Executive Session

Floor Speech

EXECUTIVE SESSION -- (Senate - November 08, 2007)

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Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I would ask for 5 minutes.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.

Mr. GRAHAM. And I thank the Senator from Vermont. I appreciate that.

Mr. President, I will be voting for Judge Mukasey because I think he is the solution, not the problem. My good friend from Colorado made a very eloquent statement, and I respect him
greatly. This has been a good debate, and it has been long overdue.

Where do we go, and how do we get there? What do we want to do to fight this war? What is in bounds, what is out of bounds? It is very tough, America. We are fighting a vicious enemy, one not in uniform, and one that will do anything to wreak havoc on this world; an enemy that would kill a child in a heartbeat and not think about it, in the name of God. So we have a real task ahead of ourselves, very difficult, and we have a great military.

My question for my colleagues is, the fact that our military would do the things that Senator Salazar said, consciously take waterboarding off the table, does that make us weaker? I don't think so. I go to bed at night feeling pretty good about America when our military lawyers come before the Congress and say: We don't do that. We don't do that.

Now, what does our enemy do when they capture one of our soldiers? We all know. They are brutal. They are horrible. The fact we don't cut their heads off, is that a sign of weakness? The fact that we will give them a lawyer when they won't give us one; that we will base our judgments on evidence, not revenge and hatred, does that make us weaker? No.

The ticking time bomb is not the scenario of a terrorist who may possess some special knowledge. The ticking time bomb is a world that is losing its way. There is no shortage of people who will cut your head off in this world. There is a shortage of people who will stand up for a better way. We know what bad people will do to good people. The question is, what do good people do to bad people?

We are good people, and we are struggling. And I think Judge Mukasey is part of the solution. He has lived a good life in the law, and he has been asked a question about solving a problem not of his making.

If I thought, I say to Senator Salazar, he really believed that waterboarding, at the end of the day, was the legal way to do business, I wouldn't vote for him. He is in a bind. He can't answer that question. But he will one day because I have asked him. And he doesn't have this theory of the law that there is only one branch of Government in a time of war that has been pushed by this administration to the point of being absurd.

He is a mainstream legal thinker. He answered my question that there is no power given to the President, inherent or otherwise, to avoid the Geneva Conventions obligations of this country or to set aside the McCain amendment. That was music to my ears. He is bound.

The question for us, as we have been a part of the conventions for a long time, and we have led the world for a long time by being different from our enemy, do we reserve to our Executive in those special circumstances the right to set the conventions aside? You see, we are threatened by someone out there who has no boundaries, a group that has no boundaries. So do we reserve to ourselves the ability to treat them any way we want to because the means justifies the end?

Well, let me tell you what will happen if we go down that road, and where we will wind up. What will we say to the Chinese Communist dictator who waterboards the Christians because they are threatened by the Bible? What do we say to people in China who will torture the Buddhist monk because they are threatened by a humble, decent religion? What do we say in Venezuela? What do we say anywhere in the world when people who feel threatened use horrible tactics simply because they are threatened?

This is a good man of the law, Judge Mukasey. Over time, Senators SCHUMER and FEINSTEIN will be shown to have done the country some good--a lot of good. And to those who cannot vote for Judge Mukasey because he didn't answer this question as directly as you would like, I understand. But we are about to fix a problem in the Justice Department that needs to be fixed, and we are going to have an honest, good debate about how to win this war.

I can tell you right now, the only way we will win this war is not just by killing because this is not about how many of them we can kill. That is an endless number. This is not about a capital to conquer, an air force to shoot down, or a navy to sink. This is about ideas. Our way of living is better than theirs, only if we will have the courage and the common sense to embrace it and not be afraid to be good in a time where there is evil.

God bless you.

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