Statement of Rep. Tom Lantos: House Government Reform Committee Hearing on "Acquisition Under Duress: Reconstruction Contracting in Iraq"

Statement of Rep. Tom Lantos: House Government Reform Committee Hearing on "Acquisition Under Duress: Reconstruction Contracting in Iraq"

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You and my friend Mr. Waxman have raised many of the specific issues that concern all of us. I would like to take a different tack.

But first, let me commend Mr. Bowen for the invaluable work you have done on behalf of the American people. If it were not for your Inspector General's reports, we would know a fraction of this very unsavory picture.

As I was doing all my reading in preparation for this hearing, two images kept coming back in my mind, both of them I wish I could not remember.

Some 15 years ago, I chaired the housing subcommittee of this committee, and we had, I believe, 27 nationally-televised hearings on waste and corruption and abuse and cronyism in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is the single most unpleasant episode of my congressional career, and it revealed a series of appalling actions by high-ranking officials of the Department of Housing and Urban Development some 15 years ago.

Many years ago, during the Soviet period, the Russians produced some propaganda films taking little vignettes of the seamy side of American society, put them together and presented them as accurately reflecting what the United States is. And not until the Hurricane Katrina nightmare, where we saw the seamy side and incompetence of our society, did we have anything comparable to that. And we provided through our news clips during the hurricane the material for devastating propaganda against the United States by showing the failure to prepare and the failure to manage that crisis.

This crisis is in many ways worse. It is worse because it is an insult to our soldiers and Marines who are performing their jobs magnificently, with over 2700 having lost their lives, a vast number permanently injured - we don't know how many - with long-term psychological repercussions. And it's an insult to the American taxpayer. One really doesn't know whether to call this a Theater of the Absurd where billions of American taxpayers' moneys were wasted in an obscene fashion or whether to call it a chamber of horrors.

Now, I am fully aware -- as I am sure every single member of this committee is -- having visited Iraq, that it's a very difficult place in which to function in an orderly and normal fashion. We all understand the physical dangers, the unpredictability of the surrounding situation at any moment. But this degree of irresponsibility, incompetence, failure to engage in supervision, and proper management practices, boggles the mind.

And when our leaders at the highest level say, "We want to stand up the Iraqi police," and here we have this awful report about the police academy, when we hear about the need for improving health care and 6 of 150 planned health care facilities are completed, one is speechless - it boggles the mind.

So Mr. Chairman, let me just say this hearing is long overdue, I am very pleased we are holding it, and I'm very pleased that we have, among other distinguished witnesses, the Inspector General - because (to Mr. Bowen), I don't want to embarrass you with extreme praise, but you have done an outstanding job in documenting this chamber of horrors which confronts us.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman

http://www.lantos.org/news_statement_2006-09-28.html