[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 6519-6521]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      IMPORTANT ISSUES TO BE FACED

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I wish to make a couple of comments today 
on some very important issues we will face in the days ahead.
  We have the supplemental appropriations bill on the floor of the 
Senate asking for just over $80 billion for the cost of the war in Iraq 
and Afghanistan.
  Most of it is to replenish military accounts. A number of amendments 
have been offered. Immigration amendments are now pending. I intend to 
offer a couple of amendments as well.
  I will describe one of those amendments this morning. It deals with 
the establishment of a special committee of the Senate, modeled after 
the Truman Commission, to investigate the waste, fraud, and abuse that 
is happening with respect to contracting in Iraq.
  I also wish to address another amendment I will offer, that would 
shut down the investigation that has been going on now 10 years by Mr. 
Barrett, an independent counsel. He started in 1995 to investigate 
allegations against Henry Cisneros, who was a Cabinet Secretary, 
allegations that he had given payments to a former mistress and then 
lied about it.
  That independent counsel investigation started in 1995 and has been 
going on ever since. But Mr. Cisneros pled guilty in 1999. And he was 
pardoned in 2001 by a Presidential pardon. Yet here it is 2005 and the 
independent counsel is still spending money, $1.3 million, I believe, 
for the previous 6 months. I believe it is time for this Congress to 
say stop, enough is enough. Stop wasting the taxpayers money. What on 
Earth could you be thinking about? Four years after the person was 
pardoned and 7 years after the person pled guilty, the independent 
counsel is still spending money? If ever there were an example of 
Government waste and lack of common sense, this is it.
  I also wish to mention briefly this country's trade deficit. I wanted 
to come to the floor the day before yesterday, but I was not able to do 
that.
  There was a small announcement the day before yesterday that in 
February our trade deficit was $61 billion in 1 month. This is an 
example of what is happening to this country's trade deficits: We are 
choking on red ink. This is serious. It is a crisis, and nobody seems 
to care. The White House is snoring its way through this issue. The 
Congress is sleeping through it. Nobody gives a rip about this at all. 
Nearly $2 billion a day is the amount we purchase from abroad from 
other countries in goods and services in excess of the amount we sell 
to them. That means every single day foreign countries and foreign 
investors own $2 billion more of our country, claims against our 
country, stocks, bonds, assets, or real estate.
  This is a crisis that will have a profound impact on future economic 
growth in this country. It will have a profound impact, and does, on 
the wholesale export of American jobs all across the world.
  Yesterday, I read a piece that General Motors called in its 
subcontractors and said: You need to start moving your jobs to China to 
be more competitive.
  Evidence is all around us that this trade strategy we have is 
unsound. It does not work. It injures our country. It is hollowing out 
our manufacturing sector, and it is moving American jobs overseas. This 
country had better take notice. This Congress had better sit up and 
start caring about this, and this President had better start parking 
Air Force One and providing some leadership on things that are a 
crisis.
  No, Social Security is not in crisis. Social Security will be fully 
solvent until George Bush is 106 years old. That is hardly a crisis. 
But the announcement that in February of this year we had a $61 billion 
1-month trade deficit ought to provoke this White House and this 
Congress, Republicans and Democrats, to take action in support of this

[[Page 6520]]

country's economic interests for a change.
  What do we hear about trade? We do not hear anybody wanting to do 
anything about this, and I will speak later on about what we should do 
in some detail. What we hear is we want another trade agreement to be 
passed by the Congress called the Central American Free Trade 
Agreement, CAFTA. To me, it is an acronym that means careless and 
foolish trade agreement.
  Along with my colleague from Georgia, Senator Lindsey Graham, we are 
going to lead the opposition, and I hope we can round up the votes in 
this Congress to defeat this trade agreement. The message ought to be 
to those folks who are negotiating these agreements and then sending 
them to Congress under fast track, please fix some of the problems that 
have been created in past trade agreements before negotiating new ones 
and before asking the Congress to approve new ones. Fix a few of the 
problems that have been created.
  Do my colleagues think this is not a problem? This comes from NAFTA. 
This comes from GATT. This comes from all of the distant cousins of the 
trade agreements that we brought to the Senate floor, almost all of 
which I have voted against, because I believe they pull the rug out 
from under the interests of this country. They pull the rug out from 
under our workers and our businesses. So I hope very much that we can 
finally get someone's attention. If $61 billion a month in trade 
deficits is not a wake-up call that gets someone's attention, my guess 
is they are permanently asleep.
  Now, I wish to speak about the issue of contracting in Iraq. There is 
massive waste, fraud, and abuse going on in contracting in Iraq, as is 
the case in many circumstances where a lot of money is being poured out 
to prosecute a war. If one does not watch carefully, people are going 
to fleece the taxpayers, and that is what is happening. Nobody seems to 
care about that, either.
  We cannot get aggressive hearings in the Congress about oversight. 
Why is that? I do not know. So as chairman of the Democratic Policy 
Committee, we have held four hearings on these abuses.
  In a moment, I will read a few newspaper headlines about this waste, 
and yes, these headlines mention the word Halliburton, and I know that 
when the word Halliburton is mentioned people think, okay, now this is 
political, it is partisan, now we are going after Vice President Cheney 
because he used to head that corporation. This has nothing to do with 
Vice President Cheney. He has been long gone from Halliburton. This has 
nothing to do with the Vice President, nothing to do with partisan 
politics. It has everything to do with the American taxpayers being 
cheated.
  So to the extent that Halliburton is in these headlines, it is 
because they were given very large sole-source contracts without any 
competitive bidding. Billions of dollars have gone into the pockets of 
Halliburton and here is the result, with a substantial lack of 
oversight.
  First, let me describe this picture. This does not deal with 
Halliburton, by the way. This deals with a company called Custer 
Battles, two guys named Custer and Battles. This picture shows $2 
million in cash wrapped in Saran wrap. This fellow, incidentally, was 
the guy who was turning over the $2 million because the company that 
was owed the $2 million showed up with a bag. Why did they show up with 
a bag to collect cash wrapped in Saran wrap? Because they were told in 
Iraq: When you are contracting, bring a bag, you are going to get cash, 
by the bagful.
  Now, these people got a lot of cash. This is their first $2 million. 
They have been accused of substantial fraud. Doing security at 
airports, they allegedly confiscated the forklift trucks, took them off 
the airport property, repainted them, and then sold them back to the 
Coalition Provisional Authority, which was the U.S. taxpayer.
  So here is the first delivery of $2 million in cash in a bag to a 
company that is now widely accused of fraud.
  Now, here are some of the stories of waste that I mentioned, 
involving Halliburton. I will read some of these headlines. This was a 
former Halliburton employee who testified before our committee: 
``Halliburton Manipulated Purchase Orders to Avoid Oversight''--that is 
a newspaper headline. For purchase orders under $2,500 buyers only 
needed to solicit one quote from a vendor. To avoid competitive 
bidding, requisitions were quoted individually and later combined into 
the $2,500 and more. They were told to do that in order to cheat.
  In fact, this particular guy held up a towel, and he said: This was a 
towel we were supposed to order because we were buying towels for U.S. 
soldiers.
  They paid nearly double the price for the towels because instead of 
ordering the towel that was the plain towel, they ordered one 
embroidered with their company's logo on it so the American taxpayer 
could pay nearly double.
  ``Halliburton Discouraged Full Disclosure to Auditors.'' 
``Halliburton Overcharged for Oil.'' This is from the fellow who used 
to run the portion of the Defense Department that would purchase oil, 
yes, even in areas where we were at war, and he said: During my tenure 
at the Defense Department, we were occasionally forced to pay sole-
source prices in some locations, but not even in remote central Asia 
did we pay close to a gallon for jet fuel of what Halliburton was 
charging in Iraq. He said that overcharging for oil was simply out of 
control. This is a former Defense Department official.
  By the way, Halliburton ordered 25 tons of nails--that is 50,000 
pounds of nails. Do my colleagues know where they are today? They are 
laying in the sand of Iraq because they came in the wrong size. 
Somebody made a mistake on the order. If someone wants 50,000 pounds of 
nails, they are laying in the sands of Iraq someplace. The American 
taxpayer paid for them, and Halliburton got reimbursed for it.
  We had testimony of people driving $85,000 trucks in Iraq, and those 
trucks were abandoned just because they had a flat tire or because they 
had a clogged fuel pump. They were abandoned and torched, and they went 
and bought new trucks. So much for oversight. Nobody cares because it 
is a war and because there are sole-source contracts. These are pieces 
of testimony from whistleblowers, from former employees, who said: Here 
is what is going on. The truck piece was from a truckdriver in Iraq who 
worked for Halliburton.
  It is just unbelievable when one listens to what is happening: Bags 
of cash, billions of dollars. We say we are going to put air-
conditioning in a building near Baghdad, and so our contractor hires a 
subcontractor, who hires a couple of workers, and we get charged for 
air-conditioning and they put in a ceiling fan that does not work. Does 
anybody care? Can we get anybody in this Congress, any committee, to 
hold oversight hearings to care about the massive fraud, waste, and 
abuse? Not on one's life, not a chance. God forbid that we should be 
critical of anything that is going on around here, despite the fact 
that the American taxpayer is getting fleeced wholesale.
  I offered an amendment in the Appropriations Committee that would 
have set up a Truman-style investigating committee. Senator Harry 
Truman from Missouri, at a time when there was a Democrat in the White 
House, decided there was substantial abuse by contractors at the start 
of World War II, and he persuaded a Democratic Congress to set up an 
investigative committee. Yes, a Democratic Congress and a Democrat in 
the White House set up an investigative committee, and they saved a 
massive amount of money by uncovering a dramatic amount of fraud and 
waste.
  Now we have one party control, and nobody wants to embarrass anyone 
else, so they do not look at anything. It is see no evil, hear no evil, 
speak no evil. Meanwhile, the American taxpayers are completely getting 
fleeced by massive waste, fraud, and abuse.
  We have done four hearings. I mentioned Halliburton, but I also can 
mention Custer Battles. I can mention other companies. Obviously, 
Halliburton is the poster child because they received giant contracts 
without bidding, and then we see that they are

[[Page 6521]]

charging the American taxpayer to feed 42,000 soldiers a day when, in 
fact, they are only feeding 14,000 soldiers a day. So they are charging 
us for 28,000 meals that are not served. Fraud? I would think so. But 
what happens these days? First, it does not even get investigated. If 
it does get investigated, they get a slap on the wrist and a pat on the 
back with another contract.
  This Congress needs to start facing up to these issues and getting 
tough. No, this is not partisan. If we are going to shove $81 billion 
out the door in a supplemental defense funding bill, should we not, 
along with it, provide the appropriate approach to investigate these? 
That is what my amendment will do.
  I offered my amendment in the Appropriations Committee. It was turned 
down on a partisan vote, regrettably. This is not a partisan amendment. 
My hope is that perhaps I will see a different result on the Senate 
floor.
  How much time remains on our 30 minutes?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Coleman). There is 15\1/2\ minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I believe the Senator from Connecticut is 
going to be coming over to claim parts of our 30 minutes, but the time 
is running. I see the Senator from Kentucky is on the floor. I know 
that by previous consent we have established 30 minutes on our side 
followed by 30 minutes on the other side. At this point, I will 
relinquish the floor if I could ask that we would reserve the remaining 
time for Senator Lieberman from Connecticut because he is not here. If 
the other side would like to continue to take some of their time and 
then provided that when Senator Lieberman comes, he would have reserved 
the additional 15\1/2\ minutes? I will make that a unanimous consent 
request and see if the Senator from Kentucky would agree to that.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The majority whip.

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