[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 19]
[Senate]
[Pages 25483-25486]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     MINIMIZING DAMAGE FROM STORMS

  Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I would like to spend a few minutes this 
morning speaking about a subject that is extremely important to the 
State I represent, the State of Louisiana, and to the gulf coast and 
also to call attention to a small but important victory we achieved 
this week that I hope will signal a turning or a course correction that 
Congress should take to help prevent the destruction we have seen on 
the gulf coast in the last several weeks.
  Mr. President, you are from Kansas, and you know the power of 
tornadoes and Mother Nature. There is not anything we can do to prevent 
the fury of nature, but we can minimize the damage. We most certainly 
can use our intelligence that God has given us and our talent that God 
has given us and the wisdom that He gives us to make wise investments 
and smart choices and try to set priorities that help us make good 
choices for the people we represent so that we can minimize their pain 
and their suffering and we can maximize their hopes and their dreams 
for the future. I believe that is why we are here. I know I have talked 
with you personally, Mr. President, about the reasons you came to the 
Senate and I came to the Senate, and I think most of our colleagues 
share that view.
  I wish to speak for a few minutes this morning to remind the Nation 
and my colleagues about the devastation and the destruction that 
occurred only 10 weeks ago in one of the greatest cities in the United 
States of America, and that is the city of New Orleans and the 
surrounding parishes.
  New Orleans is our largest city in Louisiana, with 450,000 people, 
but it sits right next to Jefferson Parish of 450,000, right next to 
St. Bernard parish of about 60,000, and right next to Plaquemine, which 
is about 30,000. So it is a metropolitan area of close to 1.5 million 
to 2 million people.
  We have never in the history of the Nation seen destruction such as 
this. It is unprecedented. It was not, we now know and as I said 2 days 
after the hurricanes, the hurricanes that got us, Katrina and Rita--a 
double hit, one to the southeastern part of our State, a category 4 and 
5, and one to the southwestern part--but it was our own failings, if 
you will, that got us stuck. It was the breaching of a levee system 
that has successfully protected this city for over 300 years. But 
because of a lack of investment, because we have not set the right 
priorities in the last several years and over some time, and because we 
have our focus abroad and not at home, this is the destruction that has 
occurred, not just in New Orleans but in the region, in the 
southwestern part of our State as well, and

[[Page 25484]]

throughout the gulf coast of Mississippi.
  Let me show another chart that does not have the same kind of 
picture, but in a more graphic form it shows the number of people who 
have been affected by this storm and the breaching of the levee systems 
which occurred throughout south Louisiana primarily.
  Not many levees were breached to the north, but there were levee 
systems that were breached. In Louisiana, 3 million people were 
affected; in Texas, 802,000; in Mississippi, 1.7 million; and in 
Alabama, 829,000 people. Six million people were hit directly by a 
storm. Again, Katrina and Rita could not have been avoided, but I 
promise you, Mr. President, we could have minimized the damage and 
maximized hope if we had set better priorities and invested our money 
better right in this Congress with a different choice, a different 
course than the one set by this administration. What do I mean by that? 
I will get to that in a minute.
  I also want to show the significance of this region. There were 6 
million people affected in this region, but it is not just any region 
in the country. Forgive me, I represent this area, so I am quite 
partial to it. I do know every other area of this country is 
spectacular and wonderful, and I have visited many places, but I think 
anybody looking at this chart can understand there is something special 
about Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama.
  What is special about it is we are the Nation's only energy coast. 
Most of the domestic production comes off the shores, basically, of 
Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Yes, we have some important 
production in the West in shallow plays of oil and gas, but we have 
virtually shut down drilling in other parts of the country--in my 
opinion, not on very good data, but nonetheless that is a choice that 
has been made.
  The point is that we have continued to supply this Nation at a time 
when it needs oil and gas and needs energy production. Louisiana has 
not sat down on the job, Texas has not sat down, Mississippi has not 
sat down, and Alabama has not sat down. But what has happened is this 
administration and some parts of this Congress have sat down on the job 
of helping Louisiana and this energy coast protect itself from the 
kinds of storms that we have seen.
  How? By not investing in the wetlands restoration, which serves as a 
natural barrier to the great city of New Orleans and its surrounding 
areas and by not investing in the critical infrastructure of levees and 
navigation channels and appropriate dredging that would help manage 
water.
  Water can be a very powerful force for good. You can see here the 
mighty Mississippi River. Our country, in large measure, became a 
nation because of the securing of the mouth of the Mississippi River, 
the Louisiana Purchase by President Jefferson--when he made a very 
smart strategic investment. He did not waste his money on things that 
would not return a benefit to our country, but made the Louisiana 
Purchase for 3 cents an acre, the best real estate deal ever done. But 
we purchased the mouth of this river, secured it for national security 
but also secured it for commerce.
  Mr. President, it is impossible to get grain out of Kansas, your 
State, or Nebraska, or throughout the great Farm Belt in the Midwest of 
the United States, without using the Mississippi River and its 
tributaries. Yes, we can manage to get some of it over here to the east 
coast and out to our trading partners to the east, but moving it out 
here, down south to our trading partners in the south and also trade 
routes to the east and the west would be impossible without the 
Mississippi River.
  You would think this Congress would pay attention, particularly this 
administration that talks about energy independence would pay attention 
to this energy coast.
  In addition to an energy coast, you can see here the red dots are our 
ports. These are parts of the largest port system in the country--two 
of the largest. All of the south Louisiana ports and Houston. If you 
combined all of the ports in Louisiana from New Orleans to the Baton 
Rouge port, to south Louisiana, that port and the other ports, our port 
system is larger than any port system in the North American Continent 
and one of the largest port systems in the world. You would think that 
we would pay attention to infrastructure such as this and invest wisely 
and take some of the money out of this Treasury and invest in 
protection of the wetlands and in a strong and robust levee system.
  But we have not done that. In fact, we have done the opposite. This 
chart is a startling summary. It is startling to me. It is hard to 
grasp. This is ``Civil Works Capital Investment as a Percentage of 
Gross Domestic Product,'' since 1929 to the year 2001. When we in 
America, the America I grew up in, talk about the great investments 
after the war, you can see what we are talking about. You can see a 
Nation that was focused on its future. Why? Because it was investing in 
roads and bridges and levees and dams and infrastructure necessary to 
lay down the framework for the greatest explosion of entrepreneurship 
and scientific discovery that before had not been seen in the world; 
almost unequaled in its breadth and its scope. But what happened? Look 
here. Starting in the 1980s, there were new priorities set in 
Washington. They have been very damaging priorities, indeed--slashing 
critical investments in infrastructure, cutting back on 
``nonessentials,'' trying to ``conserve.'' This is not conservation. 
This is akin to taking a gun and shooting yourself in the head, when 
you take money out of civil works projects, away from cities, away from 
suburbs, away from communities, and spend it on either tax cuts for 
people who do not need them or on other priorities that are not as 
important or on wars that we cannot win. It is this low line here, 
right down here to the lowest percentage, under one-half of 1 percent 
of the GDP, that results in devastation such as this.
  You do not have to have a Ph.D. in economics to understand this. This 
is not complicated. I am going to show it to you again. This is 20 
years of disinvestment, disengagement, pretending that these problems 
do not exist, pretending we have surpluses when we do not, and 
underfunding critical infrastructure. When that happens, this is the 
result.
  The 450,000 people who lived in the city of New Orleans at one time 
and the 450,000 people who lived in Jefferson Parish and the 200,000 
people who lived in St. Tammany Parish and the 60,000 people who lived 
in St. Bernard and the 30,000 people who lived in Plaquemines Parish--
and that is not mentioning the other parishes along the western part of 
our coast, Cameron, that is completely destroyed, and Calcasieu Parish, 
that suffered, and Washington Parish, that had not every tree fall but 
every house collapsed or destroyed in some way or affected in some way 
by the falling of the trees-- ask these people whom I represent, was it 
smart to cut off investments? I don't think so.
  The sad thing is, we have had an answer. I am not coming to complain. 
I am coming to offer a solution which our delegation has offered, now, 
decade after decade. We have pleaded, we have held hearings, we have 
had field trips to Louisiana, we have done fly-overs, we have formed a 
national alliance, we built a coalition of 4,500, an alliance of 
industry and environmentalists. We have done it all. But what we cannot 
seem to do is get the attention of this administration and enough 
members of the Republican leadership to understand that smart 
investments make a difference: They save lives, they build hope, they 
build communities, and they make a nation stronger. What I have asked 
for and my delegation has asked for--and I know my time is running out, 
and I will take 2 more minutes--what we have asked for is to redirect a 
portion of offshore oil and gas revenues that have been generated off 
of our coast, off of this coast where all these people have been 
injured.
  There it is. With the oil and gas being drilled--and has been drilled 
since 1955--off of this coast, we are generating about $6 billion a 
year that comes into the general fund. It would be a smart thing and a 
wise thing right now, a wise action and a smart action,

[[Page 25485]]

to redirect a portion of those revenues to invest in a levee system, in 
the restoration of this Gulf Coast area and the wetlands that protect 
the Nation's great energy port and trade port.
  That is my message. We can do better. We must do better. We must make 
smarter investments with the money that is in the National Treasury. We 
do not have to raise additional taxes to do this. We have to redirect 
some of the taxes already flowing into the Treasury to invest to 
protect the people along the gulf coast. If we needed to share those 
revenues with other coastal communities--since by the year 2020, two-
thirds of the continental United States will live within 50 miles of 
the coast--we most certainly are able to do that. But for Heaven's 
sake, let's get our priorities straight.
  We can do better. We can make better decisions. That is what this 
effort is about. We are going to continue on, not complaining but 
offering solutions. We are not offering to raise taxes but to redirect 
some of the taxes that we have to make better choices to build a 
stronger Nation and stronger communities. I ask my colleagues to join 
us in this effort because I know we can get this job done. I thank the 
Senator from Illinois for yielding some time this morning for me to 
discuss this important issue.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from the great State of 
Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, let me thank the Senator from Louisiana. 
She has been through an ordeal, as well as her colleague, Senator 
Vitter, with the Katrina damage and what followed. She has been on this 
floor every day and in private meetings every single day, exhorting 
this Senate, both Democrats and Republicans, not to forget what 
happened to her home State. It is a tragedy that none of us would like 
to see befall our own States, and we owe it to her to work with the 
President, on a bipartisan basis, first, to help the evacuees and 
victims; second, to make sure the great city of New Orleans is back and 
running as quickly as possible; third, to make the changes that are 
necessary to give them peace of mind and security for generations to 
come.
  I have listened to her time and again come to the floor and talk 
about health care and education, the basics that people need to 
survive. I worry, as I am sure she does, that we are going through 
Katrina fatigue, that we have heard it for so long we want to turn the 
page and talk about other things. Thank you for reminding us every 
single day we cannot turn that page. I have met with those victims. 
Some have come to Illinois. I tell you but for the generosity and 
compassion of churches, charities, and local community groups, I do not 
know how some of these families would have survived.
  What has happened in farflung communities in Illinois is that these 
evacuees have been embraced--and thank goodness that happened because 
otherwise they tell me they wouldn't have known where to turn. When the 
Government should have been there, it was not there. Sadly, we have to 
step back now and take an honest evaluation of why that happened.
  I know the Senator from Louisiana shares my belief that if we had an 
independent, nonpartisan commission--which we have been begging for for 
weeks now--to take a look at what happened, not so much that we can 
figure out who to blame but so that we make sure we never do it again. 
We hear complaints about FEMA--a few weeks ago in Florida and 
complaints in Texas. We can do better. When it comes to disasters 
facing America, natural and otherwise, we can do better. I think we 
need to come together in an independent, nonpartisan way to make that 
happen.


                             Ahmed Chalabi

  It is almost hard to believe, and impossible to explain, what is 
going on in Washington today as we honor and fete Ahmed Chalabi. Who is 
Ahmed Chalabi? He enjoys the rank of Deputy Prime Minister in the 
nation of Iraq. But he enjoys a very questionable reputation otherwise.
  Ahmed Chalabi, it turns out, was one of the key advisers to the Bush 
administration before the invasion of Iraq. He was so important to the 
Bush administration that they paid his organization, through the 
Defense Intelligence Agency, $335,000 a month to sustain his life and 
his office. Overall, the Bush White House gave his Iraqi National 
Congress $39 million over the last 5 years, $39 million to this Ahmed 
Chalabi. Ahmed Chalabi is an expatriate from Iraq, now returned with 
Saddam Hussein being removed from power, and he has been bankrolled by 
our Government as long as President Bush has been in office. His Iraqi 
National Congress was a major source of misinformation and 
disinformation about the situation in Iraq before our invasion. He was 
the one who was producing the evidence that led the administration to 
tell the American people there were weapons of mass destruction.
  There were people who were skeptical of Ahmed Chalabi from the start. 
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said, on June 12, 2003, ``I 
can't substantiate Chalabi's claims. He makes new ones every year.''
  This skepticism was shared by other agencies of our Government, but 
it did not stop the leaders of our Government, under President Bush, 
from bringing Ahmed Chalabi into the highest level meetings concerning 
America's national security and our policies in Iraq.
  On September 18, 2001, Richard Perle convened a 2-day meeting of the 
Defense Policy Board, a group that advises the Pentagon. Chalabi, who 
was a guest speaker at this meeting, made a presentation on the threat 
from Iraq.
  It turns out that Chalabi was producing information from so-called 
defectors on a regular basis to the highest levels of the Bush 
administration--most of which turned out to be false.

       Chalabi's defector reports were . . . flowing from the 
     Pentagon directly to the Vice-President's office [Mr. Cheney] 
     and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by 
     intelligence professionals.

  That statement was made by State Department intelligence expert Greg 
Thielmann in the New Yorker. He went on to say:

       There was considerable skepticism throughout the 
     intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi's 
     sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. 
     Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the 
     garbage was being shoved straight to the President.

  Ahmed Chalabi was the source of this so-called intelligence garbage 
about the situation in Iraq.
  And then there was the notorious source named ``Curve Ball.''
  He should have been given that name because his information turned 
out to be so wrong, so bad, and so misleading. He was another one of 
the so-called defectors who provided this information. He was a 
discredited INC defector to Germany, code named ``Curve Ball,'' and the 
chief source of information on Iraq's supposed fleet of mobile germ 
weapons factories which turned out to be a hoax. ``Curve Ball'' was the 
brother of a top lieutenant to Ahmad Chalabi.
  Chalabi did not stop with reaching the highest levels of our 
Government and misleading them about the situation in Iraq. He had his 
friends in the media. Chalabi was the source of discredited news 
stories about Iraq, penned by New York Times reporter Judith Miller. In 
2001, Miller wrote a front-page story about claims that Saddam had 20 
secret WMD sites hidden in Iraq. It is amazing, the exclusive story 
came ``just three days after the source had shown deception in a 
polygraph test administered by the CIA at the request of the Defense 
Intelligence Agency.''
  So when they confronted Ahmad Chalabi and asked, how could you 
mislead the United States with all of this bad information, leading to 
our invasion of Iraq, 160,000 American soldiers risking their lives, 
over 2,000 killed, he said ``we are heroes in error.'' He boasted to 
the international media that even if he had misled the United States, 
he had achieved his goal. He got the United States to invade Iraq and 
depose Saddam Hussein.
  And then what happened? The tables turned on Mr. Ahmad Chalabi last 
year. In May of last year, the Iraqi officials, with the cooperation of 
the United States, raided Ahmad Chalabi's

[[Page 25486]]

offices in Iraq. Why? I will tell you. In June 2004 Chalabi came under 
investigation for allegations that he passed secret intelligence data 
to Iran. Remember Iran, one of the axes of evil? Chalabi is accused of 
telling the Iranian Government that the United States had broken the 
code it used for secret communications. National Security Adviser 
Condoleezza Rice promised Congress a full investigation into these 
allegations.
  The Wall Street Journal reports:

       There is little sign of progress in a Federal investigation 
     of allegations that Chalabi once leaked United States 
     intelligence secrets to Iran.

  If he did this, it is clear he endangered the lives of our troops, he 
endangered America's national security.
  Just this week, the Wall Street Journal came out with a story about 
Ahmad Chalabi. They went to the FBI and said some 18 months later, what 
is the status of Ahmad Chalabi? Let me quote FBI spokesman John Miller, 
who strongly denied that the Chalabi investigation is languished. He 
said:

       This is currently an open investigation and an active 
     investigation.

  He added:

       Numerous current and former government employees have been 
     interviewed.

  Here we have a man who misled the leaders of our Government. Here we 
have a man who conceded and boasted that although he misled them, he 
achieved his purpose of getting the United States to invade Iraq. Here 
we have a man accused of selling secrets to the enemy, to Iran, and 
endangering American troops. And where do we find Ahmad Chalabi today? 
He is being hosted and feted by this administration. This man is in 
Washington with his motorcade moving around town, having appointments 
with Treasury Secretary Snow and the Secretary of State, Condoleezza 
Rice. Today, he is going to share his wise view of the world with the 
conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
  This is a hard story to explain. Hard to explain to the American 
people; harder still to explain to American troops. How can a man who 
has been accused and is under investigation for passing secrets from 
the United States to the Iranians and endangering the lives of our 
troops and national security now be the toast of the town in 
Washington, DC? How can a man under active investigation by the Federal 
Bureau of Investigation, a man who has not been called for any 
statement or any testimony, be this guest at the highest levels of our 
Government?
  Congressman George Miller has been involved in this inquiry, as I 
have. He has made it clear, and I agree with him, when it comes to 
Ahmad Chalabi we shouldn't be serving him lunch, we ought to be serving 
him with a subpoena. We shouldn't treat him like a hero, we should 
treat him like a suspect in a case that may have endangered the lives 
of our troops.
  I don't understand it. We need to call on the Intelligence Committee 
as well as the Department of Justice to use the tools they have to 
subpoena Ahmad Chalabi to make certain he answers the hard questions 
about how he misled our Government into invading Iraq and what he did 
to endanger the lives of our troops and our national security. Nothing 
less should be allowed when it comes to protecting our troops.
  How much time remains?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Isakson). There is 2 minutes 10 seconds.


                              OIL PROFITS

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I close by saying we also have coming to 
Capitol Hill today a group of oil company executives. They couldn't 
have come at a better time.
  Someone said this is simply theater. I hope it isn't. It is time to 
ask hard questions of these oil companies which have over the past 6 
months dramatically increased the price of energy for people across 
America. People living in Illinois and across our Nation--families, 
small businesses, farmers--have been dealing with this oppressive 
increase in prices.
  A lot of blame was pointed, when it came to OPEC, that it is the 
Saudis; they are running up the price of oil. Well, they did, but that 
was not the reason the price at the gasoline pump went to $3. It went 
to $3 because of this: Oil companies are making record profits, record 
profits over the increased prices they are charging to consumers across 
America. This chart is an indication of the billions of dollars they 
are making.
  ExxonMobil reported record quarterly profits of $9.9 billion, up 75 
percent from last year. Put the nozzle in the tank and watch the 
numbers spin on the gas pump; the money from your credit card is going 
directly to the boardrooms of these oil company executives.
  Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington has the right idea: We need to 
put the oil company executives under oath today, ask them the hard 
questions as to whether they have been profiteering at the expense of 
the most vulnerable people in America, people who get up and go to work 
every day and cannot afford to fill their gas tanks; businesses that 
are languishing, that cannot hire the people they need, cannot reach 
profitability, because of the profiteering of oil companies. And 
farmers, already hard pressed in many parts of our country by bad 
weather and bad prices, find their input costs going through the roof 
because of the high cost of energy.
  The oil company and lobbyists are all over Capitol Hill. They are 
swarming because several Senators, including some Republicans, have 
called for a windfall profits tax. I support that. Take the money back 
from these oil companies, give it to consumers across America, fully 
fund LIHEAP, our program to provide heating sources for the poor in 
America. Make certain we tell these oil companies no, and stand up for 
the consumers who paid these outrageous prices.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The balance of morning business is controlled 
by the majority.
  The Chair recognizes the Senator from Kentucky.

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