Mr. Railsback . Chairman, thank you, and members of the committee by saying that you, mr. Chairman, i think in a rather difficult assignment with you because you know on many occasions i think you have handled yourself very well. And i think i can say for the most members of the committee that during these six months through the 38 volumes of evidence, the listening to the live witnesses morning, afternoon and night that i can be proud of my judiciary colleagues, most of them. I feel badly as Charlie Sandman did about the leaks, the selective leaks, some of which i think the newspapers made a mistake in playing. Although i know they have a job. I used to like to be on the House Judiciary Committee when we were worried about penal reform and juvenile delinquency, trying to improve some very important things in our country that needed improving, but im about to reconsider my assignment now that we have had amnesty, abortion, impeachment and now a bomb threat. Let me say that im one of th
Has in fact either authorized the bake in or personal the cover up. We were persuaded beyond a convincing case that he should stand trial in the political sense of having to have a trial in the senate but nobody felt great about it. Most people get burdened. They didnt want to. We felt there was no alternative. We were the elected officials and had a duty to see whether the highest officer in the country had breached his duty. William cohen, 1974, a republican member of the House Judiciary Committee. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for being with us on cspans 3 American History tonight. Tv 8 00 eastern time sunday evening we will continue our look at house judiciary committ committee. Our coverage of the 40th anniversary of water gate continues including debate over article two which charge nixon of abuse with power. You will also hear from the forrer director of the library and museum and explains how the committees vote affecting our understanding of president ial power today.
What group might be willing, or against to vote impeachment, who might come that morning. Met jim mann and talked to him for the first time. Waldon flowers and talked to him time. E first and Caldwell Butler and we met at that point and said is there we really allthat of us could agree on. Either an constitute process, abuse of say, and we went through all of the evidence that pretty convincing knew think at that point i who was voting for and who least their inclination and we went public respectivey with our speeches. You were a 34yearold from maine and a republican so a member of your by party facing impeachment a committee you served on. It was not a happy moment. Distressed through the. I knew it would be the most beortant decision i would called upon to make. I tried to be as well prepared as i could. The previous six years, three as a prosecutor, three as a defense attorney so my focus and analyzinge the evidence without regard to oritical affiliation hadisan affiliation and i s
Question from one of our multinational partners. Im from the british embassy. Just following on from a point you made that and with the recent events in europe and the repositioning of some of your armored combat teams back to europe, are you confident that under the Restructuring Initiative that youve got the right assets or enough assets within europe or john, you want to take the first one . I think we spend a lot of time talking to our rsccs around the world. Army service sorry. Army Service Component commands. And sorry, with the acronym soup here. We were talking about pegs earlier. Great record on that. So we stay closely tied, and the aviation Restructuring Initiative is about adding capability, increasing capability even though were going to have less structure because it is the best step. And were going to tie that to the idea that we need to become more expeditionary and we need to proat a time forrotate force basis. We did in hawaii this summer and we put a company out of c
General, thanks for your time this morning. I was hoping you could clarify how air strikes are being conducted without any jtax on the ground in most cases and also how you assess civilian casualties in most cases, if at all . Let me start with civilian casualty piece. You know, the coalition is really very deliberate about how it conducts strikes out there. And we have some great capability in terms of precision. Whats in the balance here if youre not careful is you can be precisely wrong. You could strike, you know, tribe, you could strike Iraqi Security forces and you could create a very bad situation. To date weve got a very good record. Im tracking no civilian casualties where we just if we even suspected civilian casualties, we would immediately direct investigation, determine the cause and then seek to understand the lessons is learned from that and apply those lessons learned. So thats the civilian casualty piece of this. And again, a very deliberate process. And the second que