9/11/2003 Statement of Senator Mark Dayton

from Google cache:
Floor Statement of Senator Mark Dayton on Telling Us the Truth
September 11, 2003

September 11, 2001, was a day of infamy that will rank down with the very worst, most cowardly and vile actions ever taken against this Nation or any other nation on this planet, a sneak attack, murdering thousands--innocent children, women, and men--with no provocation, no forewarning, with no justification or rational reason, just the demented ravings and rantings of a fanatic who has perverted the principal teachings of his professed faith, of its greatest prophet, Mohammad. He twisted Mohammad's words into support for wars, with himself to play God and decide who deserved mercy and who did not. Innocent civilians died in the United States as a result of that fanaticism. His soldiers died on September 11. And he is off somewhere hiding in a cave.

Ten Minnesotans or Minnesota natives lost their lives in the attacks that terrible day: Gordon Aamoth, Jr., whose parents are good friends of my parents, an investment banker with offices on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center; as did Ann Nelson, a bond trader. Others were killed at work at the Pentagon: Captain Charles Burlingame, III, was the pilot of the hijacked American airlines plane which struck the World Trade Center. Tom Burnet was a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93, and one who led the counterattack against the hijackers on that plane. Tom and the other American heroes could not save themselves, but they may have saved us, as that plane's target was reportedly this very Capitol in which I stand with you today--alive, all of us, thanks, possibly, to Tom Burnet and the other American heroes.

These were good, hard-working Minnesotans, good, hard-working American citizens, who had the terrible misfortune to be living their lives in the wrong places on that day, September 11, 2001. They have been forever taken away from their families and friends, from their lives. So to those families and friends I express my very deepest condolences.

I remember leaving the Russell Senate Office Building that morning, going over to a hotel just a couple of blocks away from the Capitol where I was residing at the time, and I was asked by the general manager if I wanted to go up on the roof of the hotel, which I did, about 10:30 in the morning. The sky was totally clear except for a dark plume of cloud coming up from the Pentagon. There was no air traffic in the sky, no planes going in and out of National Airport, no helicopters, as is usually the case, going across the river.

All was quiet there until suddenly this one F-16 fighter plane came streaking down The Mall, seemingly just a few hundred feet right over the top of the Capitol. I thought to myself, I just never imagined in my worst nightmares I would ever see a day where a U.S. fighter jet was flying over our Capitol to defend it from whatever foreign enemy was attacking us. I pray to God I will never, ever see it again--never again.

George W. Bush became our President that week. He hadn't been elected our President, not in the traditional way of a democracy, by getting the most votes in the election, but that week he became our President. He rose magnificently to the enormous challenges and burdens which a President of the United States must bear, and must often bear alone, for all the rest of us. President Bush did that and he did it well, very well. He gained the good will of our entire Nation, and our Nation gained the good will of almost the entire world.

What priceless silver linings there were for all of us who survived those dark, terrible, black clouds which engulfed us on that terrible day. What opportunities those 10 Minnesotans and their fellow citizens gave to their country, at the terrible cost of their own lives. We gained the support, the good will, and the alliance of practically the entire world.

The President said, just 4 months later in his State of the Union Address to Congress and the American people, on January 29, 2002:

As we gather tonight, our Nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the State of our Union has never been stronger.

I recall all of us rising up in the House Chamber where we were witnessing that speech, and being stirred--shivers down my spine--by those words: ``Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger.''

Today, 2 years later, the U.S. Government, the same Bush administration, does not have the support nor the trust nor the respect of the nations of the world--not their governments and not the majority of their citizens. That is not surprising. For most of the past year, the administration has scorned most of the rest of the world. It has denounced the United Nations, derided allies of ours who disagreed with us, has berated others in order to try to compel their support. And it has proclaimed repeatedly the right of the United States, and the intention of the Bush administration, to take whatever military action it deems necessary--whenever, against whomever, who threatened or might at some time in the future threaten our national security.

No one in this country who cares about this country could question our right to protect our Nation's or our citizens' safety, not before September 11, 2001, and not after September 11, 2001. No one in the world who wishes us well would question our doing so. In fact, the vast majority of the world's governments and people supported our war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and against al-Qaida, and our stated intention to attack terrorists and terrorist organizations and their bases of operation wherever they were throughout the world.

But instead, the administration chose to go to war against Iraq. That action most of the rest of the world did not support. Other governments and the United Nations were skeptical about the Bush administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which U.N. inspectors could not find last fall and this year. They didn't believe they constituted an imminent threat to our National Security.

The Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix, called the evidence the U.S. gave him about Iran's weapons of mass destruction ``pretty pathetic.'' The rest of the world was skeptical, and the rest of the world would be proven right to be skeptical. There were no weapons of mass destruction used, thank God, against U.S. troops when they invaded Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction were found unused on battlefields or command posts or stored in caches anywhere in that country. Not even biological, chemical, or nuclear materials that could have been used to make those weapons have been found. Not even top level Iraqi scientists or former government officials, some of whom have been incarcerated for months now, denied any legal representation, denied chances to visit with their families--in some cases the families don't even know where they are or even if they are alive--not even interrogations under those conditions have produced information leading to weapons of mass destruction or supplies of weapons of mass destruction materials of the kinds and in the amounts that were claimed by the President and Vice President and Secretary of Defense and the National Security Adviser.

The rest of the world didn't believe our fears, but the American people did. The American people trusted our leaders. They believed them. They supported their decisions. They sent their sons and daughters, their husbands and wives, their friends and neighbors halfway around the world to fight for, and some to die for, that stated threat, that urgent threat that was asserted again and again by our leaders.

On August 26, 2002, Vice President Cheney said in a speech:

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.

One month later, on September 26, 2002, President Bush stated after meeting with Members of Congress:

All of us are united in our determination to confront an urgent threat to America. The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. The Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as minutes after the order were given.

Ten days later, just before Congress voted on his desire for a resolution, the President added that ``Iraq is exploring ways of using UVAs--unmanned aerial vehicles--for missions targeting the United States''.

Later, the administration officials admitted those vehicles had a maximum range of only about 300 miles and couldn't have been used against the United States.

During the same speech, the President asserted Saddam Hussein could have ``a nuclear weapon in less than a year''.

Supposedly the evidence cited and leaked to the press before that speech was that Saddam Hussein was secretly buying aluminum tubes for use in producing nuclear fissile materials. But when our own Department of Energy concluded they were the wrong tubes to use for such a purpose, the State Department's intelligence bureau concluded and pointed out they weren't even secret buys and that the purchase orders were posted on the Internet. The question was not made known to Congress nor made known to the American people.

In two reports to the Secretary of State, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program at all.

That was, in fact, what Saddam Hussein's own son-in-law had told the United States and United Nations officials when he defected in 1995.

As the Washington Post reported on August 10 of this year, a year previously--on August 7, 2002--the Vice President volunteered in a question-and-answer session at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, speaking of Hussein, that ``left to his own devices, it's the judgment of many of us that in the not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear weapons.''

On August 26, the Vice President described Hussein as a ``sworn enemy of our country'' who constituted a ``mortal threat'' to the United States. He foresaw a time in which Hussein could ``subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.''

Continuing to quote:

We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law.

But as the Washington Post goes on to say, the son-in-law's testimony was the reverse of the Vice President's description; the opposite of what the American people, were told and what Congress was told. But those contradictions were never disclosed to the American people nor to Congress. In fact, the President and the Vice President continued to insist right up until the invasion that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear threat that was an imminent and urgent danger to the United States.

The Vice President said on a network show on March 16 of 2003 that ``We believe he--Saddam Hussein--has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.''

The President, in his address to the Nation on March 17, 2003, cited intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves ``no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.''

If the Vice President of the United States asserts there is no doubt, and if the President of the United States asserts there is no doubt, then what is there to doubt? If you can't trust your own President and Vice President to tell you the truth about matters of life and death, such as nuclear threats, wars, and the future of this Nation, then what can you trust?

Another thing the American public believes is that Saddam Hussein is directly linked to al-Qaida and to the terrible events of September 11, 2001. According to the national surveys, over two-thirds of the American public believes that. Why? Because that assertion has been made repeatedly by this administration.

In fact, in the President's speech to the Nation last Sunday, he mentions the word ``terrorists'' or ``terrorist organizations'' 27 times--27 times. He cited the weapons of mass destruction once, in a rhetorical reference.

The fundamental basis on which we went into Iraq as proclaimed before the war began was only cited one time in that entire address to the Nation. But ``terrorism,'' or the connection of terrorists to Iraq, al-Qaida, and the West dominated the President's remarks, and his continued assertions to the American people of what the real situation is in that country for which Americans are still giving their blood, bodies, and lives.

On the other hand, as reported in the Washington Post recently, key administration figures have largely abandoned any claim that Iraq was involved in the 2001 attacks. ``I am not now sure that Iraq had something to do with it,'' Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on August 1.

The CIA's report--the administration's main source of information about these connections or lack of them--to the President and the administration, as reported in the New York Times on February 2 of 2002, found ``no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is convinced that Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaida or related terrorist groups.''

Maybe former Marine General Anthony Zinni, who has been on missions representing the administration and the President in the Middle East, has the best analysis of this changing rationale for our actions. He said:

Initially, there was at least an implication that Iraq was linked to terrorism. When that link couldn't be made, it was possession of weapons of mass destruction. When that link couldn't be made, it was lack of cooperation. Right now it is about ``we will not let you talk to our scientists,'' and it is the reason we will go to war. We know what the Iraqis have, and we can't tell you. I just think it is too confusing.

What is not confusing is the casualties mount. The number of Americans being wounded or killed in action in Iraq last month exceeded the previous month by over a third. Director Tenent told us this week that they are averaging 15 attacks a day on United States forces after the victory we won so courageously and magnificently in 3 weeks over 4 months ago. But we in the Senate owe the American people and those soldiers over there our continued search for and insistence that the truth be told to us and to the American people about the circumstances that got us into this war, the circumstances that exist in this war, and how we are going to get out of this war preserving the victory which was won but also bringing our men and women home. They have performed and continue to perform with patriotism that goes beyond anything I can imagine. But they want to come home. Their families want them home. They deserve to come home.

In his Gettysburg address, recognizing and paying tribute to other American heroes who lost their lives, President Lincoln concluded that ``we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.''

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people is a government that tells the truth to its citizens. If it doesn't, it is not a government of them, not by them, and certainly not for them. It is imperative.

Today, in commemoration of those who did not die in vain 2 years ago, there should be once again a rebirth of our freedom and our assertion to this Government or any Government of the United States of America to tell us the truth.