Steve Buyer: “let me take a shot at this. Since I am also a JAG officer and I have been in a theater of war, what the gentleman from…”

“let me take a shot at this. Since I am also a JAG officer and I have been in a theater of war, what the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Kennedy) is purporting I would say is false. When a war is fought, it is fought under the laws of war. There are also the Geneva Conventions. Our country has treaties with other countries. We have memorandums of understanding. We have exchanges of letters with regard to the jurisdiction and who can prosecute whom under what circumstance. I am going to support the DeLay amendment because I do not want our military to be tried by Iraq or some other nation out there. If we have a nation, take Germany, for example, and that military officer or an enlisted person commits a crime in the line of duty, we prosecute those; we take care of that. If they commit an offense in the civilian, outside the line of duty, they are prosecuted by Germany. That occurs out there. I think we need to pause and really think whether we want to subject our military to an international court.”