Pete Sessions: “I will share a little bit of the history of what has happened, as I recall it. I am sorry, I just got back from Alabama…”

“I will share a little bit of the history of what has happened, as I recall it. I am sorry, I just got back from Alabama and was not able to participate earlier in the debate. We have had maybe 29 hearings involving prisoner abuse. That is a lot of hearings. I serve on the Judiciary and Armed Services Committees. Probably 20 of those have been in those 2 committees of which I have been a member and tried to participate as much as I could in each one of them. I remember that the U.S. military announced they had problems in Abu Ghraib with prisoner abuse. They indicated they were conducting an investigation of it. Members of the Senate, like dogs that chase a car down the road, sometimes I thought they thought they were making the car go because they were chasing it. The military commenced, on its own accord, an investigation that has culminated in the conviction of a number of people who have gone to jail for rather substantial periods of time for violating the policies of the Department of Defense and the laws of war on those prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It took place on a midnight shift and was not justified. It was beyond the law, and they have been punished for it. That has been morphed into allegations about what happened at Guantanamo. We apprehended 17,000 prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. We brought 700 to Guantanamo. There are only 500 left. Some of those are the worst of the worst. Allegations were made that they were being abused.…”