[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 76 (Thursday, June 3, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H3755-H3756]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE INCOMPETENCE MUST STOP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, sadly I am here to talk 
about what we cannot ignore: the sad, sad chronicle of incompetence and 
blunder which marks this administration's conduct of national security 
policy.
  I do not think in the history of the United States there has been a 
major national security effort handled so badly. I voted against the 
war in Iraq. I voted for the war in Afghanistan, and I am glad I did. I 
voted against the war in Iraq because I did not think it was justified, 
and I feel vindicated in that judgment; but even for those who thought 
it was justified, I do not understand how they can fail to join in the 
criticism of the shambles this administration has made of the policy.
  I will insert in the Record here, Mr. Speaker, an article by 
Elisabeth Bumiller from the May 29 New York Times, and the headline is 
``Conservative Allies Take Chalabi Case to the White House.''

                [From the New York Times, May 29, 2004]

        Conservative Allies Take Chalabi Case to the White House

                        (By Elisabeth Bumiller)

       WASHINGTON, May 28--Influential outside advisers to the 
     Bush administration who support the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad 
     Chalabi are pressing the White House to stop what one has 
     called a ``smear campaign,'' against Mr. Chalabi, whose 
     Baghdad home and offices were ransacked last week in an 
     American-supported raid.
       Last Saturday, several of these Chalabi supporters said, a 
     small delegation of them marched into the West Wing office of 
     Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to complain 
     about the administration's abrupt change of heart about Mr. 
     Chalabi and to register their concerns about the course of 
     the war in Iraq. The group included Richard N. Perle, the 
     former chairman of a Pentagon advisory group, and R. James 
     Woolsey, director of central intelligence under President 
     Bill Clinton.
       Members of the group, who had requested the meeting, told 
     Ms. Rice that they were incensed at what they view as the 
     vilification of Mr. Chalabi, a favorite of conservatives who 
     is now central to an F.B.I. investigation into who in the 
     American government might have given him highly classified 
     information that he is suspected of turning over to Iran.
       Mr. Chalabi has denied that he provided Iran with any 
     classified information.
       The session with Ms. Rice was one sign of the turmoil that 
     Mr. Chalabi's travails have produced within an influential 
     corner of Washington, where Mr. Chalabi is still seen as a 
     potential leader of Iraq.
       ``There is a smear campaign under way, and it is being 
     perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. and a gaggle of 
     former intelligence officers who have succeeded in planting 
     these stories, which are accepted with hardly any scrutiny,'' 
     Mr. Perle, a leading conservative, said in an interview.
       Mr. Perle, referring to both the Central Intelligence 
     Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the campaign 
     against Mr. Chalabi was ``an outrageous abuse of power'' by 
     United States government officials in Washington and Baghdad.
       ``I'm talking about Jerry Bremer, for one,'' Mr. Perle 
     said, referring to L. Paul Bremer III, the top American 
     administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 
     charge of the occupation of Iraq. ``I don't know who gave 
     these orders, but there is no question that the C.P.A. was 
     involved.''
       In Baghdad, coalition authorities vigorously denied Mr. 
     Perle's assertion. ``Jerry Bremer didn't initiate the 
     investigation,'' Dan Senor, the spokesman for the Coalition 
     Provisional Authority, said in a telephone interview.
       Similarly, Mark Mansfield, a C.I.A. spokesman, called Mr. 
     Perle's accusation that the agency was smearing Mr. Chalabi 
     ``absurd.'' A Defense Department official who asked not to be 
     named said that Mr. Perle's accusations against the D.I.A. 
     had no foundation.
       Mr. Chalabi has been a divisive figure for years in 
     Washington, where top Pentagon officials favored him as a 
     future leader of Iraq and top State Department officials 
     distrusted him as unreliable. Either way, Mr. Chalabi and his 
     exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, fed intelligence to 
     the Bush administration about Iraq's unconventional weapons 
     that helped drive the administration toward war.
       Intelligence officials now argue that some of the 
     intelligence was fabricated, and that Mr. Chalabi's motives 
     were to push the United States into toppling Saddam Hussein 
     and pave the way for his installation as Iraqi's new leader.
       Although Mr. Chalabi's supporters outside the 
     administration have been caustic in their comments about his 
     treatment, there has been relative silence so far from Mr. 
     Chalabi's supporters within the administration. Deputy 
     Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who favored going to war 
     in Iraq and was a patron of Mr. Chalabi, did not respond to 
     numerous requests this week for an interview.
       Mr. Wolfowitz's spokesman, Charley Cooper, said in an e-
     mail message that Mr. Wolfowitz believed that Mr. Chalabi and 
     the Iraqi National Congress ``have provided valuable 
     operational intelligence to our military forces in Iraq, 
     which has helped save American lives.'' Mr. Cooper added 
     in the message that ``Secretary Wolfowitz hopes that the 
     events of the last few weeks haven't undermined that.''
       The current views of Vice President Dick Cheney and his 
     chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby,

[[Page H3756]]

     are not known. Both strongly supported Mr. Chalabi before and 
     during the war in Iraq.
       Last Saturday, participants in the meeting with Ms. Rice 
     and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, said Ms. Rice told them she 
     appreciated that they had made their views known. But she 
     gave no hint of her own opinion, participants said, and made 
     no concessions to their point of view.
       Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of 
     Representatives, also attended the meeting. A larger meeting 
     later that day, with Mr. Hadley alone, included Danielle 
     Pletka, a vice president of the American Enterprise 
     Institute, a research institution in Washington.
       In an interview, Ms. Pletka said that Mr. Chalabi had been 
     ``shoddily'' treated and that C.I.A. and State Department 
     people had been fighting ``a rear guard'' action against him.
       ``They've been out to get him for a long time,'' Ms. Pletka 
     said. ``And to be fair, he has done things and the people 
     around him have done things that have made it easier for 
     them. He is a prickly, difficult person and he drives them 
     crazy. He never takes no for an answer, even when he 
     should.''
       Ms. Pletka added: ``There are questionable people around 
     him--I don't know how close--who have been involved in 
     questionable activities in Iraq. He is close to the Iranian 
     government. And so all of these things have lent credence to 
     the accusations against him.''
       Mr. Perle said the action against Mr. Chalabi would burnish 
     his anti-American credentials in Iraq and possibly help him 
     to be elected to political office. ``In that regard, this 
     clumsy and outrageous assault on him will only improve his 
     prospects,'' Mr. Perle said.
       Mr. Perle said that he had no business dealings with Mr. 
     Chalabi, but that he believed the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were 
     spreading false information that he did. He also said that 
     Mr. Chalabi was not alone in supplying intelligence to the 
     United States government that turned out to be false.
       ``I know of no inaccurate information that was supplied 
     uniquely by anyone brought to us by the Iraqi National 
     Congress,'' Mr. Perle said.

  Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chalabi, if I am pronouncing it right, people will 
remember, is the man who we had thought was someone the President 
approved of, whom the President now tells us he cannot quite remember.
  I do think, Mr. Speaker, as an aside, that probably we should be 
investigating Chamber security here because apparently at the last 
State of the Union address a man largely unknown to the President 
managed to seat himself next to the First Lady. Mr. Chalabi was seated 
next to Laura Bush. Now the President has no idea or only a vague idea 
who this man is; and when a stranger, apparently a stranger of some 
disrepute, if we listen to the White House, is allowed to seat himself 
next to Laura Bush, then I begin to feel nervous. In general, I think 
the people who run security do a very good job, I do not know, and this 
point probably was not their fault. They may have been misled by 
somebody in the Defense Department, but we better look into it.
  We now go back to the spectacle of this administration's internal 
warfare. We read recently that the Secretary of State was very angry at 
the CIA because he now acknowledges that they gave him misinformation. 
I do not know if that is one of the reasons that the director of the 
CIA resigned. He is the man who, of course, told the President that it 
was a slam dunk that there were weapons of mass destruction. 
Apparently, he slammed when he should have dunked, and he is no longer 
with us, but the chaos continues.
  Here we have in this story the conservative allies, according to Mr. 
Richard Perle, who is a close adviser to the Defense Department, and 
according to this article last Saturday, several of these Chalabi 
supporters said a small delegation of them marched into the West Wing 
of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to complain about 
the administration. For some of these people, who have been consistent 
advocates of war, marching into Condoleezza Rice, it was the only 
marching they ever did because certainly they have not been in uniform 
to march in any wartime conditions, but we have them denouncing the 
Bush administration, Bush advisers denouncing Bush advisers.
  Mr. Powell was quoted in the New York Times last Sunday, well, big 
surprise, ``we disagree with each other.'' That is not the problem. It 
is not a problem that the President's advisers disagree with each 
other. The problem is that the President appears to agree with each of 
them who disagree with each other. The President does not solve these 
problems. We have had this ongoing dispute. It is extraordinary to have 
someone being paid $40 million or more by the American Government, 
supported by the Defense Department, Mr. Chalabi, then overthrown by 
the State Department or the CIA.
  Here is Mr. Perle, again, a close ally of the Defense Department, 
remember the Defense Advisory Board, saying there is a smear campaign 
under way being perpetrated by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence 
Agency. This is Mr. Perle, and then he denounces Mr. Bremer. We are 
told you, Democrats, do not be critical of the people in Iraq who are 
running our policy, you will undermine them.
  I am nicer than Mr. Perle to these people. Mr. Perle is being much 
more vitriolic, and he has even managed, Mr. Perle, because he is the 
epitome of niceness, to find a way to defend Mr. Chalabi who we are now 
told by this government may have leaked important information to the 
Iranians.
  Here is Mr. Perle's defense of Mr. Chalabi, and Mr. Perle is a man 
who chooses his words carefully. I wish he chose his friends as 
carefully as he chose his words, but he does choose his words 
carefully; and here is what he said about Mr. Chalabi's organization, 
the Iraqi National Congress, from the New York Times of last Saturday: 
`` `I know of no inaccurate information that was supplied uniquely by 
anyone brought to us by the Iraqi National Congress,' Mr. Perle said.''
  In other words, he does not deny that Mr. Chalabi lied to us. He does 
not deny that Mr. Chalabi in effect boasted he gave us misinformation 
and does not mind that it could help us go to war. His point is that 
Mr. Chalabi was not the only one who lied to us. I do not think it is 
much of a defense of Mr. Chalabi to say he is the only one who lied to 
us, nor does it say much for this administration that they listened to 
so many liars. The incompetence must stop.

                          ____________________