Government Accountability

GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY -- (Senate - April 05, 2005)

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I rise this morning to talk about three areas of accountability as we begin discussing a range of things in the Senate this week. The issue of accountability rises on the question of the report offered to the American people and to the Congress by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Senator Chuck Robb. It deals with the question of intelligence preceding the Iraq war.

The 600-page report given us was largely a useless retelling of what we know already. I do not want to completely diminish the effort, and there are some things in that report that are interesting, but the fact is, we already know that the intelligence with respect to Iraq was dead wrong. The major question is, How was the intelligence used and for what purpose was it used?

We know what we were told prior to the Iraq war. All of us went to briefings up in the room in the Capitol where we receive top secret briefings, and we heard all kinds of language there and in the popular press by people in this administration and others who said that this was a certainty, that they knew where the weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq; it was urgent; there were unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver weapons of mass destruction; this is a slam dunk.

Now we know not only from this report but from previous reports that this intelligence was gathered, for example, with respect to one of the issues, as our Secretary of State told the world in the United Nations presentation, concerning the prospect that the Iraqis were developing a mobile chemical weapons lab to produce weapons of mass destruction. Now we discover that information came from a source named ``curve ball.'' It was a single-source piece of information. Some suspect that ``curve ball'' was a drunk, at least when he met with our intelligence folks. It says that he was suspected of having a hangover. We know that he was a fabricator.

So on the basis of a fabricator, a drunk, single source, we told the world through our Secretary of State that Iraq had mobile chemical weapons labs that threatened our country.

The aluminum tubes are another story. I am not going to go through all the stories, but the question is, Where is the accountability? We get a 600-page report that tells us what we already know; that the intelligence with respect to Iraq was dead wrong. Where is the accountability? Where does the buck stop?

Mr. Tenet, who was the head of the CIA--and this 600-page report points certainly to him among others--was brought to the Oval Office, to the White House, and given the Medal of Freedom after he left the CIA. Where is the accountability? Is there accountability in this country for having gotten it not just wrong but, as the 600-page report says, dead wrong? Will this Congress require accountability? I think it is very important.

This 600-page report is half the story. The other part of the story is not only bad intelligence, but how was it used, and what was the purpose of using it? Go to the Woodward book, go to the O'Neill book, and one gets some hint of the connection to this.

I think this Congress is owed additional answers. I think this report was far too narrow.

Second, I want to ask about accountability with respect to an independent investigation that is going on in this town. The Washington Post report was surprising to me because I was not aware of these facts. The Washington Post did a story that said the cost of the Cisneros probe nears $21 million over 10 years. This was a probe of Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros by independent counsel David Barrett. In May of 1995, Mr. Barrett was appointed as independent counsel to investigate allegations that a then Cabinet Secretary lied to the FBI about money that he had paid to a former mistress. That was May 1995.

In September 1999, Mr. Cisneros pleaded guilty, paid a $10,000 fine, and then following that he was later pardoned by President Clinton. By then, the independent counsel had spent $10.3 million on his investigation, and since that time he has spent another $10 million-plus on the investigation.

Is there a screw loose someplace? What are they thinking about? There was an independent counsel appointed 10 years ago to investigate an alleged impropriety by a Cabinet official. The Cabinet official pleaded guilty 4 years later, was pardoned a year after that. The independent counsel is still working? He is supposed to be supervised by three Federal judges, but the fact is, they are leaking money down there.

I intend to offer an amendment to the supplemental to shut off the funding. Ten years later, $21 million, investigating the question of whether a Cabinet official lied about money paid to his mistress? He pleads guilty to it and we have a guy 10 years later still investigating it?

I think waste is a disaster in the Federal Government. Talk about waste, this is shameful, and if the three-judge panel does not have the common sense to shut this down, then the Congress, I hope, will have the common sense to shut it down. I will offer an amendment during the supplemental that shuts off the money and does it now.

The third area of accountability is this: As chairman of the Policy Committee on our side, I have held a good number of hearings on the issue of contracting in Iraq. There is massive waste, fraud, and abuse going on with respect to contracting in Iraq. All of us know there is money going out of this Congress in wholesale quantities, tens of billions of dollars.

Last year, Congress passed a bill for reconstruction money in Iraq. I did not vote for it; I voted against it. In fact, I offered an amendment to shut it down, reconstruction money to the tune of nearly $19 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq. In addition to that, we have spent nearly $160 billion to $180 billion on the war in Iraq. There is an $82 billion request before the Senate right now. That is the supplemental I was referring to earlier. This is a massive amount of money being spent with respect to the operations in Iraq and also the reconstruction in Iraq.

I will talk a bit about what we have learned. One contractor was feeding our troops and charged the American Government, the Pentagon, for feeding 42,000 troops a day. It turns out this contractor was only providing 14,000 meals a day. We are getting billed for 42,000 meals, but the contractor was only providing 14,000 meals. Someplace 28,000 meals are charged for that were never offered to our troops, or perhaps not needed.

I come from a small town, and they call that cheating in my hometown. That contractor is still the largest contractor in Iraq being paid by the U.S. taxpayer.

We had testimony from truckdrivers who were hired to move goods around Iraq, including fuel coming into Iraq by contractors. Truckdrivers testified that $85,000 brandnew trucks were left on the side of the road to be torched and looted because they had a clogged fuel pump or because they had a flat tire they could not fix. What did they do? They left the truck beside the road, just abandoned the truck. That is the kind of waste, fraud, and abuse that is going on.

We had a guy testify and show us a picture of the bags of cash that were used to give to contractors in Iraq. One contract company started business in Iraq with $450. They have been paid tens of millions of dollars now. Two of their employees, by the way, became whistleblowers and said: What we are seeing is making us sick, so we are going to tell somebody about it.

Here is what they said: These two people who started this company and are contracting with the U.S. Government--it is called the Coalition Provisional Authority that we created in Iraq; it was us, we paid for it--were providing security at an airport, and they were alleged by the employees to have taken forklift trucks off the airport property to a warehouse, repaint them blue, and then bring them back to the airport and sell them to the U.S. taxpayers through the Coalition Provisional Authority. Again, in my hometown, they call that fraud.

We had a big picture that one of the other whistleblowers had taken who worked in Iraq, and he said: We told contractors in Iraq that when it was time to get paid, just bring a big bag because we are going to give you cash.

He showed us one picture of the contractor I discussed, the one with respect to the forklift trucks. He showed one picture of $2 million wrapped in Saran Wrap in bundles sitting on a table and the contractor comes with a big bag and they get their $2 million and waltz off.

This contractor, by the way, was also alleged to have created a subsidiary in the country of Lebanon for the purpose of buying and selling to and from itself so it could inflate prices and therefore further cheat the United States taxpayer.

It is unbelievable what we have learned about contracting in Iraq. One whistleblower came forward and said he was the buyer who was supposed to buy towels for U.S. soldiers. He said this is the towel I bought under orders from my superiors. The company wanted to pay almost double the price of the towel in order to have the company's name embroidered on the towel the soldiers used--unbelievable waste.

When you think of what is happening, this Congress is shoveling out tens of billions of dollars in pursuit of all of this and nobody is watching the store. You hear the stories about us paying for reconstruction of a building in Iraq--and we are doing it for thousands of buildings. We decide we are going to put an air conditioner in that building, so it is subcontracted to an Iraq subcontracting company. First it goes to the contractors who are in Iraq being paid by our Government, some of whom I have described here, and then it goes to an Iraq subcontractor, and then the subcontractor for that subcontractor, and pretty soon that air conditioner in the building became a ceiling fan and we paid for an air conditioner and the ceiling fan doesn't work. So there you are.

The question is, who in this Congress is going to decide this matters at a time when we are up to our neck in debt, the largest debt in the history of this country, with a fiscal policy that is way off track, a President who sends us a budget with the highest Federal budget deficits in history, and trade deficits that are the highest in history, a combined fiscal policy and trade deficit of over $1 trillion in the past year? We are sinking and drowning in debt. Who is going to care about this kind of waste, fraud, and abuse, the most serious I have seen in all the years I have served in the Congress?

I raise this because it relates to accountability, accountability with respect to the use of intelligence prior to the war in Iraq, accountability with an independent counsel who spent $21 million 10 years after the fact when he was supposed to investigate a Cabinet official who lied about paying money to his mistress. This is an independent counsel who is still operating and has spent $21 million. Who is accountable for that? Who is accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq?

Harry Truman had the famous sign on his desk, ``The buck stops here.'' These days the buck doesn't seem to stop anywhere. Nobody seems to be accountable for anything.

I intend to offer another amendment. I don't know whether I will offer it on the existing bill or on the supplemental, but I will offer it again, setting up a Truman committee of sorts. In 1941, at the start of the Second World War, Harry Truman, then a Democratic Senator when a Democrat was in the White House, traveled around this country and saw waste, fraud, and abuse in military spending. He created a special committee and as a result of the investigation of that committee they unearthed massive fraud and massive waste. That was when a Democrat in the Congress did it, when a Democrat was in the White House.

These days nobody wants to raise any questions. You don't want to make any waves because we have one-party control and we don't want to talk about this, that, or the other thing. The fact is, I have never seen the kind of waste that now exists with respect to our operations in Iraq. It undercuts and undermines our soldiers' efforts, in my judgment. It cheats America's taxpayers, and it represents the worst of Government.

We ought to be able to hire contractors who will do the job without allowing waste, fraud, and abuse to represent the major impact of what we see happening in Iraq these days with respect to these contractors.

Part of this stems from greed. Part of it stems from the fact that many of these contracts in Iraq are no-bid contracts--one company. I have not mentioned Halliburton, but I could because a lot of it deals with Halliburton and KBR--not exclusively, but a lot of it. Any time somebody mentions Halliburton, somebody says: Oh, you are attacking the Vice President. Not a bit. This happened after the Vice President left Halliburton. These are of recent vintage, these activities in Iraq. It is not an attack on anybody. It is in support of the taxpayers of this country. We ought not allow this to happen. Republicans and Democrats all ought to stand on their feet and demand accountability and demand that the waste, fraud, and abuse stop--$8,000 a month to rent an SUV; $40 for a case of pop or soda--Coca-Cola.

There were 50,000 pounds of nails ordered by a contractor to Iraq. They were the wrong length, so they dumped them. If anybody wants to pick up 50,000 pounds of nails, they are laying in the sand in Iraq. It is unbelievable the waste, fraud, and abuse we hear about.

The reason I have held the hearings in the Democratic Policy Committee is nobody else will hold hearings. No one else wants to hold these contractors accountable. There are whistleblowers all over who are disgusted with what they saw, working for contractors and supervising contractors in Iraq.

I have only described a brief portion of what we learned in these hearings. We intend to conduct additional hearings. My preference would be that we not conduct these hearings in my committee. My preference would be that the authorizing committees and the relevant committees that should be assuming oversight of this would hold aggressive hearings, but they don't and they probably won't, and as a result we will continue to do this.

I am intending to offer an amendment to create a Truman-type committee here in the Congress, as we did some decades ago, to take a hard look at what is happening through that kind of committee, an investigative committee that would include Republicans and Democrats, all of whom I hope would be committed and dedicated to the task of deciding that waste, fraud, and abuse is not something that should happen on any of our watches here in the Congress.

Again, I think the key issue here is accountability. There seems to be none these days in almost any direction. I hope in all of these areas we can begin to decide there is accountability, at least here in the Congress.

I yield the floor and make a point of order a quorum is not present.

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