|
Leahy Presses Ashcroft For Answers On War Policies;
Urges Attorney General To Reverse Trend of Secrecy
[WASHINGTON
(Tuesday, June 8) – U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) faulted
Attorney General John Ashcroft Tuesday for managing a Department of
Justice that has been secretive and resistant to oversight by
Congress. Leahy, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, challenged Ashcroft during an oversight hearing
before the panel to follow in the footsteps of other leaders who have
taken responsibility for some of the failures that have occurred in
the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism. Leahy’s opening statement
at that hearing is below.]
++++++++++++++++
Opening Statement Of Senator Patrick Leahy,
Ranking Member,
Senate Judiciary Committee
Oversight Hearing
Attorney General John Ashcroft
June 8, 2004
Welcome, Mr. Attorney
General. It is good to have you back before the Committee, and we are
pleased to see you have recovered so swiftly from your surgery earlier
this year. It has been a long time since our last oversight hearing
with you. Fifteen months have passed since your last, brief
appearance in March last year.
Sparse And Grudging Cooperation
Mr. Attorney General, I must
speak frankly about an issue that has emerged as a basic problem
during your tenure. There are two words that succinctly sum up the
Justice Department’s accountability and its cooperation with
congressional oversight on your watch. Those two words are “sparse,”
and “grudging.” Even those of us who have served through several
presidents cannot recall a worse performance record when it comes to
responsiveness.
Too often we on this
Committee, on both sides of the aisle, get the sense that under your
direction and example, the Justice Department and its agencies
consider oversight by Congress to be nothing more than a nuisance.
But lack of oversight has
costs and consequences, and we are beginning to reap them. Why is
oversight important? Beyond the fact that the Constitution prescribes
such checks and balances among the three branches of government,
proper oversight – with cooperation from Executive agencies – helps
make government work better. It also contributes to accountability.
How is the Justice Department using all of the tools this Congress has
provided in the USA PATRIOT Act? With the lack of oversight
cooperation we have received, and with the secrecy that shrouds
several aspects of the law, how would any of us know the real answer
to that question, or dozens of other questions on other vital topics?
Now more than ever, the
American people need the Justice Department and the FBI to be as good
as we need them to be in combating terrorism. Congressional oversight
is an essential ingredient in identifying problems and forging
solutions.
Just days ago we learned of
Justice Department involvement in devising legal arguments to minimize
our obligations under such U.S. laws and international agreements as
the convention on torture. Yet a letter I wrote to you last November,
well before most of these abuses came to light, went unanswered for
months, and when we are lucky enough to get responses, the premium is
on unresponsiveness. Few of the answers we get are worth much more
than the paper they are printed on. We often learn more about what’s
really happening in the Justice Department in the press than we do
from you.
Could the Administration’s
cooperation with Congressional oversight have prevented such disasters
as the prison abuse scandal? The answer is obvious.
What We Know
So in the meantime, the problems and the
questions just keep on piling up.
In the 1000 days since the catastrophic attacks
of September 11th, we have learned little from our Justice
Department. We know this:
- Osama bin Laden remains at large;
- At least three senior al Qaeda operatives who
helped plan the 9/11 attacks, including the suspected mastermind of
the plot, are in U.S. custody, but there has been no attempt to
bring any of them to justice;
- The Moussaoui prosecution has bogged down
because the prosecution refuses to let
the defense interview witnesses in U.S. custody;
- A German court acquitted two 9/11
co-conspirators, in part because the U.S. Government refused to
provide evidence for the cases;
- Three defendants who you said had knowledge of
the 9/11 attacks did not have such knowledge; the Department
retracted your statement, and then you had to apologize to the court
for violating a gag order in the case;
- The man you claimed was about to explode a
“dirty bomb” in the U.S. had no such intention or capability, and
because he has been held for two years without access to counsel,
any crimes he did commit might never be prosecuted;
- Terrorist attacks on Capitol Hill and
elsewhere involving the deadly bioterror agents anthrax and Ricin
have yet to be solved, and the Department is defending itself in a
civil rights action brought by a man who you publicly identified as
a “person of interest” in the anthrax investigation;
- U.S. citizens with no connection to terrorism
have been imprisoned as material witnesses for chunks of time --
with an “Oops, I’m sorry” when a “100 percent positive” fingerprint
match turns out to be 100 percent wrong;
- Non-citizens with no connection to terrorism
have been rounded up on the basis of their religion or ethnicity,
held for months without charges and, in some cases, physically
abused;
- Interrogation techniques approved by the
Department of Justice have led to abuses that have tarnished our
nation’s reputation and likely given strength and driven hundreds,
if not thousands, of new recruits to our enemies
- Your Department turned a Canadian citizen over
to Syria who was tortured;
- Documents have been classified, unclassified,
and reclassified to score political points rather than for
legitimate national security reasons;
- Statistics have been manipulated to exaggerate
the Department’s success in fighting terrorism; and
- The threat of another attack on U.S. soil
remains high, although how high depends on who, in the
Administration, is talking and what audience they are addressing.
Unfinished Business After 1,000 Days
Your testimony here comes
about 1,000 days after the September 11th attacks and the
subsequent launch of your efforts against terrorism. As National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice acknowledged in her testimony before
the 9/11 Commission, the terrorist threats to our nation did
not begin in September 2001. Yet preliminary
findings of the 9/11 Commission suggest that counterterrorism simply
was not a priority of the Justice Department before September 11th.
In fact, just one day before the attacks, you rejected the FBI’s
request to include more money for counterterrorism in your budget
proposal. Arab language translators were so sorely lacking that when
we did intercept information, we did not have the capacity to learn
from it. The FBI lacked computer analysis capability to make sense of
the valuable information we did have, such as an informant’s claim
that he and other al Qaeda operatives had been sent to the United
States to hijack planes. The strong concerns of FBI agents like
Coleen Rowley in Minnesota and Kenneth Williams in Phoenix were
falling on deaf ears. The Justice Department failed to understand and
apply the correct standard to get a search warrant for the computer of
Zaccarias Moussaoui, who was in federal
custody in August 2001. We were more concerned about Mexican
immigration along our southern border than with securing American
borders from terrorists. We were not coordinating effectively with
international allies or our own State and local law enforcement
agencies. And while you have recently been sharply critical of the
so-called “wall” between criminal investigators and intelligence
agents, you did nothing to “lower” it during your first seven full
months in office. The President is fond of saying that September 11
changed everything, as if to wipe out all the missteps and misplaced
priorities of the first year of this Administration.
Now, 1000 days later, there is
ample cause for concern about whether, even now, the Justice
Department is using its increased resources well and is setting its
priorities toward the right goals.
Another Suspected Terrorist Goes Free
After the attacks you promised
a stunned nation that its Government would “expend every effort
and devote all necessary resources to bring the people responsible for
these crimes to justice.”
Last week we learned from
press reports that you chose to deport rather than prosecute Terrorist
No. 27 on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. This is one of the most
disturbing and frankly, stunning, revelations to emerge from the home
front in the war on terrorism. According to the Associated Press,
seasoned prosecutors like Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald
believed that a prosecution was viable. Instead, the Justice
Department declined this case on the ground that the United States
could not effectively prosecute terrorists without giving away
intelligence sources and methods. And instead, this suspected
terrorist was deported and turned loose where he presumably could
still wage jihad against us.
This was not the only instance
since September 11 that the Government has chosen an easy option
instead of effective criminal prosecution. I hope that you can
explain how mere deportations, dragnets, detentions contrary to
international law and definitional charges to inflate “terrorism”
statistics serve to make American safer in the long run.
Mr. Attorney General, you have spent much of the past
two years increasing secrecy, lessening accountability and touting the
Government’s intelligence-gathering powers under the PATRIOT Act. I
and others here in Congress from both sides of the aisle worked
together in unparalleled cooperation to pass the PATRIOT Act shortly
after September 11.
But now I must ask, to what end? The threshold
issue really is: What good is having intelligence if we cannot use it
intelligently? Identifying suspected terrorists is only a first
step. To be safer, we must follow through. Instead of declining
tough prosecutions, we need to bring the people seeking to do us harm
to justice. That is how our system works. Instead, your practices
seem to be built on secret detentions and overblown press releases.
Our country is made no safer through self-congratulatory press
conferences when we face serious security threats.
A Responsibility To Deliver Justice
In December
2001, you announced the indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui and told the
world that al Qaeda would now “meet the justice it abhors.” At that
moment, those who watched the Twin Towers fall in New York City, the
destruction of the Pentagon and the carnage in a field in rural
Pennsylvania, embraced your promise that “the awesome weight of
justice against the terrorists who blithely murdered innocent
Americans” would now be brought to bear.
But in the 1000 days since the attacks, the
public justice we yearn for has eluded the very criminal justice
system we hold up as a successful symbol of democracy to the rest of
the world. We need to know why our Government is
unwilling or unable to investigate and prosecute the crimes of
September 11. From the moment that maniacal scheme was hatched and
through its implementation on that terrible day, those responsible in
any way must be identified and held accountable.
The Government agency that bears the name of
Justice has yet to deliver the justice for the victims of the worst
mass murder in this nation’s history. The 9/11 Commission is working
hard to answer important questions about the attacks and how the
vulnerabilities in our system that allowed them to occur, but it
cannot mete out punishment for those involved. Neither the 9/11
Commission nor this Committee can do the job of the Justice
Department.
You spoke recently about efforts that are under
way in a number of nations to transform their criminal justice systems
from an inquisitorial system to one modeled after our own -- a system
that relies on evidence and adversarial proceedings. But you are not
allowing our system to work.
The United States should not be afraid or
reluctant to accord those charged with heinous crimes basic due
process. Our prosecutors and criminal investigators are ready,
willing and able to do their jobs. We have techniques to provide
security for sensitive information through the Classified Information
Procedures Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other
provisions. This Administration’s expansion of all manner of
government secrecy has, however, served to undercut the mission of the
Justice Department.
There are times and occasions when the United
States must act militarily. There are aspects of this effort that
must be undertaken diplomatically in the international community and
the President is belatedly discovering the benefits of diplomacy and
alliances. But our criminal justice system is another dimension of
our efforts against those who commit terrorist acts against the United
States and our citizens. The skilled and hard-working men and women
of the Justice Department and the FBI deserve so much credit for all
they do, day and night, month after month, to protect the security of
the American people. But under your leadership the Justice Department
seems to have all but abandoned the field on so many of these cases.
Instead, you deploy the Justice Department’s resources to deny justice
to the American victims of terrorism who have sought compensation in
the courts, while failing to implement the victim compensation program
that Congress called for nearly four years ago.
For 1000 days now, the families of the victims of September 11 have
waited for the killers of their loved ones to pay the price for their
crimes. As you yourself recognized, the indictment of Zaccarias
Moussaoui was an important step in securing justice for the victims of
September 11. Unfortunately, it appears to have been the last step.
A Time for
Accountability
Mr. Attorney General, since September 11 you have blamed
former Administration officials for intelligence failures that
happened on your watch; you have used a tar brush to attack the
patriotism of Americans who dare to express legitimate concerns about
constitutional freedoms and civil rights; and you have refused to
acknowledge these problems, even when your own Inspector General
exposed widespread violations of the civil liberties of immigrants
caught up in your post-September 11 dragnets.
Secretary Rumsfeld recently went before the Armed
Services Committee to say that he should be held responsible for the
abuses of Iraqi prisoners on his watch. Director Tenet is resigning
from the Central Intelligence Agency. Richard Clarke went before the
9/11 Commission and began with his admission of the failure that this
Administration bears for the tragedy that consumed us on 9/11. I am
reminded this week as we mourn the passing of President Reagan that
one of the acts for which he will be remembered is his concession that
while his heart told him that the weapons for hostages and unlawful
funding of insurgent forces in Nicaragua should not have been acts of
his Administration, his head convinced him that they were and that he
took responsibility.
We need checks and balances. There is much that has
gone wrong that your Administration stubbornly refuses to admit. For
this democratic republic to work, we need openness and accountability.
Mr. Attorney General we all know that your style is to come to
attack. You came before this Committee shortly after 9/11 to question
our patriotism when we sought to conduct congressional oversight and
ask questions. You went before the 9/11 Commission to attack a
Commissioner by brandishing a conveniently declassified memo in so
unfairly slanted a presentation that the President himself disavowed
your action. I challenge you today, however, to abandon any such
plans for this session and begin it, instead, by doing that which you
have yet to do: Talk plainly with us and with the American people
about not only what is going right in the war on terrorism, but also
about the growing list of things that are going wrong, so that we can
work together to fix them. Let us get about the business of working
together to do a better job protecting the American people and
ensuring that wrongdoers are effectively brought to justice.
# # # # # |
