UNOFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT: Hour 3 – Sen. Rand Paul Filibuster of Brennan Nomination

 

UNOFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT:
Hour 3 – Sen. Rand Paul Filibuster of Brennan Nomination

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Sen. Rand Paul took to the Senate floor to participate in an active filibuster of President Obama’s nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan. Sen. Paul’s remarks began at 11:47 a.m. ET, and as of this release, he is still participating in the filibuster. Below is video and an unofficial transcript of his remarks between approximately 1:47 p.m.-2:47 p.m. Click HERE and HERE for video and transcript of hours 1 and 2.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH HOUR 3 OF SEN. PAUL’S FILIBUSTER

TRANSCRIPT:

What we’re talking about is noncombatants eating dinner, sleeping in their house, walking down the street, a large percentage of the drone strikes have been people who were not carrying arms or in combat. Now, were they bad people? I’m not positive that I can tell you one way or the other, but I don’t want that sort of standard to be used in America. I don’t want the standard to be that if you’re close to a bad person and you’re a male between the ages of 16-50, that you are no longer a civilian but that you are actually a militant. Is that the standard we’re going to use in America? I don’t want the standard to be sympathizing. You know, has anybody ever been on the Internet? Have you ever seen crackpots on the Internet who say all kinds of crazy things? If you’re saying crazy things and they happen to be against your government, is that enough for a Hellfire missile to come down on your house? Is sympathizing enough? People have written about this and talked about the idea that during the Vietnam War, there were many people - and some of them frankly were treasonous and should have been tried for treason - but even having said that, I would never be for killing them without some sort of due process or trial. The idea of the right to trial by a jury is something that really we have based our history for hundreds and hundreds of years have been basises of a foundational principle for our country. I can’t imagine that we would be so cavalier as to let it go.

As we move forward with this nominating process, I have decided to occupy as much time as I can on the floor to bring attention. Ultimately, I can’t win. There’s not enough votes. There would be if truly there was an uprising of bipartisan support who would come to the floor and say, you know what? It’s not really about John Brennan. It’s about a Constitutional principle, and we’re willing to delay this until the President can explicitly answer that noncombatants in America won’t be killed with drone strikes. I think it’s a pretty simple answer, but it’s been like pulling teeth. I have written letter after letter for weeks and weeks trying to get an answer on this, and we haven’t had much luck.

There have been people who have written about the lawfulness of these lethal operations directed against citizens, and there is a question both in the country and outside the country, there is a question of what the standard will be, will it be the same standard? Now, some say there is no standard once you get outside the country, that anybody can be killed whether they are an American citizen or not. I frankly don’t like the idea of no standard. I think, for example, the most prominent American that has been killed overseas was Awlaki. He was on a list and his name was publicly known to be on a kill list for months. I see no reason why he couldn’t have been tried in a federal court, expeditiously, if he didn’t return home he’d still be tried, but given representation and tried for treason. These aren’t real frequent cases overseas that have occurred, so I see no reason why we wouldn’t use federal courts. The federal courts are adapted such that they can go into secret session, if there is classified material. Federal courts in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York have done this on occasion.

And I think we could do this in federal court. We have tried and convicted quite a few terrorists, I think, number into the several hundreds in the United States in our courts. The main thing is that, I object to people becoming so fearful that they cavalierly give up their rights. We had two terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky. My town is 50,000 people. Who would have thought we would have two terrorists? And they were conspiring to either buy or send Stinger missiles to Iraq, and I’m glad they were caught and I’m glad they were punished. They were done so in a court. But many people said oh, let’s just send them to Guantanamo Bay forever, it’s like – once we go down that path that we’re not going to have any due process – our courts have done a pretty good job. In fact, I think we have not let off anybody from one of our courts that should have been kept here and tried. I do have some questions how these terrorists got to the country, and it goes back to while we don’t want terrorism to occur, how we should combat it. Whether it’s most – best combated by being in Yemen, Mali, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan or whether some of the way we ought to combat terrorism is to do a better job of knowing who comes into our country and who leaves. For example, we have allowed 60,000 people from Iraq to come into this country in the last two or three years. I think that’s a lot, frankly. They come here under asylum. The problem with asylum is, see, I thought asylum was when you were escaping dictatorship, when you were going to be persecuted by a dictator. Well, we won the war in Iraq. It’s a democratic government over there, and I wouldn’t understand why you would be trying to leave a democratic government. Also, the 60,000 you leave, other than maybe the two we captured in Bowling Green, you would presume that most of them are pro-Western if they want to come over here, those are the people we want running Iraq. There are all kinds of reasons why they should stay in Iraq to run the country. But in letting so many people come in, we didn’t do a very good job, because the two terrorists we let in in Bowling Green, their fingerprints were on an I.E.D., And the I.E.D. was in a warehouse somewhere, and the interesting thing about it is they didn’t find the fragments that their fingerprints was on matching up in a database. After we caught them and were trying them and we knew their name and had their fingerprints, we went and directed towards some fragments that had been in a warehouse for years and years and had not yet been checked for fingerprints. So we’re really not quite doing the job.

Sometimes we want to analyze so much information that we get overwhelmed with the information, too. We collect millions and millions and billions of pieces and bits of information, but it can’t possibly all be analyzed, and some of it I fear goes against your rights to privacy. Any of your e-mails over six months can be looked at. We found out about this recently when we had an adultery affair in our military, and it’s like, I think your third party records are yours. So I had an amendment recently on this, and I told people that my Visa bill is pretty private. Just because I use my Visa card doesn’t mean I have given up that information and that the government should get to look at my Visa bill every month. But that’s what we have done. This has been going on, a lot of these things have been slipping away from us for a long time. They are not President Obama. They are 40 or 50 years of court cases. So like 30, 40, 50 years ago, we decided that, once a third party had your records, they weren’t yours and they weren’t private anymore, which I think is an absurd notion.

Think about the age we live in now and how a lot of people don’t use cash at all. Your Visa card has everything on it. You can look at a person’s Visa card, find out if they see a psychiatrist, what kind of medicines they are on sometimes. You can find out what kinds of magazines they get, what kind of books they get, where they buy them from. You can look at a person’s Visa bill and find out if they drink alcohol, or if they gamble. You can find out their travel patterns. There is a lot – you can find out a ton of information about someone’s Visa bill. Should people be able to look at your Visa bill without asking a judge and saying, we think he’s involved in this? And see, I’m not saying you can’t do this for a terrorist, but what you should do is you should go to a judge, you should present some evidence to say we think he’s a terrorist, we want to look at his Visa bill. Instead of saying everybody in America, your Visa bill is open to scrutiny. That’s basically what we have now. Your banking records, your Visa statements, all of your records that are held by a third party are not protected. You may have heard some about they want to have cybersecurity. Everyone wants their computers to be secure, including the computer companies. They work nonstop trying to keep these hackers out of our computers. But the law they want to pass wants to give immunity to the computer companies. Well, a lot of us don’t think much of it. We check off that confidentiality button and we hope that we have signed the contract and they are not going to share our stuff. They share it in a way, but in an anonymous way but with people you buy stuff from and we put up with that in order to get a great search engine. And I’m okay with that, that’s a private contract. What I’m concerned with is all of a sudden when we pass this cybersecurity all of a sudden its going to be, oh well, you really can’t sue them if they breach your privacy. So then we become everybody’s computer, everybody’s searches, everybody’s reading habits are open to the federal government. It’s once again because we are fearful of people coming at us and fearful of attacks, we give up our rights.

But I thought we were fighting to preserve our rights. So then what are we fighting for? These battles are going on throughout government. The interesting thing about these battles is they are not really always Republican versus Democrat. These are battles that are sometimes really coalitions of people from the right and people from the left who have gotten together and fought on these things. On trying to get the President to acknowledge that he won’t do drone strikes, there have been people on the Democratic side of the aisle who have allied with me and helped me to get some of this information. In fact, the President would have refused probably until hell froze over of giving me anything, but the fact that we got a few Democrats on there to ask for the information also, all of a sudden we had a coalition and we were able to get some information. But it hasn’t been easy, and that’s what’s worrisome. The fact that they don’t want to acknowledge limitation to the presidential power worries me that they believe in an incredibly expansive presidential power.

In order to stop that, we have got to be protective of our rights. You know, we have got to be able to not so easily give up on our rights. There is a white paper that was written and the title of it was the lawfulness of a lethal operation directed against a U.S. Citizen who is an operational leader of al-Qaida or an associated force. This is from the Department of Justice. This white paper sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the U.S. government could use lethal force. One of the things that they do in the document – and some of this was leaked recently –  is they tell you the criteria for when they can kill people overseas. Now, we don’t know the criteria for killing people in this country. They make a contention that the rules will be different but no one’s really acknowledging exactly who they can kill or what the rules will be. For the people who were killed overseas by drone strikes, the thing that they come up with is that they say that it has to be an imminent threat but it doesn’t have to be immediate.

Well, you know, to my thinking, only a bunch of government lawyers could come up with a definition for imminent that says it isn’t immediate. So that’s the first problem with it. Is that going to be the standard that’s used in America? That has to be an imminent threat but it doesn’t have to be immediate, because then my next question, what does that mean? Does that mean noncombatants who you think might someday be combatants are an imminent threat? I mean, it is a pretty important question, what is imminent? No, there is no question what is imminent lethal force. Someone aiming a gun at you, a missile, a bomb, any of these things is imminent, and no one questions that. No one questions using lethal force to stop any kind of imminent attack. But we become a little bit worried when the President says imminent doesn’t have to mean immediate. And when that happens and then when you see, from what we can tell from the unclassified portion of the drone attacks overseas, many of these people are not involved in combat. They might someday be involved in combat, they might have been involved in combat, but when we kill them, most of them are not involved in combat. So even overseas, there is some question of this program, but my questions are primarily directed towards what we do in this country. Now, it says that the U.S. government can use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities. That’s once again the point. We’re not talking about a battlefield, but because the battlefield has no limits, since the battlefield is not just Afghanistan, the battlefield has no geographic limits, so the battlefield is the whole world, including many in this body who say the battlefield is the United States. So once you acknowledge and admit that the battlefield is the United States, this whole idea of what’s imminent versus what is immediate becomes pretty important because we’re talking about your neighbors now.

The other thing about this is, is you need to try to understand who – who are these terrorists? Members of al-Qaida. There are no people walking around with a card that says “al-Qaida” on it. There are bad people and there were bad people associated with the terrorists. We’ve killed a lot of them who were in Afghanistan training and part of the group that attacked us. But there are terrorists all over the world that are unhappy with their own local governments. Some of them are unhappy with us, too. But to call them al-Qaida is sometimes a stretch, and sometimes open to debate, who is and who isn’t. But then they use other words, and words are important. They’re either a member of al-Qaida or associated forces. I don’t know what that means.

Do you have to have talked to al-Qaida or do you just have to be committing terrorism? Do you have to be in a country where we’re supportive of the government and people are attacking the government? It’s not always clear. The other question you get to when it’s either al-Qaida or people associated is that now we get to the United States and we have the government defining what they say is terrorism. So the government has put out some documents, one by the Bureau of Justice, to warn you of who might be a terrorist. In fact, the government has programs, they want you to inform. They say, see someone, tell someone. If you see these people, you’re supposed to inform on them. So some of the characteristics of people who might be terrorists – and I don’t know, they don’t have to be an imminent threat so I don’t know, it doesn’t have to be immediate but some of these people might be terrorists. I don’t know. If the President’s going to kill these people, he needs to let them know.

Some of the people who might be terrorists are people who are missing fingers. Some people have stains on their clothing. Some people who have changed the color of their hair. Some of the people who have accumulated guns. Some people who have accumulated weatherized ammunition, which might be half the hunters in the South this time of year. Or, people who might like to pay in cash. Or, people who have seven days of food on hand. Well, I know people just for religious reasons, they are taught to keep food on hand. In fact, the government web sites sometimes tell you to keep food on hand for hurricanes. If you live along the coast, one government web site says keep food on hand. The other government web site says, if you do, you might be a terrorist. Now, not saying you are but if these are the characteristics of terrorism, would you not be a little concerned that if the government’s putting this list out, that we’re going to drop Hellfire missiles from drones on people in America who might be on this other list? I’m – I’m particularly concerned about that. So I think we can’t be sloppy about this. We can’t allow ourselves to, you know, be so, I guess, afraid of terrorism or afraid of our enemies that we give up on what makes us Americans. What makes us Americans are, you know, are our constitutional rights, that these are enshrined in our Constitution. It’s why we’ve gone to wars to defend these rights. You know, when we think the war still has purpose if we’re no longer able to enjoy these rights at home?

The problem as I see it, as we go forward, is that I wish I could tell you that there was an end to this, that there would be a grand battle for your constitutional rights or for what rights you lose overseas, what rights you lose here if you travel. The problem is, they don’t see an end to the war. They – they see perpetual war, perpetual war without geographic limits, and they see the battlefield here. So they want the laws of war to apply not only there but to apply here. Another way of saying the laws of war is martial law. These are the laws of war, these are the laws that are accepted in war. We accept a lot of things on the battlefield that we don’t want to accept here. I acknowledge, we accept it, you don’t get Miranda rights on the battlefield. You don’t get due process. You don’t get an attorney. If you’re shooting at us, we shoot back and kill you. The thing is, if you’re sitting at a cafe in Houston, you do get Miranda rights, you do get accused of a crime, you do get a jury of your peers. That’s what we’re talking about here. The President should unequivocally come forward and state that noncombatants, people not involved with lethal force, will not have drones dropped on them.

The other thing you should acknowledge is the law. Not only the constitutional law but the law since the Civil War has said the military doesn’t operate in the U.S. There’s a reason for the military not operating in the U.S. Why? The military operates under different rules of engagement than policemen. The rules are stricter on policemen. We do it because we’re not in a war here. So the policemen have to call judges. A lot of people don’t think through this, though, and they’ll say, well, these people are terrible, they’re awful people who would cut your head off. You’re right, they’re really bad people. We have really bad people in our country too sometimes. We have murderers and rapists. But tonight at 4:00 a.m., if there’s a rapist going around the neighborhood and you get to a house and there isn’t an imminent thing going on but you’re told he might be in this house, before the door’s broken down, they call on a cell phone, they get a judge out of bed and they say, we have chased him into this neighborhood, no one’s answering, we want to break the door down, can we have a warrant? And sometimes you don’t need it in that situation, but most of the time in our country the police have to call for a warrant. We have a process. But definitely when he’s arrested, they don’t just string him up. We don’t – we don’t have lynchings in our country. We don’t let mobs decide who’s guilty and who’s not.

I don’t question the President’s motives. I don’t think the President would purposely take innocent people and kill them. I really don’t think he would drop a Hellfire missile on a cafe or a restaurant like I’m talking about. But it bothers me that he won’t say that he won’t. And it also bothers me that when he was a Senator in this body and when he was a candidate, he had a much higher belief and standard for civil liberties, and that he seems to have lost that as he’s become President. So I think this is an important issue. It goes beyond John Brennan. It goes beyond really the President. It goes to an issue that rises above, I think, all other issues that we consider here. I voted for three of the President’s nominations, not because I agreed with them politically. In fact, I disagreed with the vast majority. But I disagree with the President on a lot of political issues, but I voted for his nominations because I think the President does get some prerogative in deciding who his political appointees are. I’ve chosen to make a stand on this one, and not so much the person, but the principle of this. I have nothing personally against Brennan, I have nothing personally against the President. But I have a great deal of concern about the rights that were enshrined in the Constitution. I have a great deal of concern about this slippery slope of saying that there won’t be accusations, there won’t be trials, that we will just summarily execute people. And the question is, will you execute noncombatants? If he’s not going to, he ought to say so.

In this white paper that was released, they talked about the three different conditions. One of them was imminence. But then they qualified it by saying imminent doesn’t have to mean immediate. Another one was feasibility. They said, you know, it’s not feasible to get some of these people overseas and so we kill them. But feasibility is to a certain extent could be defined as convenience. And so the question is, in America, you know, what if they live up in the Rocky Mountains and there are no roads leading up to where they are? They’re not very accessible, it’s not very feasible. And so are we going to do strikes based on convenience? Is that going to be the standard? When we talk about standards, they say they have a process in place, but the process is very important. The standards are important. But it’s also important that one group of people, one political group of people or one politician doesn’t get decide that standard. That the standard – and part of the way the process in our country works is there are checks and balances between three branches of government, and that one branch of government doesn’t get to unilaterally decide what these standards are. Because some of the standards are a little bit loose. Whether or not you’re near someone. Apparently we’re not counting civilians who are killed by drone strikes if they’re males between the ages of 16 and 50. If they were close to the person we were targeting, we just count them as other militants. Are we going to do that in the United States? If you’re eating with 15 of your family members and one of them one of them may or may not be communicating by e-mail with somebody a Middle Eastern country, can we just kill all 20 of you? And because some of you are within the right age group, that’s fine?

Or let’s say you’re eating with your cousin who is communicating with somebody in the Middle East and that person may or may not be a bad person, and then when you leave, let’s say you’re going to a wedding and you’re going from a pre-party and there’s 20 cars all going to the wedding and they know or they think they know or there may be a bad person among you, why don’t we just strike the caravan? These are called signature strikes. The “Wall Street Journal” said that the bulk of our drone strikes overseas are signature strikes. That’s a good question for the president. Are signature strikes going to be the standard for killing Americans in America? The President simply says the rules will probably be different for inside than outside. Well, I frankly don’t think that’s good enough. He says he has no intent to kill Americans in America. I frankly don’t think thats good enough. I don’t think it’s good enough for the President to say, I have no intention of breaching the Fourth – the Fifth Amendment. Intending not to is not the same as saying I won’t. His oath of office says, I will not – no, it says, I will protect, defend and preserve the constitution. It doesn’t say, I intend to protect, preserve and defend the Constitution except for when it’s infeasible or inconvenient. That’s not what the rules are about.

I think the rules are pretty absolute. The rules are, the Bill of Rights are yours. You got them from your Creator. They were enshrined in the Constitution. Nobody gets to take them from you. Nobody. No President from no party gets to be judge, jury and executioner. This decision to let this go, to let this nomination go without an answer is a big mistake for us. If we do this, if we let this nomination go without a debate, without significant opposition, without demanding more answers from the president, the problem is, is we’re never getting any more answers.

There will be some in this body who say, well, just let it go, the snow’s coming and we want to go home. The – the problem is, is that he’s never going to answer these questions unless he’s forced to. I suspect George Bush would have been the same. I suspect a lot of the Presidents would be the same, and I think it’s unfortunate but they see their power and their sphere of power as being more important than your constitutional rights. But we won’t get this by just the gladhand and the winning smile is not going to get any information from the President. The only way that this President would ever give us information is if we were to stop this nomination. And I’m not even saying stop it personally. My objection really is not so much to Brennan as being in charge of the CIA as my objection is to the program and to the President not admitting that he can’t do drone strikes in America. So I will continue to do what I can to draw attention to this and we’ll see where things lead. But I am disappointed in the President. I am one who, while I’m a Republican, I didn’t vote for him in 2008 or 2012, I am one who has admired certain aspects of his policy. I admired his defense of civil liberties. I admired him in 2007 when he said that Americans shouldn’t be involved in torture. I admired him when he said that we should follow the rule of law and that we should have warrants before we tap people’s phone, that we shouldn’t be trolling through people’s records. But I find a great irony and, really, frankly, a great hypocrisy to someone who would defend getting warrants before we tap your phone but won’t defend a trial before we kill you. You know, tapping one’s phone is a breach of your privacy and it should only be done if you’ve been accused of a crime and evidence has been presented and a judge grants a warrant. But killing someone with no due process? With no judicial oversight?

Now, some are saying in here, oh, we’ll get to it. We’re eventually going to set up a court, maybe a FISA court, which, unfortunately, probably won’t be quite good enough because it’ll be in secret and you really should have a chance to confront your accusers and have a public trial if you’re going to be killed. Particularly what I’m talking about is American citizens. But there needs to be some oversight. But the problem with waiting to do this and saying, oh, you know, we’ll do this, you know, sometime. We’ll get to it eventually. It never happens. Same way with saying, oh, we’ll get to – we’ll keep asking the president for more information. But it never happens. You know? If we do not take a stand for something we believe in, it’s going to slip away from us. I think our rights are gradually eroding. I think they are gradually slipping away from us. I think the understanding of the Constitution as a document that restrains your government, that restrains the size and scope of your government has been lost on a lot of people, and I think it’s something we shouldn’t give up on. When the President goes through his three different items that were leaked through this memo, he says there has to be an imminent threat and he says the capture has to be inconvenient or infeasible, and he says that the operation of killing the person has to be conducted within a manner consistent with the applicable law of war. Here’s the problem. That sounds fine if you’re in Afghanistan in the mountains fighting a war, but I’m talking about downtown Washington, D.C., talking about living in the suburbs of Houston or Atlanta. Are we going to have drone strike programs in America consistent with the applicable law of war? See, the other way to put law of war – and this isn’t a stretch, this is just turning the words around – martial law. Now, people, if you put it that way might have a little bit different impression. Do we want martial law in our country? If you go back to the battle we had over indefinite detention last year, where they are saying they can take a citizen without a trial, actually send them from America to Guantanamo Bay if they are accused of terrorism, – accused, not convicted, accused of terrorism – you start to worry about some of the stuff happening in our country, that this could actually happen. One of the sort of ironies of looking at different governments and looking at what makes people unhappy. In Tahrir Square in Cairo, there have been hundreds of thousands of people protesting, and it’s interesting what they are protesting. They are protesting – one of the large things they protest is something called an emergency decree, which I believe went in place by Mubarak 20-some odd years ago. So you get leaders who come in and they are fearful or they use fear to accumulate power, and you get a decree, so you get martial law. The martial law ironically enough in Egypt allows detention without trial. They do have the right to trial but there is an exception and it’s been excepted for the last 20-some odd years, and the people are hopping mad over it. So we get involved in their country and their politics and give them money and weapons, and we have got some of the same debate and proble here at home. Whether or not you can indefinitely detain.

You know, the president’s response to this was also pretty disappointing. It wouldn’t have become law without him. I think he threatened to veto it and then he signed it anyway. Empty threats are of no value. He struck no great blow for America or for American freedoms by not vetoing this. But when he signed it, he said something similar to what he’s saying now. He said well, I have no intent to indefinitely detain people. Am I the only one in America that’s a little bit, you know, underwhelmed by the President saying he has no intent to dough taken somebody but he is going to sign it into law saying he has the power to? That’s the same thing we’re getting now in this drone strike program. Don’t worry, everything’s okay. I’m your leader, and I would never detain you. I would never shoot Hellfire missiles at noncombatants. I won’t do that. And I can take him at his word, but what about the next guy? And the next guy? In 1923, when they destroyed the currency in Germany, they elected Hitler. I’m not saying anybody’s Hitler, so don’t misunderstand me. I’m saying that there is a danger even in a democratic country that someday you get a leader who comes in in the middle of chaos and says, Those people did it! Those people are the mistake, those people are who we need to rout out. And if the laws have been removed that prevented that from happening, if the laws had been removed that say we can indefinitely detain. In Hitler’s case, he said the Jews, those bankers, the Jews did this to us and they were indefinitely detained. Now, am I saying it’s going to happen in our country? Unlikely. I can’t imagine any of our leaders for all of our disagreements doing that. But if you don’t have the law to protect you, you don’t have that protection, because you do not know who the next guy is, and the next guy, or the next woman.

When Madison wrote about this, he wa