Jane Harman: “Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, more Americans have died in Iraq in the last 8 months than died during the first 3 years of…”

“Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, more Americans have died in Iraq in the last 8 months than died during the first 3 years of Vietnam. There are three Members of Congress who have not put themselves in the secrecy bag in this place, so I represent the 280-some million people in this country who do not know what is going on in the secret world. But it is very obvious from reading the newspapers, whether one reads the American newspapers or the European newspapers, there is an enormous fight going on between the intelligence agencies and the White House. The Secretary of the Army, or the Secretary of War, or whatever we want to call Mr. Rumsfeld, saw fit to establish his own agency which gave information to the President, and the President stood in this very well and told us things which apparently he believed, but have turned out to be absolutely fallacious. Nobody, even the President, has come back and said it is not true. Now, this report, this motion is the minimum that we can do for the American people. We want to know why those kids are dying, why the intelligence was so bad, and why the President took us over there into something that he is now saying, we are not going to cut and run, but what he is doing is calling Mr. Bremer over and saying, how can we get out of here before the election? Now, we have to hurry. We have to get out of here by next June.”