Executive Session

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PAUL. Do drone attacks work? Well, you might say: Of course they work; they kill their intended target.

But do drone attacks really work? Do drone killings make us safer? Do drone killings bring victory nearer? Do drone killings kill more terrorists than they create? I think these are valid questions and questions that should be debated and discussed.

There are those who have been involved in the drone killings who actually believe that they aren't helping our country. This is a letter from four American servicemen in the Air Force to President Obama from a year or two ago. It reads:

We are former Air Force servicemembers who have been involved in the drone program. We joined the Air Force to protect American lives and to protect our Constitution. We came to the realization, though, that innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism in groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool.

This administration--

then, referring to the Obama administration-- and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.

The question is this: Do drone killings actually kill more terrorists than they create?

As the brothers, sisters, and cousins from the village gather around the mangled bodies, do they say, ``Oh, well, I guess we are now going to put down our arms and make peace,'' or are they excited, are they engendered, are they somehow motivated to become suicide bombers themselves?

Do the drone killings simply steal their resolve? Do the drone killings cause surviving members to strap on suicide vests? Is there a limit? Is there an end to how many we will kill with drones?

The power to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime is an ominous power. I think most of the people involved in the program, including President Obama, had motives to kill our enemies, to kill those who they thought might come someday and kill us, but the program has become so extensive, and it has extended across so many different countries that there is concern, No. 1, about the civilians--the women and children who are being killed in these strikes as collateral damage--but there is also some concern about whether or not that kind of ominous power-- the power to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime in the entire world--is so ominous that there should be checks and balances.

In our country, no one is killed without not only checks and balances but without the due process of the law. People say: Well, you can't have due process in far-flung battlefields around the world. Shouldn't we at least consider, though, whether or not there should be checks and balances and whether or not one person can make the decision to kill? I think this is something that should be debated, discussed, and we should have oversight from Congress.

You will recall that in Obama's administration, the drone attacks really hit a new peak. You will recall that he made his decisions on whom to approve the killing of on ``Terrorism Tuesdays.'' There were reports that flash cards were used in the discussion of who was to be killed.

There were also reports that John Brennan had complete authority to kill on his own in certain places. John Brennan also responded and said, when asked about the drone program, that there are no geographical limitations to where we can kill.

That is a little bit worrisome, particularly since Congress has never authorized war in the seven different countries where President Obama utilized drones and where drones continue to be used.

People say: Well, this isn't really war, or this has something to do with 9/11.

This has nothing to do with 9/11. None of these people had anything to do with 9/11.

People say: There are associated forces.

That is not in the 9/11 authorization. Congress voted after 9/11 and said: You can go after those who organized, aided, abetted; those who helped to plan; those who helped the attackers of 9/11. It didn't say you could go after any far-flung religious radical or ideologue throughout the world and kill them, but that is what we do. It is an ominous power to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime.

I had this debate with the Obama administration, and I asked them directly: Can you kill an American with a drone?

Interestingly, they hesitated to answer that question. They finally did say: We are not going to kill an American not involved in combat in the United States with a drone. It took 13 hours to get that answer from them.

There are questions about what happens to an American accused and put on the kill list. Can we kill an American overseas?

Often the killings aren't people marching around with muskets. They aren't people marching around shooting each other in a war, where it is like you have a war zone and you are dropping a bomb on the other side of a war. These are often people sitting in a hut somewhere, eating dinner. These are often people whom we kill where we find them. We often don't know the names of those who are killed, and we often have no idea in the end who is killed in these attacks.

Sometimes we do it just simply because it looks like a bunch of bad people all lined up. So we have what we call ``signature strikes,'' where we just kill people whose cars are lined up whom we presume to be bad people.

I think their motives are well intended, but sometimes we end up killing the wrong people. We killed about 12 people in Yemen in 2013 for which we paid $1 million, saying: Whoops, we got the wrong people. It is an ominous power that should have more oversight and more checks and balances.

One of the statements that particularly bothered me was when the former head of the NSA, Michael Hayden, said: Well, we kill people based on metadata.

That is an alarming statement to me. Metadata is whom you call and how long you talk to them. We remember they said that it was no big deal. Your metadata is not that private. You should just give it up. And for a while they were vacuuming up everyone's metadata--whom you call and how long you talk.

It turns out that they are so competent in metadata that they are actually making kills based on metadata. That is what Hayden said.

So we have before us a nominee for the National Counterterrorism Center who has some involvement with developing these kill lists. So we asked him that question. I said: Do we kill people based on metadata?

The nonanswer was very interesting. He said: Well, I can't tell you because I am not in government.

Well, my guess is he has been in government, and he has been in the military. So he probably knows the answer, but he is saying that he will not tell the answer because he is not in government.

So we said to ask the people who are in government: Do we kill people based on metadata?

Do you know what every one of them said? None of my business.

I was elected to the U.S. Senate to represent an entire State, and the people in the administration had the audacity to say: If you want to know that, why don't you join the Intelligence Committee?

See, a democratic republic is where all elected officials have oversight, not only a select few--often, a select few who actually are always in agreement with more power for the Intelligence Committee and become a rubberstamp simply for more power. Those of us who are skeptical of power, those of us who think we need to have more oversight are typically not on those committees. But the question is whether we should allow a select few to be the overseers. Often, these overseers aren't a check and a balance. These overseers are people who simply say: We want to be consulted.

When the President comes to you or the CIA comes to you and says ``We are going to kill this person; oh, you have been consulted--often consulted after the fact, but you have been consulted,'' that, to me, is not a check and a balance. That is being a rubberstamp for the policy.

The question has come up time and again, and the media looks and says: Oh, my goodness, this is a conspiracy theory, the deep state. There actually is a deep state, and the deep state has been around for decades and decades. In fact, the Church commission in the 1970s was set up to investigate the deep state.

Who was the deep state in those days? It was Hoover. Hoover was using the enormous power of the intelligence agencies to investigate people he didn't like--civil rights leaders and protesters of the Vietnam war--so he illegally used this power of intelligence gathering to spy on Americans.

Americans were rightly upset. The Church commission tried to rein in the intelligence communities. But the interesting thing is, in those days, the power to do intelligence was some guy sneaking into your house and placing a little magnet on your phone. It is not done that way now. They can scoop up every phone call in America like that. They can scoop up every international phone call, every phone call to a country. We can listen to what anybody is saying anywhere around the globe any time we want, and then we can kill anyone anytime, anywhere in the world. These are ominous powers and deserve more oversight. So when people refer to the deep state, that is what we are talking about--more oversight.

What happens now is there are eight people in Congress who are consulted about intelligence, consulted about targeted killings--eight people. But they are not given a check and a balance. They are consulted. They are told often after the fact. So, really, there are no checks and balances. This is an enormous, ominous power, and it is not checked. Those eight people are the leader of the Senate, the minority leader of the Senate, and the chairman and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee. It is the same on the House side. So eight people know anything.

You say: Well, this certainly can't be true. Certainly, they must brief all of you.

Do you remember when they were collecting all of your phone data and storing it in Utah? Everybody's phone data, every phone call you were making, was being stored in Utah.

One of the authors of the PATRIOT Act who had been involved in and had actually been supportive of this said that he was unaware of it and said that he didn't believe the legislation that wrote the PATRIOT Act actually authorized that.

There is not enough check and balance. There is not enough oversight. We have seen it recently with the killing of the Washington Post journalist and dissident, Khashoggi. The CIA concluded, according to media reports, with high probability that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia--with a high degree of probability--was responsible for the killing. Was everybody told that? No, the public was not told that. Most of Congress, most of the Senate--I was not told that because the briefings are only for a select few.

What happens is you get imperfect and not very good oversight; the checks and balances are not working because the only people being told about what the intelligence community is doing are the people who are rubberstamps for what they are doing. The skeptics, those who believe there is too much power, are not being told.

My point in bringing that up with this nominee today is not the individual being nominated but that the deep state has circled its wagons, and they are preventing me from finding out: Do we kill people around the world based on metadata? It is a very simple question, it is a very specific question, and they are refusing to answer it.

So I have been holding this nominee and will vote against the nominee because I believe that the deep state needs more oversight. I believe that we shouldn't kill anyone, anywhere, anytime around the world without some checks and balances.

I also believe that our drone program, our targeted killing, actually makes the country less safe and makes us more at risk for terrorism. I think we should reevaluate this. We have had a top 20 kill list for 20 years. We just keep replenishing it with more and more and more. It is a never-ending top 20 list. I think we should reevaluate it. I think we should talk about, is there a way we can declare victory?

I am proud of the President today to hear that he is declaring victory in Syria. Most of the voices around here like to stay everywhere for all time, and they believe that it doesn't work unless you go somewhere and stay forever. The President has the courage to say that we won in Syria, and we are coming home--the first President in my lifetime really to do that. That is why President Trump is different, and that is why I think President Trump is one we should all look to for some changes and for some reform of the deep state.

I yield back my time. Cloture Motion

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source