MJ19
02-26-2003, 07:05 PM
This is a presentation give by Curt Weldon yesterday. I have highlighted areas I found interesting and/or thought all Americans should be aware of.
THE NEED FOR FURTHER UNITED NATIONS ACTION ON IRAQ -- (House of Representatives - February 25, 2003)
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The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to lay on the record information that needs to be brought to the attention of this body and every American as we struggle with the current crisis involving our relationship with Iraq.
We have seen a lot of information, in the media, a lot of public protests, both against and for action that this country might need to take, but there has been one major part of the debate that has been missing
As we talk about Saddam Hussein and the need for him to abide by the agreement that he reached with the U.N. And the U.N. Security Council 12 years ago, as we discuss the fact that the U.N. inspectors have not yet been able to determine that he in fact has taken apart his weapons of mass destruction, there is in fact one set of facts, Mr. Speaker, that are obvious, that are documented, and that need action.
It is for this reason that I rise this evening to present to this body, our colleagues, our country and the world, the facts that will support a resolution that I will introduce in this body on Thursday of this week, a bipartisan resolution, with the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), and a whole host of other Democrats and Republicans, that calls for the President to require and request the U.N. to convene a special war crimes tribunal to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for the egregious acts against human beings that he has perpetrated over the past 20 years.
Mr. Speaker, it is certainly time that the world holds Saddam Hussein accountable .
Mr. Speaker, the facts are all over the place. They have been documented by human rights groups, by Amnesty International, by agencies of the U.N. and the U.S. Government, and by other nations around the world. In fact, there have been specific actions taken by the U.N. The United States budget in fiscal year 2001 and 2002 contributed $4 million to a special U.N. Iraqi War Crimes Commission to document the evidence, some of which I am going to put out this evening.
The United Nations Security Council and the Commission on Human Rights have repeatedly condemned Iraq's human rights record. On April 19, 2002, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution drawing attention to ``the systematic widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law by the Government of Iraq resulting in an all-pervasive repression and oppression sustained by broad-based discrimination and widespread terror.''
In fact, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 674 called on all states to provide information on Iraq's war-related activities and atrocities to the U.N.
Mr. Speaker, it is amazing to me as we heard Americans, especially those coming from Hollywood , recently on our national media outlets, praising and defending Saddam Hussein as a man who can be trusted, as someone who will do the right thing if just given the right amount of time.
It is amazing to me that this country went to war just a few short years ago, pushed very aggressively by France and Germany, to remove Milosevic from power in Yugoslavia because he was allegedly committing war crimes.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I am no fan of Milosevic. In fact, I think he is where he belongs, in the Hague before a war crimes tribunal. But, Mr. Speaker, tonight I am going to lay out the evidence that will make the case that Saddam Hussein makes Milosevic look like a common street criminal. In fact, I am not the only one that feels this way, Mr. Speaker.
Let me quote from a recent op-ed that ran this past Sunday, written by Richard Holbrooke. Now, Richard Holbrooke was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Bill Clinton. Let me quote from Mr. Holbrooke's op-ed that ran nationwide this past weekend.
``When one considers that Saddam Hussein is far worse than Slobodan Milosevic and that Iraq has left a long trail of violated Security Council resolutions while there were none in Kosovo.'' So Richard Holbrooke, the U.N. Ambassador under President Clinton, has publicly acknowledged as recently as this past week that, in his opinion, Saddam Hussein is far worse than Slobodan Milosevic .
This country went to war to oust Slobodan Milosevic. This country murdered innocent Serbs with bombs to oust Slobodan Milosevic. And who pushed this country? France and Germany , because the French and Germans were concerned that Milosevic was in their neighborhood.
In fact, Mr. Speaker, in a quote from a book just recently released, The Threatening Storm, by the expert on Iraq during the Clinton administration in both the CIA and the Security Council, Ken Pollack, one section documents the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, and I want to quote from this book, which I think every Member of this body should read. It is page 122, discussing the Iraqi state and security. Again, this individual, Ken Pollack, is an acknowledged intelligence expert on Iraq. This is what he said:
``Max Van der Stoel, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iraq, told the United Nations that the brutality of the Iraqi regime was of an exceptionally grave character, so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War .''
In other words, Mr. Speaker, that the Saddam Hussein regime has not been equaled since Adolf Hitler. Not Slobodan Milosevic, who the Germans and French supported militarily to remove, but not since Adolph Hitler.
Let me continue. ``Indeed, it is to comparisons with the obscenity of the Holocaust and Stalin's mass murders that observers are inevitably drawn when confronted with the horrors of Saddam's Iraq. Saddam's Iraq is a state that employs arbitrary execution, imprisonment and torture on a comprehensive and routine basis.''
A full catalogue is not yet totally available, but tonight we are going to put on the record, Mr. Speaker, the examples that are available.
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Let me read again some from Ken Pollack's account, and these are not the most pleasant facts, but they are facts , Mr. Speaker.
``This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents. This is a regime that will crush all the bones in the feet of a 2-year-old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts. This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply, a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution. This is a regime that applies electric shocks to the bodies of its victims, particularly their genitals, with great regularity. This a regime that in 2000 decreed that the crime of criticizing the regime, which can be as harmless as suggesting that Saddam's clothing did not match, would be punished by cutting out the offender's tongue.
[Time: 22:45]
A regime that practices systematic rape against its female victims. A regime that dragged in a man's wife, daughter, and female relative and repeatedly raped her in front of him. A regime that forced a white-hot metal rod into a person's anus or other orifices. A regime that employs thallium poisoning, widely considered one of the most excruciating ways to die. A regime that beheaded a young mother in the street in front of her house and children because her husband was suspected of opposing the regime. A regime that used chemical warfare on its own Kurdish citizens , not just on the 15,000 that were killed and maimed at Halabja, but on scores of other villages all across Kurdistan. A regime that tested chemical and biological warfare agents on Iranian prisoners of war and used the POWs in controlled experiments to determine the best ways to disperse these agents to inflict the greatest damage.
All of this, Mr. Speaker, I quote, and is from the documentation by Ken Pollack, the intelligence expert on Iraq during the Clinton administration in the book available to everyone in America entitled ``The Threatening Storm.''
But, Mr. Speaker, it is not just Ken Pollack. In fact, the citations and documentations of the violations of human rights by Saddam Hussein are overwhelming and comprehensive. As a member of the Human Rights Caucus in this Congress, I am outraged that there has been no solid vocal outcry, not just from this body and America, but from those countries in Europe, especially Germany and France, who claim to be for the human rights of innocent people.
Let me summarize. The methods of torture, the human rights abuses documented by our special military commission looking into our own POWs that Saddam held against the Geneva Convention that controls the treatment of prisoners. Let me read the documentation in summary.
Americans experienced the following: 21 service members captured during Desert Storm were all covered by the Geneva protections. They were beaten to the rhythm of songs. The beatings were done by led pipes, by clubs, by rifle butts, by rubber hoses, by black jacks and batons, by kicks and punches to the face, neck, ears, prior injuries, genitals and kidneys. Malice to their knees, cat-o'-nine tails, burning of individuals with cigarettes, including the butts being placed into open wounds. Urination on POWs. Genital investigations and harassment to determine if POWs were circumcised as Jews.
Mock executions, threatened dismemberment, threatened castration, cattle prod shocking, talkman shocking, electrocuted wires run around a person's head attached to the ears, causing massive convulsions in the jaw, knocking out teeth, sexual abuse, fingernail extraction, person hung by their feet with barbed wire.
Mr. Speaker, these were American citizens , and this is how they were treated by Saddam Hussein in direct violation of the international agreements on caring for prisoners of war. This was not made up, Mr. Speaker. These are documented cases involving America's sons and daughters.
Where is the outcry in America? Where is the outcry in Hollywood and from those experts on TV and the movies who claim to know all about how Americans were treated by this madman in Baghdad? And what about the actions that have been documented by Amnesty International, by all of the major groups that monitor human rights of what Saddam did against the Kuwaitis and the Kurds?
Let me again run through some of those cases that have been documented, including knifings, boring holes in bodies with drills, tongue and ear removal, hammering nails into hands, eye-gouging, inserting broken bottlenecks into rectums, pumping air and gasoline through people through their rectums and other orifices and then igniting the gasoline until the bodies exploded. Pouring acid on skin, forcing detainees to watch the torture, rape and execution of others and relatives, random and unjustified killings, electric shocks to the mouth, forcing women to eat flesh cut from their own body, removal of eye balls, placement of people into rotating washing machines, execution by electric drill, cutting with razors, rubbing salt into wounds, castrations, blow torches, suspension from ceiling fans.
Mr. Speaker, all of these actions are documented and conducted and ordered by Saddam Hussein and those people currently in control in Baghdad.
Where is the outrage, Mr. Speaker? France and Germany, pushing America to go in to remove Milosevic who committed ethnic cleansing; none of the charges against Milosevic at the Hague at this point in time come anywhere near the atrocities that Saddam Hussein has been documented as having committed on a regular and routine basis. There is no shame in those countries, Mr. Speaker, because it is unbelievably a double standard and total hypocrisy.
Let us talk about some of the documented human rights violations within Iraq. Again, these are all documented , Mr. Speaker, documented through extensive files, portions of which I will lay into the RECORD this evening for our colleagues to review. In Iraq, this is what Saddam has done: killing of prison inmates to account for overcrowding. Loss of freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, movement and due process; arbitrary punishment of death for suspected violations of laws, political disagreements and social actions; beheading of prostitutes and displaying of heads. Iraq is the country with the highest number of disappearances reported to the working group on enforced and involuntary disappearances established by the Commission on Human Rights. Beating of Iraqi soccer players because they lost a game. Refusal to permit visits by human rights monitors. Campaign of murder, summary execution and protracted arbitrary arrests against religious followers of the Shia Muslim population, the Kurds. Harassment and intimidation of relief workers and U.N. personnel, removal of children of unwanted minority groups to get them from cities and regions, and only 48 percent of the supplied medicines and equipment to clinics and hospitals. The rest were in government warehouses overflowing.
This is a man who challenged our President to a debate. What an absolute joke , Mr. Speaker. This man deserves to debate no one. This man deserves to be taken to the Hague and deserves to have a war crimes tribunal convened to lay out all of the charges that have been brought forward against him in a formal way by the U.N., and this resolution we will put into place on Thursday will have this body go on record in asking that that be done.
Let us talk about the chronology of murder of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Speaker, again, all documented. Not documented by the U.S. Government; documented by international groups that monitor human rights, documented by the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights . Let us go through them in a chronological order.
In 1979, the purge of the Baath Party leadership, members were forced to confess to invented crimes and then arbitrarily executed. Family members were held hostage. In 1980, Saddam led the attacks on the Fayli Kurds, removal of the Kurds in Baghdad and the southern cities of Kut, Basra and Hilla. Forced expulsions from homes to Iran. Execution of most captured young males; there was an unknown amount of these young males that were executed. Fourteen tons of captured Iraqi secret police documents, videotapes and pictures provided a character of Iraqi rule over the Kurds that has been matched by no one since the great Holocaust of World War II. In fact, there is enough paperwork to document over 200,000 murders.
Mr. Speaker, where are the French and the Germans who cried to America
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to get Milosevic out of power for his ethnic cleansing, when we have documentation through the U.N. and these NGOs that Saddam Hussein has been responsible for the murder of 200,000 people? In 1980, Mr. Speaker, the invasion of Iran, a clear violation of article 2, section 4 of the U.N. charter. Launch of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets. Use of human shields, physical and mental torture of captives, all documented, on-file offenses. Eight military offensives in 1988. Systematic campaign of extermination and genocide waged against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq. Code name Anfal comes from a Koranic verse that legitimizes the right to plunder women and the property of infidels. During this time there were mass executions and indiscriminate killings of fighters and civilians. There was an order very similar to the Nazi order of ``sturm and nebel'' to proclaim thousands of square kilometers of Kurdistan to be a free-fire zone in which neither human nor animal life was to remain.
Saddam during that time used chemical weapons and poison gas. He forced resettlement. He destroyed between 1,000 and 2,000 villages. The estimated killings during that period was between 50,000 and 100,000; but it may be as high as 182,000 people. There were 16,496 reported disappearances in 1988.
Mr. Speaker, I cannot hear the French and the Germans. Where is their outrage, Mr. Speaker? Are the French so blinded by oil that their principles have gone down the cesspool? Was Slobodan Milosevic so bad that he is in the Hague being tried, but Saddam Hussein who has committed these crimes is not worthy of action by the U.N.?
Let us go on, Mr. Speaker. In 1990, the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam orders to kill any civilian found after curfew or bearing anti-Iraqi slogans on homes. A violation of the clear contravention of article 2, section 4 of the U.N. charter. Systematic torture as a method of extracting information. Holding thousands of foreign hostages to dissuade their countries from joining the coalition and used as human shields, including Americans.
In 1991, the invasion in March, attacks on civilians following a cease-fire in the cities of Basra, Najaf, Karbala; massive executions, bombarding residential areas, destroying religious shrines. And how about other actions before 2000, Mr. Speaker? Mass executions in a grave in Burjesiyya, a district near Zubair south of Basra, torturing and extended detentions preceding the deaths due to suspicion of political demonstrations. In April 14, 1999, 56 detainees charged with treason who were executed at Abu Ghraib on August 10 of 1999; 26 prisoners were executed at Abu Gharaib prison. March of 1999, the bombarding of residential areas of tribes by an armored division number 6 in Basra, Al-Ghameigh, Bail Wafi and Bait Sayed Noor. January, February, 1999, destruction of 52 houses of political opponents with bulldozers in Basra, nine in Jamhuriyah, five in Al-Zubier, seven in Al-Karmah, 12 in Abo Al-Khaseib, and five in Al-Tanumah. July 20, 1999, demolished six houses in Thawra after the detention of their entire families.
[Time: 23:00]
But here is a man, Mr. Speaker, who has a family of human rights abusers of the worst possible kind. It is not just Saddam.
His son, Udai Hussein, created the Saddam's martyrs, who go around, 30,000, dressed in black, and they are known for executing and doing gruesome public spectacles of killing the President's critics. In fact, he is known, when there is a sporting loss, for torturing and in some cases killing the athletes because they have not been successful. His group has also been known to abduct women from the streets.
Qusai Hussein, the deputy for his father's military security and intelligence, heads Amn al-Khass, and they have also conducted outrages against innocent people.
Finally, Lieutenant General Hussein Kamal Hassan al-Majid, is known as ``Chemical Ali'' for his brutality against the Kurds , especially for his use of weapons procurement and weapons of mass destruction, and being able to sneak in those supplies that the U.N. has prohibited.
This individual defected. He returned to Iraq after having received a pardon. What happened? Saddam murdered him and he murdered his family, his own blood relatives.
Mr. Speaker, we have people in this country and we have people in France, we have Jacques Chirac, saying we should trust Saddam Hussein, just give him time. Mr. Speaker, it is time to lay the facts on the table. It is time to hold Saddam Hussein accountable.
Whether one is for military action or against it, this resolution does not discuss that. Whether one supports Iraq, whether one disagrees and does not support Iraq, whether one thinks there should be more time, 2 months, 5 months, 12 years, it does not apply to this resolution. This resolution simply says that we must hold this regime responsible for the crimes they have committed against humanity.
Mr. Speaker, I call upon my colleagues to hold this man accountable, at least equal to the way we are holding Slobodan Milosevic accountable.
Mr. Speaker, just a few short years ago there were claims from the administration that there would be mass graves that we would find in Serbia containing perhaps millions of bodies. Well, several years after the fact, the truth did not quite bear that out. That is not to lessen the atrocities of Milosevic; he is a war criminal, make no mistake about it. But there was a gross exaggeration of what he had done, even though the crimes he committed were outrageous. He is being held accountable for those crimes right now at the Hague, in a trial that has been going on for almost a year.
Mr. Speaker, the French and the Germans, where were they in this case? They were pushing America: Get your troops over here, America. Get this man out of power. He is a brutal dictator. He has committed ethnic cleansing. Help us rid Europe of him because of the crimes he has committed against humanity. In the words of Richard Holbrooke, who was our U.N. Ambassador during the nineties under Bill Clinton, Slobodan Milosevic does not come anywhere near Saddam Hussein in terms of committing war crimes.
Mr. Speaker, do I detect a double standard here? Do the French think that Milosevic is worse than Saddam? The U.N. does not think so. Are the French denying the facts of the U.N. special rapporteur? Are the French and Germans not realizing the gross atrocities that have occurred against human beings, or do they not want to admit to what occurred?
Let me go through some more evidence , Mr. Speaker. I take this information from the Report on Iraqi War Crimes prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Army.
This was released on March 19, 1993, as a result of an intense investigation of our own citizens who were captured by Saddam. These are specific cases. Americans and members of this body can ask for the documentation of these cases and they can get them.
POW number 1 , file number 176.1. Our own Americans were exhibited as war prizes. They were urinated on. They were beaten constantly , including to the rhythm of a song on a radio.
POW number 2 , file number 176.2. He was abandoned by his captors in spite of having a broken leg. In fact, they put an Arab headdress on him.
POW number 3 , file number 176.3. Saddam's troops beat and kicked him while being transported; punched him in the face; hit him in the head with a rifle; kicked him in a circle, and injured his leg; beaten severely with a lead pipe; and from the guards' boots smeared on the face. He had multiple cigarette burns all over his body from Saddam's leaders.
POW number 4 , file number 176.4, American POW. Dragged by the hair, kicked by the captors, sexually molested during transport, slapped and spat upon, threatened with death. That was a female, Mr. Speaker.
Where are those in America expressing outrage at what this man ordered to be done to our citizens?
POW number 7 , file number 176.7. Karate-chopped, forced to make a videotape.
POW number 9 , beaten with fists, batons, rifle butts; kicked in the head and legs broken; beaten to the rhythm of a song; knocked unconscious many times; forced to make a videotape; beaten in the stomach and back with club, resulting in long-term pain to his kidneys; eye injuries from his beatings .
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Mr. Speaker, these are actions documented by Saddam Hussein against American citizens. We have Saddam Hussein now on international TV proclaiming he is for peace, he is against war. Mr. Speaker, cut me a break. Are we that naive? Are we that short of our memory that we do not understand what this man has done over the past 20 years?
Let me go through some more examples, Mr. Speaker.
As we know, in capturing a prisoner-of-war, the only thing a prisoner has to do is to state their surname, first and last name and rank, their date of birth, and their army or unit that they are involved with. That is all they have to give under the special protections under the Geneva Convention. That is it.
In the case of our POWs, Saddam consistently, along with his military, grossly abused their rights and tortured them. In fact, he forced them to do things that are absolutely sickening to read.
POW number 12 , assaulted twice with a cattle prod; beaten with a hard rubber stick while being interrogated by the voice; assaulted with a stun gun; an AK-47 placed against his head and threatened with execution as a war criminal; threatened with dismemberment; shocked with a Talkman; multiple beatings.
POW 13 , struck with hands, fists, a wooden club, blackjack, and sticks; punctured his eardrums; loosened his teeth from the beatings ; beaten so severely he could not walk and could not stand.
Mr. Speaker, there is a lawsuit that has been filed in the courts of the District of Columbia. The lawyer represents these brave American POWs who are suing Saddam and Iraq because of what he did to them. Is America going to stand behind these brave young people? Are we going to stand up and hold Saddam accountable for what he did, or can they only sue civilly in a court, as documented by this lawsuit?
Mr. Speaker, I am going to ask special permission to have texts of this lawsuit entered into the RECORD, even though it will cost extra money, because I want every one of our colleagues and every American to understand the facts of what was done to our citizens by Saddam Hussein and by his evil subordinates in his military.
Let us go on to Article 32, documented by the Army also back in 1993, the specifics of some of which I mentioned already.
Iraq's violation and Saddam's violations of Article 27 and 32, which were absolutely outrageous: torturing Kuwaiti nationals. Widespread and barbaric actions, such as beatings on all parts of the body with various implements; beating people while they were suspended in air; hanging with cables; breaking appendages; knifings; extracting their finger- and toenails; boring holes in their body with drills; cutting off their tongues and ears; cutting off their body parts with saws; gouging out their eyes; castrations; hammering nails into their hands; shootings; rapes; inserting broken bottlenecks into their rectums; pumping air or gasoline into their orifices; pouring acid on their skin ; Asian and Kuwaiti women routinely raped by Iraqi soldiers; all of this documented by the official commission of our Army and sent to the U.N. for further action.
How about some specific cases, Mr. Speaker, that were also filed with the U.N. that took place in Kuwait City?
[Time: 23:10]
This Kuwaiti citizen file number 66.01015 was arrested by the Iraqis at his home on the 23rd of December 1990 and held until mid-December. During his captivity he received repeated beatings and electric shocks to his mouth, nose and genitalia. He was suspended from the ceiling and subjected to mock executions. He witnessed the torture of other Kuwaitis by techniques which included forced ingestion of gas causing abdominal pains, forcing a woman to eat flesh cut from her own body, an execution by ax, removal of eyeballs, dismemberment, burning with a hot iron, execution by electric drill, and placement of a person into a large rotating washing machine.
Mr. Speaker, we are not dealing with a human being. We are dealing with an animal. We are not dealing with a person that we can have some feeling of a moral authority. This man is the lowest of the low , Mr. Speaker. It has all been documented through thousands of pieces of information assembled by nonprofit organizations, organizations concerned with human rights violations by governments around the world and by the U.N. itself. It has been documented. It is time to hold him accountable.
Mr. Speaker, here is a man, with all the documentation we have, who some people say we should trust. If you listen to Jacques Chirac, whose country has millions of dollars of oil contracts with Saddam Hussein and who himself is a personal friend of Saddam's, we should trust this man. Shame on Jacques Chirac. Mr. Speaker, shame on Jacques Chirac. By defending someone like Saddam Hussein, by not having his government take action to hold this man accountable, he has no moral authority. In fact, in my opinion he has no credibility.
Our government , Mr. Speaker, can do the right thing. Members on both sides of the aisle have introduced resolutions in the past 10 years. The Senate has voted on a resolution in the past 10 years. One of my Democrat colleagues offered a resolution, has an amendment in the Committee on International Relations just recently holding Saddam accountable.
This body has repeatedly publicly called on the U.N. to hold Saddam accountable, and I think we should do it again, Mr. Speaker. And so, therefore, this Thursday I will introduce along with colleagues from both sides of the aisle, there are already over 25 co-sponsors, and I urge all of my colleagues to sign on to a resolution to ask our President to appeal to the U.N. to convene a special war crimes tribunal against Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Speaker, we did that for Milosevic, and he is today being tried for those crimes he committed against innocent people in the former Yugoslavia. Innocent Kosovars, innocent Serbs, innocent Montenegroans, innocent people that Milosevic thought he could abuse. He deserves the full weight of the punishment meted out by that special tribunal.
Is Saddam Hussein any less deserving of a tribunal? Are all of these cases documented by the U.N., by these NGOs, by other governments, should we just discard them and pretend that they do not exist and let Saddam go on as if nothing has happened?
Mr. Speaker, we have not done right by the American people. We talk about the need to deal with Saddam because he has chemical precursors for his weapons of mass destruction, because he has missiles that will go longer than what the U.N. said he could. They are all violations, and they are all material breaches of the agreements that were reached by Saddam and the U.N. 12 years ago. But why, Mr. Speaker, is there not more discussion about this man for the evil person that he is?
The U.N. special rapporteur said, No one has come close to this kind of activity since World War II, since the great Holocaust. No one, Mr. Speaker, including Milosevic. Is the world going to ignore the activities of Saddam Hussein? Are we going to ignore the atrocities he committed against our own people when they were captured? If that is the case, then international agreements mean nothing. The Geneva Convention has no basis. The Helsinki Final Act has no meaning. If we are not going to hold leaders who commit such outrageous acts accountable, then we might as well not have those acts, those agreements existing in the first place.
Mr. Speaker, this body, our body can take action soon, to lay out to the world those who support military action and those who oppose military action, that regardless of whether or not you think war is inevitable, there is one thing that we all can agree on: Saddam Hussein is a war criminal. There is no doubt about that.
Those who understand the facts, those who look at the documents, those who see the evidence understand that this man comes as close to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin as anyone that we have seen in the last several decades.
And so, Mr. Speaker, I appeal to our colleagues to co-sponsor this legislation before I drop it. Our colleagues have that opportunity. Democrats and Republicans are already on. We have over 25 Members and that was in the
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first day. I would hope that we would end up with over 300 co-sponsors and send a signal to the world that Saddam Hussein is an unacceptable leader because of his war crimes.
Again, Mr. Speaker, and I know I have said this before, but it really irks me because initially I opposed the Kosovo war, not because I support Milosevic, he is a war criminal, but because I felt that we had not brought Russia in to use their influence to get Milosevic out of power. In fact, Mr. Speaker, I led a delegation to Vienna with five of our Democrat colleagues and five of our Republican colleagues. We took a State Department official. And with the support of our State Department, we flew to Vienna; and for 2 days around the clock working with the leaders of the Russian political factions, we fashioned a statement that called Milosevic a war criminal for his ethnic cleansing. We laid the groundwork with the help of the Russians that became the basis of the G-8 document to end the war 10 days later.
Mr. Speaker, we were prodded into war against Milosevic by the French and the Germans. They were bold back then. They did not want to put their own troops in harm's way without America being there. So we went into Kosovo. America was the number one supplier of the military. There were more American planes than there were any other nation, even though Yugoslavia is not far away from France and Germany. The French and Germans came in after us, but they pushed us the whole way. And why? Because they said Milosevic was a war criminal who had abused people. And they were right. But, Mr. Speaker, so is Saddam Hussein, only a far worse war criminal than Milosevic ever was. Those are not my words. Those are the words of Richard Holbrook, U.N. Ambassador for the United States under President Clinton in an op-ed he wrote this past week. Those are the words of the special rapporteur of the U.N. who said that Saddam Hussein's regime has no equal since World War II.
[Time: 23:20]
Mr. Speaker, I would hope that every one of our colleagues would cosponsor the resolution to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for war crimes. It is a very simple resolution and I at this point in time enter that resolution into the Record so that all of our citizens, all of our colleagues can see the text, the documents, the actions, that we now request of the United Nations against Saddam Hussein.
H. Res. --
Whereas in 2001 and 2002, the Department of State contributed $4,000,000 to a United Nations Iraq War Crimes Commission, to be used if a United Nations tribunal for Iraqi war crimes is created;
Whereas the United Nations Security Council and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights have repeatedly condemned Iraq's human rights record;
Whereas Iraq continues to ignore United Nations resolutions and its international human rights commitments;
Whereas on April 19, 2002, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution drawing attention to ``the systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law by the Government of Iraq, resulting in an all-pervasive repression and oppression sustained by broad-based discrimination and widespread terror'';
Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 674 calls on all states or organizations to provide information on Iraq's war-related atrocities to the United Nations;
Whereas Iraq's aggressive pursuit of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and its past use of weapons of mass destruction against its own people and Iraq's neighbors illustrates the danger of allowing Saddam Hussein to go unchallenged;
Whereas torture is used systematically against political detainees in Iraqi prisons and detention centers;
Whereas this regime gouges out the eyes of the victims, crushes all of the bones in their feet, and burns a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply ; and
Whereas citizens of Iraq live in constant fear of being tortured, kidnapped, or killed : Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That consistent with Section 301 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993 (Public Law 102-138), House Concurrent Resolution 137, 105th Congress (approved by the House of Representatives on November 13, 1997), and Senate Concurrent Resolution 78, 105th Congress (approved by the Senate on March 13, 1998), the Congress urges the President to call upon the United Nations to establish an international criminal tribunal for the purpose of indicting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law.
Mr. Speaker, in fact, the resolution which does not have yet a number, lays out the fact that we spent, as I said earlier, $4 million in each of the past 2 years for a special U.N. Iraqi War Crimes Commission. It is already in place, continuing from the 1990s. American tax dollars are being used to support this U.N. effort.
This war crimes commission has, in fact, seen resolutions passed by the Security Council and the Commission on Human Rights as recently as April 19 of 2002, U.N. Security Council Resolution 674, all of which deal with Saddam Hussein's abuses of human rights. This resolution says, and resolves, that consistent with section 301 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, the House concurrent resolution and the Senate concurrent resolution, that the Congress urges the President to call upon the United Nations to establish an International Criminal Tribunal for the purpose of indicting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law.
Mr. Speaker, we can do no less .
END
What is your position after reading this information?
THE NEED FOR FURTHER UNITED NATIONS ACTION ON IRAQ -- (House of Representatives - February 25, 2003)
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The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to lay on the record information that needs to be brought to the attention of this body and every American as we struggle with the current crisis involving our relationship with Iraq.
We have seen a lot of information, in the media, a lot of public protests, both against and for action that this country might need to take, but there has been one major part of the debate that has been missing
As we talk about Saddam Hussein and the need for him to abide by the agreement that he reached with the U.N. And the U.N. Security Council 12 years ago, as we discuss the fact that the U.N. inspectors have not yet been able to determine that he in fact has taken apart his weapons of mass destruction, there is in fact one set of facts, Mr. Speaker, that are obvious, that are documented, and that need action.
It is for this reason that I rise this evening to present to this body, our colleagues, our country and the world, the facts that will support a resolution that I will introduce in this body on Thursday of this week, a bipartisan resolution, with the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), and a whole host of other Democrats and Republicans, that calls for the President to require and request the U.N. to convene a special war crimes tribunal to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for the egregious acts against human beings that he has perpetrated over the past 20 years.
Mr. Speaker, it is certainly time that the world holds Saddam Hussein accountable .
Mr. Speaker, the facts are all over the place. They have been documented by human rights groups, by Amnesty International, by agencies of the U.N. and the U.S. Government, and by other nations around the world. In fact, there have been specific actions taken by the U.N. The United States budget in fiscal year 2001 and 2002 contributed $4 million to a special U.N. Iraqi War Crimes Commission to document the evidence, some of which I am going to put out this evening.
The United Nations Security Council and the Commission on Human Rights have repeatedly condemned Iraq's human rights record. On April 19, 2002, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution drawing attention to ``the systematic widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law by the Government of Iraq resulting in an all-pervasive repression and oppression sustained by broad-based discrimination and widespread terror.''
In fact, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 674 called on all states to provide information on Iraq's war-related activities and atrocities to the U.N.
Mr. Speaker, it is amazing to me as we heard Americans, especially those coming from Hollywood , recently on our national media outlets, praising and defending Saddam Hussein as a man who can be trusted, as someone who will do the right thing if just given the right amount of time.
It is amazing to me that this country went to war just a few short years ago, pushed very aggressively by France and Germany, to remove Milosevic from power in Yugoslavia because he was allegedly committing war crimes.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I am no fan of Milosevic. In fact, I think he is where he belongs, in the Hague before a war crimes tribunal. But, Mr. Speaker, tonight I am going to lay out the evidence that will make the case that Saddam Hussein makes Milosevic look like a common street criminal. In fact, I am not the only one that feels this way, Mr. Speaker.
Let me quote from a recent op-ed that ran this past Sunday, written by Richard Holbrooke. Now, Richard Holbrooke was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Bill Clinton. Let me quote from Mr. Holbrooke's op-ed that ran nationwide this past weekend.
``When one considers that Saddam Hussein is far worse than Slobodan Milosevic and that Iraq has left a long trail of violated Security Council resolutions while there were none in Kosovo.'' So Richard Holbrooke, the U.N. Ambassador under President Clinton, has publicly acknowledged as recently as this past week that, in his opinion, Saddam Hussein is far worse than Slobodan Milosevic .
This country went to war to oust Slobodan Milosevic. This country murdered innocent Serbs with bombs to oust Slobodan Milosevic. And who pushed this country? France and Germany , because the French and Germans were concerned that Milosevic was in their neighborhood.
In fact, Mr. Speaker, in a quote from a book just recently released, The Threatening Storm, by the expert on Iraq during the Clinton administration in both the CIA and the Security Council, Ken Pollack, one section documents the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, and I want to quote from this book, which I think every Member of this body should read. It is page 122, discussing the Iraqi state and security. Again, this individual, Ken Pollack, is an acknowledged intelligence expert on Iraq. This is what he said:
``Max Van der Stoel, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iraq, told the United Nations that the brutality of the Iraqi regime was of an exceptionally grave character, so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War .''
In other words, Mr. Speaker, that the Saddam Hussein regime has not been equaled since Adolf Hitler. Not Slobodan Milosevic, who the Germans and French supported militarily to remove, but not since Adolph Hitler.
Let me continue. ``Indeed, it is to comparisons with the obscenity of the Holocaust and Stalin's mass murders that observers are inevitably drawn when confronted with the horrors of Saddam's Iraq. Saddam's Iraq is a state that employs arbitrary execution, imprisonment and torture on a comprehensive and routine basis.''
A full catalogue is not yet totally available, but tonight we are going to put on the record, Mr. Speaker, the examples that are available.
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Let me read again some from Ken Pollack's account, and these are not the most pleasant facts, but they are facts , Mr. Speaker.
``This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents. This is a regime that will crush all the bones in the feet of a 2-year-old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts. This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply, a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution. This is a regime that applies electric shocks to the bodies of its victims, particularly their genitals, with great regularity. This a regime that in 2000 decreed that the crime of criticizing the regime, which can be as harmless as suggesting that Saddam's clothing did not match, would be punished by cutting out the offender's tongue.
[Time: 22:45]
A regime that practices systematic rape against its female victims. A regime that dragged in a man's wife, daughter, and female relative and repeatedly raped her in front of him. A regime that forced a white-hot metal rod into a person's anus or other orifices. A regime that employs thallium poisoning, widely considered one of the most excruciating ways to die. A regime that beheaded a young mother in the street in front of her house and children because her husband was suspected of opposing the regime. A regime that used chemical warfare on its own Kurdish citizens , not just on the 15,000 that were killed and maimed at Halabja, but on scores of other villages all across Kurdistan. A regime that tested chemical and biological warfare agents on Iranian prisoners of war and used the POWs in controlled experiments to determine the best ways to disperse these agents to inflict the greatest damage.
All of this, Mr. Speaker, I quote, and is from the documentation by Ken Pollack, the intelligence expert on Iraq during the Clinton administration in the book available to everyone in America entitled ``The Threatening Storm.''
But, Mr. Speaker, it is not just Ken Pollack. In fact, the citations and documentations of the violations of human rights by Saddam Hussein are overwhelming and comprehensive. As a member of the Human Rights Caucus in this Congress, I am outraged that there has been no solid vocal outcry, not just from this body and America, but from those countries in Europe, especially Germany and France, who claim to be for the human rights of innocent people.
Let me summarize. The methods of torture, the human rights abuses documented by our special military commission looking into our own POWs that Saddam held against the Geneva Convention that controls the treatment of prisoners. Let me read the documentation in summary.
Americans experienced the following: 21 service members captured during Desert Storm were all covered by the Geneva protections. They were beaten to the rhythm of songs. The beatings were done by led pipes, by clubs, by rifle butts, by rubber hoses, by black jacks and batons, by kicks and punches to the face, neck, ears, prior injuries, genitals and kidneys. Malice to their knees, cat-o'-nine tails, burning of individuals with cigarettes, including the butts being placed into open wounds. Urination on POWs. Genital investigations and harassment to determine if POWs were circumcised as Jews.
Mock executions, threatened dismemberment, threatened castration, cattle prod shocking, talkman shocking, electrocuted wires run around a person's head attached to the ears, causing massive convulsions in the jaw, knocking out teeth, sexual abuse, fingernail extraction, person hung by their feet with barbed wire.
Mr. Speaker, these were American citizens , and this is how they were treated by Saddam Hussein in direct violation of the international agreements on caring for prisoners of war. This was not made up, Mr. Speaker. These are documented cases involving America's sons and daughters.
Where is the outcry in America? Where is the outcry in Hollywood and from those experts on TV and the movies who claim to know all about how Americans were treated by this madman in Baghdad? And what about the actions that have been documented by Amnesty International, by all of the major groups that monitor human rights of what Saddam did against the Kuwaitis and the Kurds?
Let me again run through some of those cases that have been documented, including knifings, boring holes in bodies with drills, tongue and ear removal, hammering nails into hands, eye-gouging, inserting broken bottlenecks into rectums, pumping air and gasoline through people through their rectums and other orifices and then igniting the gasoline until the bodies exploded. Pouring acid on skin, forcing detainees to watch the torture, rape and execution of others and relatives, random and unjustified killings, electric shocks to the mouth, forcing women to eat flesh cut from their own body, removal of eye balls, placement of people into rotating washing machines, execution by electric drill, cutting with razors, rubbing salt into wounds, castrations, blow torches, suspension from ceiling fans.
Mr. Speaker, all of these actions are documented and conducted and ordered by Saddam Hussein and those people currently in control in Baghdad.
Where is the outrage, Mr. Speaker? France and Germany, pushing America to go in to remove Milosevic who committed ethnic cleansing; none of the charges against Milosevic at the Hague at this point in time come anywhere near the atrocities that Saddam Hussein has been documented as having committed on a regular and routine basis. There is no shame in those countries, Mr. Speaker, because it is unbelievably a double standard and total hypocrisy.
Let us talk about some of the documented human rights violations within Iraq. Again, these are all documented , Mr. Speaker, documented through extensive files, portions of which I will lay into the RECORD this evening for our colleagues to review. In Iraq, this is what Saddam has done: killing of prison inmates to account for overcrowding. Loss of freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, movement and due process; arbitrary punishment of death for suspected violations of laws, political disagreements and social actions; beheading of prostitutes and displaying of heads. Iraq is the country with the highest number of disappearances reported to the working group on enforced and involuntary disappearances established by the Commission on Human Rights. Beating of Iraqi soccer players because they lost a game. Refusal to permit visits by human rights monitors. Campaign of murder, summary execution and protracted arbitrary arrests against religious followers of the Shia Muslim population, the Kurds. Harassment and intimidation of relief workers and U.N. personnel, removal of children of unwanted minority groups to get them from cities and regions, and only 48 percent of the supplied medicines and equipment to clinics and hospitals. The rest were in government warehouses overflowing.
This is a man who challenged our President to a debate. What an absolute joke , Mr. Speaker. This man deserves to debate no one. This man deserves to be taken to the Hague and deserves to have a war crimes tribunal convened to lay out all of the charges that have been brought forward against him in a formal way by the U.N., and this resolution we will put into place on Thursday will have this body go on record in asking that that be done.
Let us talk about the chronology of murder of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Speaker, again, all documented. Not documented by the U.S. Government; documented by international groups that monitor human rights, documented by the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights . Let us go through them in a chronological order.
In 1979, the purge of the Baath Party leadership, members were forced to confess to invented crimes and then arbitrarily executed. Family members were held hostage. In 1980, Saddam led the attacks on the Fayli Kurds, removal of the Kurds in Baghdad and the southern cities of Kut, Basra and Hilla. Forced expulsions from homes to Iran. Execution of most captured young males; there was an unknown amount of these young males that were executed. Fourteen tons of captured Iraqi secret police documents, videotapes and pictures provided a character of Iraqi rule over the Kurds that has been matched by no one since the great Holocaust of World War II. In fact, there is enough paperwork to document over 200,000 murders.
Mr. Speaker, where are the French and the Germans who cried to America
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to get Milosevic out of power for his ethnic cleansing, when we have documentation through the U.N. and these NGOs that Saddam Hussein has been responsible for the murder of 200,000 people? In 1980, Mr. Speaker, the invasion of Iran, a clear violation of article 2, section 4 of the U.N. charter. Launch of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets. Use of human shields, physical and mental torture of captives, all documented, on-file offenses. Eight military offensives in 1988. Systematic campaign of extermination and genocide waged against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq. Code name Anfal comes from a Koranic verse that legitimizes the right to plunder women and the property of infidels. During this time there were mass executions and indiscriminate killings of fighters and civilians. There was an order very similar to the Nazi order of ``sturm and nebel'' to proclaim thousands of square kilometers of Kurdistan to be a free-fire zone in which neither human nor animal life was to remain.
Saddam during that time used chemical weapons and poison gas. He forced resettlement. He destroyed between 1,000 and 2,000 villages. The estimated killings during that period was between 50,000 and 100,000; but it may be as high as 182,000 people. There were 16,496 reported disappearances in 1988.
Mr. Speaker, I cannot hear the French and the Germans. Where is their outrage, Mr. Speaker? Are the French so blinded by oil that their principles have gone down the cesspool? Was Slobodan Milosevic so bad that he is in the Hague being tried, but Saddam Hussein who has committed these crimes is not worthy of action by the U.N.?
Let us go on, Mr. Speaker. In 1990, the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam orders to kill any civilian found after curfew or bearing anti-Iraqi slogans on homes. A violation of the clear contravention of article 2, section 4 of the U.N. charter. Systematic torture as a method of extracting information. Holding thousands of foreign hostages to dissuade their countries from joining the coalition and used as human shields, including Americans.
In 1991, the invasion in March, attacks on civilians following a cease-fire in the cities of Basra, Najaf, Karbala; massive executions, bombarding residential areas, destroying religious shrines. And how about other actions before 2000, Mr. Speaker? Mass executions in a grave in Burjesiyya, a district near Zubair south of Basra, torturing and extended detentions preceding the deaths due to suspicion of political demonstrations. In April 14, 1999, 56 detainees charged with treason who were executed at Abu Ghraib on August 10 of 1999; 26 prisoners were executed at Abu Gharaib prison. March of 1999, the bombarding of residential areas of tribes by an armored division number 6 in Basra, Al-Ghameigh, Bail Wafi and Bait Sayed Noor. January, February, 1999, destruction of 52 houses of political opponents with bulldozers in Basra, nine in Jamhuriyah, five in Al-Zubier, seven in Al-Karmah, 12 in Abo Al-Khaseib, and five in Al-Tanumah. July 20, 1999, demolished six houses in Thawra after the detention of their entire families.
[Time: 23:00]
But here is a man, Mr. Speaker, who has a family of human rights abusers of the worst possible kind. It is not just Saddam.
His son, Udai Hussein, created the Saddam's martyrs, who go around, 30,000, dressed in black, and they are known for executing and doing gruesome public spectacles of killing the President's critics. In fact, he is known, when there is a sporting loss, for torturing and in some cases killing the athletes because they have not been successful. His group has also been known to abduct women from the streets.
Qusai Hussein, the deputy for his father's military security and intelligence, heads Amn al-Khass, and they have also conducted outrages against innocent people.
Finally, Lieutenant General Hussein Kamal Hassan al-Majid, is known as ``Chemical Ali'' for his brutality against the Kurds , especially for his use of weapons procurement and weapons of mass destruction, and being able to sneak in those supplies that the U.N. has prohibited.
This individual defected. He returned to Iraq after having received a pardon. What happened? Saddam murdered him and he murdered his family, his own blood relatives.
Mr. Speaker, we have people in this country and we have people in France, we have Jacques Chirac, saying we should trust Saddam Hussein, just give him time. Mr. Speaker, it is time to lay the facts on the table. It is time to hold Saddam Hussein accountable.
Whether one is for military action or against it, this resolution does not discuss that. Whether one supports Iraq, whether one disagrees and does not support Iraq, whether one thinks there should be more time, 2 months, 5 months, 12 years, it does not apply to this resolution. This resolution simply says that we must hold this regime responsible for the crimes they have committed against humanity.
Mr. Speaker, I call upon my colleagues to hold this man accountable, at least equal to the way we are holding Slobodan Milosevic accountable.
Mr. Speaker, just a few short years ago there were claims from the administration that there would be mass graves that we would find in Serbia containing perhaps millions of bodies. Well, several years after the fact, the truth did not quite bear that out. That is not to lessen the atrocities of Milosevic; he is a war criminal, make no mistake about it. But there was a gross exaggeration of what he had done, even though the crimes he committed were outrageous. He is being held accountable for those crimes right now at the Hague, in a trial that has been going on for almost a year.
Mr. Speaker, the French and the Germans, where were they in this case? They were pushing America: Get your troops over here, America. Get this man out of power. He is a brutal dictator. He has committed ethnic cleansing. Help us rid Europe of him because of the crimes he has committed against humanity. In the words of Richard Holbrooke, who was our U.N. Ambassador during the nineties under Bill Clinton, Slobodan Milosevic does not come anywhere near Saddam Hussein in terms of committing war crimes.
Mr. Speaker, do I detect a double standard here? Do the French think that Milosevic is worse than Saddam? The U.N. does not think so. Are the French denying the facts of the U.N. special rapporteur? Are the French and Germans not realizing the gross atrocities that have occurred against human beings, or do they not want to admit to what occurred?
Let me go through some more evidence , Mr. Speaker. I take this information from the Report on Iraqi War Crimes prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Army.
This was released on March 19, 1993, as a result of an intense investigation of our own citizens who were captured by Saddam. These are specific cases. Americans and members of this body can ask for the documentation of these cases and they can get them.
POW number 1 , file number 176.1. Our own Americans were exhibited as war prizes. They were urinated on. They were beaten constantly , including to the rhythm of a song on a radio.
POW number 2 , file number 176.2. He was abandoned by his captors in spite of having a broken leg. In fact, they put an Arab headdress on him.
POW number 3 , file number 176.3. Saddam's troops beat and kicked him while being transported; punched him in the face; hit him in the head with a rifle; kicked him in a circle, and injured his leg; beaten severely with a lead pipe; and from the guards' boots smeared on the face. He had multiple cigarette burns all over his body from Saddam's leaders.
POW number 4 , file number 176.4, American POW. Dragged by the hair, kicked by the captors, sexually molested during transport, slapped and spat upon, threatened with death. That was a female, Mr. Speaker.
Where are those in America expressing outrage at what this man ordered to be done to our citizens?
POW number 7 , file number 176.7. Karate-chopped, forced to make a videotape.
POW number 9 , beaten with fists, batons, rifle butts; kicked in the head and legs broken; beaten to the rhythm of a song; knocked unconscious many times; forced to make a videotape; beaten in the stomach and back with club, resulting in long-term pain to his kidneys; eye injuries from his beatings .
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Mr. Speaker, these are actions documented by Saddam Hussein against American citizens. We have Saddam Hussein now on international TV proclaiming he is for peace, he is against war. Mr. Speaker, cut me a break. Are we that naive? Are we that short of our memory that we do not understand what this man has done over the past 20 years?
Let me go through some more examples, Mr. Speaker.
As we know, in capturing a prisoner-of-war, the only thing a prisoner has to do is to state their surname, first and last name and rank, their date of birth, and their army or unit that they are involved with. That is all they have to give under the special protections under the Geneva Convention. That is it.
In the case of our POWs, Saddam consistently, along with his military, grossly abused their rights and tortured them. In fact, he forced them to do things that are absolutely sickening to read.
POW number 12 , assaulted twice with a cattle prod; beaten with a hard rubber stick while being interrogated by the voice; assaulted with a stun gun; an AK-47 placed against his head and threatened with execution as a war criminal; threatened with dismemberment; shocked with a Talkman; multiple beatings.
POW 13 , struck with hands, fists, a wooden club, blackjack, and sticks; punctured his eardrums; loosened his teeth from the beatings ; beaten so severely he could not walk and could not stand.
Mr. Speaker, there is a lawsuit that has been filed in the courts of the District of Columbia. The lawyer represents these brave American POWs who are suing Saddam and Iraq because of what he did to them. Is America going to stand behind these brave young people? Are we going to stand up and hold Saddam accountable for what he did, or can they only sue civilly in a court, as documented by this lawsuit?
Mr. Speaker, I am going to ask special permission to have texts of this lawsuit entered into the RECORD, even though it will cost extra money, because I want every one of our colleagues and every American to understand the facts of what was done to our citizens by Saddam Hussein and by his evil subordinates in his military.
Let us go on to Article 32, documented by the Army also back in 1993, the specifics of some of which I mentioned already.
Iraq's violation and Saddam's violations of Article 27 and 32, which were absolutely outrageous: torturing Kuwaiti nationals. Widespread and barbaric actions, such as beatings on all parts of the body with various implements; beating people while they were suspended in air; hanging with cables; breaking appendages; knifings; extracting their finger- and toenails; boring holes in their body with drills; cutting off their tongues and ears; cutting off their body parts with saws; gouging out their eyes; castrations; hammering nails into their hands; shootings; rapes; inserting broken bottlenecks into their rectums; pumping air or gasoline into their orifices; pouring acid on their skin ; Asian and Kuwaiti women routinely raped by Iraqi soldiers; all of this documented by the official commission of our Army and sent to the U.N. for further action.
How about some specific cases, Mr. Speaker, that were also filed with the U.N. that took place in Kuwait City?
[Time: 23:10]
This Kuwaiti citizen file number 66.01015 was arrested by the Iraqis at his home on the 23rd of December 1990 and held until mid-December. During his captivity he received repeated beatings and electric shocks to his mouth, nose and genitalia. He was suspended from the ceiling and subjected to mock executions. He witnessed the torture of other Kuwaitis by techniques which included forced ingestion of gas causing abdominal pains, forcing a woman to eat flesh cut from her own body, an execution by ax, removal of eyeballs, dismemberment, burning with a hot iron, execution by electric drill, and placement of a person into a large rotating washing machine.
Mr. Speaker, we are not dealing with a human being. We are dealing with an animal. We are not dealing with a person that we can have some feeling of a moral authority. This man is the lowest of the low , Mr. Speaker. It has all been documented through thousands of pieces of information assembled by nonprofit organizations, organizations concerned with human rights violations by governments around the world and by the U.N. itself. It has been documented. It is time to hold him accountable.
Mr. Speaker, here is a man, with all the documentation we have, who some people say we should trust. If you listen to Jacques Chirac, whose country has millions of dollars of oil contracts with Saddam Hussein and who himself is a personal friend of Saddam's, we should trust this man. Shame on Jacques Chirac. Mr. Speaker, shame on Jacques Chirac. By defending someone like Saddam Hussein, by not having his government take action to hold this man accountable, he has no moral authority. In fact, in my opinion he has no credibility.
Our government , Mr. Speaker, can do the right thing. Members on both sides of the aisle have introduced resolutions in the past 10 years. The Senate has voted on a resolution in the past 10 years. One of my Democrat colleagues offered a resolution, has an amendment in the Committee on International Relations just recently holding Saddam accountable.
This body has repeatedly publicly called on the U.N. to hold Saddam accountable, and I think we should do it again, Mr. Speaker. And so, therefore, this Thursday I will introduce along with colleagues from both sides of the aisle, there are already over 25 co-sponsors, and I urge all of my colleagues to sign on to a resolution to ask our President to appeal to the U.N. to convene a special war crimes tribunal against Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Speaker, we did that for Milosevic, and he is today being tried for those crimes he committed against innocent people in the former Yugoslavia. Innocent Kosovars, innocent Serbs, innocent Montenegroans, innocent people that Milosevic thought he could abuse. He deserves the full weight of the punishment meted out by that special tribunal.
Is Saddam Hussein any less deserving of a tribunal? Are all of these cases documented by the U.N., by these NGOs, by other governments, should we just discard them and pretend that they do not exist and let Saddam go on as if nothing has happened?
Mr. Speaker, we have not done right by the American people. We talk about the need to deal with Saddam because he has chemical precursors for his weapons of mass destruction, because he has missiles that will go longer than what the U.N. said he could. They are all violations, and they are all material breaches of the agreements that were reached by Saddam and the U.N. 12 years ago. But why, Mr. Speaker, is there not more discussion about this man for the evil person that he is?
The U.N. special rapporteur said, No one has come close to this kind of activity since World War II, since the great Holocaust. No one, Mr. Speaker, including Milosevic. Is the world going to ignore the activities of Saddam Hussein? Are we going to ignore the atrocities he committed against our own people when they were captured? If that is the case, then international agreements mean nothing. The Geneva Convention has no basis. The Helsinki Final Act has no meaning. If we are not going to hold leaders who commit such outrageous acts accountable, then we might as well not have those acts, those agreements existing in the first place.
Mr. Speaker, this body, our body can take action soon, to lay out to the world those who support military action and those who oppose military action, that regardless of whether or not you think war is inevitable, there is one thing that we all can agree on: Saddam Hussein is a war criminal. There is no doubt about that.
Those who understand the facts, those who look at the documents, those who see the evidence understand that this man comes as close to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin as anyone that we have seen in the last several decades.
And so, Mr. Speaker, I appeal to our colleagues to co-sponsor this legislation before I drop it. Our colleagues have that opportunity. Democrats and Republicans are already on. We have over 25 Members and that was in the
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first day. I would hope that we would end up with over 300 co-sponsors and send a signal to the world that Saddam Hussein is an unacceptable leader because of his war crimes.
Again, Mr. Speaker, and I know I have said this before, but it really irks me because initially I opposed the Kosovo war, not because I support Milosevic, he is a war criminal, but because I felt that we had not brought Russia in to use their influence to get Milosevic out of power. In fact, Mr. Speaker, I led a delegation to Vienna with five of our Democrat colleagues and five of our Republican colleagues. We took a State Department official. And with the support of our State Department, we flew to Vienna; and for 2 days around the clock working with the leaders of the Russian political factions, we fashioned a statement that called Milosevic a war criminal for his ethnic cleansing. We laid the groundwork with the help of the Russians that became the basis of the G-8 document to end the war 10 days later.
Mr. Speaker, we were prodded into war against Milosevic by the French and the Germans. They were bold back then. They did not want to put their own troops in harm's way without America being there. So we went into Kosovo. America was the number one supplier of the military. There were more American planes than there were any other nation, even though Yugoslavia is not far away from France and Germany. The French and Germans came in after us, but they pushed us the whole way. And why? Because they said Milosevic was a war criminal who had abused people. And they were right. But, Mr. Speaker, so is Saddam Hussein, only a far worse war criminal than Milosevic ever was. Those are not my words. Those are the words of Richard Holbrook, U.N. Ambassador for the United States under President Clinton in an op-ed he wrote this past week. Those are the words of the special rapporteur of the U.N. who said that Saddam Hussein's regime has no equal since World War II.
[Time: 23:20]
Mr. Speaker, I would hope that every one of our colleagues would cosponsor the resolution to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for war crimes. It is a very simple resolution and I at this point in time enter that resolution into the Record so that all of our citizens, all of our colleagues can see the text, the documents, the actions, that we now request of the United Nations against Saddam Hussein.
H. Res. --
Whereas in 2001 and 2002, the Department of State contributed $4,000,000 to a United Nations Iraq War Crimes Commission, to be used if a United Nations tribunal for Iraqi war crimes is created;
Whereas the United Nations Security Council and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights have repeatedly condemned Iraq's human rights record;
Whereas Iraq continues to ignore United Nations resolutions and its international human rights commitments;
Whereas on April 19, 2002, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution drawing attention to ``the systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law by the Government of Iraq, resulting in an all-pervasive repression and oppression sustained by broad-based discrimination and widespread terror'';
Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 674 calls on all states or organizations to provide information on Iraq's war-related atrocities to the United Nations;
Whereas Iraq's aggressive pursuit of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and its past use of weapons of mass destruction against its own people and Iraq's neighbors illustrates the danger of allowing Saddam Hussein to go unchallenged;
Whereas torture is used systematically against political detainees in Iraqi prisons and detention centers;
Whereas this regime gouges out the eyes of the victims, crushes all of the bones in their feet, and burns a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply ; and
Whereas citizens of Iraq live in constant fear of being tortured, kidnapped, or killed : Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That consistent with Section 301 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993 (Public Law 102-138), House Concurrent Resolution 137, 105th Congress (approved by the House of Representatives on November 13, 1997), and Senate Concurrent Resolution 78, 105th Congress (approved by the Senate on March 13, 1998), the Congress urges the President to call upon the United Nations to establish an international criminal tribunal for the purpose of indicting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law.
Mr. Speaker, in fact, the resolution which does not have yet a number, lays out the fact that we spent, as I said earlier, $4 million in each of the past 2 years for a special U.N. Iraqi War Crimes Commission. It is already in place, continuing from the 1990s. American tax dollars are being used to support this U.N. effort.
This war crimes commission has, in fact, seen resolutions passed by the Security Council and the Commission on Human Rights as recently as April 19 of 2002, U.N. Security Council Resolution 674, all of which deal with Saddam Hussein's abuses of human rights. This resolution says, and resolves, that consistent with section 301 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, the House concurrent resolution and the Senate concurrent resolution, that the Congress urges the President to call upon the United Nations to establish an International Criminal Tribunal for the purpose of indicting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law.
Mr. Speaker, we can do no less .
END
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