrorists here in the U.S., including Ramzi Yousef, The Blind Sheikh, and a number of others. We have been able to successfully hold terrorists in the United States. We also hold mass murderers and gang leaders and mobsters. We have the ability to safely hold these people in the United States of America. So there is no downside to doing this.

The upside is to finally do what President George W. Bush recognized back in 2007 and 2008 that we needed to do, to close down Guantanamo Bay because of the international perception that it goes against our values and because of the very fact that it does go against our values to have people locked away in a prison that was originally set up under the hopes that somehow we would be able to avoid habeas corpus. Well, the Supreme Court said no, Guantanamo Bay is effectively under U.S. control, so habeas corpus applies anyway, so same amount of rights, same everything. It is simply an international eyesore that we keep open for no good reason.

This bill has prohibitions on closing it. My amendment would put in place a plan to close Guantanamo Bay by the end of 2016 and enable the steps necessary to accomplish that.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes.

This amendment would eliminate indefinite detention in the United States and its territories. So basically anybody who we captured who we suspected of terrorist activity would no longer be subject to indefinite detention, as is now currently the law.

The basic reason for this is our Constitution works, and we ought to value it and we ought to let the Constitution work. We have gone through article III courts to try, convict, and incarcerate terrorists successfully for decades. Yet, because of the 2001 AUMF, we still have on the books a law that would allow the President, any President now or in the future, to indefinitely detain any person in the United States if they determine that that person is affiliated with al Qaeda or affiliated forces. If they are acting in support of those organizations, they would be subject to indefinite detention and would not be allowed to due process rights that are in our Constitution.

That is an enormous amount of power to give the Executive: to take someone and lock them up without due process. It is not necessary. This President has not used the authority. President George W. Bush did not use it after about 2002 and then only in a couple of instances. It is not necessary. It is an enormous amount of power to grant the Executive, and I believe places liberty and freedom at risk in this country.

We need to eliminate indefinite detention in the United States. This amendment would do that clearly and unequivocally, and I urge support.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

The language within the NDAA about preserving rights is very confusing. I think it is very clear that the President does have the power right now to indefinitely detain people. So arguing that rights are protected, they are not. Indefinite detention is the law of the land. The President has the power to do that. Habeas corpus is one right. It is not due process. This law currently allows for due process to be ignored and for the Executive to indefinitely detain people.

The other big problem with this is it goes on forever. We have at different points in our Nation's history suspended habeas corpus--during the Civil War and other times of extreme danger. But in this case, al Qaeda and terrorism have been with us for a while. They are going to be with us for a long time to come in some form or another.

So to grant the President the power to indefinitely detain people is a long, long-term issue. Again, it is not necessary. Our article III courts have arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated hundreds of terrorists. It works. We don't need to give the President the power to throw out portions of the Constitution.

I reserve the balance of my time

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of our time.

First of all, Guantanamo Bay would not apply in this case. None of the people being held at Guantanamo Bay were captured in the United States, so this would have nothing to do with that. That is a vexing and difficult question. This applies to people captured from this point forward in the United States. It would not apply to Guantanamo Bay inmates.

Second, I want to deal with this argument about intelligence. It is an argument that has been made repeatedly that does not make any sense. This notion that somehow under the normal judicial process, under the normal law enforcement model you cannot collect any intelligence. Well, that would be a surprise to the FBI. It would be a surprise to every law enforcement agency in the United States of America that has been giving suspects Miranda rights, investigating crimes, and gathering intelligence for decades. Just because you tell someone they have the right to remain silent doesn't mean that they will, first of all.

Second of all, even if you don't tell them, everybody is aware of the fact that they don't have to talk. We have used Miranda successfully to gather intelligence in a variety of different ways repeatedly. You will not lose that ability if you go through article III courts using Miranda rights.

Again, I want to emphasize, the idea that when you capture a terrorist, it never occurs to them that they don't have to give up information until you give them Miranda rights makes no sense whatsoever, number one.

Number two, over and over and over again domestic law enforcement officials have been able to give Miranda rights and gather an enormous amount of intelligence. That is a red herring in this argument.

Again, we come back to what the law does. The law gives the President of the United States the power to indefinitely detain people without due process. The Republican Party is always talking about freedom from government intrusion. They are concerned about the health care law, they are concerned about all manner of different things. This is a law that gives the President the power to lock you up and take away your basic freedom without due process. It strikes me that nothing could be more fundamental to those basic freedoms from government intrusion that we always hear about from the other side of the aisle than this issue.

I urge Republicans and Democrats alike to support this amendment. Take away the President's ability to lock people up indefinitely without due process. That is a gross, gross violation and an individual right that none of us in this country should stand for any longer.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes.

First of all, on the trust issue, you wouldn't have to negotiate with people that you trusted.

Unfortunately, regrettably, we have to negotiate with people all the time who are not entirely trustworthy. That is why Ronald Reagan always said, ``Trust but verify,'' which I think was wrong. Let's verify. Trust is a very difficult thing.

Obviously, Russia has proven itself untrustworthy, but they have consistently reduced their nuclear weapons arsenal as a result of treaties that were first negotiated by Ronald Reagan, and many others.

They have also worked cooperatively with us to contain nuclear material, which has been enormously important. They would be a huge terrorist threat if they were to ever get their hands on nuclear material. Outside of the United States, the former Soviet Union--and now Russia--is the number one place where you have that nuclear material.

So having some measure of cooperation with them to contain and reduce that material is enormously important. That is the goal of the START Treaty.

It is not a matter of whether or not you trust Putin or Russia. I don't trust many people, just in general, and I certainly don't trust them. The question is: is the START Treaty, an effort to reduce the number of nuclear weapons that Russia has and to contain and control the fissile material that they have, is that in our best interest?

It is. And we should negotiate that.

Certainly, what Putin is doing in the Ukraine is reprehensible and violates all manner of treaties. I support the President and the efforts of others to condemn and sanction them as a result.

But to walk away from an effort to contain nuclear weapons I don't believe is in the best interest of the U.S. It is not a matter of whether you trust Russia; it is a matter of what it is in our best interest. I believe it is in our best interest to try to contain the nuclear fissile material available out there in the world. START is one way to do that. Walking away from this just because we don't trust Putin--and we don't--is not sound policy.

I urge opposition to this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 1/2 minutes.

First of all, just for everybody's information, you cannot actually reveal classified information, even if it has showed up in the newspaper, because then you are confirming it. So you are not supposed to do that.

Second of all, if you don't like the START Treaty, that is one thing. We can have that debate. We had that debate in the Senate and a bipartisan group of senators confirmed the treaty and then passed it. That is a separate debate. If you are trying to still reopen that, that is something that the Senate has already determined.

Again, it is not a matter of Russia being trustworthy. I don't think of them as a partner. I think of them has a reality that we have to deal with.

In the one area where they have been fairly consistent, again, starting with the treaty negotiated under Ronald Reagan, is they have reduced their nuclear forces and worked with us to contain their fissile material after the breakup of the Soviet Union. This has reduced the amount of nuclear weapons in the world, which is a positive step.

So, again, yes, what they are doing in the Ukraine, we ought to oppose that. But when it comes to trying to contain nuclear material for the protection of both of our countries and the world, that is not something that I think we should walk away from.

I am sure there are other opportunities, other ways we can punish Russia for their misdeeds that would make a great deal more sense. This hurts us, it does not help us.

Again, I urge opposition to the amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I agree with the chairman we should adopt the en bloc amendments.

I did want to take a moment here--we don't have any speakers on this--to make a couple comments about some Rules Committee decisions that I have not had a chance to speak about before.

Overall, I applaud the product that we have crated here in a bipartisan way. I thank the chairman for doing that.

I do think it is a fortunate the Rules Committee ruled out of order a number of amendments. Two of them were mine. One was to offer a BRAC amendment to give Members of Congress a chance to vote on it. The other was to offer up the administration's proposal to lay up 14 Navy vessels as an effort to save money.

There are several problems with the fact that these amendments were ruled out of order, and the biggest one is one of the arguments that I have made of concern about this bill from the very beginning, because even though I support the product and there are a lot of very good things in this bill, I think the weakness of it and the thing that we are going have to confront when we go to conference is the fact that it delays every single difficult decision.

During the debate and during general debate yesterday, a couple of people commented that they liked the bill for a variety of different reasons and said that it made some tough choices. I asked a couple of times to name one. I don't believe we did make a tough choice. When you look at the issues that we face in terms of the budget, we ducked every single one of them. We have both sequestrations for another 8 years. Even if sequestration doesn't come, we also have substantial cuts coming to the defense budget as a result of sequestration in fiscal year 2013 and a series of CRs and a series of cuts to the defense budget that we did not anticipate.

We are going to have substantially less money over the course of the next 10 years for defense than we thought we were going to have.

That is true even if sequestration goes away. If sequestration happens, we really face a challenge. So the question is how are we going to restructure our defense plans to deal with the fact that we are going to have substantially less money than we had going forward. The answer in this bill is we are not going to deal with it this year, and we are going to hope things get better and maybe deal with it next year.

The administration confronted this problem in a number of areas. I will walk through them. Number one, in the very controversial and difficult area of personnel costs, they found savings in health care by expanding what servicemembers would have to pay for their health care, they reduced somewhat the subsidy to our commissaries, they reduced the housing subsidy, and they also reduced the pay raise down to 1 percent and got rid of it for senior officers.

Except for the last part of that, we ducked all of those. That is $2 billion over 5 years that the administration was able to save. Nothing was offered, nothing was done on our part to deal with that.

In the Guard and Reserve, the Army has put together a plan to restructure their helicopters in a way that is way too complicated to explain, but that saves $12 billion over the course of 5 years. We put into our bill an amendment saying they can't do that at all in 2015. Also added in one of the en bloc amendments was an amendment now that says we are going to study it for a longer period of time even beyond that--that is another $12 billion--and we don't make it up anywhere because that is over 5 years, so we can get away with that in 2015.

I mentioned the Navy issue: 14 ships that the Navy has said they will lay up in order to save money. That is roughly $3.5 billion that they will save. Again, we got rid of that in order to pay for it in the short-term. We didn't come up with more money or cut something else. We raided the ship modernization accounts to fund that in the short term, which again does not deal or address the problem. DOD also proposed getting rid of the A-10 and getting rid of the U-2. We stopped them from doing both of those things.

We have at every turn blocked just about every single proposal the administration has made to save money over the long-term. In each one of those isolated incidents, there are strong arguments that tend to be mostly parochial. In other words, if it is in your district or in your neighborhood then you rise up in furious anger against it, but there may be arguments as to why that isn't the best choice. But there was no alternative proposed. We simply got creative in our accounting to get through 2015. These are mostly 5-year savings, so we can sort of stagger our way through 2015 and create a massive bow wave down the road that we are not at all prepared to deal with.

I am sorry I left out the big one: BRAC. It is estimated we are wasting $6 billion a year on facilities that we don't need. Absolutely the only argument that exists against doing another BRAC round, given how much we have drawn down our force structure and the fact that the military estimates that they are 25 percent over capacity in terms of their facilities, is that Members don't want to run the risk of having a base be closed in their district. I get that. There are a ton of bases in the State of Washington. But we have to confront these issues because the money is not going to magically appear.

So the amendments that were disallowed, I was hoping to have the opportunity on those two amendments to have the broader debate about making the choices now. I don't think we should simply rubberstamp what the White House has done. If we don't like those cuts, let's come up with another one. This is the conversation I had with my adjutant general in the State of Washington, who was concerned about the cuts to the Army Guard and the Air Force Guard. He was talking about everything he didn't like about it. I said: Look, present me an alternative, give us an alternative that says here is how we are going to save $12 billion instead, and I am happy to look at it. But just to say: We don't like the cuts, I get that. Nobody--well, there are some. Most people don't like the cuts, but they are there. We passed the Budget Control Act, we shut down the government, we passed the budget agreement last year that set the levels for FY14 and FY15, and we still have on the books 8 more years of sequestration.

If Congress doesn't want the administration to wind up making all these choices, then we have got to step up and make the decisions now rationally about where we are going to be in terms of the budget.

The final point I will make on that is that what happens when we don't make those decisions is that readiness gets cut. In this bill, readiness is cut by $1.2 billion from the President's request. Plus, there is another $633 billion that we take out of OCO to fund the A-10. That is probably readiness as well, because they use the OCO account to backfill some of the cuts in readiness. So that is $1.8 billion out of the readiness account that was already depleted because of the shutdowns, because of the CRs.

Well, what is readiness? We had an interesting discussion about this in committee. Readiness is not the size of the force. Readiness is the capability of the force. Are the troops trained and equipped to perform the missions that we have asked them to do?

The chairman has quite eloquently on a number of occasions pointed to past wars: the Korean war and World War II, where we had to ramp up in a hurry and we sent troops over who were not ready to fight, and many of them were killed and injured because they were not ready to fight.

If we raid readiness accounts to protect personnel, to stop BRAC, to stop the Pentagon from cutting the U-2 or the A-10, or from shutting down a Guard unit, if we do that they've got to raid readiness, because that is the easiest thing to do. You spend less on fuel, you don't repair some equipment that is out there, you fly less, you drive less, you train less. What we wind up with is the hollow force that nobody wants.

So as we go into conference and as we go forward, it is an obligation of this Congress to say: What is our plan? Right now our plan is hope. I didn't serve in the military, but I heard very early on in my time on the Armed Services Committee one of the sayings in the military is ``hope is not a strategy.'' We are hoping that the money will appear, we are hoping that somehow we magically won't have to make those decisions.

I think we are past that point. The decisions are going to get made. They are either going to get made poorly if we ignore them, or preferably they will get made well so that we do our best to put together a force that no matter the size is at least capable and ready to perform the missions that we might ask of them.

So ruling those amendments out of order I think was most unfortunate--that we weren't able to have that debate. But rest assured, as the chairman has pointed out, this is his last term, so I would say there is no ducking this, but I guess you can retire. You won't be here. But the country will have to deal with those decisions one way or the other, and we thus far have not made them.

So I would urge us to start looking at this and saying if we are not going to do a BRAC, then what are we going to do. If we are not going to shrink the Guard this way, then what are we going to do.

Let's get some concrete proposals on the table that are something other than, don't cut anything in my backyard, and closing our eyes and hoping that the problem will go away.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Again, I concur in support for the en bloc amendments. This is the last amendment, and I just want to say thank you again to Chairman McKeon. I think it is right that this bill is named after him. As I have said, he has done a fabulous job on our committee. I appreciate his hard work and for, once again, putting together this product.

I also want to thank the staff. This is a very large bill. Lots of amendments are offered both on the committee level and on the House level. Staff has to pour through all of that and make sense of it and keep us informed. They do an incredible job and an incredible service to our country and to the men and women who serve in the military by making sure that this bill gets done every year, so I very much appreciate that.

I want to particularly recognize Debra Wada from the HASC staff, who will soon be leaving us. She has been promoted to be the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. Debra has served for 15 years as staff on this committee and as an invaluable source of knowledge on personnel and on many, many other issues. It has been great working with her. We congratulate her on her appointment and wish her the best. Again, she is but one example of an absolutely fantastic staff and of the great work that they do to put this product together every single year.

So we thank you.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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