Patrick Leahy: “this has been a week. I spoke earlier about the loss of my good friend Senator Mike Enzi, as many other Senators have…”

“this has been a week. I spoke earlier about the loss of my good friend Senator Mike Enzi, as many other Senators have, out of respect, from both sides of the aisle. Yesterday, another good friend, Senator Carl Levin, left us. And, again, there will be respect shown, I am sure, by both Republicans and Democrats because he was of the school that worked with both. I had the privilege of being here throughout his decades of service, and he epitomized what the Senate should be. He was a person of complete integrity; a person who knew the issues, whatever they were, that he was going to be discussing and working on. He knew them as well as anybody else. But everybody knew, Republican or Democrat, that they could take his word for anything. And I couldn't help but think last night, if more Senators had listened to him at the time of the major Iraq war, supposedly because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which of course he did not; when we had been told by many in the administration they had evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, when they did not; and because he actually took the time to read the intelligence--he was one of three Senators, another one being the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, a conservative Democrat from Florida--they would come to us and tell us specifically what parts of the intelligence we should read, as did a third Senator.…”