Senator Webb's Floor Speech on National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2012 Amendment 1107

Senator Webb: Thank you, Mr. President. I'd like to say that I believe that the Senator from Colorado has a good point here, and I say that as someone who is a strong supporter of military commissions who, in many, many cases, has aligned myself with my good friend, the Senator from South Carolina and Senator McCain as well on these issues. To me this is not a jurisdictional issue and it's not an issue about whether we should be holding people under military commissions under the right cases or under military detention under the right cases.

My difficulty, and the reason that I support what Senator Udall is doing, is in the statutory language itself. I say this as someone who has spent a number of years drafting this kind of legislation as a committee counsel. I have gone back over the last two days again and again reading these sections against each other -- 1031, 1032 particularly -- and I'm very concerned about how this language would be interpreted not in the here and now as we see the stability that we brought to our country since 9/11, but if something were to happen. And we would be under more of a sense of national emergency and this language would be interpreted for broader action. And the reason that I have this concern is that we're really talking here about the conditions under which our military would be sent into action inside our own borders. And in that type of situation, we need to be very clear and we must very narrowly define how they would be used and, quite frankly, if they should be used at all inside our borders. And I think that’s the concern that we are hearing from people like the director of the FBI and the Secretary of Defense.

And I'm also very concerned about the notion of the protection of our own citizens and our legal residents from military action inside our own country. I think these protections should be very clearly stated and in this language there's a lot of vagueness. And what the Senator from Colorado is proposing is that we clarify these concepts, that we take this provision out, clarify the concepts, protections are in place in our country, we're not leaving our country vulnerable -- in fact, I think we're going to make it a much more healthy legal system if we do clarify these provisions.

So that is the reason I'm here on the floor to support what Senator Udall is saying and I know the emotion and the energy that Senator Levin has put into this and I respect him greatly. I just happen to believe that we should do a better job of clarifying our language. And I spent 16 years on and off writing in Hollywood, and one of the things that came to me when I was comparing this, this is kind of the danger that you get when you get the fourth or fifth screenwriter involved in a story. Where you tend to want to fix one thing and you're not fixing the whole thing. I greatly respect the legitimacy of the effort that is put into this, but when you read Section 1031 against Section 1032, there are questions about what would happen to American citizens under an emergency. Let's take, for instance, what happened in this country, for instance, what happened in this country after Hurricane Katrina. It's not a direct parallel, but you can see the extremes that people went to under a feeling of emergency and vulnerability. We had people who were deputized as U.S. marshals in New Orleans and you could see them on CNN, putting rifles inside people’s cars, stopping them on the street, going into people's houses, making a decision that later was rescinded that they're going to take people's guns away from them.

The vagueness in a lot of this language will not guarantee against these types of conduct on a larger scale if a situation were more difficult and dangerous than it is today. Section 1031, which Senator Levin mentioned, may be clear from the administration, it's not that clear to me when they talk about a covered person. This isn't simply Al Qaeda, depending on how you want to interpret it in a time of a national emergency, it says a person who is part of or substantially supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act. We might be able to agree what that means here on the Senate floor today, but you don't know how that might be interpreted in a time of national emergency. I'm not being -- I'm not predicting that it will. I'm saying we should have the certainty that it will not. Similar –

The Speaker Pro Tempore: The Senator has consumed five minutes.

Senator Webb: Ok. Similar concerns also revolve around the definitions in terms of the applicability of United States citizens and lawful residents, aliens, when you go to the word “requirement” does not extend, what about an option? These are the types of concerns I have. We should have language that very clearly makes everyone understand the conditions under which we would be using the United States military inside the borders of the United States. I yield the floor.