Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I came tonight to the floor of the House to address an outrage, perhaps the largest fraudulent activity in American history which has resulted in literally billions of dollars being stolen from American ratepayers for electricity in the western United States. And this, of course, is the outright theft from West Coast ratepayers by the Enron Corporation. And I have come to the floor tonight because, unfortunately, the energy bill that passed this Chamber today did absolutely nothing whatsoever to restore one ounce of justice for the consumers on the West Coast who were so grievously ripped off by the Enron Corporation.

Mr. Speaker, the sad fact is that today the House of Representatives had an opportunity to do something about an outrage that has not been remedied now despite our efforts for the last 3 years. Because the sad fact is that the Enron Corporation and others manipulated with unfortunately great effect the energy market in the West Coast starting in 2000. This manipulation resulted in West Coast ratepayers paying conservatively in the billions of dollars of overcharges to Enron and other energy traders. And the law of the United States as written is designed to prevent that and does prevent that if we had a cop on the beat to enforce the laws. But, unfortunately, what happened in the years 2000 and 2001 is that Enron found a way to gain the system. They found a way to essentially shut off generating capacity for the western coast of the United States and, as a result, drive up the prices dramatically, and they were unfortunately successful in this outrageous conduct. In fact, rates being paid by utilities, and therefore ratepayers in the western United States went up by a factor of a thousand percent, sometimes on a daily basis. And Enron was successful in doing this because they decided not to follow the law. And, unfortunately, they had some allies in not following the law, and that was this Federal Government, which did not enforce the law of the United States and allowed Enron to foist billions of dollars of overcharges on the ratepayers on the West Coast.

Now, just to put a sense on how grievous this is, in Snohomish County, Washington, in the northern Puget Sound area, an area which I represent, ratepayers are still paying today half as much more than they should be paying, 52 percent more than they should be paying for electricity due to the depredation, the rapaciousness of the Enron Corporation.

This is now over a billion dollars in the State of Washington of overcharges that ratepayers are still paying today. And we believe, at least on my side of the aisle, that the Federal Government should take action to get refunds back from the Enron Corporation as a result of these wrongful activities.

Unfortunately, today, the Republicans refused to allow an amendment to be even voted on in this Chamber to get that money back for ratepayers on the West Coast. It would have been a simple amendment. I offered it in conjunction with the gentleman from California (Mr. Filner) and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), that would have required that refunds would have been given to these ratepayers going back to the year 2000. But unfortunately the majority party decided to side with Enron, the bankrupted corporation, bankrupt both fiscally and morally. They sided with Enron rather than with consumers and stood against giving consumers the refunds that they are owing.

This is outrageous, and I know it is outrageous because the offenses of which I speak are not hypothetical. We have very clear evidence of what Enron did, and that evidence has been disclosed by very vigorous, assertive, and healthfully combative Public Utility District in Snohomish County PD, in Snohomish County, Washington, because what they did was they forced the disclosure of audio tapes that these Enron traders had kept of their conversations when they came up with their nefarious deals.

The Bush administration and their Federal Energy Regulatory Commission did not want the public to hear these tapes. They did not want the public to have access to the gamesmanship that went on that cost consumers so many millions of dollars, but Snohomish County PD was very energetic in getting these tapes released. Now they have come forward, and what is on these tapes would shock even the saltiest of sailors, not only because of the language that was used but because of the immoral, unethical conduct where these traders basically sacrificed willingly the ratepayers in order to juice out another million dollars or so a day for the Enron Corporation.

I would like to go over some of these, and we have deleted the expletives that were unfortunately frequently in their conversations, but we are trying to keep the gist of their conversation, and I am just going to refer to some of them here. These are audio tapes transcripted by Snohomish County Public Utility District of traders for Enron Corporation talking to one another.

First trader: So the rumor is true that they are taking all the blank money back from you guys, all that money you stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

Response: Yeah, Grandma Millie, and she is the one who could not figure out how to blank vote on the butterfly vote.

Response: Now she wants her blank money back for all the power you jammed her for, for $250 per megawatt hour.

That is a conversation between Enron traders.

Now, when they talk about jamming Grandma Millie, what they mean by this is they have constricted the supply down, going to the California ratepayers and Washington for that matter and, therefore, boosted the price up, in this case to $250 a megawatt hour, in many cases up to $1,000 a megawatt hour, 10 times what was the previously going rate.

Now this type of conservation was repeated over and over and over again by these traders.

Second example. The Enron traders discovered a handy little technique. They found a way to congest transmission lines so that when they were congested, energy could not get through. So they would willfully schedule transmissions in a way that would prevent transmission from occurring, and when that happened, the price skyrocketed because of the existing demand. So here is a conversation here. They are talking about the congestion.

Then the other trader states: If the line's not congested, I just look to congest it. If you can congest it, that is a money maker, no matter what.

And it was a money maker, because when they congested these lines, the price skyrocketed, sometimes tenfold, and when it skyrocketed, several things happened. First off, you actually had brownouts in California, but you also forced utilities like Snohomish County Public Utility District in Washington State to enter into long-term contracts to try to ameliorate, to try to reduce the outrageous hits they were taking in these skyrocketing prices. Enron tried to sort of lure them into these long-term contracts and were sometimes successful because they were punishing ratepayers with these outrageous prices.

Third example. The Enron traders talked about who they would like to be running the Federal Government, and they talked about it in terms about who would be on Enron's side. They talked about who would be favorable to Enron, who would sort of wink at the wrongful actions by Enron, who would be sort of the cop who was asleep at the switch; and they reached a conclusion pretty quickly.

First off, they noted that Enron was the biggest contributor to the election campaign of President George Bush. They then noted that would it not be great if the next Secretary of Energy was Ken Lay, the disgraced CEO of the Enron Corporation. What they said was, How great would that be for all the players in the market. He would open these markets up.

Now, they were right on that. If Ken Lay was Secretary of Energy, he would have opened up these markets and

would not have taken any steps to try to tamp down the rapacious behavior of Enron, but it turned out they did not need Ken Lay as being Secretary of Energy because the people in the Bush administration were quite effective in not doing anything to lift a finger to stop Enron from gouging west coast ratepayers. They got what they wanted. They got cops on the beat who just winked and let the bank robbers take money out the door without doing anything about it.

It is very interesting here. The prediction of the Enron traders that, number one, they could congest these lines and drive up prices was accurate, much to the damage of people in Washington, Oregon and California; but their second prediction, that the President of the United States would let them get away with it, was accurate, too. That is the reason why it was such a grand shame here today when the Republican Party would not let this House vote on an amendment to simply enforce these laws, to finally blow a whistle on Enron and blow a whistle on the Bush administration for their failure to enforce this law.

I would like to yield to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) who has been fighting this battle now for several years, who has been a stalwart on it, who has a never-give-up attitude.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to go into our conversation in some detail with the Vice President.

This was a bipartisan meeting with members of the west coast delegations, and what we did is we laid out the evidence for the Vice President, and stoplights in California were not working at the time we were talking to the Vice President of the United States, begging him for assistance. What the evidence we showed him was that at the time we were talking to him fully 32 percent of all the generating capacity in the west coast of the United States was turned off. At the time that stoplights were going out in California, Enron and its co-conspirators had turned off almost a third of all the generators in the west coast. They have tried to lay this excuse that, well, we were maintaining them, which was pretty lame because on the average in the last 12 years there has only been 2 to 4 percent of these plants down.

So what we told the Vice President, in a pretty cogent way is, Mr. Vice President, it is obvious someone is gaming the system. There is clear manipulation going on. There is skullduggery. This is a scandal. One-third of the generators are turned off. You are causing brownouts in California. We are having 1,000 percent run-ups in the State of Washington. We need your help. We need your help to force FERC to enforce the law. And I will never forget what he said to that request.

He looked at us in the eye, and he said, and this is about as close to a quote as I can come: you know what your problem is, you just do not understand economics. Now, we do understand economics. My degree happens to be in economics. It is just that we do not understand Enronomics. We do not understand Enronomics that the President and the Vice President of the United States sit on their hands and do nothing while consumers are gouged 10, 20 billions of dollars a year and are still suffering as a result of this Federal Government's refusal to act.

That is correct and the reason this is such a shame now is that for over 2 years we urged the administration to act. They did not act. There was an obvious defrauding going on, an obvious offense, an obvious crime. They let the embezzlement in a sense continue, and then told us they cannot get the money back for us. I want to make sure people understand this.

First, when we asked for relief, the President and the Vice President said you are on your own, we are not going to help you. They said that for 2 years. Finally, in 2003, they said, okay, now we give up, we are going to offer some price caps, and they finally gave us some relief in 2003.

But the horse was well out of the barn after 2 years of theft. What happened was they allowed that money to go to Texas. A lot of people in Houston bought mansions with the money we paid on the west coast, with money they stole from the west coast. The former Texas Governor let them steal it and did nothing for 2 years. Those people are now in Texas with money in bankruptcy that we cannot get.

Now because of the combination of President Bush's inaction and failure to follow his responsibility and the bankruptcy laws, this money is gone. But at least we ought to be able to stop Enron from getting another $122 billion from Snohomish County.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Davis) who has been a tremendous advocate from the very beginning trying to get some action by this government for California ratepayers.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentlewoman's eloquent statement, but I think it is important to state that the Democrats on this side of the aisle, we were prevented from having this amendment brought up. Think about the outrage, when we want democracy in Iraq, we do not have democracy on the floor of the House. The House is not even given an opportunity to vote on an amendment to get refunds.

To show how callous these Enron traders that the Republican Party has now decided to accommodate by not allowing this amendment even to be voted on, I want to read one transcript to let Members know what the Enron corporation was like. Here is a trader that says, Kevin, there was a guy here yesterday. He is some consultant for some ``blank'' other business we are supposed to be starting over. He said the guy came in and he said I am in California now, and my small consulting business, my energy costs have gone from $100 to $500 a month. It is unbelievable. I do not know what to do.

The trader said, I just turned from my desk and looked at him and said, Move.

Mr. Speaker, that was a very heartfelt comment, and that was Enron's attitude and apparently that is the Republican Party's attitude. He should have moved from the west coast because we are not going to do anything for refunds.

The same trader continued saying, ``The best thing that could happen is if there was a `blank' earthquake and let that thing,'' meaning the west coast, ``float out to the Pacific where they can just light candles.''

That is the attitude of Enron and that is the attitude of the majority party, apparently, that would not allow us to take action to do something about this travesty. California was hit, Oregon was hit, Washington was hit; and we are still suffering today.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman.

The reason we need to respond is the administration has not. Beginning in 2000 and 2001, we have made every concerted effort to get the administration to impose some type of relief, price caps or otherwise. They refuse to take any steps. They sat on their hands. As Bonnie and Clyde ran out with the bank notes, these people sat there and watched this theft occur and did not lift a finger for 2 years.

Now in 2003, because they were so ashamed by what was going on, they finally issued some price caps. But unfortunately according to their commissioner, and this was on June 4, and this is amazing, talk about a catch-22 here, this administration's agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose job it is to protect consumers, they wrote me a letter. I urged them to take action to get refunds for people up and down the west coast.

They wrote me a letter and told me, number one, we have concluded there was massive violation of the law by Enron. We have concluded that there was manipulation. We have concluded there was gaming of the system. We have concluded in essence that there was congestion caused to shut down access to drive the price. We have concluded there was all of this skullduggery and scandal. But we do not think we have the authority to act to get refunds back from the people who had all of this money embezzled before 2003.

So here we have this administration saying we concluded there was a huge crime here. There was robbery, fraud, and embezzlement, and we know how much was taken from ratepayers; but golly gosh, we cannot do a thing about it.

Mr. Speaker, we had a chance today to do something about it to make it the law of this land that we are going to get those refunds, and the majority party refused to even allow that to come up for a vote, and it is a double scandal. It is a scandal that would make Enron proud.

Let me make reference to one thing, when there was a fire that shut down a transmission line and prevented transmission of electricity to California which allowed Enron to boost the rates almost a thousand percent, a trader said, ``Burn, baby, burn. That is a beautiful thing.'' That is why Enron would be very proud of the majority party today refusing to allow us to vote on something to get refunds for people. The majority party adopted the ``burn, baby, burn'' approach to not allow us to do anything to get these refunds.

If there was some question, if it was kind of a close call, like there are close calls in baseball, was he safe, was he out, if this was a close call whether Enron gouged west coast ratepayers, then perhaps there might be an excuse; but there is no excuse here. These tapes are the equivalent of a videotape of the crime, DNA of their identity, fingerprints, and a confession after their Miranda rights; and still when this crime occurred, the Republican Party will not help us remedy this wrong. We are going to continue this effort.

Just to give you an example, I just want to read specific language of two traders. They are talking about whether to keep a generating plant running or not. One trader asked the operator of the plant from Enron, ``How hard would it be for you to turn off your plant and then if we want to start it up later?'' He said, ``It's not that hard.'' So the Enron trader said, ``If we shut it down, could you bring it back up in 3 or 4 hours?'' The response was, ``Oh, yeah.'' The response was, ``Why don't you just go ahead and shut it down if that's okay.'' And when they shut it down, they boosted these prices up, sometimes 1,000 percent.

That type of language was found by Snohomish County in at least a dozen specific circumstances where Enron specifically requested energy to be shut down. We do not know all of them because we found out they were actually taking some of these calls on cell phones to try to get them off their recording system but we have got enough to know there was a clear crime here.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird), who has so ably advocated for southwest Washington, which also suffered in this debacle.

Not only did they do nothing, this House today did nothing while our consumers are still continuing to pay these outrageous electrical rates in Snohomish County, Washington, 52 percent today, still higher. This is the long, dark shadow of Enron that today we refused to do anything about. I want to go through just a moment of history of how this administration has and has not acted and why this ends up with rates being so high.

It is interesting when President Bush was running for office in October 2000, when he was in San Diego and the prices were just starting to maybe go up, he said, ``I believe so strongly that part of this region is going to suffer unless you have a President who is willing to tell FERC to do what is right for the consumer.'' So when he was campaigning, he said he was going to make sure FERC did right by the consumers. He then took the oath of office in January 2001 and the next thing we heard was from Lawrence Lindsey, his assistant in the White House who said, ``They should expect no more help from the White House.'' Message from George Bush to the West Coast: Go fish. Let them eat cake. As a result, Enron had the green light from the President of the United States to go embezzle, cheat, gouge as much as they could from the West Coast and, by gum, Enron got the message. How do I know that? Here is a quote from one of the Enron traders. This is just right before the election. ``Matt,'' the Enron trader said, ``you know what? I'm scooping up every bit of `blank' power I can and take next summer,'' Tom said, ``because caps won't be there,'' meaning price caps, meaning he knew the President would do nothing about this problem.

Matt responded, ``They got to come for it. I'm bound to bet huge on the election. When this election comes, Bush will `blank' whack that stuff, man.'' I am paraphrasing the expletives out. ``He won't `blank' play this price cap stuff. I bet they'll impose a national price cap at $1,000 and that's fine with me.''

They bet and they won. The Enron traders won when George Bush was elected to office and when the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives because they have done nothing for the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 to remedy this bleeding by our consumers.

Just to make sure that people understand we are not kind of making this stuff up as we go along, I want to read about what the administration themselves concluded. On March 2003, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a final report on price manipulation in western markets. It found ``significant market manipulation,'' that ``many trading strategies employed by Enron and other companies were undertaken in violation of antigaming provisions.'' It identified more than 30 entities that might have manipulated the market. But Catch-22 from the Bush administration, we are not going to do anything about it. They concluded for 2 years before 2003 there was massive market manipulation and they refused to lift a finger to give refunds for people who were victimized. I could understand it if they said we are not sure if there was a crime here. But when the President of the United States' own agency concludes that billions of dollars were stolen from ratepayers in the western United States but they refused to lift a finger to get refunds, something is rotten in the State of Washington, D.C., and it is the influence of Enron Corporation still in the political process of those who still run the Federal Government. We have got to see some changes around here.

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, our friends on the other side of the aisle were worse than silent. They absolutely choked off any consideration of the Enron scandal on the floor of the House today. Here we have this enormous scandal breaking with the exposition of these tapes, and they refused to allow any Enron discussion even or action on the floor of the House.

The gentleman brings up campaign contributions. It is interesting because so did the Enron traders. I want to read from a transcript of a tape of two Enron traders talking shortly before the election. The first one, his name was Matt. Matt was talking to Tom, and the transcript says: ``Tell you what. You heard this here first: When Bush wins--

``Tom: Caps are gone,'' meaning price caps, some action to keep prices reasonable.

``Matt: That `blank' Bill Richardson,'' former Secretary of Energy, ``he's gone, and Clinton, he's gone. All those socialists are gone.

``Tom: Yeah.

``Matt: And who's the biggest single contributor to the Bush campaigners?

``Tom: You.

``Matt: (Laughs) Enron.

``Tom: Enron. What?

``Matt: Enron.

``Tom: Is it Enron?

``Matt: Yeah.

``Tom: Is that true?

``Matt: Yeah, I think it is.

``Tom: The biggest single contributor.'' Enron Corporation.

``Matt: Yeah, the biggest corporate contributor.

``Holy--really? That's huge.

``And that is number one.

``Ken Lay,'' CEO of Enron, ``is going to be the Secretary of Energy.

``Tom: Get out of here!''

Tom does not have to get out of here because he got what he wanted. He got a compliant administration that let Enron rip off American citizens, Democrats, Republicans, Independents alike. They were bipartisan victims, and he got an administration to let them run rampant through the energy markets and steal billions of dollars from our citizens and neighbors who cannot afford it. He got what he wants. Now it is up to this Congress to do something to get what we want and what our citizens, Republicans and Democrats alike, want, which is a refund for the money.

Where did this money go? It went to buy a lot of mansions in Houston where the President used to be Governor, where his Vice President met with Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron, in a secret meeting to come up with a secret energy plan that is no secret any longer. There is no secret about what happened here. Enron got what they wanted, a compliant administration to let them take as much as they want from consumers and do nothing about it. And they got a Vice President, when we laid out the facts to them, when it was clear as a bell that this manipulation was going on, they got a Vice President, and do my colleagues know what he said? The same months that there were brownouts in California, he said ``The basic problem in California was caused by Californians.'' Maybe he is referring to the traders in Enron. Maybe they lived in California. I do not know, but I do not think so because it was obvious what was going on here. Thirty-two percent of all the steam-generated, gas, coal-fired plants feeding the west coast United States had been turned off, and the Vice President and the President of the United States told victims of that skullduggery that they were not going to do anything about it.

And now Congress needs to act, and we are going to continue to press on this because we have learned an interesting thing. We can actually get this administration sometimes to change behavior. For 2 years they refused to do anything about this. We finally shamed them into action, and in 2003 they finally adopted price caps that they said were going to ruin the U.S. economy and that this was a communist plot to have price caps. They finally did it in 2003 because they could not take the heat anymore. We are hoping this administration, when they feel enough heat, and our colleagues across the aisle, when they feel enough heat, maybe they will not see the light; but maybe they will feel the heat, and maybe they are going to then knuckle under and do something for the consumers that are owed so much. I would like a closing comment from the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird) as we close our discussion tonight.

Mr. Speaker, we do not want to believe that the U.S. Congress would allow such a massive rip-off of Americans to take place and not do something. We do not want to believe that just because Ken Lay was so close to President Bush that the whole Federal Government will do nothing. We do not want to believe that massive political contributions could end up with the Federal Government not doing its job. We do not want to believe that when the Federal Government itself concludes that there was a crime, that there was manipulation, that there was gamesmanship, that there was defrauding, that there was embezzling, that they would do nothing. We do not believe that is the right thing to do, and we think ultimately we have some confidence that we will actually prevail on this. Even if it takes November and we get a new Congress that will finally take action to get a refund for Americans, that is the route we will go.

I want to thank the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird) for joining me this evening.

Mr. Speaker, it is high time for the Bush administration to take action to recoup the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Enron energy trading racket stole from people in the State of Washington.

We have now heard the tapes, the smoking guns, where energy traders talk about ``jamming'' grandmothers in Washington State, saying ``burn, baby, burn,'' during the brownouts, just laughing at the fact that they got away with hundreds of millions of dollars of theft.

We are calling on the administration to stop protecting the Enron energy trading racket. We will offer on the floor of the House next week an amendment to compel the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to get off the dime and get our money back from Enron.

This is a ripoff that is too obvious even for the Bush administration to ignore, and it is time for Congress to stand up on our hind legs and force this administration to take action. The people in Snohomish County deserve their hundreds of millions of dollars back, and we are going to see to it that they get it.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to join my colleagues in honoring Catherine May Bedell.

In my role as a previous representative of the Fourth Congressional District, before I was freed by the voters for other duties, as we say, and the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Hastings) took that noble office, I did not have the honor of knowing her personally, but I knew her by her legacy. That I think is maybe the nicest, most meaningful legacy a Member of Congress could have. That is when I was door-belling and going to thousands of homes when I was running in Yakima for the seat that she previously held. I had a lot of people, when her name came up, said, I remember her. She was really a nice lady. I really liked her. I heard that a lot.

When you think about a legacy that any of us might have here, I think that is the highest one we could have, that our names may come up when other people are door-belling. She was well loved in Yakima Valley, and we are thinking of her family today. It is an honor to represent her district as well.

Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, that is one of the best rhetorical questions the gentleman has ever posed and very successfully; and it is accurate that the Senate and the House are now under the control of our friends, the Republicans, for the last 2 years.

Let me answer that and quickly segue to tonight's discussion. The presidency is under control of the Republican party, the Senate is under control of the Republican party, the House is under control of the Republican party, and if there is waste, fraud or abuse, it is under the watch of the Republican party which controls the government of the United States.

Our Republican friend speaking this evening talked about waste, fraud and abuse. Let us cut to one of the most onerous, glaring, enormous, stunningly scandalous waste, fraud and abuse that the Bush administration, with Republican support, has supported, and that is that they have given almost $40 million of taxpayer money to Mr. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress who tonight stands accused of giving away some of our most secret information to Iran.

This President, amongst the many mistakes that he has made, squandered almost $40 million in waste, fraud and abuse, taking the money from American taxpayers and giving it to this fellow that he told us was going to be the ``Spartacus of Iraq.'' We were told by the Vice President that we would be welcomed as liberators, with rose petals, and that this administration believed with Richard Pearl and Dick Cheney and the whole group of them and Paul Wolfowitz, we have heard them described as the neo-cons. They are neo-cons, and they allowed Mr. Chalabi to con this administration out of $40 million, and we have not got a penny back.

Now, we 2 weeks ago, I think, tonight, held a meeting here on the Iraq Watch, and we blew the whistle on Mr. Chalabi loud and clear. Interestingly enough, the next morning, we were advised that the administration had finally cut off this spigot of taxpayer money to Mr. Chalabi. A week later, we find out that he is under investigation; and they have now raided his offices to find out if, indeed, he did give this secret information to Iran.

I just am encouraged, I suppose, that our Republican friends want to root out waste, fraud and abuse. It would have been nice if they had joined us in blowing the whistle on Mr. Chalabi months ago when we had been saying that this whole plan was based on a house of sand.

Now the administration, just to make sure people understand what happened here, Mr. Chalabi and his allies gave phony information about weapons of mass destruction. The neo-cons in the White House and the Defense Department bought it hook, line and sinker. They convinced the President, who apparently did not need much convincing, that we would just send Mr. Chalabi in there and he would be, as I said, the new Spartacus of Iraq, the De Gaulle of Iraq.

So what did we do? We put him on the payroll of one of the biggest welfare programs ever, to the tune of $40 million, and we flew him and 800 of his closest co-conspirators into Iraq about 4 days after the invasion, 2 days after the collapse of the Iraqi Army, thinking he was going to be our agent. It was a total scam, and the American taxpayers paid for it, and he is the worst case of waste, fraud and abuse.

Well, I know, but I would like the gentleman to articulate that, actually.

And Mr. Chalabi in the press reports said, well, somebody in the agency of the United States government told me when they were drunk, and this guy who had the President give $40 million to then disclosed some of the most sensitive information possible, that we have broken the Iranian code.

What is so disturbing about this, at least to me, is this is almost a pattern of this administration blowing Top Secret security information. They did it through Mr. Chalabi, although perhaps unintentionally. They did it blowing the cover of a CIA agent in order to punish Joe Wilson, the ambassador who blew the whistle on the falsehood that the President gave in his State of the Union speech. Is nothing sacred? Is nothing sacred in our security information? This administration needs to be held to account.

Here we have a situation where the President of the United States okayed $40 million of taxpayer money going to this scam artist who had already been convicted of bank fraud in Jordan and could not set foot back in his home country because of his previous conviction. We have a situation where this information was found out to be totally false, all of it. We started a war based on this false information.

And how many people have the President fired as a result of this scandal, as a result of this failure? How many people has he let go? How many heads have rolled in his administration to have accountability for this Chalabi debacle? Zero. Zero. This President has shown zero accountability throughout this entire mess, and the only people he has fired are those who are the ones who have told the truth, General Shinseki and Richard Clarke.

Paul O'Neill. He punished Joe Wilson's wife.

And, Mr. Speaker, if my colleague will yield, another thing that cannot stand is this administration essentially sort of pooh-poohing the enormity of this disaster of relying on Mr. Chalabi.

There are two groups that have suggested it is of no consequence, one of which is Mr. Chalabi. He was interviewed in a major newspaper sometime ago and the article said ``an Iraqi leader accused of feeding faulty pre-war intelligence to Washington,'' and that is Mr. Chalabi, ``said yesterday his information about Saddam Hussein's weapons, even if discredited,'' meaning wrong, meaning false, ``had achieved the aim of persuading America to start a war.''

Mr. Chalabi has just kind of laughed off the fact that his false information caused America to start a war in which over 700 Americans have died. To him, that is okay because he described himself as a ``hero in error.'' Hero in error? Here is a man who took $40 million of taxpayers' money, gave us apparently willfully, according to Colin Powell, Colin Powell says willfully deceptive information, and started a war in which 700 Americans have died, in which thousands have been terribly wounded; and he describes himself as a hero. Well, he is no kind of hero in this Chamber or in my district or any district in this country.

But he, apparently, is still on some kind of a little bit of a working relationship with the Bush administration. How do I know that? Well, we have paid the man $40 million, and I have not heard the President of the United States say ``give the taxpayers that money back.'' I have not heard the President of the United States say, ``Mr. Ashcroft, go get that $40 million back; this man started a war, gave me false information.'' Still, with apparently now, or maybe people around him cooperating with the Iranians and breaking our security information, I have not heard the President say to go get that $40 million back.

What I have heard the President say, and what this administration has done, although the President says it was not with his approval, but he said, and there is a certain irony here, in the speech where the President of the United States had Mr. Chalabi sitting up in back of the First Lady, up there in the second row, at that very same speech where the President gave the American people the falsehood that Iraq was buying uranium from an African country, we now find out that was false. And we know it is false, because Ambassador Joe Wilson, who worked for the first President Bush, blew the whistle on that falsehood and indicated that that was not true. And what was the response of the administration? They blew the CIA cover of Joe Wilson's wife in an attempt to destroy her career with the CIA.

So here you have a situation where this administration has squandered $40 million of taxpayers' money and has not lifted a finger to get it back, even though that created a fraud which started a war, which destroyed the career of the person who told the truth about the falsehood that Mr. Chalabi got the President to tell the American people.

This is kind of an Alice in Wonderland moment, it seems to me, where the truth-tellers are punished, and the President still says go ahead and keep your money, I guess, that we gave to Mr. Chalabi. Something is wrong with this picture.

This administration has failed to come to grips with the multiple mistakes it has made in Iraq. And until it faces the music and admits the multiple mistakes it has made, we will continue to make them.

If the gentleman would yield, I want to address why and how that happened. This incompetence, as the gentleman describes it, Mr. Speaker, was institutionalized. It was set up to be incompetent.

What happened here was the CIA had good reason not to trust the information they were getting from Mr. Chalabi, and they kept telling the White House that. But the people in this administration, if they have a belief, it must be right, and it really does not matter what the evidence is. So what they did was, Mr. Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence agency, heretofore never in existence in the Pentagon; and it was their special little intelligence shop which they staffed with the people who worked for the neocons, who were basically going to tell the neocons whatever they wanted to hear.

So when the CIA was telling them and the Air Force, for instance when the Air Force told them these aluminum tubes the President told us about were used to build a nuclear weapon, I think it was the Air Force told him, or the CIA, one of the agencies, I have forgotten which one now, they said that is not accurate. So they just went to the little Pentagon fiefdom of the neocons and said, sure it is. They got their yes men and made their yes men in control of America's foreign policy, and this has led to the loss of 700 American lives as a result.

Now what has this President done to bring accountability to that system? Has he changed the director of this Pentagon intelligence agency? No. Has he disbanded it? No. Has he taken away the washroom privileges of anyone in the Pentagon? No. Has he canned the Secretary of State? No. Has he changed the Director of the CIA? No.

The only thing he has done or his administration has done is to break the security secrecy of the identity of a CIA agent in order to punish the one man who told the truth about the falsehoods that the President gave the American people. That is the only person that has lost their job associated with this, except General Shinseki who also told the truth about needing several hundred thousand American troops to provide security in Iraq.

We are seeing that the first step to a successful Iraq policy is to admit the mistakes of the past, clean house and get some new, fresh ideas in Iraq. Clinging to these folks and these agencies which have been so wrong on Iraq so many times is not going to allow us to be successful in Iraq, is not going to allow us to bring our troops home in a reasonable period of time.

We are asking the President to finally demand some accountability; and if this Chalabi scandal does not wake up the President to this need, it is hard to imagine what will.

Mr. Speaker, I think responsibility is the right word, and I think what has been so stunning to us is the failure of the President to hold people and agencies responsible for their multiple foul-ups. This is not the way to run a railroad or a war, and other Presidents in other difficult circumstances have had the gumption and leadership to hold people accountable.

I had the honor of joining my dad, a World War II vet, at the dedication of the World War II Memorial this weekend. We were very proud of many people, including my father, at the dedication.

The memorial is a very moving place, and I encourage people to visit it. It is a very moving place. They have 4,000 stars representing our losses in World War II, and framing that wall of stars are two pillars, both of which have quotes from President Harry Truman.

I was talking to my dad, and he reminded me that Harry Truman did something. He held somebody who was very popular at the time accountable. He fired General MacArthur. It was an extremely controversial thing for the President to do. But he recognized in war you have to have accountability and responsibility.

There is nobody in this administration as popular as General MacArthur. I can guarantee the President that. And if President Bush had half the gumption of President Truman, he would fire some of these people tomorrow to send a message that we are not going to tolerate this incompetence anymore, and we are going to send a message to the world that we are going to be accountable to it as well.

If the gentleman will yield, I want to just kind of recap some of the things we have talked about as to why we are so adamant that this administration change and improve its policies in Iraq. We have talked about some things tonight, but I want to talk about the 10 significant failures of this administration. I just want to recap them quickly as to why we feel so strongly, why we have been here every week. I want to list them quickly.

Failure number one: the President told us, ``Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.'' That and his other statements, many others, were false. Failure number one.

Failure number two: they told us that they had clear and convincing evidence of the connection between Saddam Hussein and the attack, the heinous attack on us on September 11. Those statements were false. Failure number two.

Failure number three: they told us we would be greeted as liberators, with rose petals at our feet. Mr. Chalabi would be the Spartacus of Iraq. That statement was false.

Failure number four: they ignored clear evidence and clear advice from

General Shinseki and many others that we would need several-fold the number of troops that they gave to this effort in order to secure Iraq, and they ignored this clear advice. Why? Because they wanted to fight this war on the cheap so they would not have to pay for it. Well, we have suffered from their effort to fight a war on the cheap with a lot of dead good American people in Iraq.

Failure number five: they refused to involve the United Nations until maybe 2 weeks ago, when they finally went back on their knees to the

Mr. Speaker, there are some outrages that are so gross and offensive that even if it takes years to right them, we should do that, and one of those outrages is the energy crisis of 2000 and 2001 on the West Coast of the United States.

But in fact there are two outrages involving the energy crisis in the Western United States. The first outrage is

that Enron and various other traders gouged over hundreds of millions of dollars from consumers in the western United States. But the second and perhaps equal outrage is that the Federal Government, under the Bush administration, has been wholly ineffectual in getting back the money that has been stolen from consumers in the Western United States. These are two outrages.

Today and the last few days we have now discovered over 2,000 hours of taped conversations between Enron traders and others that clearly show the way that they stole hundreds of millions of dollars from consumers in the Western United States.

Those were discovered because of the great work of a small public utility district, the Snohomish PUD in Snohomish, Washington, that finally let us know, to get a window of the horrendous theft that went on, and I just want to quote a couple of things that the Enron traders talked about as they were stealing from the consumers of the West Coast.

Here is one trader, Tim Beldon, who since pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges, who said, ``Grandmothers were taken at the tune of a million bucks or two a day.'' Taken. They were taken due to the outright fraud of Enron.

Another quote from an employee who can be heard asking, ``Do you know when you started overscheduling and making buckets of money on that?'' Well, the buckets of money that they made came right out of the pockets of consumers.

The last quote, we heard traders of Enron saying basically, ``Isn't it great that we jammed grandmothers for millions of dollars?''

Well, it is not great that they ``jammed'' grandmothers on the West Coast of the United States, and that needs to be fixed by the Federal Government.

But the second outrage is that our Federal Government and this administration has acted essentially like the Keystone Cops in doing nothing effective to get back these millions of dollars from our consumers. In Snohomish County, Washington, we have had 50 percent increases in electrical rates as a result of this gouging, and yet the FERC, the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission, and the Bush administration has done nothing to get this money back for the consumers.

Next week, when the energy bill is on the floor of the House, I will be offering an amendment to compel FERC, to compel the Bush administration to get off the dime and get this money back that has been stolen. They have acted with all the energy of Barney Fife on this, and it is time for them to do the job and get this money back for ratepayers.

Now, why has this not happened? Why has the Bush administration sat on their hands while this theft occurred? Well, I have to tell you that we have done everything humanly possible to get the administration, the President and the Vice President, to act on this.

In fact, during this crisis in 2000 and 2001, we asked the Vice President to personally intercede. Do you know what he did? On April 17, 2001, he met with Ken Lay of Enron; and they apparently talked about the energy crisis. And what after that conversation did they do? Two days later, the Vice President came out, Mr. Cheney came out on April 19 and said, ``We think price caps simply don't work.'' And they did nothing effectual to solve this problem.

In fact, we had a meeting with the Vice President when this was going on, and we told the Vice President of this, at the very time there were brownouts in California, we told the Vice President of the United States that over 30 percent of the generating capacity in America was turned off. Obviously, to anyone who knew anything about energy, people were gaming this system. And we pleaded with the Vice President to help us.

After we laid out all of these facts and circumstances, these are several Members of Congress and myself to the Vice President, he looked at us in our eyes and simply said, ``You know what is wrong with you? You just don't understand economics.''

Well, we do understand economics. We just do not understand Enronics. We just do not understand a Vice President who wants to talk to Ken Lay but will not lift a finger to help American consumers to get these hundreds of millions of dollars back that were stolen. We do not understand a Vice President who says let those grandmothers be jammed, and we are not going to help.

We are going to have an amendment next week to solve this problem.

Mr. Chairman, how often in the last year have we heard the phrase in this country saying we support our troops? I have heard it a lot on this floor, but those who oppose this amendment have a new slogan. We support our troops except for their constitutional rights.

The women of this country are in the streets of Baghdad and Nasiriyah and Fallujah today trying to install the concept of individual liberty and individually, constitutionally protected rights in Iraq while their Members of the U.S. Congress are trying to deny it back here in Washington, D.C.

Do not deny this amendment. Do not send the proud women in our armed services to the back streets of Baghdad. They are serving to establish liberty in Baghdad, not back-street abortions. Do not go back to those old days while we fight new battles trying to establish liberties overseas. Pass this amendment.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield.

Mr. Speaker, my constituents are tired of being suckered with false information that both precipitated and continue this war in Iraq, and they want some accountability of what happened with such a massive amount of misinformation given to the American people leading up to this war. They want accountability, and they deserve accountability.

We offered today an amendment to the defense authorizations bill to be considered this week that will give Americans some accountability on the source of this information, of Mr. Chalabi's rogue group, this alleged Iraqi National Congress. And there is nothing congressional about it. It is a bunch of folks that want to go back in and run Iraq and who convinced the neoconservatives who are behind this war that we would all be greeted with rose petals because Mr. Chalabi would be seen as the great savior of Iraq.

This great fantasy was bought hook, line and sinker by the President of the United States and the administration, and it was a fraud. And it is time for the American taxpayers to have accountability here.

Now, what I am told, and I want to make sure it is true, but I am told taxpayers are still paying this group, this group that gave us, apparently willfully, or potentially willfully, false information leading to this war. We are still paying $350,000 a month for their great services in Iraq. What did this group do for the American people? It got us into a war based on false administration they gave to the administration. The administration was all too happy to accept that there were weapons of mass destruction there; that there was a connection to 9-11 and that they would be greeted as liberators, the three legs of this stool, all of which were false. And we are still paying these people.

So we will offer an amendment, hopefully tomorrow it will be allowed, I hope the majority will allow it to be considered, which will cut that money off, assuming the things I have suggested are true; and I believe they are. So we need some accountability here of this group. We cannot continue it.

And I want to make sure people understand how dire this is and how hoodwinked this administration was. And, frankly, I think they were patsies for this group. We paid millions of dollars very shortly after the Iraqi Army collapsed to fly into Iraq, I am told like some 800 or 900 of the cohorts and the coconspirators, if I can use the pejorative term that I think is appropriate here, of Mr. Chalabi's. We flew them into Baghdad, and it was going to be the sort of great saviors flying in that would be the recipient of all these rose petals and would quickly reestablish them as the functioning government of Iraq.

Surprise. They were not really welcomed with open arms in Baghdad. Totally failed. Wasted our millions of dollars, and they are still taking money from the taxpayers. Now, here is one mistake, at least one mistake the administration ought to own up to and fix so we do not continue pouring money down a rat hole in Iraq with the Iraqi National Congress, which has not helped us one wit.

Because, frankly, what Iraq needs is a real congress which is elected by the Iraqi people. These guys who are under indictment in Jordan, you cannot parachute him in and expect him to be welcomed as the savior of Iraq.

Let me say one more thing. We need elections sooner rather than later in Iraq to vest them with their own destiny, and I will offer an amendment to do that as well.

I yield to the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie).

Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman has put his finger on what we ought to call the Chalabi principle in the Bush administration. The Chalabi principle is this: If you tell the truth, you get fired by the President. If you tell a falsehood, you get promoted and praised.

That is a pretty strong statement, but let us look at the facts. General Shinseki told the truth. He said we are going to need several hundred thousand troops to prevent massive looting and anarchy after the army collapses, and it was true; so they canned him. General Zinni said the same thing; he gracefully was allowed to retire. Joe Wilson told the truth and pointed out that the President told a significant

falsehood to the American people and Congress in the State of the Union address, asserting that Iraq was getting uranium to build a nuclear weapon. He told the truth and so the President's people punished Mr. Wilson's wife by outing her CIA employment, which should be a Federal crime.

So if you tell the truth in the Bush administration, you can canned, punished, and your wife's career gets destroyed. But if you tell a falsehood, like Mr. Chalabi's outfit who gave us repeated misinformation, according to the Secretary of State, you get praised, you get the President trying to get you an in in the new government in Iraq, and you get $350,000 a month of taxpayers' money, together with the millions of dollars we spent trying to parachute them into Baghdad to form a new government, which was an abject failure, you are praised.

If you are Paul Wolfowitz, who told the Congress that oil revenues would pay for this and we would be greeted with rose petals, you are praised by the President.

And if you are the Defense Secretary, if you are wrong about WMD, wrong about the connection with 9/11, wrong about the number of troops we need, and wrong about not having armor and how we are going to pay for it and how much it is going to cost, if you are wrong about not having early elections, the Vice President says you are the best Secretary of Defense America has ever had. This is the Chalabi principle. We need to break this.

This is one of the things wrong with our Iraqi policy. The people telling the truth are not listened to, and the people fouling up get promoted. That needs to change.

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues and I tonight have come to the floor in a continued series of discussions that we have styled as the Iraq Watch. We, unfortunately, have had to be involved in this now for several months. We do so because we believe very strongly that this situation in Iraq is of such high challenge that the U.S. Congress owes an obligation to be involved in the tough decisionmaking and not just punt to the executive branch of the United States Government. We believe that there are some serious issues that need discussing, and we intend to do so tonight.

But before we get to some of the controversial issues that need discussion, I think it is important to note the unanimity that this country has and the total bipartisanship we have in three or four very central elements in this challenge pertaining to Iraq, and I want to list four of those.

First, all of us are dismayed and appalled at the savagery of the United States contractor who was executed in a horrendous act that Americans are seeing and hearing about on their television screens tonight. I think it is important for us to recognize the sense of outrage that we need to maintain as a healthy sense, and not to give it up and say it is another act of violence. We need to retain our sense of outrage at their behavior.

Second, we have a bipartisan consensus in this country that we are dismayed and disturbed by the occurrences in our prisoner of war camps. Today, as Members of Congress, we join in a bipartisan way, unfortunately, to review the incredibly disturbing still pictures and videotapes which still have not been released of some of the things that went on in the prison camps.

There is a bipartisan recognition that those actions damaged our potential success in Iraq and that we in a bipartisan way want to find a way to make sure that never happens again because we have too many challenges already in Iraq to add to those challenges by self-inflicted wounds. Third, we have a national consensus that extends our feeling of loss to many of the innocent Iraqis who have found themselves in harm's way as a result of this action. Fourth, and perhaps this is the most important for us to reiterate, in any discussion of Iraq, there is absolute unanimity across this country in expressing pride and respect for the heroism and the professionalism of our troops in the field in Iraq. No matter what we say tonight about the civilian leadership who unfortunately we believe have made some very grievous errors to our soldiers' disadvantage, it is very important to realize there is total consensus in this country and in the House of Representatives respecting the dedication of our troops, notwithstanding the difficulty in the command and control structure that happened in these prisons. Those are four points of consensus and unanimity that we have in this country that we intend to make sure we note.

With that, I would like to turn to some of the challenging things that we need to talk about tonight, if I may, if the gentlemen will give me a few moments. The unfortunate truth is, however, that the professionalism of our soldiers in the field, hundreds of thousands of whom are serving with distinction, has not been matched by some of the civilian decisionmakers pertaining to the Iraqi operation. There, unfortunately, have been a series of substantial errors which have posed challenges to us that now we have to dig ourselves out of. I want to mention 10 of those very quickly in summary form to set the framework for our discussion tonight. There are 10 serious mistakes, errors, of judgment and negligence that have been made by our civilian authorities in the executive branch of this government which are now putting us in a very, very deep hole, of what was already a challenging position. I will quickly summarize those 10 that we will discuss tonight.

First, the United States Government told the American people in unequivocal terms that there was, and I think I quote from the chief executive, no doubt but that Iraq possessed and was deploying some of the most lethal weapons systems devised by man before this war. That statement unfortunately has proved to be false. It is one that we should think seriously about as we move forward in Iraq.

Second, the executive branch and the civilian authorities of our Nation told the American people in unequivocal terms that there was a clear, convincing and cogent connection between Iraq and the heinous attack on our Nation of September 11. That assertion after months and over a year of digging has not turned out one solitary shred of evidence to substantiate that assertion; and as far as we know tonight, that assertion was false. Why is it important to recognize the falsity of those two assertions preceding this war? It is important to understand both the Iraqis' response and the world's response and now our difficulty in obtaining assistance for our troops in the field because the war started on two basic falsehoods, and this is a recognition that we have to have as we form a strategy to have success in Iraq.

The third issue. We were told in very clear terms and this Congress was told in many briefings that we would be welcomed as liberators, we would be welcomed with rose petals at our feet. The savagery that our men and women who are serving in Iraq have seen was hardly a sense of liberation. Why is this important? It is important because it explains some other failures by the civilian leadership in our Nation.

It explains the fourth failure, the failure to have adequate troops on the ground at the time the Iraqi Army collapsed. We had multiple truth-tellers who told the truth to the executive branch, what was needed in Iraq; and they have all been fired. General Shinseki told the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense that we would need several hundred thousand troops on the ground to prevent Iraq becoming an infested place of looting and anarchy the day after the Iraqi Army collapsed. He was ignored and then fired.

General Zinni essentially said the same thing. He was ignored, then he was fired. We have seen this as a consistent pattern of truth- tellers about Iraq. When Joe Wilson blew the whistle on the falsehood we heard from that Speaker's rostrum during the State of the Union, his wife had her job diminished by secretly outing her as a member of the CIA. The sad fact is advice given to the civilian authority has not been followed.

The fifth error. We knew that to bring democracy to Iraq, we need to bring democracy to Iraq. The way to bring democracy to Iraq is to have elections. The first proconsul we had, Jay Garner, said, let's have early elections; we might get the Iraqis to buy into this system. He was fired. He was let go. The successful example in southern provinces of Iraq which has had successful elections is now not being followed, and we have no idea from the plan from the administration when that may occur. We need elections in Iraq.

The next error. We have failed wholly to build an international assistance for our troops. This needs to be an international responsibility. American taxpayers should not be the only ones footing the bill in Iraq. In fact, the rest of the world footed the bill for the first Persian Gulf War under the first President Bush. Now the American taxpayer is paying this almost lock, stock and barrel both in blood and in treasure.

The next error. We consciously sent, and when I say ``we,'' I mean the executive branch in the United States, consciously sent American men and women into battle without armor. We knew we were sending people into the warren's den of RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices; and we sent them in these little thin-skinned Humvees to drive around for a year and a half, and we have had over 700 lost Americans, many of whom because we did not have adequate armor in the field. Now, yesterday, when we went through the streets of Baghdad, we went in armored personnel carriers and we did not lose anyone, which are impervious to rocket-propelled grenades and a lot of IEDs. We ignored the clear advice that we needed a stronger, more well-armored force in Iraq, and we lost sons and daughters because of it. I will say a good thing for this administration, they are now finally beginning to rush to this battlefield as fast as they can the armor we need.

The next error we had, I think it is number seven, we did not even have body armor for these people. We did not have flak jackets.

Briefly. Then I need to complete my two more.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for the calculated and exact improvement of my discussion.

It is. And, Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for leading on this issue about this flak jacket failure.

I do want to make the point, though, I think the administration has made some changes in its policy that are starting to move in the right direction, but they are a year, and we have suffered dramatically as a result of that. We welcome these changes that we are seeing now. Now the President says now he wants the U.N. to come in and help us. But frankly it is very difficult, after we stuck our finger in the eye of the rest of the world, to encourage people. But we want to encourage the administration to move.

And I will just mention two other things, and then I will yield to my colleagues. Two other areas: One, this administration has not proposed a single plan on how to pay for this war. Every single dollar that is being spent in this war is coming out of the backs and the futures of our children of deficit spending. We have a $500 billion deficit, and this President was not forthright enough with Americans to even put in his budget one dollar for the Iraq War, knowing that every dollar he put in the Iraq War would be additional deficit spending.

Winston Churchill said, ``All I have to offer you is blood, sweat, toil, and tears.'' We cannot now just tell the people of America let us fight the Iraq War and then go shopping. We cannot simply have the only people sacrificing in America those in the frontlines of Iraq. This is a tough battle, and the President of the United States cannot fight it on the cheap. We need to face the difficulty in Iraq straightforward and have the tenth thing we need, and then I will yield.

We need something we have not had for 1\1/2\ years now. We need a plan for success in Iraq, and we still do not have one this late in the game. And the reason I say that is tonight, as we are sitting here, supposedly we are going to have a turnover to a sovereign government in Iraq on June 30 and no one has a clue who they will be, no one has a clue what they will do, and the sad fact is the only thing this Iraq group is going to do is issue library cards because, frankly, we are running Iraq because we are the only force that is capable of doing that right now. We need a plan. We need some fresh thinking. I have some thoughts I will describe a little later.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt).

Reclaiming my time, I just wanted to note, following the horrendous situations in our prison camps, a lot of folks thought the only reason people were calling for the Secretary of Defense's replacement was that problem. But that was only the straw that broke the camel's back. We had all these other 10 problems which I alluded to, all of which he was involved with. That is why many Members here believe that this Nation deserves better to serve our troops.

I would like to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel), the originator of this, who shows great leadership on being able to tackle these very great problems in Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield for just a moment, and then I want to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel). One of the unfortunate reasons there has been a failure here is that there is a persistent practice or habit in this administration to ignore a principle of leadership, which is to reward competence and to sanction incompetence, to reward those who are right and sanction those who are wrong, to reward those who tell the truth and sanction those who do less than that. And look what happens in this situation.

Let us compare those who were wrong to those who were right. Those who were right, General Shinseki, right about needing new troops, canned. General Zinni, who was right

about needing more armor and troops, canned. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, by the way, stood up personally to Saddam Hussein and saved hundreds of American lives to get them out of Iraq before the first Persian Gulf War, this guy has guts; he told the truth and pointed out that what the President told the American people about buying uranium from Niger was a falsehood, he told the truth, and they tried to destroy his wife's career in the CIA.

So we have three truth-tellers, all of them who were punished by the executive branch of the United States.

Now, look at the other three people. George Tenet, CIA, who, if there was a more massive failure of information in American history next to calling Benedict Arnold a good American, I do not know what it was; still on the job, has not been sanctioned. He has not lost an hour of vacation time. He does not have a pink slip, does not have a slap on the wrist, said by the President to be doing a great job, when we started a war based on false information.

Donald Rumsfeld, the man who ignored General Shinseki, ignored General Zinni, ignored the intelligence from Ambassador Joe Wilson, involved in a war where we have incompetent planning, failure of planning, and we are now in a deep morass in Iraq, called by the Vice President, and I want to quote here almost, the greatest Secretary of Defense America has ever seen.

We have a different opinion. This gentleman has not been sanctioned. This gentleman has not lost an hour of overtime.

And if I can remember who the third one is, if I can read my notes here that I wanted to talk about. Help me out, gentlemen. Who is the third one I was thinking about here? The list goes on and on.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to make sure that we include this gentleman in this discussion: Assistant Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told this Chamber on repeated occasions he was dead right sure, not only that we would be greeted as the great liberators of the Mideast, spreading democracy through the Mideast, not only that that would happen but, bonus time, I say to my colleagues, the Iraq oil fields would pay for this whole thing. American taxpayers would not have to put out a dime for this. He came and told us he knew this was going to happen, we would not have to do anything with taxes, taxpayers would not have to pay a dime. If there has been a greater failure of analysis, I do not know what it could possibly be.

Now, what has the President done to the man who totally misled the United States Congress? On both sides of the aisle, by the way, he told this to Republicans and Democrats. Nothing. So we have the three people who have gotten us into a war based on false information with lousy planning, with incompetent preparation for our troops, people losing their lives in Iraq who are greeted as the greatest civil servants in human history, and the three guys who told us the truth were fired, lost their jobs.

I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. Speaker, we have about 30 seconds, and I just wanted to wrap up and thank the gentleman for his work tonight. I just want to say one thing. One of the worst possible things that can happen to our soldiers is base the war on wishful thinking. And the failures we have been talking about tonight have largely occurred because of civilian decisionmakers who have based decisions on wishful thinking that are not in touch with the reality and the difficult situation in Iraq. We are very hopeful that this administration will start to recognize the challenges we have in Iraq and start listening to military advisers, rather than basing their decisions on the fantasy that they have that this can be done on the cheap. We have paid too dearly in blood for that misassessment, we have paid too dearly in treasure for that misassessment; and it is time for a fresh, new strategy in Iraq. Just sticking with the same old same old is a recipe for disaster.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, May 13, 2004, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, this outrage cuts to the bone, not just because it damages our international relations, but because it damages basic tenets of American values. And when you have such a deep wound, self-inflicted, you cannot have half measures. And this resolution is weak tea when we need strong medicine; and it is inadequate, and this rule should be defeated for that reason.

Where in this resolution is there a call for the obvious need for an investigation of the private contractors who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, who are involved in this outrage, who are outside the chain of command, who are not subject to military justice? Why will the Republican Party not join us in investigating those private contractors and putting this in this resolution? Why is there nothing in this resolution about the need for an international opening up of our system so that we can regain credibility? Why is there not in this resolution an accounting for the Iraqi people of who is in there? And lastly, where is the resignation for Donald Rumsfeld?

Mr. Speaker, I want to dovetail on this, to reference why this is so spectacularly ironic. About an hour ago one of our Republican colleagues was railing about the only problem with the Federal Government is waste, fraud and abuse, that that is the only problem, and just if the Democrats would stop all this waste, fraud and abuse we would have no problems.

I thought that was interesting, because this entire government is run by the Republican Party, a Republican President, a Republican Senate and a Republican House, yet he pointed out all this waste, fraud and abuse in the Federal Government. I wanted to stand up and say, who is in charge of the waste, fraud and abuse? Obviously it is the Republican Party, because that is who is running this government right now.

But here is this gentleman wailing about waste, fraud and abuse, when his party foisted down the throats of Congress and the American people this situation where they are giving $46 billion of taxpayer money to the insurance industry, which is totally unnecessary, because we could have given exactly the same benefits through Medicare.

Now, I challenge any Republican, any Republican or any Democrat, or any Green Party or socialist or independent, to show me a larger portion of waste, fraud and abuse than the $46 billion of taxpayer money going to the insurance industry, that does not deliver one penny of additional prescription drug benefit to seniors than Medicare could have done, had we not been involved in the shenanigan, not to pay off, but to pay benefits to people who are very, very powerful political forces in this town.

This I would nominate for the largest piece of waste, fraud and abuse, foisted on this country by the Republican Party, and it is an abomination. When you think about the generation having this done to them, think about who the victims of this fraud are, it is the men and women who we will be celebrating on Memorial Day down when we dedicate the World War II memorial. My dad is coming in. He was a World War II veteran.

This is the greatest generation. They prevailed in World War II, and how do we treat them? We foist this abomination, that can only pass this Chamber through fraud itself, a situation where my colleagues have talked about the 3-hour delay.

It reminds me of when we beat the Russians in 1964 in the Olympics in the basketball game. The only way the Russians won was to put time back on the clock. This was a Russian-style democracy, when they put 3 hours back on the clock. But during that 3 hours, what happened? There was a Republican Congressman who reported that he was offered a $100,000 bribe, in essence, to his son's campaign, if he would switch his vote. Does the greatest generation deserve that type of contempt for democracy in this Chamber, which has sullied the name of Congress and Medicare?

I have to tell you one thing, I will tell you, my Republican colleagues, this dog is not hunting with our constituents. I had meeting with 200 senior citizens in Edmonds, Washington, many of whom are stalwart Republicans, two weeks ago. I asked for their hands. This is a nonpartisan senior citizens group, just a bunch of folks concerned about this.

We talked about this bill in some detail, and I asked how many people believe this bill was substantially beneficial in their lives and that it deserved passage by Congress? Not one single hand was raised of those senior citizens, who were an eclectic group of conservatives and not-so-conservatives and Democrats and Republicans.

It is not playing, it is not being accepted, and because it is not accepted, people understand this, and people need to know why their taxpayer money is being wasted in another great incident of waste, fraud and abuse on this $18 million plan to try to sell this to the American people. Why is that waste, fraud and abuse taking place?

Well, there is a reason for it, and the reason about it is that this administration understands that the seniors have figured out it is an Edsel, and the seniors know about the Edsel. Maybe some of our younger constituents do not, but it is a turkey.

The seniors know it is an Edsel, and that is why these guys are spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to try to dig themselves out of this horrible hole they have dug us into. It is an abomination.

I have to tell you, I am glad we all are here talking about it tonight.

Mr. Speaker, it is difficult, while our proud men and women are serving in the field in Iraq, to tell some very unfortunate truths about the failure of the executive branch of this government to live up to their service in Iraq. It is difficult to say the truth, which is there has been gross incompetence, deception, manipulation of the truth, failure to recognize reality in Iraq which has got us in such an unholy mess by the executive branch of the Federal Government. That is not pleasant to say given what our troops face in Iraq tonight. But it is necessary to say it.

And the reason it brought hope to me when I was visiting a family that lost a son and a husband in Iraq while serving in an incident where he earned the Bronze Star posthumously, a man who will not be coming home to his children, when I talked to his widow, the one thing she impressed upon me that she wanted me to do is to not fail to blow the whistle on executive branch incompetence which has created such problems in Iraq or at least not responded to them the way they should. And this body, the people's House, has an obligation to blow the whistle on these multiple failures, and they are multiple. And tonight I think we are going to talk about 10 failures of the executive branch of the government, which has been responsible in part for some of the difficulties that we face in Iraq.

And the first one I would like to mention is the one that leads in part to some of the problems we face with handling prisoners of war. The public is well aware of what happened here. I heard a conservative commentator yesterday just describe this as the soldiers just having a good time, just blowing off steam. It is that kind of attitude that apparently permeated our command and control structure in our prisoner of war camps, and that kind of attitude has the potential to inflame the Arab world and create more enemies of the war we are fighting against al Qaeda right now. It is a gross mistake.

It is a failure of a command and control structure.

One of the problems this Congress needs to get right to the bottom of is this scandal regarding private contractors in Iraq. We have heard of multiple scandals involving overpayments to the Halliburton Corporation, multiple scandals involving mispayments and overpayments for oil to these corporations, many of whom are great political donors, I might add, in the United States political system.

But there is another one we need to get at, and that is why we have private contractors doing interrogation of prisoners of war in Iraq, who are outside

the command and control structure, who are not subject to military discipline, and who apparently were instrumental in this debacle in our prisoner of war system. There is an error and failure that we need to get to the bottom of.

If the gentleman will yield further, this is starting to permeate our whole system. We are finding that contractors are going to leave when the temperature gets too hot. We have got these private contractors doing interrogation and involved in this scandal in our prisoner of war camp.

Let me suggest this is part and parcel of the second failure. The first problem we talked about is a failure of command and control. But the second failure of this executive branch is the failure to be honest with the American people as to what this war is costing and their desire to fight a war on the cheap. While our people are losing their lives in Iraq, this administration refuses to be honest with the American people about the real cost of this war.

Let me suggest two reasons that I know that is true. Number one, instead of having a military system that is capable of fighting this war and putting the troops on the ground that were really needed, they tried to do it with these private contractors, many of whom are, again, engaged in the political process in this system and are political allies of those making executive decisions about this war. Number one.

Number two, as of this moment, in the middle of this war, while our soldiers, men and women are putting their lives on the line, this President has not shown how to pay for this war, and today I am told now proposed another $25 billion of deficit spending to pay for this war.

If our soldiers can put their lives on the line, this executive branch ought to say what this war is really going to cost us and how long we are going to be there and how we are going to pay for this war. And just adding it open to the backs of our children just will not wash. Maybe that is the politically expedient thing to do. Maybe when you start a war based on false information, and we now learned it is false, maybe you want to kind of sweep it under the rug, how many billions of dollars it is going to cost the American taxpayers. But it is the wrong thing to do, like it is the wrong thing to do to fight this war on the cheap, to have contractors in there instead of folks in your command and control system. We need to get to the bottom of that failure number two.

Mr. Speaker, if it was one failure, wars are tough, some things go wrong; and if it was one failure, maybe we would be in the excusing mode. But it is interesting. Of all of the failures that have happened in Iraq from day one, not one single person has lost their job, except maybe recently in this POW camp situation.

Who is my constituent, by the way, and we will talk about that in a few minutes. But let me suggest that there is not one failure, there are 10 failures. And before the night is out, I want to list the 10 failures of this executive branch which are significant which have gotten us into this mess.

Failure number 1. They told us and the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The President of the United States said on August 26, 2002, ``Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.'' That statement was false.

Number 2. They told us they had clear and convincing evidence of the connection between Saddam Hussein and the attack of September 11 and al Qaeda. No matter how many times that is said, that statement is false. We have now seen the intelligence briefing. There was no such evidence. That statement was false.

Third: they told the American people that we would be greeted as liberators, rose petals strewn at our feet, happy convocations of democracy-seeking Iraqis greeting our personnel carriers. As a result of that failure, Americans died, because they refused to send armor that would have protected our soldiers from these improvised explosive devices along our roadways, and they sent them with thin skin, sheet metal Humvees not as thick as your washing machine that did not protect our soldiers.

Now, why did they make that such fundamental error? Why did they not send our armored personnel carriers that we have 11,000 of them sitting in warehouses around this country, why did they not send those? Well, there is a reason. It is because they were so, and I have no other word to put it but arrogant, to believe that their wisdom would be accepted by the entire Mideast when they came into Iraq, and they were wrong, and our people died.

Issue number 4: they ignored clear evidence that we needed more troops on the ground after the collapse of the Iraqi Army. General Shinseki, General Zinni, many people told them, when the Iraqi Army collapses, there is going to be massive looting and chaos and you are going to need hundreds of thousands of troops to protect us and the Iraqis, and they ignored it. Why? Because of arrogance.

Issue number 5: they refused to say we needed the U.N. Now the President is now saying we needed the U.N., now. Well, it is a little late now when the rest of the world is refusing to become involved.

Number 6: they refused to have elections. I am told Jay Garner, the first provost they had, suggested they needed elections. That is kind of what democracy is about. Now, proposedly, the President is going to turn over sovereignty on June 30. What a joke. The only thing these people are going to control in Iraq after we hand-pick these people are who gets library cards. Every single thing else is going to be run by us, and Iraq knows it. I will go quickly.

Number 7: No command and control and adequate training in handling these POWs with a massive black eye to the United States of America. When we have tens of thousands of people doing a great job in Iraq, our reputation has been soiled.

Number 8: no armor. We talked about that.

Number 9: no plan to pay for Iraq. We have over $130 billion of payment of Iraqi expenses, and this President has not suggested one single dollar except deficit spending to pay for this war.

Number 10, and this is the one maybe that is the most no-brainer to me I can think of. They sent 130,000 troops into Iraq without body armor, knowing that you are sending them into the war and into the dens of modern combat without modern flap jackets. That is 10, and that is enough.

I just want to offer a brief suggestion why that is. How could the Assistant Secretary of Defense not know our casualties? How could you possibly explain that? Well, there is an explanation.

This administration has got us into a war and is pursuing a war based on wishful thinking rather than hard reality. Now, wishful thinking is fine in Hollywood. It makes some great dramas, but it is a lousy way to win a war; and it costs people's lives, and that is what is happening tonight. They have wishful thinking: if we just stay the course, the Iraqis will accept the government we are trying to force down their throats. It is wishful thinking that the ID are going to stop and the Humvees are going to stop the attacks on our soldiers. It is wishful thinking that somehow we will find $150 billion a year to pay for this war.

They refuse to recognize the hard cold reality that our soldiers are facing every day in Iraq. It is morally, ethically, and democratically wrong; and that is why we are here tonight.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to say what is happening in Iraq due to the deception and falsehood by this administration is not only a threat to our soldiers, it is a threat to democracy itself. There is no greater violation of the democratic principle than an administration that does not tell the truth to the American people, and we are not getting the truth. We know we did not get the truth about WMD or a connection to 9/11, but now we find it was months and months before we got to the truth because somebody leaked pictures about this scandalous situation in our POW camps.

This is a direct threat to the democratic principle. If you want to know how bad things are going to go, when the government does not tell the truth to the American people, I want to quote something I read today. I was with the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) at the Library of Congress this evening, and they have an exhibit about Winston Churchill. On page 42 of this pamphlet, it has a picture of Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia taken in 1921 at the Cairo Conference. It says, ``During this meeting, Churchill helped establish the government ethnic composition and political boundaries of Iraq and other portions of the Middle East.''

When the British did that, they told their people they would be there for a year or two and they would help bring democracy to Iraq. Lawrence of Arabia told them they were crazy because they did not understand the ethnic composition of that part of the world.

Do Members know the year they left Iraq after getting in in 1922, the British Empire, 1953; 31 years. What is 31 years, that is 2035 if we have a similar misunderstanding as to what is going on in Iraq.

The sad situation is this administration has demonstrated repeated failures to understand the challenges we have in Iraq. I want to offer one idea. We have offered a lot of criticism and we have called for accountability of people which is a democratic principle. We have called for accountability of people in this administration who should be removed because of their repeated failures, misjudgment and deception.

There is only one way we are going to get out of Iraq, and that is allow the Iraqi people to seize their own destiny, and that destiny may not be perfect according to what the Oval Office wants it to be, but this President has to recognize he cannot run Iraq from the Oval Office. The Iraqi people are going to have to fashion their own destiny.

That is why I believe we should call for early elections this summer if possible, as was done in the town of Tar and the village of Shatra, a town of 250,000. They have had elections. They have done it using their ration cards. In these towns, they have already had elections. You bring in your ration card, you stamp it when there is a vote, and you pick who you think should be in charge of your destiny.

The Iraqis need to get involved in their country's future. Right now they are dependent on us for everything. They are dependent on us to do all of the dying and spending. We need Iraqis to grasp their own destiny, and the best way to do it is through elections. Those elections may not be as good as the one in Florida in 2000, but it would be a lot better than us picking the people that we are going to shove down the Iraqi's throats in this bizarre situation.

Mr. Speaker, I have come tonight to discuss the challenge for America in the Iraq war. Some may know that a group of my colleagues and myself have been discussing this challenge now for several months on the floor of the House, once a week. We style this the Iraq Watch. The reason we come to the floor, sometimes as late as midnight, is that this really is a challenge and it demands that Congress be involved and not sit on the sidelines of this issue. This issue is too important, it is too deadly, it is too contentious for Members of Congress to simply take a pass and have responsibility only rest in the executive branch, the President's branch of the United States Government. So we have come once a week to talk about how to pursue a meaningful, commonsense, successful policy in Iraq. Hopefully I will be joined by some colleagues a little later in the evening.

I would like to start by just giving a background about why this is so important and why it is so important for Members of Congress to address the Iraq issue and not walk away from it. The answer is simply an example many Members of Congress have had, that I have had, of visiting a few weeks ago with a family in Bremerton, Washington, who the father and the husband was serving in Iraq proudly as a sergeant in the United States Army a few months ago. He was involved in a sweep mission near the Tigris River. A boat overturned, he went to aid, to try to save an Iraqi who was serving in forces with the U.S. Army. Unfortunately, he drowned while doing his duty. Like so many others in Iraq, a hero.

We now have lost since the war began 725 Americans, since the capture of Saddam Hussein 264 Americans, since May 31, 2003, and the President declared that the mission was accomplished, 585 Americans. We have had, total wounded, 4,151 Americans, many with very, very severe injuries, many which I have visited in Walter Reed and Bethesda.

Our losses demand that the U.S. Government pursue a policy that is not based on half truths but all the truth, not on partial planning but full planning, not on a policy based just on wishes and dreams and hopes and even faith but based on meaningful plans, strategic decisions that are based on the hard realities in Iraq.

Unfortunately, the truth is, and it is hard to say, that our policy in Iraq has not fit the extent of the heroism put

forth by our proud men and women in Iraq who have served with great valor and distinction in extremely trying circumstances.

Their valor, their professionalism, their integrity has not been matched by the Federal Government's decision-making. We are going to discuss tonight in several ways why that professionalism in Iraq has not been matched by professionalism and wisdom here in Washington, D.C.

I want to talk about several of those mistakes which have cost us grievously. By the way, I want to say one thing up front: these people say, well, this is not the 50,000 people we lost in Vietnam. Try telling that to the family that I visited and the two kids whose dad will never come home. One American life lost due to incompetence, neglect, exaggeration, deceit, failure to plan is too many; and that is what has happened in Iraq.

So, if I may, let me address some of the mistakes that our country has suffered in Iraq due to failures of this nature.

Number one, this administration sent into combat, into mortal combat, into the lion's den our soldiers and sailors with inadequate security protection for themselves. Today as we speak, almost 1 year after the President of the United States declared that the mission was accomplished, we still do not have armored Humvees in an adequate number in Iraq to protect our sons and daughters and husbands and wives. That is inexcusable.

It is inexcusable, because we obviously were going to be involved in urban combat going into Iraq. We obviously were going to take RPG, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, which can penetrate this tiny little thin skin of sheet metal on a Humvee; and we did not, the people who were vested in the executive power of the United States Government, did not do adequate planning to protect our soldiers and sailors from an obvious threat in the dens and warrens of Baghdad, Fallujah, Basra. Today they are still not on.

Why did that happen? You know of the travail and travesty, that we sent our soldiers over there without flak vests either. We are now told that finally after a year that has been remedied. By why would the executive branch of this government send our soldiers and Marines into dangerous urban combat without armor to protect them? Why would they do that?

Well, it is because of mistake number two. Mistake number two was the one where the executive over and over and over again told us in the Congress, told Americans, and apparently believed, for reasons that stretch my powers of imagination, that we would be met with nothing but rose petals and champagne and the welcome mat from grateful Iraqis for occupying their country, and that this country, if you can call it that, which is a collection of tribes thrown together after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, would come together in this joyous reunion of brotherhood and sisterhood and welcome us with nothing but open arms, an occupying army from a Western nation, the greatest Western nation and the greatest democracy that has ever lived, but one that is totally foreign to Iraq.

This was wishful thinking at its highest. It was the arrogance at its highest of those that did not have a clue what was going on in the culture and sent our boys and daughters into this combat without this protection; and, as a result, we have lost now hundreds of our finest people in this country.

Now, thankfully, finally, the executive has admitted its mistake and they are trying to remedy this issue, and they have now issued these contracts trying to put these retrofitted armor plates on our Humvees. But it is an example of what happens when an executive makes a war- power decision based on arrogance. People die. And that is what has happened in Iraq, and it is what happens when you make a decision based on not understanding the nature of the threat.

So let me go to mistake number three that still exists today. Now, today we had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Condoleezza Rice, who finally came and briefed the Democratic Caucus. We think the briefings should be bipartisan, because this is a bipartisan challenge and there are no Democrats or Republicans in Iraq. There are only Americans.

I could be mistaken, but I do not recall any. The way this one happened is she agreed to brief the Republican colleagues, and only later as an afterthought, at our request, apparently, offered to brief the Democratic colleagues. We have suggested that we have bipartisan briefings, because we are in this pickle together, and we have suggested this.

That is correct. It is a failure, because we need to be a team in this regard.

And we would hope in the future when we do have these consultations that we do this in a bipartisan manner, because we have to all have the information, Democrat and Republican alike, so we can try to fashion the proper response.

Let me go to the third mistake, if I can, we were talking about. I must say after briefings today by Dr. Rice and listening to the administration and listening to the press information, this is an error that I will next address that still exists in this administration, and that is the error that they have a strategic initiative that is based on the wishful hopes that there is just a few finite number of individuals in Iraq, and that if they are eliminated, this problem is going to be solved.

This administration still looks at Iraq as sort of this virginal, potential flower Garden of Eden of democracy that just happens to have the Corleone family in it, and if they can just get rid of the Corleone family, everything is going to be hunky-dory.

Listening to Dr. Rice's briefing today, I was astounded to hear that things were going so swimmingly in Iraq, that if we just eliminate a few more people in Fallujah and maybe a couple in Basra and three in Baghdad, things were going to be okay.

That is the most wildly out-of-touch viewpoint about the challenge that we have in Iraq and dooms our policy in Iraq to failure.

If you think about the administration's theory, their plan, if you can call it that, their view is, well, when we get Uday, things are going to be okay. We got Uday, and things were not okay. If we get Saddam, things are going to be okay. Well, we got Saddam, and we have lost 264 Americans since then. Now, if we just get a few people in Fallujah, things are going to be okay.

Well, unfortunately, that is not the situation, because one of the most prescient things said was stated by Mr.

Paul Bremer when he said on January 1, and, I am sorry my quote does not have which year, but it holds for any year, he said, ``As long as we are here, we are the occupying power.'' It is a very ugly word, but it is true: ``As long as we are here.''

Unfortunately, Mr. Bremer was correct, and that is why this administration is wrong not to equip our Army in a way that will make it prepared for that type of conflict as long as we are there and to develop a strategic effort to recognize that we will be seen as an occupying power by a significant portion of that population as long as we are there.

This administration's theory is if we just eliminate a few more people, we will no longer be seen as an occupying power, but rather as the liberators that we wish to be. It is a policy based on a falsehood which is based on mistake number four.

Mistake number four is that there is one principal rule of warfare, that you should not start a war based on falsehood. Unfortunately, that is what this executive branch of the United States Government did. If I can spend just a few minutes, and then I will yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) in that regard. That is a significant thing to say, but it is, unfortunately, the sad truth.

On March 17, 2003, the President of the United States, George Bush, said, ``Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.''

That statement was false, and that statement formed the entire foundation of the war that this President initiated, and it was false. But, unfortunately, it was not the only falsehood that we heard.

On March 16, 2003, the day before, the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney said, ``And we believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.'' That statement was false, and it was an underlying principle of this executive starting this war.

On March 23, a week later, 2003, Kenneth Adelman, the Defense Policy Board member of the executive branch of the government said, ``I have no doubt we are going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.'' That statement was false.

Now, this administration I think somewhere in the year 2050 will still be saying, ``It is out there in the turkey fields somewhere. We know it is there.''

It is now over a year after we have had control of Iraq and have not found a single weapon system that this administration started a war that cost hundreds of Americans' lives over. Not one. Not an ounce. Not a gear. Not a paper. Nothing. This is while our soldiers and sailors have paid the ultimate tribute at the behest of the Federal Government.

On March 30, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, ``We know where they are,'' referring to weapons of mass destruction. ``They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north somewhat.''

That statement was false. Unfortunately, these statements were false even given the intelligence we had then. We have subsequent to the initiation of this war had access, and obviously we will not disclose any secure information tonight, but in the public realm, it is clear that our intelligence indicated there was lots of doubt, at a minimum, what the situation was in Iraq.

These airplanes that the President told us had been built by Saddam to fly over the Atlantic and spray germ warfare over Baltimore and Washington, D.C., which is a terrifying prospect, and one if it was true we ought to be concerned about, there was only one problem: the United States Air Force before the war started, according to published accounts, stated that that is not the reason these balsa wood, duct tape affairs were put together.

They were put together, they tried to come up with something they could take Polaroid pictures of the enemy. They were not meant for spraying germ warfare, and our own intelligence indicated that. But that is not what the President told us. It was something else.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, the gentleman has brought up a point with Iran which, unlike Iraq, is developing a nuclear program and is a potential threat on a nuclear basis. When I was in Israel a couple of years ago talking to the Israeli defense force, they were concerned, and rightfully so, I think, about the nuclear capabilities of Iran, not Iraq. But the pickle we are now in, we are in a situation now where we have difficulty dealing with Iran because they have the potential to inflame the Shiite allies they have in Iraq to get them whipped up, if you will, and foment violence. Now we are in a more difficult position in Iran.

But I would like to return if I can for just a minute to another economic issue, since the gentleman brought up economics.

There is a fourth mistake this administration has made which has severely hampered our effort, and that is this administration has not leveled with the American people about what the Iraq war costs, and this costs us a giant deficit because the President will not come forth and tell the truth about what this is costing the American taxpayer. How do I know that? It is real simple.

The President of the United States sent us a budget, and in the budget it is hundreds of pages thick, thousands of numbers, thousands of numbers, all kinds of numbers. But there is one number that he did not have the willingness to put in his budget so Americans could see what it was going to be. That was the cost of the Iraq war.

Can my colleagues believe it? The President of the United States purports to have us adopt a budget, but he leaves out the cost of the Iraq war. How could one possibly, with a straight face, leave out something that this year is going to cost us at least $100 billion and next year probably half to three-quarters of that at least, if not more. How with a straight face could he do that, unless he really did not want the American people to know how costly this endeavor is?

This President needs to shoot straight with the American people and tell them what it is going to cost, which is hundreds of millions of dollars coming out of their April 15 taxes. And if it is worth doing, he needs to say so. But this duplicitous thing of trying to fight a war on the cheap is wrong.

Winston Churchill said, ``All I have to offer you is blood, sweat, toil, and tears.'' This President said, don't worry, be happy. That is not the situation we are in today, and the President needs to belly up to the bar and show us how he intends to pay for this instead of ballooning the deficit, which is what he is doing, and putting the cost of the Iraq war, which is going to go on for years and years on the backs of our children, with a $500 billion deficit that he thinks Americans are not smart enough to figure out. Well, I think he is wrong.

I think they know, especially with the deficit, the cost of this war; and he is not willing to talk about his tax cuts to pay for it because he doesn't want anybody to make a sacrifice in this war except the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Air Force who put their lives on the line. They put their lives on the line, George Bush ought to put his tax cuts on the line. They know what sacrifice is. And, yet, this President won't shoot straight with the American people to show how to pay for this war.

Would the gentleman yield? He said something that really triggered a thought, and it is disappointing. He said, ``The administration needs to be more forthright to tell us its plan.'' Well, I have some really bad news for the American people tonight: there was not a plan for the security of Iraq the week before the invasion, there was not a plan for the security of Iraq the week after the invasion, there was not a plan for the security of Iraq when the President declared the mission accomplished in May, 2003, and there is not a plan for the security of Iraq tonight that has a good chance of success.

Now, why do I say that? And this is very, very frustrating to me. Because 7 days before the invasion of Iraq, we, on a bipartisan basis in several meetings, begged the administration to show us the plan for the security of Iraq after the Iraqi Army folded, which we knew was going to happen at some point. And the administration officials essentially said a week before the invasion, we are giving serious thought to that.

Well, I just do not think that is good enough. And that is one of the reasons Iraq exploded into looting because the President did not listen to General Shinseki when he told him, and this is the fifth mistake, that we need hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground to prevent Iraq from going up in flames after the Iraqi Army collapses.

And our soldiers today, tonight in Fallujah are paying the price for that mistake, that we did not have enough boots on the ground the day after the Iraqi Army collapsed. And we continue to suffer as a result of that.

Now, why did that happen? Again, the deadliest kind of plans in warfare are those based on wishful thinking. And this plan, if you could call it that, from day one has been based on fallacious, false, wishful thinking. It is wishful thinking about the amount of troops we are going to have to have, it was wishful thinking about what type of armor we are going to have to have, it was wishful thinking about how much it was going to cost, it was wishful thinking about whether we would find the weapons of mass destruction, it was wishful thinking that once we got rid of Saddam Hussein there would no longer be an ally of al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda is in Iraq. They are in there now, al Qaeda is in Iraq big time now. They may not have been there before the war; but, by gum, we made it a great place for them to do business today, and they are there.

I do not think the Iraqi new ``sovereign,'' whatever they are, should feel badly because our Secretary of State did not find out about the war until the ambassador of Saudi Arabia did first.

Prince Bandar, who learned about it before our Secretary of State. So the fact that we told the Saudis, the President of the United States shared with the Saudi Government, a foreign government, our war plan, that the war was going to start before he told the Secretary of State, the Iraqis should not feel too bad if we do not clue them to who the next government will be that we choose.

Let us be honest about this. This is what we are asking and suggesting to the President in a very, very difficult situation. And I do not envy that position of dealing with Iraq as President of the United States. But the first order of business ought to be truth. And this operation from day one has been built on the shifting sands of deception, exaggeration, failure, and simply not shooting straight.

Now he needs to be straight with the world and the Iraqis. What happens on June 30 is not going to be a sovereign government. And the reason it is not going to be a sovereign government is because the only force capable of doing anything in Iraq is the United States military. And he is fooling himself if he thinks that is going to fool the American people or the Iraqi people or the world. And we need to be straight about this that this is a multi-year situation the mess we are about.

We have only got a minute or two and if the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) would like to finish just briefly? Let me wrap up if I can.

I am sure the country will appreciate that.

First off, I want to make sure people understand what we have been talking about tonight has been very well documented. The Web site that is indicated before the podium here indicates where you can check out, anybody that is listening this evening can check out the factual statements that we have talked about. You will find 247 misstatements of fact by this administration about Iraq that are documented in this government Web site by the House Committee on Government Reform due to the good efforts of the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman). Anyone can check that out.

In conclusion, let me wrap up. What we were saying tonight is a theme. We believe this is an extremely challenging situation for America in Iraq. We believe our soldiers and sailors, Air Force personnel, men and women, are doing an exemplary job in Iraq under extremely trying circumstances; and anyone who has talked to them will agree with that. But we believe it is high time for the administration, for the President of the United States, for the Vice President of the United States, for the Secretary of Defense to stop basing an Iraq policy on wishful thinking and exaggeration.

They need to adopt the policy to the number of troops based on realism rather than rose-tinted glasses. They need to adopt a policy on how much it will cost based on hard-headed fiscal reality, rather than hiding the ball from the American people. They need to adopt a policy on the armor that recognizes how severe this problem is with security in Iraq, and starting to tell the truth to the American people is a good way to start to figure out a way out of Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things America abhors is a sneak attack. President Roosevelt in this Chamber described December 7 as a day that would live in infamy.

What I saw a few minutes ago is a sneak attack on a Member of the U.S. Senate by a bunch of my colleagues who came down here and disparaged him, contrary to the rules of the House. The Speaker repeatedly admonished them for violating the best traditions of this House, and my colleagues continually came to the Chamber to continually violate those traditions of this House.

Mr. Speaker, I want to give notice that we have a long time in this election period coming up, and we have problems deciding what we are going to do about Iraq, and it is not going to help us if we turn this into a Chamber of personal assassination.

Let me just say, there is a lot of nerve in this Chamber attacking a guy who has a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and Purple Hearts in the tradition of his Nation, and it should not be countenanced by the Speaker ever under any circumstances, whether Democrats are in the Chamber to object or not.

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, is it appropriate for the Speaker, who presides over this Chamber, when there is a clear and direct personal attack using personally disparaging comments about a Member of the United States Senate on a repeated basis, is it appropriate or allowable for the Speaker to interject and prohibit that activity, even without a Member of the Chamber expressing a concern?

In other words, does the Speaker have the ability to exercise preemptory power to enforce the rules of this House when there is a sneak attack disparaging the personal integrity of a U.S. Senator?