Jerry Nadler: “I am not going to go into how desperate the situation is and how important it is that we pass a strong and tough…”

“I am not going to go into how desperate the situation is and how important it is that we pass a strong and tough antiterrorism bill. I think everybody here agrees on that. The question is what is an effective antiterrorism bill that will effectively fight terrorism without doing violence to the liberties of the American people. That is the question before us, and we do not have to make speeches about how important a bill is. We know that; we all know that. Let me simply suggest, and I will have to speak later in greater detail, that to have tough-sounding provisions in a bill that are unconstitutional and, therefore, unenforceable gives us the illusion of being tough, but not the reality of doing anything about the problem, and that is one of the problems of the bill that we solve in the Conyers-Nadler-Berman substitute. Second, we will talk later about some of the real civil liberties problems. We cannot have a procedure for deporting aliens who are allegedly terrorists where they have no opportunity to cross-examine their accusers, no opportunity to see the evidence against them, no opportunity even to know the specific charges, and that is possible under this bill, and that provision is rewritten to provide basic due process in the substitute that we will be talking about later.”