The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“AMERICA'S PRIORITIES” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S13469-S13472 on Oct. 26, 2007.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
AMERICA'S PRIORITIES
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I wish to talk this morning about the President's request for $190-plus billion in emergency funding for the war in Iraq and for activities in Afghanistan.
Before I do that, however, I wish to mention the subject of Iran. I notice in the paper this morning, and I noticed the other day in a press conference by President Bush, he made a reference to world war III in a description of the issues with Iran. I am very concerned about what I hear from this administration. This administration has had a history of describing for us how they see the world. Many of us have spent a lot of time in classified, top-secret briefings with members of this administration, some of whom are now speaking out now about Iran. They include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others. We have had plenty of experience in top-secret briefings with them in which they described circumstances with respect to the country of Iraq.
It turns out what we were told in top-secret briefings about Iraq was not accurate. No one has done the in-depth investigation to find out why that was the case. It appears to me, in some cases that which was described to us by top-level folks in this administration about Iraq prior to the Iraq war--in some cases, it turns out they either should have known, and in some cases may have known, that what they were saying to the Congress and to the American people was not accurate.
My point is this. I think there is precious little credibility on the part of the administration on these issues. I do not--I would say most of my colleagues feel the same--do not want this administration moving off precipitously based on information they have, to take military action of any type against another country. They certainly cannot in my judgment do that without the consent of Congress. I believe they would have a very difficult time getting the consent the Congress, given the lack of credibility in this administration on many of these issues.
These are important issues. Preventing the country of Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is a very important mission, in my judgment. But we will best accomplish that through diplomatic means with other countries, particularly with the Europeans and the Russians and many others. I must say my own view is that the foreign policy of this administration--I regret to say it--has largely been an inept and a clumsy foreign policy at best. We face, as a result of it, very substantial challenges around the world. My hope is that we see much more action on diplomacy and negotiation and working to form alliances and much less front-page headlines by members of this administration.
Now I wish to talk about priorities. I wish to talk about the President's request for $196 billion in emergency funding, none of it paid for. But first I want to talk about this little girl. This little girl, her name is Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight is from the Crow Nation in Montana. She loved to dance, as you can see--
sparkling, beautiful eyes, 5 years old, loved to dance the Indian dances.
Ta'shon's grandmother testified at a hearing I held at the Crow Reservation in Montana, with my colleague, Senator Tester. Her grandmother told us a story about Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight. Ta'Shon died, by the way. This little girl with the bright eyes and the love of dancing isn't with us anymore. Ta'Shon had health problems. Last year she was taken, many times, to the Crow Indian Health Service clinic. They were treating her--after they had diagnosed various things--they were treating her for depression. It turned out this little girl didn't have depression, this little girl had a cancerous tumor, terminal cancer.
At one point, her grandfather, who was with her at the clinic, pointed out the bulbous condition of her fingertips and toes and said to the health care folks that it appeared to him this reflected a lack of oxygen to the body and they ought to check on what was causing that. That concern was dismissed.
On another visit, her grandmother asked the doctor to eliminate the possibility that this child was suffering from cancer or leukemia, but the family's concerns went unheeded. In August of 2006, Ta'Shon was rushed from the Crow clinic to the St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, MT, airlifted to the Denver Children's Hospital, diagnosed with an untreatable, incurable form of cancer. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight lived 3 more months after the tumor was discovered, in what the grandmother said was unmedicated pain, and then died.
I show you this picture of this beautiful young girl because her family said it was all right for me to use her image to describe the serious problem of health care on American Indian reservations. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight didn't get the health care we would expect, and she died. We had, on the floor of the Senate, a bill that would have provided 3.8 million American kids who do not now have health insurance coverage--it would have provided them health insurance coverage. But the President says that is not the priority, so he vetoed the bill. I am trying to bring a bill to the floor of the Senate right now that extends and reauthorizes the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. It has been 8 years, and I am likely to have to have a cloture motion filed on the motion to proceed to it, because for some it may not be a priority, apparently.
This ought to be a priority. Yes, for this little girl, her memory, and the health of other children similar to her, it ought to be a priority in this country. I hope this Senate will make it a priority. We certainly did on the Children's Health Insurance Program, and we came up short in the House of being able to override the President's veto. But we will try again.
Isn't this something most of us believe represents an urgency? As I have said before, I don't know what is in second, third or fourth place in what is important in people's lives, but I know what is in first place. It is their children and their children's health.
Having said that about priorities and values and about someone looking at what we spend our money on 100 years from now, looking back, the historians, through the rearview mirror, will say: What was that group of people--what were they doing? What was their value system? What were they about? They said they didn't believe--at least some of them didn't believe covering children with health insurance was the most significant priority. They didn't believe that adequate funding for the Indian Health Service was the most significant priority. Nobody knew that Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight lived several months in unmedicated pain, lived many months before that in an undiagnosed condition, with a terminal illness; nobody knew that, so that wasn't a priority.
So let's look at the priorities. The President has proposed to us, in this year, that we spend $196 billion in emergency funding to continue in Iraq and Afghanistan. By my calculation, that is nearly $16 billion a month, $4 billion a week, and not one penny of it is paid for. The President said: I declare an emergency. Put it on top of the debt.
Then the President went to Arkansas, at exactly the same time, and held a press conference at a political rally and said: I am going to be the fiscally responsible President, and I am going to stop this profligate spending.
I don't know, maybe he thinks people are not paying attention, people are not reading what is going on. Here is what the Congressional Budget Office says. They estimate a $2.4 trillion long-term war cost.
The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money, according to the . . . the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
We are borrowing the money because the President wants to spend the money, but he doesn't want to ask anybody to pay for it. Here is what this war is costing, all of it borrowed. The soldiers fight at the order of the Commander in Chief, and when they come back, they and their children can pay the bills. That is not a value system that makes much sense to me.
Now, the President says: I want another $196 billion, and, by the way, if you do not agree with that, you do not support the troops. He says: We will see who supports the troops.
Let me make another construct here. This is in some ways about supporting the troops, but it is much more than that. It is about supporting the contractors, because a substantial portion of this war is contracted out. I want to go through with my colleagues about whom we are supporting with this money as well, contractors for whom there is no oversight.
The Secretary of State was up here yesterday answering questions about that. I hope the Secretary of State is properly chastened, reading the stories and finally understanding what these contractors have been doing, with no oversight and virtually no accountability.
Let me go through a list of these contract issues so that people understand, and the President would understand. This is not just about
``are you supporting the troops,'' it is about are you supporting the contractors with virtually no oversight.
This is from September 21, 2007, the New York Times:
Military officials said that contracts worth $6 billion to provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, including food, water and shelter were under review by criminal investigators. In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for American soldiers and material for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities.
So when the President says: Are you supporting the soldiers? My question is this: Are you watching the contractors? Because the American taxpayer is getting fleeced. This does not support soldiers, this undermines the soldiers. Of $6 billion in contracts reviewed, the Pentagon says: The Army reported that it had 78 cases of fraud and corruption under investigation, had obtained 20 criminal indictments, and had uncovered over $15 million in bribes. That is from the same article.
Contract abuse. Of the enormous expenditures of American and Iraqi money on the Iraq reconstruction program, at least $40 billion overall has been criticized for reasons that go well beyond the corruption cases that have been uncovered so far.
Weak oversight, poor planning, and endless security problems have contributed to many of the program's failures. Some $40 billion has been spent. No, this is not in support of troops. This is in support of the administration's mission by which they hire contractors and shovel the money in their direction.
Most of us have read the stories about this, but they are pretty unbelievable. We sent 185,000 AK-47s to Iraq; 185,000. They can only account for 75,000 of them, so 110,000 AK-47s, bought and paid for by the American taxpayers, are missing. Some undoubtedly will land in the hands of the insurgents being aimed at American troops. We sent 170,000 pistols; 80,000 of them are missing. That is unbelievably inept on the part of those whom we ought to expect to be accountable and to make certain the taxpayers' money is spent wisely, No. 1; No. 2, that if you are sending weapons to Iraq, they end up in the right hands, not the wrong hands.
It is unbelievable that we have a couple hundred thousand AK-47s and pistols that we sent to Iraq, we do not have the foggiest idea where they are, yet we know some of them end up in the wrong hands.
We have trained about 360,000 police and soldiers for security in the armed forces and the police forces. We have trained 360,000 of them. We believe there are somewhere around 180,000 to 273,000 still around, but no one knows. Absenteeism is up around 50 percent. There is no official document in the Federal Government that tells us how many exist in the security forces at the moment; and, by the way, today we are only training about one-third of the number of Iraqis as we were training before the surge. So we have reduced by two-thirds the number we are now training, even as we are losing a substantial portion of the 360,000 who have already been trained for security, which begs the question: When we leave Iraq, and we will, is it up to the Iraqis to provide for their own security? After you have trained 360,000 people to do so, have you not trained enough Iraqis, so if the Iraqis have the will to provide for their own security, they can do that? One would expect so.
Between April of 2003 and June of 2004, $12 billion of U.S. currency was hauled to Iraq in C-130s on big pallets. It was disbursed by what was called the Coalition Provisional Authority, which we created.
At least $9 billion of that is missing. Some have said: So what? It does not matter. This money was Iraq's own money. This was the oil money we had for safekeeping. So if we lost the money that came from Iraq oil, so what?
Well, here is the ``so what.'' Retired ADM David Oliver, then the CPA's director of management and budget, when asked by a BBC reporter about the cash that they airlifted.
I have no idea. I can't tell you whether the money went to the right things or didn't, nor do I actually think it's important.
Tuesday, October 23, that is this week, an independent oversight agency said it could not complete an audit of a $1.2 billion contract to train Iraqi policemen because the records kept by the State Department and by DynCorp International, the contractor, were inaccurate and in disarray. . . . The documents were not sufficient in order for us to do an audit.
The Secretary of State is up here this week testifying. I do not know whether she was asked about this. But this is under her stewardship, her responsibility.
The State Department paid $43.8 million for manufacturing and temporary storage of a residential camp that has never been used. The State Department's payment of $36.4 million for weapons and equipment, including body armor, armored vehicles, and communications equipment could not be accounted for.
This week again: Among the problems identified before the audit was suspended were duplicate payments, the purchase of a never used $1.8 million x-ray scanner, and payments of $387,000 to DynCorp officials in hotels rather than other available accommodations.
I should have brought a towel that Henry Bunting brought to a hearing I held last year to show you symbolically what has been fundamentally wrong. Henry Bunting was a purchaser for Halliburton or Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. He said: I worked in Kuwait. I was supposed to buy the equipment and so on. They wanted towels, hand towels for the troops. So I made out an order for hand towels, because Halliburton was furnishing the towels for the troops. My supervisor said: No, you cannot order that particular hand towel, you have to order a hand towel with a logo on it that was embroidered that says KBR. We want the logo of our company on the hand towel.
Bunting said: But it will triple the price. The supervisor said: It doesn't matter. The taxpayer is paying for this. This is a cost-plus contract. Then Bunting went on to tell us about $7,600 a month for leasing an SUV, about paying $40 or $45 a case for Coca-Cola. He went on to tell us all these stories: It does not matter, the taxpayer is paying for it. `
It is unbelievable, if you take the lid off this and smell a little bit about what is happening with these contracts.
The President says: I want $196 billion in additional funding. I want it as an emergency. I do not want anybody to pay for it. I want to put it on top of the debt. That is almost $16 billion a month this year, $4 billion a week, and I do not want any questions about it, and we are going to see, he says, who supports American troops.
Well, that money is also going to support the same kind of incompetence in contracting that has been facing the American taxpayer now for about 4 years. I think hard questions need to be asked, yes, of the President, the Vice President, the heads of agencies who are responsible for this: How do you justify this? How do you justify insisting that this Congress come up with $196 billion and then tell us that we cannot afford, we do not have enough money to care for Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight? She died because the health care did not exist for her. That is not a priority for this administration. The President says we cannot afford it, despite the fact that the bill was fully paid for, Children's Health Insurance. We cannot afford sufficient money for the Indian health care system, so Ta'Shon died.
What is the value system here? What are the priorities? Once again the President says: Well, the priorities are we need the $196 billion. It is an emergency. If you do not support it, you do not support the troops. The fact is, this entire Senate supports our troops. We have demonstrated it time and time and time again. But it is also time for us to tell the President: We do not support a strategy that says: Let's keep spending money and not paying for it. We do not support a strategy that has us in the middle of a civil war, going door to door in Baghdad, when Osama bin Laden last week sent us another tape. Osama bin Laden is the one who boasted about attacking our country. He is the one who boasted about killing innocent Americans. Our National Intelligence Estimate of July of this year says the greatest threat to our country is al-Qaida and its leadership, and they are reconstituting themselves and developing new training camps, and rebuilding. They are in a
``secure'' or safe hideaway in northern Pakistan. There ought not be one acre of ground on this planet that is secure or safe for those who murdered innocent Americans. But instead of dealing with the greatest threat to this country, and that is eliminating the leadership of al-
Qaida, this administration has us going door to door in Baghdad, in the middle of a civil war, and now says--they say they want $196 billion in additional funding, and they want it as emergency funding, $4 billion a week for the next year.
I think there is something horribly wrong with what is going on here. I think this Congress has to tell this President that change is on the way.
I want to mention something that relates to this, because I do not know what this Congress is going to do with all of these funding requests. But I know the next time we vote on emergency funding requests by the President, I am going to offer a couple of amendments. They may be out of order, they may be blue slipped, they may be whatever, but we are going to vote on them one way or the other. That is, we need to start paying for that which we are spending money on.
The President can go to a political rally down in Arkansas and say: This is a new George W. Bush, and now I am going to be fiscally conservative. But the fact is, he has recommended all of this spending, the highest amount of spending in the history of our country from this administration. He now suggests that we continue to spend but not pay for it.
I want to talk about a couple of pay-fors. My colleagues have often heard me speak about this, but I am going to offer this again the next time we have an emergency funding bill.
There is an enterprising reporter named David Evans from Bloomberg. David Evans went to the Cayman Islands, and he went to this little place on Church Street, a quiet little five-story building, and reported that there are 12,748 corporations living here in this little four-story white building.
They are not there. This is a legal fiction created by lawyers so companies could avoid paying taxes. Well, I have got some legislation that would stop that dead in its tracks. You cannot move an address for the purpose of not paying U.S. taxes you rightfully owe. If you are not doing your central business there, you cannot claim this is where you are; we tax you as if you never left. I intend to offer that as an amendment to what the President would suggest we spend money for, and not pay for. I would suggest that: Let's begin paying for some of this.
Runaway manufacturing plants, that is another one. I have a piece of legislation I have introduced on runaway manufacturing plants.
We actually pay somebody, if they close their American manufacturing plant, fire their workers, move the jobs to China, we say: Good for you. We want to give you a tax cut.
That is totally nuts. I have tried four times to close it down. There are over 50 Senators who actually support this perverse tax break. About 44 Senators have supported me, and I am going to keep pushing this until we have a deep reservoir of common sense that says it is crazy for us to say, if you close your plant in our country and ship your jobs overseas to China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, we will give you a tax break for doing so. That makes no sense at all.
Third, I have a bill I have introduced ending benefits of abusive foreign cross-border leasing transaction. The most pernicious of all of the things going on is American companies buying foreign assets belonging to foreign governments. Let me give an example. Wachovia Bank, formerly First Union, one of the big banks, entered into a sale in-lease out transaction to purchase a sewer in Bochum, Germany. Why would an American bank want to buy a sewer--not a sewer in America, a German city sewer system? Because they want to take ownership and be able to get large depreciation on property that otherwise would not be depreciated because it is owned by a government. So they lease the sewer back to the city which will continue to use the sewer system as if they still own it, but that financial transaction turns out to be about a $175 million tax savings to an American bank. Of all of the unbelievably pernicious tax cuts that exist, this is it. The Finance Committee has taken some action. Good for them. They need to take more action. I testified a couple of weeks ago. I say shut it off, even retroactively. There is no sense supporting something that was fundamentally wrong. No one can justify this nonsense.
I am going to offer these three and several other provisions to anything we have on the floor of the Senate that calls for emergency funding. The emergency funding request in itself needs to be inspected carefully. Is there a change of course in Iraq? If not, why not? Is this support of the troops, or is it to support contractors?
A young woman named Bunnatine Greenhouse had the courage to give her job up because she was willing to stand up and say: This is the most blatant contract abuse I have witnessed as an employee of the Federal Government. She was the highest ranking civilian official in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They are the ones who monitor and approve the contracts. She stood up to the old boys network and said: What you are doing is wrong. It is the most blatant abuse. She is talking about contracts that were worth billions of dollars, many of them awarded sole source to Halliburton; Kellogg, Brown & Root; and other companies. She blew the whistle. She paid for it with her job. She was an outstanding public official. She had the courage that was necessary to speak out.
We need to have similar courage. We need to say to the President: This $196 billion is not about demonstrating whether one supports the troops. All of us support the troops. A substantial portion of this money is also going to go to contractors for which there has been no oversight. There is the greatest waste and fraud and abuse in the history of this country in recent years under this administration's contracting out virtually everything, much of it sole-source, very large, no-bid contracts. This Congress needs to weigh in on these issues.
With respect to the value system, the President says we can't afford to cover 3.8 more children who don't have health insurance with a bill that we fully pay for. He says: We can't do that. That is not important. I am not willing to sign that. I will veto it. I will stop it.
Then he goes to Arkansas and says: I am a fiscal conservative. I want to shape everybody up.
Then the next day he sends us a $196 billion request. Give me some emergency money, $16 billion a month, $4 billion a week, none of it paid for, piled on top of the debt.
That is not a fiscal conservative where I come from. That is not what they call those kinds of actions. All of us want this country to succeed. All of us want this country to do well. We need to put this country on track. Yes, we need fiscal responsibility, absolutely. We also need a foreign policy that makes sense. We need to change course in Iraq. We need to describe our values at home through the legislation we pass that represents the best of what America can do. Yes, that includes providing health insurance for children who don't have it, so that young girls such as Ta'Shon have a chance at life.
There is so much debate these days that is thoughtless rather than thoughtful at a time when we so desperately need thoughtful discussion about so many important issues that deal with America's future. My hope is that in the coming weeks, we can engage in some very thoughtful discussion about public policy and how to advance this country's interests. All of us want the same thing. We want this country to succeed, to provide expanded opportunity for people. But we face enormous challenges. Those challenges will not be met and resolved by the kind of sloganeering we hear too often these days and by chaining ourselves to certain public policies that we already know do not work. We must force change.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I have some comments I want to make about the FISA legislation. But before doing so, I commend my colleague from North Dakota. I have joined with him on so many occasions in the past. Once again, his eloquence and passion about these issues is evident this morning. We have worked together. We have sponsored legislation on a number of matters. I will join him in the efforts he raised today. He has described a situation that most Americans find horrific.
As to the point he makes on the issue of supporting our troops, I find it offensive that anyone would suggest, because we disagree with the policy, we are somehow putting our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen at risk. I strongly suggest, as does my colleague from North Dakota, that our continuing policy in Iraq has made us less safe, less secure, more vulnerable, more isolated in the world and, in fact, the very soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines we admire are in greater jeopardy because of a continuation of this policy. I will be joining with him and others as we try to bring this to a halt, not in 2009 or 2013 but hopefully this year. I commend him for his comments.
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