[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 6855-6857]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           OIL AND GAS PRICES

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I want to discuss several areas this 
afternoon. One is the excessive market speculation with respect to the 
price of oil and gas. My colleagues have done so, and I will weigh in 
on that.
  I think what is happening is not only unfair to the American consumer 
but damaging to this country's economy. So I will talk about that in a 
bit. I want to mention that, on Monday of next week, at 2 p.m., I 
intend to chair a hearing of the Democratic Policy Committee, in which 
we will hear from three additional whistleblowers on the issue of 
waste, fraud, and abuse in contracting in Iraq.
  I have held a lot of hearings over a number of years with respect to 
contracting in Iraq. It is the most unbelievable waste, fraud, and 
abuse in the history of this country. On Monday, we will hear from 
whistleblowers who will tell us about the infamous burn pits in Iraq, 
where in many cases valuable equipment is taken to be burned. In other 
cases, equipment has been pilfered and taken into the black market. It 
is an unbelievable tale. But it just fits in with the other things we 
have heard.
  I will not go through all the examples. I have spoken about them at 
great length. Presumably, some are under criminal investigation. One 
would expect and hope that the Defense Department would begin to debar 
some contractors that are, in my judgment, cheating the American 
taxpayers.

[[Page 6856]]

  Let me give a few examples. A contractor is charging for 42,000 meals 
a day they are serving to U.S. soldiers. It is discovered they are only 
serving 14,000 meals, overcharging by 28,000 meals a day. I don't know, 
maybe you can miss a cheeseburger or two on the bill someplace. But how 
do you overcharge for 28,000 meals a day?
  An American contractor is paid to rehabilitate 140 Iraqi health 
clinics and gets paid over $100 million, paid for with American 
dollars. The money is gone, but there are no health clinics. I guess 
there are maybe 20 of them with shoddy construction.
  An Iraqi doctor who knows that an American contractor was paid to 
rehabilitate health clinics in rural areas goes to the Iraqi Health 
Minister and says: I would like to tour these clinics that the American 
taxpayers paid to rehabilitate because health is such an important 
need. The Interior Minister of Iraq said: You don't understand, most of 
these are imaginary clinics.
  I had a guy come to a hearing I held, and he saw $85,000 trucks being 
burned on the side of the road, left on the side of the road because 
they didn't have a wrench to fix a flat tire. The road was safe, the 
only reason they left the trucks by the side of the road was because 
they could make a profit by buying another one. Mr. President, $85,000 
trucks torched because they had a plugged fuel pump. What is the big 
deal about that? The contractor will simply reorder new trucks because 
the American taxpayers are going to be stuck with that bill. It is a 
cost-plus contract.
  How about $7,600 a month for leasing SUVs? How about $45 for a case 
of Coca-Cola? How long do we have to come to the floor of the Senate 
and talk about this unbelievable, utter waste of the American 
taxpayers' dollars?
  We had a man named Judge Radhi come to testify. I asked that he be 
allowed to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee. He came. 
He was appointed by Paul Bremer to be the head of a Commission on 
Public Integrity in Iraq. They tried to kill him three times because 
the folks over there didn't like somebody looking over their shoulders.
  He said they pursued thousands of cases of corruption; $18 billion 
had been pilfered and wasted, most of it American money. He talked 
about $3 billion spent by the former Defense Ministry of Iraq ordering 
airplanes that never arrived in Iraq because it is likely the money 
ended up in a Swiss bank account.
  Judge Radhi said, $18 billion he estimated was wasted, most of it 
American money.
  Does that surprise anybody? We lifted C-130 cargo loads of one-
hundred-dollar bills out of this country to fly them to Iraq. In a war 
zone, you are distributing one-hundred-dollar bills out of the back of 
pickup trucks. Is it any wonder this is the most waste, fraud, and 
abuse we have ever seen?
  In 1940, at the start of the Second World War, Harry Truman, then 
serving in this body, helped create a bipartisan committee. It became 
known as the Truman Committee. It cost $15,000 and saved $15 billion. 
They did 60 hearings a year for 7 years--60 hearings a year for 7 
years. They issued subpoenas. When they saw waste, fraud, and abuse, 
they stopped it. They were serious. It was a bipartisan investigative 
committee right here in this Chamber.
  This war in Iraq has gone on 5 years. I have held hearing after 
hearing chronicling the waste, fraud, and abuse. And it is 
unbelievable.
  We read that one of the largest contractors we have engaged in Iraq, 
the Halliburton Corporation, has been paying 10,000 of their U.S. 
employees through a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands that has no 
staffing at all, just an office address. Why would they do that? Why 
would they hire Americans and run their payroll through the Cayman 
Islands? So they don't have to pay payroll taxes to the U.S. 
Government.
  When this supplemental comes to the floor of the Senate in the next 
week or two, I am going to offer an amendment that says any contractor 
doing that should not be getting any more contracts.
  At some point, does anybody have the nerve to stand up and say this 
has to stop? Is there at least a small group of people, perhaps a 
quorum, who would say this has to stop? What we should do and what I 
have tried and I say with the support of Senator Reid--and I appreciate 
his support--we have tried very hard to create a Truman-type committee 
on behalf of the American taxpayers to say: Stop this waste, stop this 
fraud, stop this abuse.
  We have been unable to do that in three votes in the Senate. I regret 
that because the American taxpayer is being fleeced and American 
soldiers are being disserved by this waste, fraud, and abuse.
  Let me mention one additional example, which may seem like a small 
matter, but is symptomatic of a larger problem. Henry Bunting, a 
wonderful man who worked in Kuwait as a buyer for Halliburton 
Corporation, brought a towel to a hearing. He held it up. He said: We 
were buying towels for American soldiers. Here is a towel I was 
supposed to buy, a white towel. So I ordered white towels.
  My supervisor said: You can't buy that white towel. You need to buy a 
towel that has the logo of our company, embroidered in silk.
  I said it will triple, quadruple the cost. The supervisor said: It 
doesn't matter, it is a cost-plus contract. We will earn more money.
  Unbelievable.
  Bunnatine Greenhouse came to testify. The price of her testimony was 
her job. She was the highest civilian official in the U.S. Army Corps 
of Engineers. She said this awarding of the LOGCAP Rio contracts was 
the most blatant abuse of contracting authority she had seen in her 
entire career. For that it cost her job.
  I have told my colleagues before, I called the general at home at 
night who has since retired, who hired Bunnatine Greenhouse, who was 
judged to be one of the best contracting officials we ever had. I 
called him at home at night.
  I said: General Ballard, tell me about Bunnatine Greenhouse. He said 
she was tops and what happened to her was wrong, dreadfully wrong.
  She blew the whistle on the good old boys network, and now her case 
is behind a shroud in the Defense Department like all the rest of these 
issues--under investigation, they say. When will the investigation be 
done? When will it end?
  Halliburton KBR was contracted to provide water to the military bases 
in Iraq. That was their job. A man named Ben who was in Iraq working 
for Halliburton came and said: We were providing water but were not 
checking the--were not testing the water.
  It turns out the nonpotable water was more contaminated than raw 
water from the Euphrates River. That is what our soldiers were 
showering in, shaving with, and often brushing their teeth with.
  Then I got hold of an internal Halliburton document--I believe it was 
21 pages--written by Will Granger, the man in charge of water quality 
in Iraq for Halliburton. He said this was a near miss. It could have 
caused mass sickness and death. This was an internal document leaked to 
me from inside Halliburton, written by a man in charge of water in 
Iraq: A near miss, could have caused sickness and death.
  We had whistleblowers from inside the company say this is what 
happened: Water more contaminated than raw water from the Euphrates 
River being sent to these camps. Halliburton said it didn't happen--
despite the fact I had the evidence--didn't happen, never happened, not 
true. The U.S. Army said: Didn't happen, never happened. I did not 
understand that. I would have thought the U.S. Army would have been 
apoplectic on behalf of the health of its troops.
  So I asked the inspector general: Do an investigation, will you, and 
tell me what the facts are.
  The inspector general did the investigation and just finished a month 
and a half ago. Guess what? The whistleblowers were right. So why did 
the U.S. Army declare to us it didn't? I understand the company 
deciding it will not admit to anything. What about the

[[Page 6857]]

U.S. Army? In fact, they sent a general to this Congress, to the Armed 
Services Committee, to say these incidents never happened. Now we have 
an inspector general report that not only demonstrates that the general 
testified inappropriately, was wrong, deceived the Congress, but that 
the inspector general had provided that information to the Pentagon 
prior to them sending the general up here to tell us information that 
was not accurate.
  It just goes on and on.
  Mr. President, we need to have a Truman committee. I know my message 
is tiresome to some, but it doesn't matter much to me. This Congress 
owes it to the American people to do what previous Congresses have done 
during wartime, and that is properly investigate the waste, the fraud, 
and the abuse on the most significant expenditure of taxpayers' money 
that has ever occurred ever in the history of this country for 
contractors. We shoveled money out this door. It is unbelievable. And 
almost no oversight.
  I brought to the floor of the Senate many times a picture of a man 
who testified with bricks of one-hundred-dollar bills wrapped in Saran 
Wrap. He said it was the Wild West. We told contractors: Come to this 
building and bring a bag because we pay in cash.
  I described that in the context of a company called Custer Battles. 
Two guys who had virtually no contracting experience in a very short 
time got many millions of dollars worth of contracts. And they were 
then found to have defrauded the Coalition Provisional Authority.
  I came to the floor a week or two ago and said the New York Times did 
some enterprising reporting--good for them, and I say to those 
reporters: You did some great work, work that probably could have and 
should have been done by the Congress in the recent past.
  I showed a picture of a man named Ephraim, 22 years old, and his 25-
year-old vice president who was a massage therapist--a 22-year-old CEO 
of a company and a 25-year-old massage therapist as the vice president. 
They ran a company that was a shell corporation set up by the 22-year-
old's dad some years ago out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach. They 
got $300 million in contracts from the U.S. Department of the Army to 
provide munitions and weapons to the Afghan army and police.
  What ended up in Afghanistan was, in many cases, ammunition from the 
mid-1960s, manufactured by the Chinese in boxes that were taped and 
coming apart. This was a company that got over $300 million.
  Should somebody ask the U.S. Department of the Army and the 
Sustainment Command of the Department of the Army in Illinois how on 
Earth did this happen? How did you think you would get by with this? 
How are you going to explain this to the American taxpayers?
  We desperately need to establish a Truman committee to investigate 
this issue. The American taxpayers deserve no less, in my judgment.

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