[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 17]
[House]
[Pages 23982-23985]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Madam Speaker, tonight I wish to spend a few minutes 
talking about a couple of issues; number one, the progress and the 
commitment and the hope that I have observed in Iraq in two different 
trips, two different opportunities I have had to travel to Iraq, once 
in August and going back in September; and then I want to talk a little 
bit about the statement today by Dr. David Kay on the interim progress 
of the Iraqi Survey Group. The Iraqi Survey Group is the group that is 
working in Iraq and doing the search and the delineation of exactly 
what the WMD, the weapons of mass destruction, program consisted of in

[[Page 23983]]

Iraq before and during the Operation Iraqi Freedom.
  First, let me talk about my trip to Iraq in August and in September. 
You fly into a city of 5.7 million people and then you fly over Baghdad 
for half an hour or 40 minutes to get kind of an observation as to 
exactly what is going on in Baghdad. Remember, I did this in the middle 
of August. The first observation was that this was not a country and 
that this was not a city that was destroyed by war and mired in 
turmoil. Sometimes that is the impression that we get from watching the 
nightly news.
  Aside from a few small pockets of destruction in Baghdad, the city 
appeared to be functioning close to a normal city in the Middle East. 
There were cars, buses and trucks on the streets. There were people on 
the streets. The stores were open. Commerce was going on in Baghdad. 
There had been a lot of progress and a lot of activity going on in 
Baghdad.
  We had the opportunity to talk with our troops and to hear about the 
rebuilding and the reconstruction that they had been involved with in 
Iraq over the last number of months. They talked about having what I 
call walking-around money, but it is very closely tracked by the 
military. The military, at any given time, can print out a list of all 
the projects that they have been working on.
  The 101st Division, up in northern Iraq, gave us a list of roughly 
1,800 projects that they had been involved with, that they had 
completed or were still working on in the middle of August. They had 
1,800 projects, from repairing clinics, drilling wells, repairing 
schools, working in hospitals, agricultural projects, and a whole 
number of different kinds of things that clearly empowered them to go 
into the communities where they were stationed and where they were 
trying to provide security and to assist the Iraqis in rebuilding their 
community, not tomorrow but at that moment and on that day. As these 
funds were depleted, the troops would get more funds. These funds came 
from the dollars that were left over in the Iraqi treasury after Saddam 
Hussein was overthrown.
  A second thing that kind of struck me. I was impressed by the troops. 
They are doing an absolutely awesome job there. The other thing that 
people have asked me, what were you surprised about when you went to 
Iraq? I was not surprised about the work of our troops in Iraq. I have 
seen our troops in action in Afghanistan. I have been on aircraft 
carriers. I have been in Bosnia and Kosovo and had the opportunity to 
interact. I am not surprised by the work of our troops. I am impressed 
but not surprised. I have come to expect that because they have 
demonstrated it over and over.
  But one of the things that did surprise me is I had heard of the 
palaces of Saddam in Iraq. I have been to Versailles, I have been to 
Buckingham Palace, but nothing prepares you for Saddam's lavish 
spending on himself once you take a look at his palaces in Iraq.
  The palace in Tikrit has over 100 buildings in it. It probably 
stretches an area from the Capitol here in Washington down to the White 
House, if not a larger area. It has a perimeter security system with 
walls and watchtowers and those types of things; three to four story 
high buildings, which in terms of their scale are closer in scale to 
the size of this building, the Capitol of the United States, than what 
they are of our White House. And again he has these all over the 
country.
  We also had the opportunity to meet with Peter McPherson, who is the 
President of Michigan State University, who for a number of months 
served in Iraq. He is now back at Michigan State but served as their 
finance minister.
  I asked him about one of the allegations that was made about the 
post-war planning. I said, Peter, there are folks that are saying there 
is very little planning that went on as to what we were going to do 
after the war. He kind of laughed and said, you know, a number of the 
things that typically happen after a war in a country did not happen 
here in Iraq.
  Many times the currency will collapse. As a matter of fact, here in 
Iraq, we had a debate about whether we should keep the Iraqi dinar. Why 
the debate? Well, the debate was the Iraqi dinar has a picture of 
Saddam Hussein on it, and the last thing we really wanted to do was to 
provide to the people of Iraq a constant reminder of the Saddam regime 
and that Saddam was still out there. But he said, Pete, we went through 
this conscious decision to keep the Iraqi dinar in circulation so that 
commerce could continue and so that the economy would not collapse.
  He also said that by keeping the dinar in circulation and by 
providing the security into the system, the banks did not collapse, 
that there was not a run on the banks right after the banks reopened. 
The banking and the financial institutions stayed in business. As a 
matter of fact, with the stability that we have there, there are now a 
number of international banks that are clamoring to get into Iraq. And 
in a couple of weeks we will be introducing a new currency into Iraq, 
one that gets rid of the picture of Saddam Hussein on the money.
  Peter McPherson worked with the Iraqi Governing Council to put in 
place a tax structure, highest tax rate of 15 percent, to put in a 
tariff structure and also to come up with rules for international 
investment. Every industry will now be open for foreign investment, 
except the energy sector.
  I also had the opportunity to meet with another individual from 
Michigan, Jim Haverman, who is serving as kind of the shadow finance 
minister, or health care minister in Iraq. What he is doing is 
rebuilding the structure. I asked him the same question. Jim, what 
about the plan or the lack of planning in the post-war period?
  He came back and said, we do not get a lot of credit or we get no 
credit for the things that did not happen here. A lot of times after 
there has been a war, there will be an outbreak of epidemic diseases, 
things like cholera, malaria, and other diarrheal diseases. So you 
notice none of those things happened here in Iraq. We were able to keep 
the hospitals open, we were able to keep the clinics open, we were able 
to provide the basic health care necessary to prevent the outbreak of 
epidemic diseases, and now we have moved forward, that we have 
distributed 10,000 tons of pharmaceuticals.
  It is not that many of those pharmaceuticals were not present prior 
to the war in Iraq. They were present in Iraq, but they were stored in 
warehouses, and they were there for the elite and not for the masses. 
But what Jim and the Iraqi health care service have done is they have 
been focusing on getting quality health care or improved health care 
out to much of the rest of the country. They have been successful in 
doing that, and they are now working at upgrading the health care 
system.
  Remember, somebody like Saddam Hussein spent about 60 to 70 cents on 
health care for each and every Iraqi last year, in contrast to what he 
spent on his palaces. And the joke, though it is not very funny in 
Iraq, is what Saddam spent his money on. He spent his money on his 
palaces. He spent it on runways. You will fly over Iraq and you will 
see military runways all over Iraq, so he was building the military 
infrastructure. And then he also spent a significant amount of money on 
munitions. Later on, as I talk about Dr. Kay's report, Dr. Kay outlines 
that they estimate that they have munitions dumps that will hold over 
600,000 tons of munitions.
  The bottom line, from my perspective and those of the people who I 
traveled to Iraq with, is that we are making progress in Iraq. We are 
bringing stability and hope to the Iraqi people. It does not mean that 
on occasion, and maybe too frequently, we do not have spectacular 
setbacks, the death of American soldiers or a bombing where the folks 
that are opposed to us are going after American troops, coalition 
troops, Iraqis that are helping us, Iraqis that are stepping up and 
taking leading roles in their government, but we are making progress.

[[Page 23984]]



                              {time}  1745

  It is our hope that once the people of Iraq experience freedom, 
economic opportunity and a representative democratic government, the 
hope and expectation is that they will embrace this new way of life and 
will not foresee ever returning to tyrannical rule by a despotic 
government that exerts control through fear and oppression.
  Today in the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence we had an 
opportunity to listen to testimony from Dr. David Kay talking about the 
progress, the 3-month progress report from the Iraqi survey group. This 
statement was released by Dr. Kay to the public at 5 p.m. This is a 
nonsecret version of the testimony that he provided to both the House 
and the Senate intelligence committees today. It contains a portion of 
what we heard today, but not everything. Let me just go through some of 
the materials that Dr. Kay wanted us to fully understand. This was my 
fourth opportunity to meet with Dr. Kay. I met with him on three 
different occasions in Iraq and then in front of the committee today.
  He begins by saying that he cannot strongly enough emphasize that the 
interim progress report is a snapshot in the context of an ongoing 
investigation of where we are after our first 3 months of work. It is 
not a completed report. It only covers the first 3 months. He says that 
they are still very much in the collection analysis mode, seeking the 
information and evidence that will allow us to confidently draw 
comprehensive conclusions to the actual objectives, scope, and 
dimensions of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction activities at the time 
of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Iraq's WMD program spanned more than 2 
decades, involved thousands of people, billions of dollars, and was 
elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that 
continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
  He goes to say that the result talks about the period from 1991 to 
2003 where much of what we expected to find in Iraq was based on very, 
very limited information. He talked extensively about what they have 
found and what we have not found. He said, ``What we have not found are 
stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say 
definitively that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed 
before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone.''
  Mr. Speaker, why are they having such difficulty? Here are some 
reasons. All of Iraq's WMD activities were highly compartmentalized 
within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and 
terror. It is hard to find out what was going on in Iraq. Deliberate 
dispersal and destruction of material and documentation relating to 
weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans- to post-conflict. 
They destroyed the evidence and the information that would have clearly 
and quickly outlined for us exactly the programs they had in place. 
``Post-Operation Iraqi Freedom looting destroyed or dispersed important 
and easily collectable materials and forensic evidence concerning 
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.''
  The report covers in detail the significant elements of this looting 
that were carried out with a clear aim of concealing pre-Operation 
Iraqi Freedom activities of Saddam Hussein's regime. Some WMD personnel 
crossed borders in the pretrans-conflict period, and may have taken 
evidence and even weapons-related materials with them.
  Another reason we are having some difficulties, any actual WMD 
weapons or materials are likely to be small in relationship to the 
total conventional armaments footprints and difficult-to-near 
impossible to identify with normal search procedures. It is important 
to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for 
and the quantities we would expect to find can be concealed in spaces 
not much larger than a two-car garage.
  But what have they found? This is not only about why it is difficult. 
What he is telling us is why we maybe did not just walk into Baghdad or 
Iraq and say here is the warehouse, and here is all of the information. 
He is telling us why it is difficult, and he says they have found 
dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of 
equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the 
inspections that began in late 2002.
  Continuing on, he gives a few examples of these concealment efforts, 
some of which I will elaborate on later. They include a clandestine 
network of laboratories and safehouses that contained equipment subject 
to U.N. monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research; a prison 
laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of biological 
agents; referenced strains of biological organisms concealed in 
scientists' homes, one of which can be used to produce biological 
weapons; new research on biological weapons applicable agents, 
documents and equipment hidden in scientists' homes that would have 
been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and 
electromagnetic isotope separation; a line of UAVs not fully declared 
at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had 
tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers, 350 
kilometers beyond the permissible limit; continued covert capability to 
manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant 
missiles; plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles 
with ranges of up to 1,000 kilometers, well beyond the 150-kilometer 
range limit imposed by the U.N.; clandestine attempts between 1999 and 
2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 kilometer-
range ballistic missiles.
  They faced systematic destruction of documents. With regard to 
biological warfare activities, he stated that Iraqi survey group teams 
are uncovering significant information, including research and 
development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi 
intelligence service, and possible biological weapon activities and 
deliberate concealment activities.
  All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its 
program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that 
could be activated quickly to surge the production of biological 
weapons agents. Debriefings of IIS, Iraqi Intelligence Service, 
officials and site visits have begun to unravel a clandestine network 
of laboratories and facilities within the security service apparatus. 
This network was never declared to the U.N. and was previously unknown. 
They are still working on determining the extent to which this network 
was tied to large-scale military efforts or BW terror agents; but this 
clandestine capability was suitable for preserving BW expertise, BW 
facilities, and continuing R&D, all key elements for maintaining a 
capability for resuming BW production.
  The Iraqi intelligence service also played a prominent role in 
sponsoring students for overseas graduate studies in the biological 
sciences. No big deal, except, the quote continues, according to Iraqi 
scientists and Iraqi intelligence service sources providing an 
important avenue for furthering BW applicable research. Interestingly 
enough, this was the only area of graduate work where the Iraqi 
intelligence service appeared to sponsor students.
  Another quote, in a similar vein, two key former BW scientists 
confirmed that Iraq, under the guise of legitimate activity, developed 
refinements of processes and products relevant to BW agents. The 
scientists discussed the development of improved simplified 
fermentation and spray-drying capabilities for the simulant BT that 
would have been directly applicable to anthrax. One scientist confirmed 
that the production line for BT could be switched to produce anthrax in 
one week if the seed stock were available.
  Another area that needs investigation, another quote out of the 
report, additional information is beginning to corroborate reporting 
since 1996 about human testing activities. Let me repeat that: 
reporting since 1996 about human testing activities using chemical and 
biological substance, progress in this area is slow given the concern 
of knowledgeable Iraqi personnel about their being prosecuted for 
crimes against humanity.
  I have only got a couple of minutes left; and the report that Dr. Kay 
has

[[Page 23985]]

issued is an interim report, and I think that this report is now going 
to be available, or this portion, the declassified portion is going to 
be available to the American people.
  When you read through here and you take a look at the concealment of 
these different programs from the U.N., the systematic effort to hide 
and destroy relevant information, and then the things that we have 
found already, the different labs, the discussion about human testing, 
the different efforts that they had that were under way, the work that 
they had going on in a number of different areas, it becomes clear 
quickly that we need to do two or three things, the first of which is 
we need to let Dr. Kay finish his report and to finish his work. As he 
states at the front end, it is too early to draw any conclusions as to 
exactly what was going on, what was available, and where Saddam Hussein 
was going. We need to let Dr. Kay finish his work so that we will have 
a clear understanding of what was and what was not available in Iraq, 
and that is going to be a very difficult task given the destruction of 
materials and the environment that we have in Iraq today.
  The second thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that we 
give Dr. Kay the resources to get the job done.
  The third thing we know is there was a lot of stuff going on in Iraq, 
and the approach that Dr. Kay is taking is exactly the kind of approach 
that we need to take. Dr. Kay really has three criteria that he talks 
about before he will reach conclusions on exactly what Iraq has. He 
wants to find physical evidence, the materials or the equipment that 
demonstrate that certain programs or activities were under way. He 
wants to find the documentation that says here is the equipment, here 
is the documentation that outlines what this equipment was intended to 
do, and then the third piece that he wants to put with this is these 
are the Iraqis that were working the plan and working the equipment so 
that he has put all of the pieces together. That is exactly the kind of 
approach that we need to take, rather than asking Dr. Kay or others to 
jump to conclusions based on the piecemeal information that we have 
today.
  In this report, Dr. Kay talks about the mobile labs. They have found 
mobile labs. So they have a piece of the puzzle. They have found mobile 
labs, but rather than reaching a conclusion and saying what they were 
or were not used for, since they only found the mobile labs and they 
have not found the documentation and they have not found the Iraqi 
personnel that might have been operating these labs, we are at this 
point in time speculating what they may have been used for and capable 
of; and Dr. Kay has simply in this report said we are not reaching a 
conclusion or making a decision as to what we believe that equipment 
was being used for. We are going to wait until we find the Iraqis; we 
are going to wait until we have an opportunity to uncover the documents 
that will outline exactly what these bio labs or what these 
laboratories, mobile labs, were going to be used for.
  The professionalism of Dr. Kay and the process that he is going 
through are exactly what we need to have in place at this point.

                              {time}  1800

  I think that the report today that was issued, the portions of the 
report that were made public, the portions of the report that are still 
classified, should give us the highest degree of confidence that Dr. 
Kay is going through this in exactly the right way that it needs to be 
done and that there are a number of very, very serious issues that need 
to be pursued and that we need to get to the bottom of. It will help us 
to better determine the accuracy and the effectiveness of our intel 
before the war, but also it will give us a better understanding as to 
how far chemical and biological weapons had progressed in Iraq, and we 
need to know that so that we will also have an idea as to what at some 
point in time may have been transferred to others who may want to do us 
harm.

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