[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9728-9736]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               IRAQ WATCH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Blackburn). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Massachusetts 
(Mr. Delahunt) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, I will shortly be joined by my colleagues, 
who, on a weekly basis, have come to the floor of the House to discuss 
events occurring in the Middle East, specifically in Iraq and in 
Afghanistan. We have called ourselves the Iraq Watch, in an effort to 
have a conversation to illuminate and educate not just ourselves, but 
those who are interested, as I think most people are, in these 
particular matters.
  It is clearly no secret, and it is a most disturbing situation, that 
we have a deteriorating situation in Iraq. One only has to remember the 
initial estimates of the cost that were put forth by the White House. I 
think the range that was suggested by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, 
Mr. Wolfowitz, was from $30 billion to $60 billion.

                              {time}  2200

  When the then-Chief Economic Adviser to President Bush, Larry 
Lindsay, indicated that in his judgment the range could be from $100 
billion to $200 billion, he was eased out because there was a sense 
that that was not a realistic number. Now, of course, we are currently 
at the figure of $150 billion, and that does not include future 
estimates, which again according to recent reports just simply is for 
the military presence of American troops in support for other military 
personnel there. That is an additional 50 or $75 billion. And of course 
that does not include the cost of reconstruction, both for Iraq and for 
Afghanistan. But, obviously, most importantly is the loss of life, 
particularly American personnel, both military and civilian. The number 
now is well in excess of 700. That of course does not account for the 
men and women in our military who have been wounded.
  Many Members of this body have been to Walter Reed Hospital and to 
Bethesda Naval Hospital and met with the men and women there who have 
suffered wounds, egregious wounds, that will clearly impact their 
future and will alter irrevocably the quality of life that they will 
enjoy for the rest of their lives.
  I know that I have attended in my district the funerals of two young 
men, Sergeant Caldwell and Corporal Jeff Burgess, who gave their lives 
in Iraq. Furthermore, there was a universal echo of support and 
sympathy for the United States in the aftermath of our national tragedy 
on September 11. I think we all remember the headline in the French 
newspaper, Le Monde, that screamed, very poignantly and eloquently the 
day after 9-11, that ``Today We Are All Americans.''
  It is clear that there was not just sympathy, but a commitment by 
countries all over the world to assist our efforts to end once and for 
all the scourge of global terrorism. Unfortunately, much of that 
international support has eroded. And now the motives of the United 
States are being called into question, and not just in the Mideast but 
all over the world.
  There was a recent poll that was done by one of the premier polling 
groups in this country, the Zogby polling group, and it was conducted 
among the elite in Latin America, the economic elite which 
traditionally had been supportive of American policy. There was no 
attempt to interview or survey those that had traditionally been 
hostile to American interests or who have disagreed with our policies. 
What I find remarkable was that of the six countries that were 
surveyed, and they range from Argentina to Brazil to Venezuela to a 
Central American country, that the negative opinion of the United 
States Government, the negative opinion of the United States Government 
exceeded 87 percent. That is particularly disturbing, because I think 
we can all agree, Mr. Speaker, that we need the international community 
and its support if we are going to end terrorism. If we are going to 
protect our homeland, cooperation is absolutely essential. It is 
absolutely critical. But now American motives are suspect.
  There was a recent poll that was done, it was done by the Pew 
Foundation and the numbers are startling. Majorities in seven nations 
believe that our intervention in Iraq was motivated by a desire to 
control Mideast oil. Clearly, there are few Americans that accept that 
premise. But when one reads the list of nations that believe that our 
intervention was based simply on the desire to control oil, we must 
acknowledge that we have a problem that has to be addressed. Let me 
just recite some of those numbers: 51 percent of the people in Russia 
believe that that was our primary motive; 58 percent of the people in 
France; 60 percent of the people in Germany; 54 percent of the people 
in Pakistan. In Turkey the number is 64 percent. In Jordan it was 71 
percent. And yet we speak of a certain moral authority. But it has 
become clear that the world does not see us in that lens. They believe 
our motives are much more crass. And when these numbers are combined 
with comments and observations and revelations by senior administration 
officials, they are reinforced.
  For those of you that have not had the opportunity to read ``The 
Price of Loyalty,'' which is a book regarding the tenure of the former 
Secretary of Treasury, Paul O'Neill, let me commend that book to you; 
and I would specifically direct your attention to page 96 of that book. 
Because Secretary O'Neill, a traditional Republican widely regarded in 
business circles, someone who served his country in the Reagan 
administration and in Bush One, reveals an anecdote that I find 
disturbing. Let me read for a moment. O'Neill had seen ``brewing a 
battle since the National Security Council meeting on January 30.''
  Let me interrupt the excerpt that I will quote to inform my 
colleagues and the viewing audience that this was 1 week after the 
inauguration after George W. Bush. One week. The anecdote itself that 
he reveals occurs February 27, less than maybe 5 weeks, after the 
President was inaugurated.

[[Page 9729]]

O'Neill: ``It was Powell and his moderates at the State Department 
versus hardliners like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz who were already 
planning the next war in Iraq in the shape of a post-Saddam country.''
  Now, let us remember, this is before our national tragedy on 9-11, 
and this is not coming from outside. This is not an opinion being 
offered by a Member of the House. This is being offered by the former 
Secretary who was present at this particular meeting of the National 
Security Council on February 27, 2001.
  ``Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency,'' 
Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, ``mapping Iraq's oil fields and 
exploration areas, and listing companies that might be interested in 
leveraging the precious asset.'' Obviously he means oil. ``One document 
headed 'Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oil Field Contracts' lists companies 
from 30 countries, their specialties, bidding histories and in some 
cases their particular areas of interests. An attached document maps 
Iraq with markings for supergiant oil fields, other oil fields 
earmarked for production-sharing while demarking the largely 
undeveloped southwest of the country into nine blocks to be designated 
for future exploration.''
  I guess this is a question that I would have for the President, for 
the Vice President, and for the Secretary of Defense: Why on February 
27, months before the attack on the homeland, why was a map being 
presented at a National Security Council meeting divvying up the oil 
reserves of Iraq?
  That, I daresay and will submit, is a question, Mr. Speaker, that 
should be answered by the Secretary, by the National Security Adviser, 
by the Vice President, and by the President. That is a question that 
cannot linger, that cannot go unanswered, particularly when a majority 
of people in countries that are our traditional allies have concluded 
that our main interest in Iraq is not to bring democracy, is not to 
save lives, but is to secure oil for our energy needs.
  And, again, let me remind my friends who are here, I have been joined 
by my colleagues, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel), the 
gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie), and the ranking member on the 
Committee on the Judiciary, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers), 
let me remind ourselves that we are losing international support. And I 
am convinced that many of the questions that the rest of the world has 
is based on reports such as this and have a potential to undermine not 
just our credibility and our moral authority, but to undermine our 
national security if we are going to do something in terms of 
international terrorism.

                              {time}  2215

  Because if the world concludes, and if we do not respond that this is 
our motivation, they will turn their backs on us. When this is all 
combined with obviously many other issues that are out there, I dare 
say we have a serious problem.
  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.
  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much for allowing 
this intervention, and I begin by commending my colleagues from 
Pennsylvania and Hawaii and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. 
Delahunt).
  It is my intention to offer into this discussion The New Yorker 
article entitled The Gray Zone by Seymour Hersh, which raises one of 
these other incidents that the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. 
Delahunt) has referred to, and that is, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq 
and the ongoing furor that has taken place around the world.
  I would like to ask my colleagues in the course of our discussion 
this evening whether they feel a need for an investigation conducted 
from the outside as the 9/11 Commission has, which it recently 
concluded, the Warren Commission in terms of the John F. Kennedy 
assassination, because this problem is beginning to tarnish our 
Nation's war against terrorism, and without a full and complete and 
impartial investigation, we will add another way of undermining our 
national moral authority.
  I just wanted to point out that it is mentioned in this article that 
will be reprinted that, ``Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in 
place to take on a high-value target, a standup group to hit quickly,' 
a former high-level intelligence official told me. `He got all the 
agencies together, the CIA and the NSA, to get pre-approval in place. 
Just say the code word and go.' The operation had across-the-board 
approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleeza Rice, the national security 
adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, 
the former intelligence official said.''
  Here, ``Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized 
the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket 
advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate `high 
value' targets in the Bush administration's war on terror.''
  The people, and I conclude with this, ``the people assigned to the 
program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me,'' 
this is Seymour Hersh. ``They created code words, and recruited, after 
careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from 
America's elite forces, Navy SEALs, the Army's Delta Force, and the 
CIA's paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: `Do 
the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need 
dead drops for the mail? Yes.' No traceability and no budget. And some 
special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.''
  In other words, a deliberate development of a plan not only to commit 
these outrageous atrocities that have shocked the world but a way to 
avoid congressional scrutiny.
  I will insert this article that I referred to earlier at this point 
in the Record.

                  [From The New Yorker, May 17, 2004]

                             The Gray Zone

                         (By Seymour M. Hersh)

       The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the 
     criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a 
     decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald 
     Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been 
     focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of 
     prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the 
     American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of 
     elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war 
     on terror.
       According to interviews with several past and present 
     American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, 
     known inside the intelligence community by several code 
     words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion 
     and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to 
     generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in 
     Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of 
     this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from 
     Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's 
     clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
       Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to 
     testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from 
     explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an 
     unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was 
     telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, 
     ``Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of 
     what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would 
     be a misunderstanding.'' The senior C.I.A. official, asked 
     about Rumsfeld's testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his 
     Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, ``Some people think 
     you can bullshit anyone.''
       The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after 
     the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of 
     Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration's 
     search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its 
     worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major 
     command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that 
     had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance 
     before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing 
     began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile 
     convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah 
     Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the 
     United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, 
     Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack 
     was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was 
     apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to 
     attack that was due to political correctness. One officer 
     described him to me that fall as ``kicking a lot of glass and 
     breaking doors.'' In November, the Washington Post reported 
     that, as many as ten times since early October,

[[Page 9730]]

     Air Force pilots believed they'd had senior Al Qaeda and 
     Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in 
     time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar 
     problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces 
     units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist 
     cells were compelled to get prior approval from local 
     American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain 
     of command.
       Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized 
     the establishment of a highly secret program that was given 
     blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, 
     interrogate ``high value'' targets in the Bush 
     Administration's war on terror. A special-access program, or 
     SAP--subject to the Defense Department's most stringent level 
     of security--was set up, with an office in a secure area of 
     the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and 
     acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and 
     would keep its activities under wraps. America's most 
     successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had 
     been SAPs, including the Navy's submarine penetration of 
     underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and 
     construction of the Air Force's stealth bomber. All the so-
     called ``black'' programs had one element in common: the 
     Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the 
     normal military classification restraints did not provide 
     enough security.
       ``Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take 
     on a high-value target--a standup group to hit quickly,'' a 
     former high-level intelligence official told me. ``He got all 
     the agencies together--the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.--to get pre-
     approval in place. Just say the code word and go.'' The 
     operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and 
     from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. 
     President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, 
     the former intelligence official said.
       The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the 
     former intelligence official told me. They created code 
     words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained 
     commandos and operatives from America's elite forces--Navy 
     SEALs, the Army's Delta Force, and the C.I.A.'s paramilitary 
     experts. They also asked some basic questions: ``Do the 
     people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we 
     need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no 
     budget. And some special-access programs are never fully 
     briefed to Congress.''
       In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to 
     respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos 
     crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism 
     suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military's 
     facilities at Guantanamo, Cuba. They carried out instant 
     interrogations--using force if necessary--at secret C.I.A. 
     detention centers scattered around the world. The 
     intelligence would be relayed to the SAP command center in 
     the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of 
     information critical to the ``white,'' or overt, world.
       Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including 
     Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint 
     Chiefs of Staff, were ``completely read into the program,'' 
     the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep 
     the operation protected. ``We're not going to read more 
     people than necessary into our heart of darkness,'' he said. 
     ``The rules are `Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'''
       One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the 
     program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of 
     Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; 
     it was created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganization of the 
     Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian 
     intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because 
     he had little experience in running intelligence programs, 
     though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a 
     committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging 
     ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known 
     instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. ``Remember Henry II--
     `Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?''' the senior 
     C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. 
     ``Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten 
     times that much.''
       Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He 
     shared Rumsfeld's disdain for the analysis and assessments 
     proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and 
     chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.'s inability, before 
     the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein 
     harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone's military 
     assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, 
     was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted 
     headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an 
     Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.
       Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle 
     within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of 
     all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on 
     terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the 
     Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth 
     deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence 
     programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently 
     left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a 
     Pentagon spokesman said, ``I will not discuss any covert 
     programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as 
     the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 
     7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making 
     process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or 
     anywhere else.''
       In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the 
     Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. 
     ``It was an active program,'' the former intelligence 
     official told me. ``It's been the most important capability 
     we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover 
     where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove 
     an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United 
     States--and do so without visibility.'' Some of its methods 
     were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.
       By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The SAP was involved in 
     some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. 
     and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed 
     up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and--without success--for Iraqi 
     weapons of mass destruction. But they weren't able to stop 
     the evolving insurgency.
       In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and 
     his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing 
     it as little more than the work of Baathist ``dead-enders,'' 
     criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda 
     followers. The Administration measured its success in the war 
     by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most 
     wanted members of the old regime--reproduced on playing 
     cards--had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror 
     bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing 
     nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing 
     twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the 
     head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week 
     after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk 
     before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that ``the dead-enders 
     are still with us.'' He went on, ``There are some today who 
     are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in 
     Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of 
     failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the 
     case.'' Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true 
     believers who ``fought on during and after the defeat of the 
     Nazi regime in Germany.'' A few weeks later--and five months 
     after the fall of Baghdad--the Defense Secretary declared, 
     ``It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in 
     Iraq than in the United States.''
       Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that 
     the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and 
     baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the 
     insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to 
     Saddam Hussein. ``When you understand that they're organized 
     in a cellular structure,'' General Jon Abizaid, the head of 
     the Central Command declared, ``that . . . they have access 
     to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you'll understand 
     how dangerous they are.''
       The American military and intelligence communities were 
     having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One 
     internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made 
     available to me, concluded that the insurgents' ``strategic 
     and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.'' 
     According to the study:
       Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets 
     and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking 
     surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been 
     passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and 
     daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the 
     Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force 
     which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi 
     ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working 
     with the CPA's so-called Green Zone.
       The study concluded, ``Politically, the U.S. has failed to 
     date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing 
     with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that 
     is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the 
     insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it 
     behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the 
     sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the 
     Governing Council''--the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.--
     ``as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the 
     true power is the CPA.''
       By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the 
     Pentagon's political and military misjudgments was clear. 
     Donald Rumsfeld's ``dead-enders'' now included not only 
     Baathists but many marginal figures as well--thugs and 
     criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners 
     freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general 
     amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it 
     simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The 
     analyst said, ``We'd killed and captured guys who had been 
     given two or three hundred dollars to `pray and spray' ''--
     that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. ``They weren't 
     really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by 
     wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.'' In many

[[Page 9731]]

     cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the 
     Baath Party. The analyst said, that the insurgents ``spent 
     three of four months figuring out how we operated and 
     developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting 
     up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the 
     American troops responded, they'd do it.'' Then, the analyst 
     said.``the clever ones began to get in on the action.''
       By contrast, according to the military report, the American 
     and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: 
     ``Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the 
     dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence 
     effort is not coordinated since either too many groups are 
     involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does 
     not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.'' The 
     success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to 
     change the dynamic.
       The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by 
     Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the 
     Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A 
     key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander 
     of the detention and interrogation center at Guantanamo, who 
     had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison 
     interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the 
     abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in 
     February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in 
     Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in 
     charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as 
     recommending that ``detention operations must act as an 
     enabler for interrogation.''
       Miller's concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, 
     was to ``Gitmoize'' the prison system in Iraq--to make it 
     more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military 
     commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in 
     Cuba--methods that could, with special approval, include 
     sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold, and heat, 
     and placing prisoners in ``stress positions'' for agonizing 
     lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally 
     declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international 
     terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible 
     for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)
       Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they 
     expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional 
     methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq 
     as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be 
     treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
       ``They weren't getting anything substantive from the 
     detainees in Iraq,'' the former intelligence official told 
     me. ``No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. 
     Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of 
     working through the normal chain of command. I've got this 
     apparatus set up--the black special-access program--and I'm 
     going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity 
     begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a 
     picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is 
     flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff. But 
     we've got more targets''--prisoners in Iraqi jails--``than 
     people who can handle them.''
       Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former 
     intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the 
     SAP's rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army 
     military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi 
     prisons under the SAP's auspices. ``So here are fundamentally 
     good soldiers--military-intelligence guys--being told that no 
     rules apply,'' the former official, who has extensive 
     knowledge of the special-access programs, added. ``And, as 
     far as they're concerned, this is a covert operation, and 
     it's to be kept within Defense Department channels.''
       The military-police prison guards, the former official 
     said, included ``recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, 
     Maryland.'' He was referring to members of the 372nd Military 
     Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing 
     charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. ``How are 
     these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army 
     Reserve doesn't know what it's doing.''
       Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib--whether military police or 
     military intelligence--was no longer the only question that 
     mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with 
     aliases, were working in the prison. The military police 
     assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many 
     others--military intelligence officers, contract 
     interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-
     access program--wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who 
     was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the 
     commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the 
     officer ostensibly in charge. ``I thought most of the 
     civilians there were interpreters, but there were some 
     civilians that I didn't know,'' Karpinski told me. ``I called 
     them the disappearing ghosts. I'd seen them once in a while 
     at Abu Ghraib and then I'd see them months later. They were 
     nice--they'd always call out to me and say, `Hey, remember 
     me? How are you doing?''' The mysterious civilians, she said, 
     were ``always bringing in somebody for interrogation or 
     waiting to collect somebody going out.'' Karpinski added that 
     she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. 
     (General Taguba found that Karpinski's leadership failures 
     contributed to the abuses.)
       By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the 
     senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. ``They said, 
     `No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan--
     pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist 
     targets--and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-
     in-law, and people pulled off the streets' ''--the sort of 
     prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. ``The C.I.A.'s legal 
     people objected,'' and the agency ended its SAP involvement 
     in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
       The C.I.A.'s complaints were echoed throughout the 
     intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at 
     Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret SAP, and 
     thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a 
     valuable cover operation. ``This was stupidity,'' a 
     government consultant told me. ``You're taking a program that 
     was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a 
     stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, 
     traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would 
     bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional 
     war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand 
     soldiers.''
       The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for 
     the Abu Ghraib disaster. ``There's nothing more exhilarating 
     for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an 
     important national security issue without dealing with 
     military planners, who are always worried about risk,'' he 
     told me. ``What could be more boring than needing the 
     cooperation of logistical planners?'' The only difficulty, 
     the former official added, is that, ``as soon as you enlarge 
     the secret program beyond the oversight capability of 
     experienced people, you lose control. We've never had a case 
     where a special-access program went sour--and this goes back 
     to the Cold War.''
       In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent 
     much of his career directly involved with special-access 
     programs, spread the blame. ``The White House subcontracted 
     this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to 
     Cambone,'' he said. ``This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld 
     and Myers approved the program.'' When it came to the 
     interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left 
     the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally 
     culpable, the consultant added, ``but he's responsible for 
     the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we've 
     changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created 
     conditions where the ends justify the means.''
       Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused 
     M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead 
     guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior 
     commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they 
     witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at 
     any trial, however, it why a group of Army Reserve military 
     policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their 
     prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially 
     humiliating for Iraqi men.
       The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual 
     humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington 
     conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion 
     of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was ``The Arab 
     Mind,'' a study of Arab culture and psychology, first 
     published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural 
     anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, 
     Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book 
     includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, 
     depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. 
     ``The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . 
     . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict 
     contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex 
     a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,'' Patai 
     wrote. Homosexual activity, ``or any indication of homosexual 
     leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is 
     never given any publicity. These are private affairs and 
     remain in private.'' The Patai book, an academic told me, was 
     ``the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.'' In their 
     discussions, he said, two themes emerged--``one, that Arabs 
     only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of 
     Arabs is shame and humiliation.''
       The government consultant said that there may have been a 
     serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation 
     and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners 
     would do anything--including spying on their associates--to 
     avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and 
     friends. The government consultant said, ``I was told that 
     the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of 
     informants, people you could insert back in the population.'' 
     The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of 
     exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency 
     action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn't effective; the 
     insurgency continued to grow.
       ``This shit has been brewing for months,'' the Pentagon 
     consultant who has dealt with

[[Page 9732]]

     SAPs told me. ``You don't keep prisoners naked in their cell 
     and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.'' The 
     consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom 
     had served for years on active duty in the military, had been 
     appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. 
     ``We don't raise kids to do things like that. When you go 
     after Mullah Omar, that's one thing. But when you give the 
     authority to kids who don't know the rules, that's another.''
       In 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements 
     of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on 
     terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from 
     the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise 
     visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then 
     chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on 
     International Human Rights. ``They wanted us to challenge the 
     Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and 
     interrogation,'' Horton told me. ``They were urging us to get 
     involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much 
     out the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for 
     abuse, and it's going to occur.'' The military officials were 
     most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in 
     the interrogation process, Horton recalled. ``They said there 
     was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a 
     result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the 
     Pentagon. The JAG officers were being cut out of the policy 
     formulation process.'' They told him that, with the war on 
     terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the 
     Geneva Conventions had come to an end.
       The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when 
     Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu 
     Gharib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army's Criminal 
     Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of 
     photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to 
     Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.
       The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The 
     C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence 
     official said. ``You can't cover it up. You have to prosecute 
     these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you 
     prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access 
     program? So you hope that maybe it'll go away.'' The 
     Pentagon's attitude last January, he said, was ``Somebody got 
     caught with some photos. What's the big deal? Take care of 
     it.'' Rumsfeld's explanation to the White House, the official 
     added, was reassuring. ``We've got a glitch in the program. 
     We'll prosecute it.' The cover story was that some kids got 
     out of control.''
       In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and 
     Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller's 
     visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the 
     subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed 
     Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and 
     Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in 
     Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller's 
     recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own 
     role, he said, was mainly to insure that the ``flow of 
     intelligence back to the commands'' was ``efficient and 
     effective.'' He added that Miller's goal was ``to provide a 
     safe, secure and humane environment that supports the 
     expeditious collection of intelligence.''
       It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of 
     New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:
       If, indeed General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to Iraq 
     for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence 
     from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions 
     that are at point here in you report [on abuses at Abu 
     Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller's arrival 
     and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by 
     those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved. . 
     . . Therefore, I for one don't believe I yet have adequate 
     information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to 
     exactly what General Miller's orders were . . . how he 
     carried out those orders, and the connection between his 
     arrival in the fall of '03 and the intensity of the abuses 
     that occurred afterward.
       Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the 
     former intelligence official told me, Miller was ``read 
     in''--that is, briefed--on the special-access operation. In 
     April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the 
     Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring 
     headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and 
     international media as the general who would clean up the 
     Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva 
     Conventions. ``His job is to save what he can,'' the former 
     official said. ``He's there to protect the program while 
     limiting any loss of core capability.'' As for Antonio 
     Taguba, the former intelligence official added, ``He goes 
     into it not knowing shit. And then: ``Holy cow! What's going 
     on?
       If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, 
     he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to 
     mention the special-access program. ``If you give away the 
     fact that a special-access program exists,'' the former 
     intelligence official told me, ``you blow the whole quick-
     reaction program.''
       One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld's account of his initial 
     reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack 
     of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been 
     recent history: there had been many previous complaints of 
     prisoner abuse from organizations like Human Rights Watch and 
     the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered 
     them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services 
     Committee that he had not been provided with details of 
     alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific 
     charges. ``You read it, as I say, it's one thing. You see 
     these photographs and it's just unbelievable. . . . It wasn't 
     three-dimensional. It wasn't video. It wasn't color. it was 
     quite a different thing.'' The former intelligence official 
     said that in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon 
     officials had not studied the photographs because ``they 
     thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of 
     engagement,'' as applied to the SAP. ``The photos,'' he 
     added, ``turned out to be the result of the program run 
     amok.''
       The former intelligence official made it clear that he was 
     not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that 
     atrocities were committed. But, he said, ``it was their 
     permission granted to do the SAP, generically, and there was 
     enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.''
       Thsi official went on, ``The black guys''--those in the 
     Pentagon's secret program--``say we've got to accept the 
     prosecution. they're vaccinated from the reality.'' The SAP 
     is still active, and ``the United States is picking up guys 
     for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the 
     quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?'' The program 
     was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was 
     allowed to know of its existence. ``If you even give a hint 
     that you're aware of a black program that you're not read 
     into, you lose your clearances,'' the former official said. 
     ``Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are 
     those who are undefended--the poor kids at the end of the 
     food chain.''
       The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. ``The 
     Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn't know 
     how to do it,'' the former intelligence official said.
       Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to 
     many conservatives, defended the Administration's continued 
     secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib.; 
     ``Why keep it black?'' the consultant asked. ``Because the 
     process is unpleasant. It's like making sausage--you like the 
     result but you don't want to know how it was made. Also, you 
     don't want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. 
     Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The 
     last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you 
     treat Arab males in prison.''
       The former intelligence official told me he feared that one 
     of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would 
     be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on 
     terror, which had already suffered from the draining of 
     resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as a ``a tumor'' 
     on the war on terror. He said, ``As long as it's benign and 
     contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis 
     without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins 
     to grow, with nobody to diagnose it--it becomes a malignant 
     tumor.''
       The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and 
     his superiors, the consultant said, ``created the conditions 
     that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we're 
     going to end up with another Church Commission''--the 1975 
     Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank 
     Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the 
     previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that 
     the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its 
     discretionary power. ``When the shit hits the fan, as it did 
     on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?'' the consultant asked. 
     ``You do it selectively and with intelligence.''
       ``Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,'' the 
     Pentagon consultant said. ``You have to demonstrate that 
     there are checks and balances in the system.'' He added, 
     ``When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have 
     very clear red lines.'''
       Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, ``If this is true, 
     it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and 
     deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get 
     to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.''
       ``In an odd way,'' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of 
     Human Rights Watch, said, ``the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib 
     have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the 
     violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.'' 
     Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has 
     systematically used third-degree techniques around the world 
     on detainees. ``Some JAGS hate this and are horrified that 
     the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in 
     the next war,'' Roth told me. ``We're giving the world a 
     ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld 
     has lowered the bar.''

  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman yield?
  Mr. DELAHUNT. I yield to the gentleman from Hawaii.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Michigan gave a

[[Page 9733]]

quote there concerning the briefing of Congress. Could the gentleman 
read that again and attribute where the source of that comment was? Was 
that an observation or was that a direct quote from someone? Perhaps he 
can read that text.
  Mr. CONYERS. No. This was from the author of the article, Seymour 
Hersh, the part that determined that the existence of a program was to 
avoid traceability, to have no budget that was reportable. So we did 
not have anything to even oversight, and then also that they could 
avoid congressional scrutiny and a requirement or obligation for being 
briefed to Congress.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. So we can make absolutely sure, this is Mr. Hersh 
reporting what information was coming to him, that that was the intent 
of this approach; is that correct?
  Mr. CONYERS. Yes, but what I am trying to do is give us the basis of 
why there ought to be an investigation. I wish I could vet all of these 
statements, assertions, and I have as many questions as the gentleman 
probably does.
  The problem is that we are now confronted with taking a few 
reservists and throwing them into a court-martial situation, when 
clearly this problem that has been exposed started with more than a few 
privates and corporals and sergeants, determining how they were going 
to commit these abuses; that this was sanctioned. This was planned, and 
I repeat again, the President was informed of the existence of the 
program, a former intelligence official talking to Seymour Hersh said.
  This is an award-winning writer on the American government scene for 
many years. I need to know more, but I am certainly not going to walk 
away from this highly complex information that has been presented to 
us.
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman yield?
  Mr. DELAHUNT. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. 
Conyers) for bringing the Seymour Hersh article to the attention of the 
House today. I read that this afternoon, and I agree with my colleague, 
the impact of that article clearly is this was a planned special 
operation that did not originate with the privates and the sergeants 
but at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
  But the question I wanted to ask my colleague, what I got out of the 
article was that not only was this a very clear attempt, if the article 
is accurate, by the Bush administration to set up an intelligence-
gathering mechanism and operation that would be free and clear of any 
congressional oversight, but that they were taking these procedures and 
methods from Afghanistan, where we were clearly fighting terrorists and 
had terrorists in custody, and were interrogating terrorists and where 
we had announced, rightly or wrongly, that the Geneva Conventions would 
not apply. Then we were taking these methods and procedures to a more 
traditional war zone in Iraq and applying them to the detainees in the 
Iraqi prisons, notably Abu Ghraib, where the detainees were a bunch of 
people off the street, street criminals, rock throwers, hoodlums, maybe 
some terrorists, but certainly a wide number of just disaffected Iraqis 
who got swept up by the police and by the Army in an urban setting that 
was a traditional war zone. Yet, here the American operation was using 
these same interrogation approaches that we have been using against 
known terrorists in a lawless situation in Afghanistan.
  This seems to me to be the root of the problem. First off, there is 
clear accountability to the very top of the Defense Department and the 
White House, and every time those gentlemen talk about just a few bad 
apples, it sets my hackles on edge because clearly they are trying to 
avoid accountability and responsibility.
  The fundamental error they made was, in my judgment, taking this from 
a terror interrogation into interrogation of street criminals and 
routine suspects that have so badly backfired on our image in Iraq.
  So I wonder, does the gentleman read the article the same way as I 
do?
  Mr. CONYERS. I do, because they said they were taking people walking 
off the streets, taxi drivers, in-laws of somebody who may be more 
seriously implicated, and that they were bringing in an expert from 
Guantanamo. They do not make them enemy combatants so that these folks 
have no rights under the Geneva Conventions whatsoever, and the whole 
thing reads like an absolute nightmare. They are naming names and they 
are naming strategies. This so-called, what do we call it, the secret 
access program.
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Very aptly known as SAP, S-A-P.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time for a moment, because I 
know we are joined by our friend, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. 
Inslee), and again, I think we are coming back to an issue that has to 
be discussed here, and that is an issue of competence.
  There is nobody in this chamber that is not committed to making every 
effort, every responsible effort to end the threat of terrorism, not 
just against the United States but all over the globe. What I think the 
world has concluded, as most Americans have concluded, is that the 
information that was provided to this administration indicating that 
there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there were 
linkages between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were absolutely false, 
absolutely false.
  What we have learned is that much of this information was provided by 
an exiled group called the Iraqi National Congress, headed by this 
particular gentleman here with the sunglasses on whose name is Ahmed 
Chalabi, who for years was working to return to Iraq.
  Mr. Chalabi is an interesting and controversial figure, of course, 
because during his exile he lived for a time in Jordan, and while he 
was there, he was charged with and accused and convicted of the crime 
of embezzlement in the amount of some $30 million. He was sentenced to 
a term of 22 years in prison. Somehow during his exile he became 
friendly with or developed relationships with Richard Pearl, who 
formerly served on the Defense Advisory Board, with the Vice President 
Mr. Cheney, and with others in the so-called neo-conservative movement.

                              {time}  2230

  And they believed what he had to say. And it has been proven to be 
false.
  And I thought what was particularly interesting was that this past 
weekend our Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made a statement, I think 
it was on ``Meet the Press,'' that he now believes, and I am reading 
again from the New York Times dated today, that ``he now believes that 
the Central Intelligence Agency was deliberately misled about evidence 
that Saddam Hussein was developing unconventional weapons.''
  Now, stop for a moment to think of this, that the Secretary of State, 
who made the presentation before the world at the United Nations, who 
built the case for this White House and for this President, now 
indicates that he was or the CIA was misled. The report goes on, ``He 
hinted at widespread reports,'' this is Secretary Powell, ``of 
fabrications by an engineer who provided much of the critical 
information about the so-called bioweapons labs. Intelligence officials 
have since found that the engineer was linked to the Iraqi National 
Congress, an exiled group that was pressing President Bush to unseat 
Mr. Hussein.'' This is a quote by the Secretary of State. ``It turned 
out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, 
deliberately misleading,'' Mr. Powell said in an interview broadcast 
from Jordan, ``and for that I am disappointed and I regret it.''
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. I yield.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, my constituents are tired of being suckered 
with false information that both precipitated and continue this war in 
Iraq, and they want some accountability of what happened with such a 
massive amount of misinformation given to the American people leading 
up to this war. They want accountability, and they deserve 
accountability.

[[Page 9734]]

  We offered today an amendment to the defense authorizations bill to 
be considered this week that will give Americans some accountability on 
the source of this information, of Mr. Chalabi's rogue group, this 
alleged Iraqi National Congress. And there is nothing congressional 
about it. It is a bunch of folks that want to go back in and run Iraq 
and who convinced the neoconservatives who are behind this war that we 
would all be greeted with rose petals because Mr. Chalabi would be seen 
as the great savior of Iraq.
  This great fantasy was bought hook, line and sinker by the President 
of the United States and the administration, and it was a fraud. And it 
is time for the American taxpayers to have accountability here.
  Now, what I am told, and I want to make sure it is true, but I am 
told taxpayers are still paying this group, this group that gave us, 
apparently willfully, or potentially willfully, false information 
leading to this war. We are still paying $350,000 a month for their 
great services in Iraq. What did this group do for the American people? 
It got us into a war based on false administration they gave to the 
administration. The administration was all too happy to accept that 
there were weapons of mass destruction there; that there was a 
connection to 9-11 and that they would be greeted as liberators, the 
three legs of this stool, all of which were false. And we are still 
paying these people.
  So we will offer an amendment, hopefully tomorrow it will be allowed, 
I hope the majority will allow it to be considered, which will cut that 
money off, assuming the things I have suggested are true; and I believe 
they are. So we need some accountability here of this group. We cannot 
continue it.
  And I want to make sure people understand how dire this is and how 
hoodwinked this administration was. And, frankly, I think they were 
patsies for this group. We paid millions of dollars very shortly after 
the Iraqi Army collapsed to fly into Iraq, I am told like some 800 or 
900 of the cohorts and the coconspirators, if I can use the pejorative 
term that I think is appropriate here, of Mr. Chalabi's. We flew them 
into Baghdad, and it was going to be the sort of great saviors flying 
in that would be the recipient of all these rose petals and would 
quickly reestablish them as the functioning government of Iraq.
  Surprise. They were not really welcomed with open arms in Baghdad. 
Totally failed. Wasted our millions of dollars, and they are still 
taking money from the taxpayers. Now, here is one mistake, at least one 
mistake the administration ought to own up to and fix so we do not 
continue pouring money down a rat hole in Iraq with the Iraqi National 
Congress, which has not helped us one wit.
  Because, frankly, what Iraq needs is a real congress which is elected 
by the Iraqi people. These guys who are under indictment in Jordan, you 
cannot parachute him in and expect him to be welcomed as the savior of 
Iraq.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield on that 
point.
  Mr. INSLEE. Let me say one more thing. We need elections sooner 
rather than later in Iraq to vest them with their own destiny, and I 
will offer an amendment to do that as well.
  I yield to the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie).
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, on that point, perhaps one of my 
esteemed colleagues could enlighten me as to the status of Mr. Chalabi 
and his brethren with respect to the sovereignty issue that is supposed 
to come to full fruition on June 30. I am unable to determine from my 
inquiries as to exactly where the United Nations representative, Mr. 
Chalabi, and Mr. Bremer cross paths.
  And to the degree or extent that they are in contact with one 
another, let alone in league with one another, exactly what the 
elements of that sovereignty will be with respect to this Iraqi 
governing council and Mr. Chalabi. Do any of my colleagues have any 
information on that or is everybody as much in the dark as I believe 
the American people and the Iraqi people are?
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania 
(Mr. Hoeffel).
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Well, I was just going to say that we have as much of a 
clue as the American officials in Iraq have, which is no clue at all. I 
do not think anybody has any idea what is going to happen on June 30.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Well, Mr. Speaker, may I ask the gentleman to take 
the time back on that point?
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Sure.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I, unfortunately, believe that we probably have a 
pretty good idea what is going to happen at that point. I believe that 
the American Armed Forces will be set adrift on a desert sea of 
anxiety, insecurity, and ineptitude.
  The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) has characterized the 
present situation with respect to our policy as one of rampant 
incompetence, but I think that it is unfortunately all too safe to say 
that that will manifest itself on June 30 with an utter incapacity to 
discern even momentarily what the military mission of the United States 
Armed Forces will be at that point, other than to try to survive the 
day, survive the week, survive the month, survive any stop-loss that 
the Secretary of Defense might impose on the troops there and then get 
home.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. 
Delahunt).
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Well, Mr. Speaker, I do not think we have the answers. 
But, again, let me go back to this issue of competence, because the 
President of the United States described the Secretary of Defense as a 
superb leader. I reject that description. I reject that description out 
of hand. One only has to see example after example, such as the 
relationship, and not just a single incident, with Mr. Chalabi. 
Clearly, the Kingdom of Jordan, which has been a steadfast ally of the 
United States, was insulted by the appointment of this individual, who 
is a convicted felon, to the Iraqi Governing Council.
  King Abdulla of Jordan was here. I and several other members of the 
Committee on International Relations, I believe I was joined by my 
colleague here tonight, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel), 
at a luncheon when I posed the question to the King, and congratulated 
him, by the way, for moving towards the democratization, if you will, 
of Jordan, whether he was ever consulted by Secretary Rumsfeld or by 
the President about the appointment of Mr. Chalabi. And he said, no, he 
was not even consulted. Yet here is an individual who established a 
bank, one of the largest banks in Jordan, then embezzled, according to 
the conviction, millions of dollars, causing the bank to collapse; and 
he then escaped from Jordan.
  When asked just recently about Ahmed Chalabi potentially becoming the 
prime minister in the interim government, what King Abdulla said was, 
``He was not the ideal choice.'' I daresay that was extremely 
diplomatic.
  But at the same time let me go and quote another individual who has 
earned the respect of Members of this body and the American people, 
David Kay. Remember David Kay? He was assigned the task by this 
President, by this Secretary of Defense to go find the weapons of mass 
destruction; and he came back and said there are no weapons of mass 
destruction, Mr. President, and testified before the United States 
Senate that we were all wrong. We were all wrong.
  But, of course, this White House, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and Mr. 
Rumsfeld cannot acknowledge that they were wrong. They were wrong about 
the weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong about the links 
between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. And now we find ourselves in a 
quagmire.
  But this is what Mr. Kay had to say, who, by the way, was one of the 
most hawkish members of the United Nations monitors that went out and 
that was part of that inspection team, and who actually supported the 
war. But here is what he had to say. He now believes the Western 
countries' intelligence agencies got it wrong for two reasons. He is 
referring to the weapons of mass destruction. First, they were 
manipulated by Ahmed Chalabi and

[[Page 9735]]

other dissidents whose central interest was ousting Saddam.
  Just mentioning the name of the Iraqi National Congress leader makes 
Kay laugh. There is a guy who is so transparent. Chalabi asked me once, 
and again this is Mr. Kay speaking, why are you so concerned about the 
weapons of mass destruction? No one cares about weapons of mass 
destruction. And when asked by Tom Brokaw was he embarrassed, no, his 
response was, we are heroes in error.
  Well that error has cost the American taxpayers hundreds of billions 
of dollars, the lives of American young men and women, and the loss of 
American moral authority and prestige in the war. Mr. Chalabi, that is 
disgraceful. That is disgraceful.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Perhaps it would be useful for us to note at this 
point that Mr. Chalabi does not occupy his position as a result of 
unilateral action on his part. Mr. Chalabi occupies this position 
because of the overt policies of this administration. The reason he is 
there, the reason that we are unable at this stage, at this stage, just 
prior to June 30, to say exactly what his position will be in the 
future is because he continues to receive the favor of this 
administration. He is there because Mr. Bush saw that he went there. He 
is there because he is supported to this day, to this moment by this 
administration.
  Everything that has been said concerning him this evening is true. It 
is factual. It is contextual. We understand the meaning of what he said 
when he said we were heroes in error. And I happened to see that 
announcement; and let me tell my colleagues the words do not convey the 
sense of triumph, the sense of disdain, the condescending attitude or 
sense of his countenance when he pronounced those words. He was pleased 
with himself that he had been able to mislead the administration and 
that he was getting away with it.
  It is one thing to deliberately mislead someone. They may not know 
what was going on. They may not know what happened. Maybe they should 
have known. Maybe they should have been paying more attention in the 
administration, but to give them the widest benefit of a doubt, perhaps 
they did not. But once someone announces to your face that you have 
been misled, and deliberately so, to continue to receive the favor of 
the person who made the appointment and allows it to continue, tells 
more about the person who does the appointing and ostensibly holds the 
power than it does about Mr. Chalabi.

                              {time}  2245

  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, it can be summed up in one word, 
incompetence, and a lack of leadership and an inability to wage a war 
against terrorism that will succeed.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Hoeffel).
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Mr. Speaker, just over a year ago at one of our first 
Iraq Watches, I recounted a visit that Mr. Chalabi paid to my office, 
as I think he did to most members of the Committee on International 
Relations in October 2002, just before the vote here in the House on 
the war authority on Iraq.
  I talked to Mr. Chalabi for 10 or 15 minutes. He had an aide with 
him, and my chief of staff was with me. They left, and I turned to my 
aide and I said, That is the kind of man that my grandfather would have 
called a four-flusher. I do not think I have used that term since my 
grandfather died in the 1980s. I am not quite sure what it means. I 
think it must come from poker where a player has four cards for a 
flush, does not have the fifth, and you are all hot air and cannot be 
trusted and you are just a spin doctor.
  That is exactly the impression that I got from Ahmed Chalabi that 
day, that he was spinning. He was spinning me, he was spinning the 
Congress, he was not a man of substance and not someone we should 
trust.
  The sad fact is, as my colleagues have said here tonight, the 
administration trusted him. Paul Wolfowitz trusted him, Doug Faith, 
Donald Rumsfeld trusted him, and because those individuals trusted him, 
our President trusted him; and he is not worthy of our trust. As a 
matter of fact, I think we need to talk about all of this talk about 
resignations in the Department of Defense. I do not think we should 
allow those civilian authorities in the DOD the luxury of resigning. 
The President ought to fire them. He ought to fire Rumsfeld and Faith 
for the bad advice they have given him, for believing in people like 
Chalabi, for the lack of planning in Iraq, for sending troops over 
there without enough numbers, without the armored vehicles to keep them 
safe.
  The failures of leadership in the Department of Defense are so great, 
including believing Chalabi, that the civilian leadership ought to go. 
While the President is at it, he ought to get rid of George Tenet for 
the bad intelligence regarding the failure of the weapons of mass 
destruction intelligence.
  The only person that ought to resign in the administration is Colin 
Powell, because his advice is not being listened to, but that is 
another matter.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman has put his finger on 
what we ought to call the Chalabi principle in the Bush administration. 
The Chalabi principle is this: If you tell the truth, you get fired by 
the President. If you tell a falsehood, you get promoted and praised.
  That is a pretty strong statement, but let us look at the facts. 
General Shinseki told the truth. He said we are going to need several 
hundred thousand troops to prevent massive looting and anarchy after 
the army collapses, and it was true; so they canned him. General Zinni 
said the same thing; he gracefully was allowed to retire. Joe Wilson 
told the truth and pointed out that the President told a significant 
falsehood to the American people and Congress in the State of the Union 
address, asserting that Iraq was getting uranium to build a nuclear 
weapon. He told the truth and so the President's people punished Mr. 
Wilson's wife by outing her CIA employment, which should be a Federal 
crime.
  So if you tell the truth in the Bush administration, you can canned, 
punished, and your wife's career gets destroyed. But if you tell a 
falsehood, like Mr. Chalabi's outfit who gave us repeated 
misinformation, according to the Secretary of State, you get praised, 
you get the President trying to get you an in in the new government in 
Iraq, and you get $350,000 a month of taxpayers' money, together with 
the millions of dollars we spent trying to parachute them into Baghdad 
to form a new government, which was an abject failure, you are praised.
  If you are Paul Wolfowitz, who told the Congress that oil revenues 
would pay for this and we would be greeted with rose petals, you are 
praised by the President.
  And if you are the Defense Secretary, if you are wrong about WMD, 
wrong about the connection with 9/11, wrong about the number of troops 
we need, and wrong about not having armor and how we are going to pay 
for it and how much it is going to cost, if you are wrong about not 
having early elections, the Vice President says you are the best 
Secretary of Defense America has ever had. This is the Chalabi 
principle. We need to break this.
  This is one of the things wrong with our Iraqi policy. The people 
telling the truth are not listened to, and the people fouling up get 
promoted. That needs to change.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, what is interesting is that David Kay, 
highly respected, the man that was charged by this President, it did 
not take him too long to conclude that Mr. Chalabi was transparent, a 
manipulator, a con man, if you will.
  In addition to all that the gentleman has said, do my colleagues 
remember when the President of the United States delivered the State of 
the Union address this year, in January of 2004, who was sitting up 
right there in the gallery in the Bush family box? Does the gentleman 
remember?
  Mr. HOEFFEL. I remember. It was Mr. Chalabi.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. It boggles the mind, it is such rank incompetence, it 
is such an inability to see reality, to be fooled. It is not 
incompetence, it is gross negligence. In some other forum it might

[[Page 9736]]

almost be funny, but here it is so tragic because it is not just about 
this President and this Vice President, but it is about war and peace 
and the American people and how we are viewed in the world, and it is 
the blood of our children, and it is mortgaging our future.
  We should walk away from Mr. Chalabi now and begin to restore the 
confidence of the world in our ability to match reality and our dreams 
and aspirations.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, I would suggest that these discussions 
that we have held and are holding weekly on the floor here are meant to 
communicate with our colleagues and with the American people. This is 
our forum to do it. I think those who may be observing our proceedings 
here today need to take up, if they believe what we have said tonight, 
the cause of having Mr. Bush remove his support from Mr. Chalabi.
  I think people across the country have to ask their representatives, 
as well as communicate with the White House. They have to ask their 
Representatives and Senators, do you support this Chalabi 
administration and the Iraqi Governing Council? Do you support Mr. 
Chalabi being a part of this sovereignty movement after June 30? If you 
do, there have to be serious questions about your competence to be 
holding office and acting on our behalf.
  This is a question that needs to be asked. Americans need not feel 
impotent, they need not feel they are merely observers of what other 
people are doing to you and doing to this country. You can demand of 
your elected Representatives and Senators, where do you stand on this 
Chalabi issue?
  It is not a matter of getting an individual, I am sure we all agree. 
He is representative of a failure of leadership. His position in the 
Iraqi Governing Council is an insult to those people who have been 
wounded and who have been killed during this war. It is an insult to 
those of us who uphold genuine ideas about freedom and democracy and 
their spread. So long as this man is there, being the official 
representative of the United States to the Iraqi Governing Council, to 
that same degree will we be disenabled from achieving any of these 
goals, regardless of how one feels about going to war in Iraq or not.
  This is what needs to be done. You have to demand of your 
representatives, where do you stand on this issue of his continued 
presence as being officially supported by the United States of America?
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Let me reclaim my time for a moment. I think it is 
important for Americans to understand that during the course of this 
week, we will be debating a bill that is described as the defense 
reauthorization bill. It is our purpose collectively as members of this 
informal group that came to being as a result of the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania's brainstorm almost a year ago now, this informal group is 
going to make every single effort to eliminate the funding and the 
authority for the funding for the Iraqi National Congress that is 
receiving some $4 million a year, as the gentleman indicates. For what, 
we do not know. For bad information, for self-aggrandizement, for 
certainly not the best interests of the United States.
  We again, as the gentleman suggests, recommend that anyone who is 
interested in this issue, that shares our concern and our belief that 
this is very much a linchpin to beginning to restore our international 
respect and support, to contact their Senators and their 
Representatives to assist in this effort, to read about, not just 
listen to our comments, but to become engaged, educate themselves as to 
the role of this individual in the course of the past several years and 
the consequences to the United States simply because there were people 
in this administration, so-called neoconservatives that were looking 
for a reason to go to war in Iraq long before our national tragedy of 
September 11.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. This is why it is so important, and I want to make 
sure everyone understands. We can do this. We do have a bill coming up 
this week, and if we are able to get on the agenda on the floor, we can 
stop the support for this group. It is fundamental to advancing the 
genuine interests of the United States and reestablishing some 
semblance of a foundation on behalf of freedom that we stop Chalabi 
from being represented on the Governing Council, as having the support 
of the United States of America.

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