Jay Inslee

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Chairman, I think I understand the nature of the gentleman's argument. But the problem that we have on this side is that not only have we offered an amendment in the appropriations process to allow refunds for Americans who have been gouged by Enron, but we also offered essentially the same amendment on the energy bill that was clearly germane to the issue, clearly would have been allowable, and under his leadership in the Committee on Rules, it was refused to be allowed under the energy bill.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman, at the Chair's discretion.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment at this time.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I intend to withdraw my amendment, but prior to that I would like to enter into a colloquy with the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Hobson). First, I would like to thank the chairman of the subcommittee, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Hobson) and the ranking member, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Visclosky) for their continued support for funding the cleanup at the Hanford site in Washington. And I want to particularly thank Chairman Hobson for his stalwart work in ending this practice of dumping waste in unlined trenches. He has truly been remarkable, and the people of the State of Washington appreciate his efforts. The Department of Energy has been seeking legislative authority to reclassify high-level radioactive waste as ``waste incidental to reprocessing.'' This high-level waste contains highly toxic radionuclides stored in underground tanks at sites in the State of Washington, South Carolina, Idaho, and New York. In agreement with these States and with Congress, the Department is required to remove as much of these wastes as is technically feasible. In order to achieve its target deadline for cleaning up these tanks, the Department now argues that it requires the authority to reclassify some of the waste at the bottom of the tanks as ``incidental waste,'' so that these wastes may be left on site or disposed of in a manner that does not live up to the federal agreement. Such authority is currently disputed by many of the involved States, who argue that the long-term impacts of such an action are unknown and potentially harmful to human health. Does the gentleman agree that it is the intent of Congress that the Department engage in fair and reasonable negotiations with the States and involved parties?

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman. And would the gentleman agree that any strategy to resolve the issue should be consistent nationwide?

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, finally, does the gentleman agree that the House should strongly encourage the conferees to the defense authorization bill to retain the language in the House Report requiring the Secretary of Energy to engage the National Research Council to study the Department's plans to manage its high-level waste streams instead of providing the Department blanket reclassification authority?

Mr. INSLEE. Once again reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman for his efforts to move the DOE in the right direction. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, in seeking a just and lasting peace in this region, I will be supporting this resolution, because it does recognize a fundamental change in Israeli policy of now withdrawing from at least a portion of the occupied territories, and we should recognize that although this seems an obvious first step, it is difficult in Israel; and we should recognize that accomplishment. But there are two points I want to make. First, should these parties negotiate ultimately some residence in Israel of a number of Palestinians that does not threaten the Jewish character of the Israeli state, this Nation should not discourage that decision by these parties. And, secondly, we should not act as enablers by silence in either party's taking actions that makes peace impossible. We should not enable Palestinians' violence by not being vocal against it, and we should not enable Israeli continued expansion in the West Bank, which is happening today. I stand in unison with my Israeli friends who are speaking out against the continued expansion in the settlements in the West Bank, because it is an impediment to ultimate settlement.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Reclaiming my time, I may note that the people who are responsible for the mistake of not putting enough troops in Iraq to quell the looting that was sure to occur, the people who made the mistakes about assessing the threat level posed by Iraq, the people who did not provide body armor to our soldiers when they went to war without adequate flak jackets, the people who sent our soldiers into the streets of Baghdad in canvas-lined Humvees instead of armored personnel carriers, who ignored the fact that we were going to need to protect our soldiers against these improvised explosive devices, the people who have made all of these mistakes are still the people in charge of our policy in Iraq. Not one person in the civilian hierarchy of the Bush administration who is responsible for these massive foul- ups that have cost hundreds of lives has lost their job or a day's vacation as a result of these foul-ups.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, let me make a suggestion. There might be a reason the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) might have trouble understanding Mr. Wolfowitz.

Mr. INSLEE. Of course, I am referring to the Secretary of Defense, who is the primary architect for this, and Mr. Wolfowitz, who is an architect of this. These are the decisionmakers that should be held accountable for these foul-ups. I hope the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) agrees with me.

Mr. INSLEE. Reclaiming my time, there is an element of this expenditure that is grossly wrong, and that is the most polite sense I can say it. The General Accounting Office, the nonpartisan group that basically looks at the financial system of the country, concludes that the United States misspent, meaning this administration, misspent at least $1 billion in Iraq in the Iraq war to date, and that was as of June 16. They made reference to multiple cases of the Halliburton Corporation misspending millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Let me give you one very small example of how Halliburton Corporation misspent taxpayer money. Halliburton, of course, is the company that got a sole source provider bid; a company that the vice president just recently has been CEO of, they did not send it out to bid to any other corporations, gave a special deal to Halliburton, and look what Halliburton did with your money. Before the war, a Kuwaiti firm had the contract to provide meals to troops at four bases in Kuwait. Just before the fighting started, and this is from the General Accounting Office, not some leftist group saying this, just before the fighting started, the Pentagon turned the job over to Halliburton subsidiary KBR, Kellogg Brown and Root. As part of the switch, the costs went up from $3 a meal to $5 a meal, for the cost, from $3 to $5. So, here is just one small example that happened thousands of times where the American taxpayers got gouged $1 billion, much of which went to the Halliburton company on a sole source contract. If this does not smell like a mackerel in the moonlight, I do not know what does.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I want to make sure the good gentleman from Hawaii can share some wisdom.

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

Mr. INSLEE. Or accepting his explanation, is I suspect the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) does not share Mr. Wolfowitz's belief that it does not matter that this war was started, based and started on a falsehood. I suspect the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) agrees with me that when you look in the eyes of a young widow, as I have, who lost their husband as a result of this multitude of falsehoods by this administration, it matters a whole heck of a lot. And this administration is now trying to demean and belittle the fact that they started a war based on falsehood, and they think that Americans are just going to forget it, and somehow we are supposed to forget the incompetence, the rank incompetence, the multitude of tactical, logistical, strategic mistakes they made time after time, of total ignorance about the cultural situation in Iraq, about the looting we knew was going to happen, and somehow we are supposed to forgive and forget that.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, so he has been saying this over and over again in city and town and ``Meet the Press'' and who knows where else. And what did the bipartisan commission conclude about this key of his whole argument that Saddam Hussein had a working alliance with al Qaeda? They concluded: ``We have examined the allegation that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague on April 9. Based on the evidence available, including investigations by Czech and U.S. authorities, plus detainee reporting, we do not believe that such a meeting'' occurred. So despite the best intelligence of the United States of America, the Vice President is willing to continue to spout something that is false, according to our best intelligence, in order to back up this ideological fixation of invading Iraq. That is why we are in this war, because we have an administration willing to do that.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, if I may, I would like to attempt to answer the question why we are in Iraq rather than Iran, and the answer is because we have an administration who is willing to follow their ideology rather than the evidence. They are willing to say things as long as it is consistent with their ideological beliefs even if it is inconsistent with the facts as given to them by our intelligence agents. Let me give an example. The Vice President now for 2 years has just kept spouting this statement that the reason we should invade Iraq is because there was a meeting, one of the reasons, because there was a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence person in Prague.

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. INSLEE. I have got to add just one more thing before I go to the gentleman from Massachusetts. Another thing the administration did in not finding Osama bin Laden, in not cutting off the head of al Qaeda, I got a letter today, because I was trying to investigate, I asked the Department of Treasury, is it true that the administration 2 days after September 11, allowed a chartered jet airplane to fly around America picking up Osama bin Laden's relatives and flying them out of the country before they were fully interrogated and debriefed about the potential relationship with Osama and al Qaeda and over 100 Saudi citizens where now we know the attack emanated from? They answered, yes, that is true. Our administration, when no one else could fly in America, people were stranded here, had to drive across America to get home from Washington, D.C., but while you had to drive home from Washington, D.C., the President of the United States, the administration, told all the Saudi Arabians, we will let you fly, without even talking to the CIA or the Department of Treasury to find out if they were associated with this. They said, indeed, that was true. I asked them, why is that? They frankly could not give me an answer. That is just one problem we have got. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. INSLEE. Let me suggest, and the gentleman brings up a very important point, it has been called a stop loss order, but it really is a start the draft order. This is a silent draft. These people are being drafted into service they did not sign up for. They signed up for a definite term and they are now being drafted. They happen to be in Iraq right now, but we are already seeing the implications of the policy as the gentleman has addressed. It comes back and again the Dallas Morning News called it the Iraq Trust Gap, this is the President and his neocon colleagues who were telling us that this war would be simple, we would be welcomed with rose petals, our people would be home in a reasonable period of time, it would not stress our military, we only needed 100,000 troops, there would not be massive looting after we had this amount, there would not be casualties after a period of time, the mission was accomplished back in May 2003. All of these things are appropriately creating a trust gap not only for the President, but for the United States.

Mr. INSLEE. And yet the President of the United States just left out that little fact that they were in the part of Iraq that Saddam did not control when he discussed this issue. Now, this omission has led many people to be very concerned, even those who have supported President Bush. I note this editorial in the Dallas Morning News of June 22, 2004. This is a newspaper that supported President Bush's election. In fact, they noted that in this editorial, and they have listened to the administration's response to the 9/11 Commission. They have listened to this sort of excuse-making that has come out of the White House to try to excuse this. But look what the Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that has supported President Bush, said. It said, ``U.S. troops have found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and the 9/11 panel says there was no working partnership between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. President Bush presented both WMD and the al Qaeda-Hussein link as reasons for striking Iraq before it attacks us. ``The President has a credibility gap here, and he needs to address it right away. Vice President Dick Cheney tried but failed miserably. He said, in effect, `we know more than you and you better trust us.' '' And then, I might have to subscribe to the Dallas Morning News, because I think in the next paragraph they hit the nail on the head. ``The country did just that when we went to the war in Iraq, but things aren't working as promised. The administration needs to respond with specifics, not like members of a secret society with keys to the kingdom.'' But the unfortunate truth is there really is nothing the administration can now say to excuse the fact that they gave us false information to start the war. Let me note just one other quote. Vice President Cheney, who is now saying we did not really intend to imply that there was a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq, we did not mean to say that, but what did Vice President Cheney say before the war started? He said on Meet the Press that by attacking Iraq, ``We will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for years, but most especially on 9/11.'' Now, obviously the vice president was trying to create an impression that we were going to be striking back at the people who struck us on September 11. That is the obvious implication of his language. I do not think he was simply trying to point out that Iraq is in the Middle East. I do not think it was a geographic lesson he was trying to give us. He was trying to build support for a war that was based on two huge falsehoods, one falsehood about weapons of mass destruction and another about this alleged working relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Now, there are connections between Iraq and al Qaeda. They both have ``Q'' in their names, but the 9/11 Commission concluded there was no working relationship between these two groups. Let me mention one thing, and I will yield to the gentleman from Ohio. In fact, what the 9/11 Commission, again, a bipartisan commission, chaired by the former New Jersey governor, Republican governor, bipartisan group, what they concluded was that years back, back in 1994, Osama bin Laden had, in fact, asked Iraq for help but had been rejected. Now, that may be a contact, but it is not a basis for a war, and it is most unfortunate now that even today this White House will not come clean about their manifest falsehoods that they gave us. And until they do, we will be here blowing the whistle on these falsehoods.

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.