[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 66 (Thursday, April 24, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3387-S3389]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
OIL AND GAS PRICES
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I want to discuss several areas this
afternoon. One is the excessive market speculation with respect to the
price of oil and gas. My colleagues have done so, and I will weigh in
on that.
I think what is happening is not only unfair to the American consumer
but damaging to this country's economy. So I will talk about that in a
bit. I
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want to mention that, on Monday of next week, at 2 p.m., I intend to
chair a hearing of the Democratic Policy Committee, in which we will
hear from three additional whistleblowers on the issue of waste, fraud,
and abuse in contracting in Iraq.
I have held a lot of hearings over a number of years with respect to
contracting in Iraq. It is the most unbelievable waste, fraud, and
abuse in the history of this country. On Monday, we will hear from
whistleblowers who will tell us about the infamous burn pits in Iraq,
where in many cases valuable equipment is taken to be burned. In other
cases, equipment has been pilfered and taken into the black market. It
is an unbelievable tale. But it just fits in with the other things we
have heard.
I will not go through all the examples. I have spoken about them at
great length. Presumably, some are under criminal investigation. One
would expect and hope that the Defense Department would begin to debar
some contractors that are, in my judgment, cheating the American
taxpayers.
Let me give a few examples. A contractor is charging for 42,000 meals
a day they are serving to U.S. soldiers. It is discovered they are only
serving 14,000 meals, overcharging by 28,000 meals a day. I don't know,
maybe you can miss a cheeseburger or two on the bill someplace. But how
do you overcharge for 28,000 meals a day?
An American contractor is paid to rehabilitate 140 Iraqi health
clinics and gets paid over $100 million, paid for with American
dollars. The money is gone, but there are no health clinics. I guess
there are maybe 20 of them with shoddy construction.
An Iraqi doctor who knows that an American contractor was paid to
rehabilitate health clinics in rural areas goes to the Iraqi Health
Minister and says: I would like to tour these clinics that the American
taxpayers paid to rehabilitate because health is such an important
need. The Interior Minister of Iraq said: You don't understand, most of
these are imaginary clinics.
I had a guy come to a hearing I held, and he saw $85,000 trucks being
burned on the side of the road, left on the side of the road because
they didn't have a wrench to fix a flat tire. The road was safe, the
only reason they left the trucks by the side of the road was because
they could make a profit by buying another one. Mr. President, $85,000
trucks torched because they had a plugged fuel pump. What is the big
deal about that? The contractor will simply reorder new trucks because
the American taxpayers are going to be stuck with that bill. It is a
cost-plus contract.
How about $7,600 a month for leasing SUVs? How about $45 for a case
of Coca-Cola? How long do we have to come to the floor of the Senate
and talk about this unbelievable, utter waste of the American
taxpayers' dollars?
We had a man named Judge Radhi come to testify. I asked that he be
allowed to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee. He came.
He was appointed by Paul Bremer to be the head of a Commission on
Public Integrity in Iraq. They tried to kill him three times because
the folks over there didn't like somebody looking over their shoulders.
He said they pursued thousands of cases of corruption; $18 billion
had been pilfered and wasted, most of it American money. He talked
about $3 billion spent by the former Defense Ministry of Iraq ordering
airplanes that never arrived in Iraq because it is likely the money
ended up in a Swiss bank account.
Judge Radhi said, $18 billion he estimated was wasted, most of it
American money.
Does that surprise anybody? We lifted C-130 cargo loads of one-
hundred-dollar bills out of this country to fly them to Iraq. In a war
zone, you are distributing one-hundred-dollar bills out of the back of
pickup trucks. Is it any wonder this is the most waste, fraud, and
abuse we have ever seen?
In 1940, at the start of the Second World War, Harry Truman, then
serving in this body, helped create a bipartisan committee. It became
known as the Truman Committee. It cost $15,000 and saved $15 billion.
They did 60 hearings a year for 7 years--60 hearings a year for 7
years. They issued subpoenas. When they saw waste, fraud, and abuse,
they stopped it. They were serious. It was a bipartisan investigative
committee right here in this Chamber.
This war in Iraq has gone on 5 years. I have held hearing after
hearing chronicling the waste, fraud, and abuse. And it is
unbelievable.
We read that one of the largest contractors we have engaged in Iraq,
the Halliburton Corporation, has been paying 10,000 of their U.S.
employees through a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands that has no
staffing at all, just an office address. Why would they do that? Why
would they hire Americans and run their payroll through the Cayman
Islands? So they don't have to pay payroll taxes to the U.S.
Government.
When this supplemental comes to the floor of the Senate in the next
week or two, I am going to offer an amendment that says any contractor
doing that should not be getting any more contracts.
At some point, does anybody have the nerve to stand up and say this
has to stop? Is there at least a small group of people, perhaps a
quorum, who would say this has to stop? What we should do and what I
have tried and I say with the support of Senator Reid--and I appreciate
his support--we have tried very hard to create a Truman-type committee
on behalf of the American taxpayers to say: Stop this waste, stop this
fraud, stop this abuse.
We have been unable to do that in three votes in the Senate. I regret
that because the American taxpayer is being fleeced and American
soldiers are being disserved by this waste, fraud, and abuse.
Let me mention one additional example, which may seem like a small
matter, but is symptomatic of a larger problem. Henry Bunting, a
wonderful man who worked in Kuwait as a buyer for Halliburton
Corporation, brought a towel to a hearing. He held it up. He said: We
were buying towels for American soldiers. Here is a towel I was
supposed to buy, a white towel. So I ordered white towels.
My supervisor said: You can't buy that white towel. You need to buy a
towel that has the logo of our company, embroidered in silk.
I said it will triple, quadruple the cost. The supervisor said: It
doesn't matter, it is a cost-plus contract. We will earn more money.
Unbelievable.
Bunnatine Greenhouse came to testify. The price of her testimony was
her job. She was the highest civilian official in the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers. She said this awarding of the LOGCAP Rio contracts was
the most blatant abuse of contracting authority she had seen in her
entire career. For that it cost her job.
I have told my colleagues before, I called the general at home at
night who has since retired, who hired Bunnatine Greenhouse, who was
judged to be one of the best contracting officials we ever had. I
called him at home at night.
I said: General Ballard, tell me about Bunnatine Greenhouse. He said
she was tops and what happened to her was wrong, dreadfully wrong.
She blew the whistle on the good old boys network, and now her case
is behind a shroud in the Defense Department like all the rest of these
issues--under investigation, they say. When will the investigation be
done? When will it end?
Halliburton KBR was contracted to provide water to the military bases
in Iraq. That was their job. A man named Ben who was in Iraq working
for Halliburton came and said: We were providing water but were not
checking the--were not testing the water.
It turns out the nonpotable water was more contaminated than raw
water from the Euphrates River. That is what our soldiers were
showering in, shaving with, and often brushing their teeth with.
Then I got hold of an internal Halliburton document--I believe it was
21 pages--written by Will Granger, the man in charge of water quality
in Iraq for Halliburton. He said this was a near miss. It could have
caused mass sickness and death. This was an internal document leaked to
me from inside Halliburton, written by a man in charge of water in
Iraq: A near miss, could have caused sickness and death.
We had whistleblowers from inside the company say this is what
happened: Water more contaminated than
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raw water from the Euphrates River being sent to these camps.
Halliburton said it didn't happen--despite the fact I had the
evidence--didn't happen, never happened, not true. The U.S. Army said:
Didn't happen, never happened. I did not understand that. I would have
thought the U.S. Army would have been apoplectic on behalf of the
health of its troops.
So I asked the inspector general: Do an investigation, will you, and
tell me what the facts are.
The inspector general did the investigation and just finished a month
and a half ago. Guess what? The whistleblowers were right. So why did
the U.S. Army declare to us it didn't? I understand the company
deciding it will not admit to anything. What about the U.S. Army? In
fact, they sent a general to this Congress, to the Armed Services
Committee, to say these incidents never happened. Now we have an
inspector general report that not only demonstrates that the general
testified inappropriately, was wrong, deceived the Congress, but that
the inspector general had provided that information to the Pentagon
prior to them sending the general up here to tell us information that
was not accurate.
It just goes on and on.
Mr. President, we need to have a Truman committee. I know my message
is tiresome to some, but it doesn't matter much to me. This Congress
owes it to the American people to do what previous Congresses have done
during wartime, and that is properly investigate the waste, the fraud,
and the abuse on the most significant expenditure of taxpayers' money
that has ever occurred ever in the history of this country for
contractors. We shoveled money out this door. It is unbelievable. And
almost no oversight.
I brought to the floor of the Senate many times a picture of a man
who testified with bricks of one-hundred-dollar bills wrapped in Saran
Wrap. He said it was the Wild West. We told contractors: Come to this
building and bring a bag because we pay in cash.
I described that in the context of a company called Custer Battles.
Two guys who had virtually no contracting experience in a very short
time got many millions of dollars worth of contracts. And they were
then found to have defrauded the Coalition Provisional Authority.
I came to the floor a week or two ago and said the New York Times did
some enterprising reporting--good for them, and I say to those
reporters: You did some great work, work that probably could have and
should have been done by the Congress in the recent past.
I showed a picture of a man named Ephraim, 22 years old, and his 25-
year-old vice president who was a massage therapist--a 22-year-old CEO
of a company and a 25-year-old massage therapist as the vice president.
They ran a company that was a shell corporation set up by the 22-year-
old's dad some years ago out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach. They
got $300 million in contracts from the U.S. Department of the Army to
provide munitions and weapons to the Afghan army and police.
What ended up in Afghanistan was, in many cases, ammunition from the
mid-1960s, manufactured by the Chinese in boxes that were taped and
coming apart. This was a company that got over $300 million.
Should somebody ask the U.S. Department of the Army and the
Sustainment Command of the Department of the Army in Illinois how on
Earth did this happen? How did you think you would get by with this?
How are you going to explain this to the American taxpayers?
We desperately need to establish a Truman committee to investigate
this issue. The American taxpayers deserve no less, in my judgment.
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