[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12047-12048]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                AMERICAN PEOPLE DESERVE FULL ACCOUNTING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. McKinney) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I know from time to time all of us have to 
balance our bank books. Now if the discrepancy is $9, we might ignore 
it figuring we made a small error.
  If it were $90, most of us would recalculate and discover the error 
and call the bank.
  If the statement is off $900, we will probably be down at the bank 
visiting the manager.
  If our account is missing $9,000, we would be on the phone to our 
lawyer.
  At $90,000, it would probably mean that we were working at Enron.

[[Page 12048]]

  If $900,000 were missing from an account, there would probably be a 
call to the accountant, the IRS and our creditors. Or else we might be 
a CEO working at a large corporation who lost their bonus.
  When $9 million shows up missing, usually that means contract 
overruns or fraud and a government audit is inevitable.
  A congressional committee might look into unaccounted expenditures of 
$90 million, and we might read about it in the New York Times.
  When $900 million goes missing, corporations collapse, mergers are 
cancelled, contracts are terminated, inspectors general are appointed, 
contracts are sometimes banned or fined, and charges are brought to 
court and people usually begin to take notice.
  I point all of this out to ask what should happen when we find out 
that $9 billion is discovered by an official investigation to be 
missing in our contracting accounts for the reconstruction of Iraq 
relating to one corporation, Halliburton, and oil revenues. Apparently, 
this administration thinks very little should happen because there has 
been no further investigation, appointment of a special inspector, a 
charge against a person responsible, or even any penalty or ban on that 
corporation which continues to make massive profits from contracts with 
the U.S. military despite evidence of overcharging, minimal 
accountability for funds, incompetence, and abuses of international and 
civil rights.
  And if that doesn't concern us enough to act, shouldn't we pause over 
recent revelations of an additional $12 billion in unaccounted funding 
shipped as currency in $100 bills directly to Iraq from the Federal 
Reserve? Worse yet is the story we are learning from the funds we can 
account for and how they have been spent or misspent, stolen or wasted, 
and how little they have improved the lives of the Iraqi people they 
are supposed to help.
  The expenditures for the Iraq war continue to grow at a rate that is 
putting our country into levels of spending and debt never seen before. 
Don't the American people deserve a full accounting of where their tax 
dollars are going at a time when more money is being spent to allegedly 
improve the infrastructure and life-style of the people of Iraq than 
here at home.

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