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Questions Needing Answers
House of Representatives - November 01, 2005

Mr. Speaker, today is All Saints Day. It is a rather remarkable day. In the 18 years, 17 years I have been in the Congress, I have never seen the other body go into secret session to try and find out the truth of anything. The fact that they had a session over there where they closed the doors to try and get at the truth tells you how bad this situation is.

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This morning's New York Times has an article, an editorial by Nicholas Kristof. Now, he is a neocon, certainly from the right, no question about it; but he says, his title is, ``What Did Cheney Know and When Did He Know It?'' He asks several questions which, I think, although many people do not have the opportunity to read the New York Times, they ought to know about it.

"Did you ask Scooter Libby to undertake his inquiries about Ambassador Joseph Wilson? Why did you independently ask the CIA for information about the Wilsons? Did you know that Mrs. Wilson was a covert officer? Did you advise Mr. Libby to leak information about Mrs. Wilson's work in the CIA to journalists? When Mr. Libby made his statements in the inquiry, allegedly committing perjury, were you aware of what he was saying?" Finally, and I think this is the question that really needs to be dealt with: "Was Mr. Libby fearful of disclosing something about your behavior in the summer of 2003?"

This goes on to suggest that if he did so, "was it a misguided attempt to try and protect you? The alleged lies shielded you," meaning Mr. Cheney, "by indicating that the information you gave him about Mrs. Wilson instead came from reporters and not from him."

Now, this is a question that the American people deserve an answer to.

Several years ago we sat in this body and listened to a State of the Union address, and the Vice President of the United States sat right up here on the dais, behind the President of the United States, knowing that what the President was saying was not factual. He knew that. How can the President of the United States explain to the American people how he sent people out to find out all this information, found it out, and still was allowed to come before the American people and the Congress and the diplomatic corps and the Supreme Court and the whole administration and tell them something that was not true.

Now, what this event does, and they may try and brush this off as a minor technicality, or it is just perjury; well, we impeached or tried to impeach President Clinton over just perjury, and that was about a sex act. No one died. Two thousand people have died, our people, untold numbers of Iraqis have died, and 10,000 of our people have come home badly, badly wounded. It has cost us $240 billion, money that we did not use to fix the levees in New Orleans or other places in this country where there are problems today.

The question that comes up again and again: Is there no limit in this administration to what will be said or done to promote this war and to protect it? Will they say anything? Is there any limit on what they will bring here as evidence?

The fact is that we hear there is a terror alert. If you look at those terror alerts, they always follow some disaster someplace to get people's mind off it. What has happened this week since the President was made aware of the fact that we had an indictment of the Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States? That man works in the White House or in the Executive Office Building right next to it.

What do we have? Well, we certainly have a lot of things here. We today had a big exposé about a flu epidemic. Now, did that just happen yesterday? That has been going on for a long time. The President said he had a flu shot. That flu shot had nothing to do with the avian bird flu from Asia. That is this year's strain of virus. We get them every year. Everybody gets a flu shot every year. They have nothing to do with this pandemic we are talking about. Yet the President makes a big exposé in the White House. And the fact is that this kind of thing to divert people's attention will continually be done to keep them from focusing on the disaster of this morally bankrupt war we are in in the Middle East.

It is time for us to call an end to this. The President has no plan to get out of it. We have no plans. There are no benchmarks for anything. They are going to stay there, and they intend to stay there. As long as there is chaos, they will be able to justify staying there, and that is what they want. They have wanted chaos.

Why did they disband the army? Why did they disband civil service? Why did they not prepare? Because they were intending to have things be in turmoil. Because in turmoil they can keep justifying their existence in Iraq. They should come home. The Vice President, as Mr. Christoff said, should either tell us what was going on or resign.