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THE IMPACT OF CPA DECISIONMAKING ON IRAQ

RECONSTRUCTION

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT

AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

FEBRUARY 6, 2007

Serial No. 110–10

Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html

http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON OVERSISGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California, Chairman

TOM LANTOS, California

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky

BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

BETTY MCCOLLUM, Minnesota

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire

CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut

JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland

PETER WELCH, Vermont

TOM DAVIS, Virginia

DAN BURTON, Indiana

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

DARRELL E. ISSA, California

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California

BILL SALI, Idaho

——— ———

PHIL SCHILIRO, Chief of Staff

PHIL BARNETT, Staff Director

EARLEY GREEN, Chief Clerk

DAVID MARIN, Minority Staff Director

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on February 6, 2007 ......................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Bremer, Ambassador L. Paul, former administrator, Coalition Provisional

Authority; Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., special inspector general for iraq

reconstruction; and David R. Oliver, Jr., former advisor, Iraq Ministry

of Finance and former director of management and budget, Coalition

Provisional Authority ................................................................................... 45

Bowen, Stuart W., Jr., .............................................................................. 71

Bremer, Ambassador L. Paul ................................................................... 45

Oliver, David R., Jr., ................................................................................. 127

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Bowen, Stuart W., Jr., special inspector general for iraq reconstruction,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 74

Braley, Hon. Bruce L., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Iowa, prepared statement of .................................................................... 41

Bremer, Ambassador L. Paul, former administrator, Coalition Provisional

Authority, prepared statement of ................................................................ 50

Davis, Hon. Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State of Virginia, prepared statement of ........................................................................ 14

Higgins, Hon. Brian, a Representative in Congress from the State of

New York, prepared statement of ................................................................ 25

Oliver, David R., Jr., former advisor, Iraq Ministry of Finance and former

director of management and budget, Coalition Provisional Authority,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 128

Sali, Hon. Bill, a Representative in Congress from the State of Idaho,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 28

Sarbanes, Hon. John P., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Maryland, prepared statement of ............................................................ 38

Waxman, Chairman Henry A., a Representative in Congress from the

State of California, prepared statement of ................................................. 5

Yarmuth, Hon. John A., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Kentucky, prepared statement of ............................................................ 31

(1)

THE IMPACT OF CPA DECISIONMAKING ON

IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2007

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM,

Washington, DC.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room 2157,

Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Henry A. Waxman (chairman

of the committee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Waxman, Davis of Virginia, Lantos,

Kanjorski, Maloney, Cummings, Kucinich, Davis of Illinois,

Tierney, Clay, Watson, Lynch, Higgins, Yarmuth, Braley, Norton,

McCollum, Cooper, Van Hollen, Hodes, Murphy, Sarbanes, Welch,

Burton, Shays, McHugh, Mica, Souder, Platts, Duncan, Turner,

Issa, Marchant, Westmoreland, Foxx, Bilbray, and Sali.

Also present: Representative Delahunt.

Staff present: Phil Schiliro, chief of staff; Phil Barnett, staff director and chief counsel; Kristin Amerling, general counsel; Karen

Lightfoot, communications director and senior policy advisor; David

Rapallo, chief investigative counsel; Theodore Chuang, deputy chief

investigative counsel; Jeff Baran and Suzanne Renaud, counsels;

Earley Green, chief clerk; Teresa Coufal, deputy clerk; Caren

Auchman, press assistant; Kerry Gutknecht; Davis Hake; Sam

Buffone; Lauren Belive; Will Ragland; David Marin, minority staff

director; Larry Halloran, minority deputy staff director; Jennifer

Safavian, minority chief counsel for oversight and investigations;

Keith Ausbrook, minority general counsel; Ellen Brown, minority

legislative director and senior policy counsel; A. Brooke Bennett,

John Callender, and Howie Denis, minority counsels; Grace

Washbourne, minority senior professional staff member; Christopher Bright, minority professional staff member; Nick Palarino,

minority senior investigator and policy advisor; Patrick Lyden, minority parliamentarian and member services coordinator; Brian

McNicoll, minority communications director; and Benjamin Chance,

minority clerk.

Chairman WAXMAN. The meeting of the committee will please

come to order.

Today’s hearing launches our committee’s investigation of waste,

fraud and abuse in Federal spending. We will have the hearing

today and a number of other hearings the rest of the week, and it

will be the beginning of a 2-year effort to make sure that we can

watch to protect taxpayers’ money from being wasted through inefficiency or corruption or incompetence.

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This effort isn’t about policy differences, and it is not about partisanship. It is about making sure that Government, which has an

important responsibility, is effective and as efficient as possible.

Our effort is aimed at making sure taxpayer’s dollars aren’t wasted. To do this job right, everything must be on the table and subject to potential scrutiny.

We will need the help of anyone and everyone who has specific

knowledge of waste, fraud and abuse in Government programs. The

committee’s Web site will now have a fraud, waste and abuse tip

line to make it easier for our constituents to give us information

we need. The Web site is www.oversight.house.gov. We will pursue

all credible allegations that are shared with us. Today’s hearing provides us with $12 billion reasons to be concerned about fraud, waste and abuse. In a 13 month period from

May 2003 to June 2004, the Federal Reserve sent nearly $12 billion

in cash, mainly in hundred dollar bills, from the United States to

Iraq. To do that, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York had to

pack 281 million individual bills including more than 107 hundred

dollar bills onto wooden pallets to be shipped to Iraq. The cash

weighed more than 363 tons and was loaded onto C–130 cargo

planes to be flown into Baghdad. The numbers are so large that it

doesn’t seem possible that they are true.

Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war

zone? But that is exactly what our Government did.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction analyzed the cash transfer and concluded that when the

money arrived in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority which

was run by our Government had not established sufficient managerial financial and contractual controls to ensure that the cash was

used in a transparent manner. Even worse, Mr. Bowen concluded

that the Coalition Provisional Authority handed over the money to

the Iraqi ministries ‘‘without assurance the money was properly

used or accounted for.’’

I am releasing a memorandum this morning that describes this

mind-boggling situation in more detail, and I am pleased that Mr.

Bowen and Ambassador Paul Bremer who led the Coalition Provisional Authority are with us today to shed more light on what happened to the $12 billion.

I know Ambassador Bremer has indicated in the past that it is

unrealistic to expect the Government to keep close track of money

sent into war zone, and I know the Inspector General believes the

opposite is true and that strong standards are especially important

if our Government is sending billions of dollars of cash into a chaotic and violent environment.

My concern is that without strong standards, we have no way of

knowing whether the cash that was shipped into the Green Zone

ended up in enemy hands.

Our goal is to assess the Coalition Provisional Authority’s actions, not by some arbitrary international guidelines imposed by

outsiders but by the Authority’s own standards written into their

own regulations. If the Coalition Provisional Authority didn’t follow

its own directives, we want to know why not, and we owe it to the

American people to do everything we can to find out where the $12

billion went.

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We also need to ask questions today about who was hired by the

administration to manage the $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq and

carry out the other responsibilities of the Coalition Provisional Authority. There were extraordinary, disturbing reports last fall that

the CPA was filled with inexperienced and unqualified political cronies. This hearing will give us a chance to probe those allegations

and find out what role incompetence and political cronyism played

in the debacle that Iraq has now become.

Finally, before I turn to Mr. Davis for his opening statement, I

would like to say a word about the empty witness chair. Our original goal for this hearing was to be retrospective and prospective,

looking both backward and forward.

On January 10th, the President announced his new strategy for

Iraq. This included an escalation of 21,000 troops, but it also included a request for another $1.2 billion in taxpayer funds for Iraq

reconstruction.

The next day, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a press

conference and announced with fanfare that the administration’s

new point person for Iraq reconstruction would be Ambassador Tim

Carney. This is what she said about his new role: ‘‘He will coordinate all relevant elements of the Embassy, USAID mission and

IRMO to bring about a smooth transition from U.S. Government

and other external assistance to full Iraqi self-reliance. He will

work closely with MNF–1 to ensure Iraq’s economic transition

plans complement the joint security strategy.’’

Well, when the President asked for another billion dollars in taxpayer funds to be spent in Iraq, Congress has a right, in fact an

obligation, to talk to the official in charge. After all the money we

have seen wasted, we want to know what Ambassador Carney

plans and find out what he has learned from past mistakes. So I

invited Ambassador Carney to testify today. When my staff talked

to Ambassador Carney directly, he was cooperative and said he was

willing to come, but the State Department refused.

Their first excuse was that he had not yet filled out his paperwork. Even though Secretary Rice publicly announced his critical

new position, he apparently could not talk to Congress because he

had not been officially hired. Next the State Department said Ambassador Carney could not come because he did not yet know what

he was going to do in Iraq. This seemed odd especially since the

Secretary had already announced that he was her new point person

on Iraq reconstruction.

Then just last week, we were informed that the Department suddenly decided that Ambassador Carney was needed in Baghdad

right away. Even though he was not officially hired and according

to the State Department had no idea what he was going to do in

Iraq, he was put on a plane to Baghdad this past Friday. The State

Department has now told us that they may make him available to

Congress in 6 months. After all the billions wasted in Iraq, 6

months just isn’t good enough.

So we have an empty chair for Ambassador Carney today, but I

can assure the Secretary of State that the chair won’t be empty for

too long.

4

We are going to have opening statements from the members of

the committee in 2 minutes length with the exception of Mr. Davis

whom I want to recognize at this time.

[The prepared statement of Chairman Henry A. Waxman follows:]

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Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you very much, Mr. Waxman.

This committee has always been about saving taxpayers’ money.

If you look over the record of the last cycle, the GAO reported that

because of the oversight this committee conducted in the last two

Congresses, we saved the taxpayers over $6.5 billion. Saving taxpayers’ money is what this is all about.

Of course, today’s hearing is really focusing on DFI dollars.

These are Development Fund for Iraq dollars which were not taxpayer dollars. These were Iraqi oil revenues.

Most of what we will do today, I think, and tomorrow were first

brought to light in the course of over 19 hearings on Iraq, conducted under this committee’s Republican leadership and reviewed

by other committees, by the Inspector General, by GAO and others.

On the processes leading up to this morning, the majority has

sent mixed signals about the subject of what the hearing was going

to be today. Only late last night at 10:30 were we given the lengthy

memo on CPA cash management. It is old news, but again at the

last minute it is just changing the focus of the hearing. The rules

require that Members receive memorandum 3 calendar days before

the hearing.

Although technically we are correct, Mr. Waxman, we hope that

in the future on these kinds of issues, we can work together and

have a heads-up and be more collaborative as we approach these

issues instead of getting a memo late the evening before.

On the substance, this is a classic example of ready, fire aim

oversight. In the past 10 days, we have received over 80,000 pages

of documents from contractors in response to the committee’s request. Some of those documents undoubtedly would shed light on

the matters that are going to be addressed by our witnesses in today’s hearing, but in rushing to take testimony before anyone has

the opportunity to carefully analyze all of that material, the committee starts with broad conclusions about the effectiveness of current reconstruction programs and supports those judgments only

with a hastily culled and selective body of evidence. Reconstruction

spending in Iraq and Afghanistan merits serious oversight, not a

slap-dash rush to judgment.

The majority continues to equate a lack of exquisite accounting

in Iraq with massive waste. Clearly, there was a leakage in the

early all cash days of occupation and reconstruction. In the early

days, there was no banking system in Iraq. There were no electronic transfers. There was no other way, except cash, to pay. But

limited visibility over payments to Iraqi ministries by itself doesn’t

establish the majority’s alleged $8 billion flood of fraud.

Concerns about Coalition Provisional Authority hiring practices

are based on anecdotes and hearsay, not evidence. The Special Inspector General for Iraq looked at CPA employment practices and

did not find undue political influence.

Real oversight gathers evidence, and then it follows those facts

to conclusions. To help us do just that, beginning today our Republican committee Web site invites whistleblowers and anyone else

with information about waste, abuse or fraud or needed reform to

provide information anonymously or to e-mail us at

www.oversight@mail.house.gov. Whether the subject is Iraq reconVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:21 Aug 15, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00016 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\36545.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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struction or why Sandy Berger was never given a polygraph, we

want to help gather the facts that drive constructive oversight.

To be sure, many of us have been justifiably critical of the way

Iraq reconstruction has been handled. Naive assumptions about

post-invasion Iraq were slow to give way to harsh but obvious realities. It turns out we brought neither the plans nor the personnel

for long term occupation and nation-building from the ground up.

Dissolution of Iraq’s army and security forces and rapid deBa’athification created a vacuum we were not prepared to fill.

But we should not let any discussion of failed means paralyze

our will to achieve honorable ends. The main value in revisiting

past mistakes is to make sure that the right lessons have been

learned and corrective action is put in place. Self-righteous fingerwagging and political scape-goating won’t make Iraq any more secure. It won’t rebuild that ravaged Nation, and it won’t bring the

U.S. troops home any sooner.

Today there are more than 300,000 trained and equipped Iraqi

security forces taking control in the provinces. There is a new emphasis on getting Iraqi businesses up and running and putting

Iraqis back to work. Despite a prohibitive security environment, infrastructure projects are being completed. The administration has

brought back a critique of previous Iraqi reconstruction policy. Ambassador Carney has agreed to coordinate these efforts. We wish

him success and look forward to his coming before our committee.

Ambassador Bremer and the Special Inspector General, Mr.

Bowen, bring extensive experience and expertise to this discussion,

and we are grateful they could be here today.

I want to thank you, Chairman Waxman, for agreeing to our request to invite retired Admiral David Oliver. He worked as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Management and Budget Officer,

and he brings a unique perspective to these important issues.

Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Tom Davis follows:]

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Davis.

I want to point out there may have been some misunderstanding

about the supplemental briefing memo. We did send out a briefing

memo within the required amount of time. This was supplemental

information which we feel we have a right to do. We will try to iron

out these differences for the future.

I do want to report that we seem to have rival tipline Web sites.

Ours for the committee is www.oversight.house.gov. The Republicans, as Mr. Davis announced, have a different one. Feel free to

contact whichever tipline would be of interest to anybody who has

information about waste, fraud and abuse. We will be sharing the

information, I expect.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Absolutely.

Chairman WAXMAN. If you want to reach the committee directly,

it is www.oversight.house.gov.

Without objection, I am now going to recognize the members of

the committee for an opening statement of no more than 2 minutes

and without objection, Representative Delahunt will be permitted

to join us and participate in today’s hearing.

Mr. Lantos.

Mr. LANTOS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for arranging this series

of hearings.

As you know, I was in Iraq just over a week ago with Speaker

Pelosi and other Members of the congressional national security

leadership. What we found was bleak. Progress in reconstruction

has been badly set back by inefficiency, fraud, and neglect.

Each quarter, the Special Inspector General files a report to Congress detailing the revolting revelations of waste and abuse of U.S.

taxpayer funds. While the details still have the power to shock, I

must say that this process is starting to feel like Groundhog Day.

We keep waking up to the same nasty reality. Our efforts at creating a stable, sustainable Iraq were botched from the start through

bad financial management and outright fraud, and we are still paying the price.

Mr. Chairman, I am also deeply troubled by the fact that Iraq’s

neighbors are failing to step up to the plate. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait

and others, whose interest in seeing a stable Iraq is in fact greater

than ours, have kept their wallets in their pockets. They have

made some pledges, but as the Special Inspector General points out

in his latest report, they have delivered virtually nothing. This is

outrageous, as I pointed out to the Kuwaiti leadership last week in

person, especially given the record windfall oil revenues the countries have enjoyed in recent years.

Mr. Chairman, you cannot unwind history nor can you unscramble this omelet, but it is some consolation to have one of its chefs,

Mr. Bremer, testifying before us today. Perhaps he can shed some

light on CPA’s deeply flawed handling of the reconstruction which

appears to have begun on day one.

I look forward to questioning our witnesses, and I want to thank

you again for holding these hearings.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Lantos.

Mr. Shays.

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Mr. SHAYS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for conducting this hearing. This is the 20th hearing. We have had 14 in my National Security Subcommittee and 5 in the full committee.

I have had many trips to Iraq, four outside the umbrella of the

military, and they have taught me many things about this amazing

country, this fertile crescent with two magnificent rivers, well educated people and frankly, oil that rivals Saudi Arabia. There are

some things in our job that transcend politics, and my God, this

has to be one of them.

On a bipartisan basis, we went into Iraq, and I believe on a bipartisan basis, we need to leave Iraq, leaving that country with the

capability to defend itself as an independent nation.

When I ask a Shi’a, are they a Shi’a they say, I am a Shi’a but

I am married to a Sunni. I ask a Sunni, are you a Sunni? They

say, I am a Sunni, sir, but my daughter is a Shi’a.

I ask a Kurd, are you a Kurd? They say, I am a Kurd. But do

you know we are Sunnis? They are Iraqis before they are Shi’as,

Sunnis, and Kurds. They didn’t attack us. We attacked them.

As we perform this open heart surgery, we have people now that

say we must leave before we finish the surgery.

I know this is controversial, but so was the Revolutionary War.

One-third of the American people supported it, one-third opposed

it, and historians tell us one-third didn’t know there was a war or

didn’t give a damn.

In the Civil War, we lost 10,372 individuals every month for 4

years, and for 3 years, President Abraham Lincoln was considered

an imbecile by politicians, businessmen and military personnel,

and it only turned when the war turned better.

Let me just conclude by saying that we have a resolution before

Congress. Critics said we want a new Secretary of State, we want

new leadership in Iraq, and we want a new plan. They have all

three, and critics now are saying basically they are against the new

plan and the status quo. The status quo isn’t the way to proceed.

I look forward to this hearing, and I look forward to many more

to come.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Shays.

Mr. Cummings.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank

you for holding this vitally important hearing to examine the Coalition Provisional Authority management and control of funds for reconstruction in Iraq.

The House Armed Services Committee on which I am a member

has been tasked with entertaining President Bush’s latest budget

request for $481 billion in defense spending. This request represents an 11 percent boost over last year, increasing spending to

levels not seen since the Reagan era. Additionally, the President is

requesting $93.4 billion in emergency supplemental funding for fiscal year 2007 and $141.7 billion for fiscal year 2008. This would

bring the total amount spent in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

to $661 billion, eclipsing in real terms the cost of the Vietnam War.

Now I have said time and time again that I was against this war

from the start. I voted against it. But I have also repeatedly said

that now that we are in Iraq, we cannot leave its people worse off

18

than when we found them. Furthermore, we have an obligation to

provide our troops on the ground with the support that they need.

However, before we can in good faith allocate historic amounts

of taxpayer dollars to this President’s war, I have one question that

remains unanswered. What has the return on our investments

been?

We have already dedicated more than 3,000 American lives and

hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars to this venture,

and our investments have yielded nothing more than a bloody civil

war. As good stewards of taxpayer dollars, Congress has an obligation to ensure that moneys spent are spent as effectively and efficiently as possible.

To the contrary, reports of waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq are

plentiful. Reports reveal that the U.S. Government cannot account

for billions of dollars already distributed to the Coalition Provisional Authority for the purposes of reconstruction in Iraq. Furthermore and finally, nearly $20 billion in Iraqi funds, the money

this President promised would help to pay for the war, cannot be

tracked. This is simply unconscionable. Before we can justify tapping the American treasury for hundreds of billions more, we must

find out what happened to the money that has already been allocated.

With that, I yield back.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Cummings.

Mr. Issa.

Mr. ISSA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for calling

this hearing today.

I might point out that administration did offer Ambassador

Satterfield who presently is the Deputy Chief of Mission in Baghdad. During the covered period, he was in fact the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near East Affairs, and before that he has been

in Lebanon, Damascus, Jeddah and Tunis. In fact, there is no person that would have been more qualified from the administration

to speak on behalf of the ground forward. I truly regret the fact

that he was not allowed to make his presentation and answer questions.

Of course, I am sorry that Ambassador Carney chose to be in a

combat zone rather than be with us here today. What a surprise.

What is the difference, yes.

I might also, for the committee, put into perspective what $12

billion is. It certainly seems like a lot of money when you put it

in hundred dollar bills and put it on forklifts and put into C–130’s,

but I think when you look at a country of more than 15 million people and a period of 15 months, you are really talking about $600

per person per year. I think when the American people look at the

volume of human beings that were without an economy as a result

of the toppling of Saddam, I think they will more accurately look

at less than $1,000 per man, woman and child in that region would

certainly be considered to be a measured amount to be spent.

No doubt there is fraud, abuse and waste. No doubt money ended

up in somebody’s pocket. But I might note for all of us that as we

looked over Katrina, done in our own country within our own

boundaries under a system that we all see used time and time

19

again, we were giving $2,000 debit cards that ended up buying

color TVs at K-Mart.

Although I certainly look forward to the testimony and I have no

doubt that there has been some waste, I also hope that we put this

in perspective. Again, I am sorry Ambassador Satterfield was not

acceptable to the committee.

I yield back.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Issa.

Mr. Satterfield did testify before this committee last fall. We

asked for Mr. Carney because we wanted Mr. Carney. He is the

one who is now going to be in charge. We wanted to know what

his vision was, what he has learned from the past, what his plans

are to be the person in charge of reconstruction in Iraq. We requested the State Department to reconsider their decision and

allow him to be with us, and we hear from other sources, I think

news sources, that he was put on a plane to Iraq. I think it is unfortunate that they are now saying we can’t have him for 6 months.

We ought to have him here, and I hope the State Department will

reconsider their reconsideration.

Mr. Kucinich is next.

Mr. KUCINICH. Thank you very much, Mr. Waxman.

I have been circulating among my colleagues, a 12 point plan to

end the war in Iraq, one element of which is to make sure that

there is a viable reconstruction program because we realize that reconstruction is inevitably linked to reconciliation. The United Nations Security Council in addressing the issue of reconstruction understood that reconstruction was related to the humanitarian needs

of the people of Iraq, and it wasn’t only economic reconstruction.

They also knew that reconstruction related to continued disarmament and the restoration of a civilian administration in Iraq.

Now we see that this program has frustrated any attempts to end

the war, and we see that billions of dollars have not been accounted for.

At some point, the record of this hearing needs to be brought to

the deliberation of Congress whether individuals who hold high office in this country have committed high crimes and misdemeanors

with respect to their misconduct in the administration of billions

of dollars of American people’s tax moneys or of the money that

was raised from the people of Iraq because either way, whoever

was in charge, it was still money that we had control over. Whatever happened to those billions of dollars, whether they got to the

insurgency, whether they were stolen, whether they ended up on

the other side of the world, we don’t know, but because we don’t

know, there has to be accountability. You cannot let billions of dollars be stolen from a Coalition Provisional Authority that was established by this administration without accountability, and it is

up to Congress to enforce that accountability.

So I am glad we are holding these hearings. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Kucinich.

Mr. Mica.

Mr. MICA. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I guess I should thank you for holding this hearing, but I do have

some concerns about the hearing, about first of all a pattern of attempting to discredit the President of the United States, a very efVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:21 Aug 15, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00023 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\36545.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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fective means of making him out to be someone who is untruthful

when in fact the Congress by a very wide margin authorized the

action in Iraq.

I guess this is let the games begin as far as a series of hearings

to try to further embarrass an effort that brought to halt, as the

Prime Minister of Iraq when he came and testified to us said, more

than a million Iraqis perished. We have uncovered over 300,000

mass graves. Here is a picture of some of those that we have uncovered. We brought to halt a regime that committed atrocities far and

beyond anything we have known since probably Adolf Hitler or

Khmer Rouge. But now we have to discredit those who risk their

lives and serve their country to try to reconstruct that Nation and

did so, I think, in very difficult circumstances.

I was asked a little bit about the money and why we paid in

cash, and then I remembered I had tucked in the top of my desk

drawer some of this cash. I just remembered that. But this is all

Iraqi money. It was given to me by soldiers who came back from

Iraq and they said it was worthless. So I got quite a bit of it. I just

brought a few samples here. We basically destroyed the country in

our effort to take over this sadistic regime, and they had no system

of finances, no money, no banks, no ATMs, no one to administer

it. That is why this was no good, and we did what we had to do

using cash.

We couldn’t send in Ernst and Young and other CPAs. We did

send in some folks, who I read about, who stayed mostly in the

Green Zone, but it wouldn’t have mattered where they stayed.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. MICA. Again, this money was useless, and our folks that we

sent tried to do the best they could, and we will hear about that

today.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Mica.

Mr. Tierney.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, oversight is an obligation of this Congress. I

think that all of us understand that besides legislating, our other

largest responsibility is the obligation for oversight. People making

assertions that when we exercise that obligation, we are somehow

harming the President or calling into question U.S. actions actually

conflict with our constitutional responsibilities and they go against

the grain of the standard that the American people set for this

Congress to meet.

The purpose of oversight is to inform better policy going forward.

In order to do that, sometimes we have to look back. We have to

look back and see what problems existed to make sure that they

are not repeated. We have to find out what went right so that we

can replicate that in the future, that we can try to ensure that we

have in place the systems and the processes to effectively and efficiently carry out the policies of this country.

In looking in back in this instance, I am concerned with the apparent lack of planning that went into what one witness here

today, Mr. Bremer, said was the second most significant goal of

this country in Iraq and that was the reconstruction, the putting

in place of an economy and an infrastructure for Iraqis so that they

21

in fact would be able to support an eventual government and support what the United States was doing there. Unfortunately, what

we are going to find out today was that there was too little planning that went into that effect, that we had people operating and

spending money in this very important process that were unqualified, that were not vetted, and in the end it caused great damage

to our policy and to the situation in which we find ourselves.

There is a huge difference between having no accountability and

having accountability in the extreme. It is no excuse that we

couldn’t have an accountability process akin to that in the United

States, to say that all we could was nothing. I think today we

should explore what could have been done to make sure that going

forward we can hope that Ambassador Carney is going to put in

place those policies, and we will have to wait for another day to

make sure that in fact that is the case.

Now, Mr. Chairman, I thank you for having these hearings, and

I would hope they become bipartisan in nature. I look forward to

the information that we will glean from today’s witnesses. Thank

you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

The Chair now recognizes Mr. Duncan.

Mr. DUNCAN. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Our former majority leader, Dick Armey said in an interview

with the McClatchy newspapers just yesterday, he said he deeply

regretted the decision to go to war in Iraq. He said, ‘‘Had I been

more true to myself and the principles I believed in at the time,

I would have openly opposed the whole adventure vocally and aggressively.’’

Chris Matthews, on election night, said, ‘‘The decision to go to

war in Iraq was not a conservative decision historically. It asked

Republicans ’to behave like a different people than they intrinsically are.’ ’’

The reason I mention those quotes, conservative Republicans

have traditionally been the biggest opponents, the biggest critics of

Federal waste, fraud and abuse. Conservative Republicans should

certainly feel no obligation to defend waste just because it has occurred in Iraq.

Ivan Nealon in the January 15th American Conservative Magazine said, ‘‘Many conservatives who regularly gripe about the Federal Government’s ineffective and inefficient use of taxpayer dollars

give the Pentagon a free ride on its profligate spending habits and

when troops are engaged in combat overseas, the general public is

wary of questioning even massive military expenditures.’’ He says

this free ride should end.

Conservatives have traditionally been the biggest opponents to

interventionist foreign policies and nation-building. We need a return to the more humble foreign policy that President Bush advocated in his campaign in 2000.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Duncan.

Mr. Clay.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member

Davis for holding today’s hearing.

22

After President Bush reneged on his pledge to spend Iraqis’

money wisely, it is vital that our committee investigate the massive

failure to properly manage the Development Fund for Iraq. Iraqi

citizens should have reaped the full benefit of billions of dollars

provided by their nation’s resources. Instead, they had to watch

from the sidelines as lax oversight from the CPA allowed funds

meant for their humanitarian needs to be improperly used. It is inexcusable that nearly $9 billion Iraqi dollars have not

been accounted for, yet yesterday the President had the audacity

to send Congress a budget plan that requests an extra $245 billion

for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including more than $1.8 billion for programs to strengthen democracy in Iraq. If this administration could not accomplish these goals with Iraqi money, how can

they be trusted to be good stewards over American taxpayer dollars?

Where will all this money go? Will it go toward overpaying more

American contractors?

While I commend Ambassador Bremer for his service to our

country through his work in Iraq, it is obvious that the work of the

CPA made a solid foundation for waste and fraud with its lack of

transparency and inability to combat corruption. Billions have been

wasted with no real progress. The CPA’s failure to provide the necessary security to protect Iraq assets undermined all future efforts

to reconstruct Iraq.

I welcome our witnesses and commend Mr. Bowen for identifying

these inefficiencies.

I yield back and ask that my statement be included in the record.

Chairman WAXMAN. Without objection, that will be the order.

Thank you very much.

Chairman WAXMAN. Mr. Souder.

Mr. SOUDER. Good morning, it is still required to be a Monday

morning quarterback, but it is not comparable in any way to being

an actual Super Bowl quarterback.

Those who were in top decisionmaking positions in Iraq in those

early days when there was no government, no currency, no police

forces, no functioning anything had to make rapid-fire constant decisions with minimal information. Many of those decisions were

wrong. I hope these hearings will carefully and calmly study the

good and bad decisions to learn for the future.

I hope these hearings will not become a self-righteous and arrogant display of comfortable Monday morning Bush-bashing.

Unproven, politically charged words like political cronyism and implied impeachment for high crimes, both already used this morning, are not helpful.

I hope this is real oversight and not just political grandstanding.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman yields back the balance of

his time.

The Chair now recognizes Ms. Watson.

Ms. WATSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this oversight hearing. You are never wrong to seek the truth.

As we are deeply engaged in a National effort to bring democracy

to Iraq, I and many of my colleagues continue to question the

methods and presumptions that took us to Iraq and now there for

over 3 years of occupation. But all of us here are united in our deVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:21 Aug 15, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00026 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\36545.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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sire to see democracy take hold in Iraq and to see Iraqis finally

control their own destiny. Unfortunately, Mr. Chairman, our own

actions have hobbled this effort. The foundations of democracy are

transparency and accountability, yet in Iraq we have only shown

the Iraqis how not to build their foundations. Our contracts and

our reconstruction plans for Iraq are opaque with no-bids and costplus contracts being the norm.

The CPA, while you were Ambassador, Mr. Bremer, managed to

misplace $9 billion. That is $9 billion that could be used for homeland security and to address Katrina. The U.S. Government officials in charge have never been held accountable.

Mr. Chairman, these are terrible examples for the fledgling Iraqi

Government and to a people only now learning to be citizens instead of subjects. I don’t believe there is a military solution in Iraq.

There is only a diplomatic and political solution, and it starts with

rectifying our failures and setting the right example of transparency and accountability to a people who have known too little

of either. This committee can help fix this damage, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to fix it.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

Mr. Westmoreland.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

This week, this committee will hold a series of hearings with the

ultimate goal of uncovering waste, fraud and abuse. However, if

the majority is so concerned with Government waste, fraud and

abuse, it may want to look at its own calendar. I believe this is our

second hearing in this first month of Congress, yet several of the

only 8 bills passed in the first 32 days of the 110th Congress were

assigned to this committee yet no subcommittee or full committee

hearing, no markup, no regular order, no 5 day work week.

The hearing that will be held here today and tomorrow have

issues that have been discussed at length by this committee. Under

Republican leadership, issues such as defense contracting and reconstruction spending were brought to the forefront 19 times in

this committee alone without political motives.

The Coalition Provisional Authority’s mission evolved rapidly in

a very hostile environment. We all recognize that the CPA’s initial

system for distributing funds was not perfect. However, it is impractical to expect a Wall Street approach to a war zone problem.

Today, the systems in place are working in a much more acceptable manner. The Iraqi security forces are growing in size and

strength and are taking on a greater role in securing their own

land. The private sector of Iraq is becoming more stable with the

help of local businesses and much needed infrastructure being completed.

I want to welcome this very distinguished panel, and I want to

thank you for your willingness to serve this country in a very hostile environment, and I look forward to your testimony.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back the balance of my time.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

The Chair now recognizes Mr. Higgins for 2 minutes.

Mr. HIGGINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

24

I will submit my opening statement for the record and yield back

the remainder of my time. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Brian Higgins follows:]

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Higgins.

Mr. Lynch.

Mr. LYNCH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank the

ranking member for his help as well. I want to thank the panelists

for your willingness to come before this committee and to help us

with our work.

Paragraph 14 of the U.N. Security Council resolution directed

that the Development Fund for Iraq be used in a transparent manner for the benefit of the Iraqi people. Unfortunately, our claims,

at least my colleagues’ claims that we did the best we could, those

claims are not borne out by the facts.

The truth of the matter is, and a lot of this has been presented

by the Special Inspector General Bowen in his report, demonstrates

that the most basic safeguards for the 19 billion that we were

asked to be custodians of on behalf of the Iraqi people—this is Iraqi

money—we did not handle this in a manner that was transparent.

We did not handle this money in a manner that was responsible

or the way we would hope that our own money and our own taxpayer money would be handled.

When we talk to the contractors on the ground there when they

were getting paid at the end of CPA’s existence when the interim

Iraqi Government was about to be sworn in and taking control, the

only instructions they were given with respect to this money was

to ‘‘bring a big bag.’’ A lot of this money was handed out in cash

out of the back of pickup trucks under the direction of the U.N. Security Council, we were supposed to hire certain accountants and

to put safeguards in place. That was never done. As a result, it appears that $12 billion was handed out in cash, and there was no

one until this year put in charge of the Iraq reconstruction efforts.

This is greatly distressing. I am getting questions from the Iraqi

leadership now on my several visits to Iraq about how this could

possibly happen. We have been hurt. Our credibility as a country

has been hurt. The fact that the American people had to step up

and replace this money with their own taxpayer money is also a

disaster.

Just to rebut my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, we did

not do the best we could. We did not do the best we could under

difficult circumstances. We failed in this process greatly, and it is

the effort of this committee to find out why.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Lynch.

Mr. Sali.

Mr. SALI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Our Nation has devoted billions of dollars to our efforts in Iraq,

both for expenses of the war and also the reconstruction of the

Iraqi economy. While much progress has been made, progress can

be no excuse for fraud or waste. Congress must fulfil its constitutional duty of oversight to ensure that taxpayers’ money is not

squandered and more importantly that our service men and women

get the resources that they need.

I note that cost overruns during a time of war are as old as the

Republic. This does not justify financial mismanagement. However,

it does underscore the fact that the issues before this committee

are not unique. For example, Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War,

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Simon Cameron, was notoriously corrupt. As one historian has

written, ‘‘Cameron’s corruption was so notorious that Congressman

Thaddeus Stevens, when discussing Cameron’s honesty with Lincoln, told Lincoln, I don’t think that he would steal a red hot stove.

When Cameron demanded Stevens retract his statement, Stevens

told Lincoln, I believe I told you he would not steal a red hot stove.

I will now take that back.’’

Sixty years ago, the Truman Commission found huge quantities

of money going to waste or worse in FDR’s administration of World

War II. By these examples, we are compelled that even if troubling

and disgraceful things come to light this week, we cannot let our

work devolve into partisan finger-pointing.

Finally, let us remember that Congress’ own record on matters

of financial management should keep us from pounding the ethical

pulpit too stridently. One survey shows that the majority of Americans believe that more than half of all Federal spending is wasteful. For this distinguished committee and indeed all of Congress,

that speaks directly and shamefully to the stewardship of the Nation’s budget.

Our constituents and all Americans deserve an honest accounting of spending surrounding the conflict in Iraq. That is not in dispute. Where there has been incompetence or malfeasance, it needs

to be revealed and more appropriately prosecuted. So let us proceed

not with an agenda of retribution but rather the commitment to

public integrity, honest inquiry and that often elusive but always

needed quality of the truth, and let us apply only the same standard to this administration’s stewardship of Iraq’s reconstruction as

we do to our own work here on Capitol Hill.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Bill Sali follows:]

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29

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Sali.

Mr. Yarmuth.

Mr. YARMUTH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you

for demonstrating the leadership to hold this hearing and to schedule it promptly.

I also want to thank Ambassador Bremer, Mr. Bowen, and Mr.

Oliver to joining us today as we examine the impact of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s management and/or mismanagement of

the Iraqi reconstruction.

Getting to the bottom of what appears to be egregious and consistent negligence as quickly as possible is, without question, in the

best interest of this country. I say that, Mr. Chairman, not because

I am anxious to point fingers or place blame but because I do believe the American people have a right to know, to demand a high

level of competence from their Government and I think our troops

deserve to know what happens to funding that could have been

used to create more stable conditions. The young men and women

in Iraq courageously fighting in the name of America must be assured that their Government is working with them. The Iraqi people who were told they were liberated should not have to watch

their future squandered. While our President escalates this war

against the will of the country, we need to at least show our constituents that we know what we are doing.

This hearing, Mr. Chairman, confronts the most pressing issue

of our time. I am proud to be a part of this work, and I look forward to shedding some light on past mistakes to prevent future calamity. Thank you for holding the hearings.

I yield back.

[The prepared statement of Hon. John A. Yarmuth follows:]

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

Mr. Marchant. He is not here.

Mr. Turner.

Mr. TURNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I think it is important that this hearing is being held, and I

think it is also important that people have noted that this committee under Chairman Davis’ leadership had held 20 previous hearings on the issue of Iraqi reconstruction and oversight.

One thing that is clear in looking at all of the written testimony

and the issue that we have before us is that this does not meet our

American standards of what we expect for the conduct of an American-led operation.

Now I was not here when this Congress voted to provide authority to go into Iraq. In fact, over 70 members of the Republican conference were not here. I have, however, been here to support this

effort and to support the men and women in uniform who are

there, as have many people. I have traveled to Iraq twice, and I

have traveled to Afghanistan twice. What troubles me is not our efforts to undertake review of where things have been done inappropriately or improperly as that it is always expanded into areas that

I think undermine our ongoing effort and the morale of our men

and women who are there.

Now it is clear from the report that we have in front of us that

this does not meet our standards. It says the Coalition Provisional

Authority approach to managing development funds for Iraq may

have been sufficient if the Coalition Provisional Authority had

some assurance that the Iraqi ministries had controls in place to

effectively manage the disbursement of funds. Clearly, it has resulted in an impact on our being able to achieve our goals, on our

reputation and on the Iraqi people. That does not meet the American standards. However, that is not an issue where we should go

all the way to the extent of making statements that go to weaken

America or to weaken our efforts and to support our men and

women in an ongoing conflict.

It is important that we have this oversight. It is important that

we find out what occurred and how we should improve it and the

sources of those problems, some of which appear to be the qualifications of those who were in charge and some of those appear to be

the processes that were in place. But this is not the place to continue to try to undermine what is an ongoing conflict with our men

and women in uniform today whose families are watching and who

are concerned for their safety. We should be committed to the ongoing processes that they meet American standards. We should not

undermine our own country.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Ms. McCollum.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, in March of this year, American

troops and Iraqi citizens will start year five of this deadly war of

choice. Iraq has devolved far beyond invasion, occupation and even

civil war. It is now a horrific cauldron of death perpetrated by insurgents, militias, death squads and terrorists. America’s troops

and innocent Iraqis are trapped in the middle.

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Today, we will examine the CPA’s contribution to the incompetence, deception and negligence that are the hallmark of President Bush’s Iraq policy. In the Iraqi war zone, some $38 billion

U.S. taxpayer dollars has been appropriated, and much of it was

spent on so-called reconstruction. The very concept of reconstruction in a war zone itself is an oxymoron. In addition to the funds

Congress approved, over $20 billion of Iraqi funds were spent by

the CPA, including $8 billion that cannot be accounted for. What have been the consequences for U.S. troops of dumping $8

billion into Iraq’s deadly stew of insurgents, terrorists and militias?

Did anyone, our intelligence agencies, State and Defense Departments, consider this a risky or dangerous idea?

To me, it is beyond comprehension, but it now appears possible

that some of the CPA’s unaccounted for cash eventually found its

way into the hands of insurgents, militias or terrorists, possibly

funding future attacks against our own troops.

Mr. Chairman, this Congress will not step aside. We will not abdicate our responsibilities for oversight. There will be no more rubber-stamp appeasement of a President in the name of political loyalty. Nearly 3,100 Americans have sacrificed their lives in Iraq.

Over 20,000 more have sacrificed their bodies. Last year, 34,000 innocent Iraqis died violent deaths. Nearly 100 civilians are killed

every single day of the year.

Mr. Chairman, thank you for providing this committee, the opportunity to ask the tough questions because the American people

and our troops deserve the answers.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentlelady’s time has expired.

Mr. McHugh.

Mr. MCHUGH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The previous speaker mentioned trying to appease President

Bush. We have to be very careful when we have these types of

hearings, that we won’t appear to be appeasing those who would

do us in, and that is why I think these hearings are important so

that it is very clear that the American people stand squarely behind our troops and what their goals are.

I have had an opportunity to visit Baghdad. I met with Mr.

Bremer when I was over there. You know he had an extremely difficult job. In that kind of a climate that he was in, it is inconceivable to me that the things that he got accomplished could have

been accomplished with perfection. Mistakes were made. There is

no question about that. But I think under the circumstances, the

job that he did and his compatriots did over there was good. Now

if we find shortcomings in these hearings that can make sure that

these things don’t happen in the future, great, but mistakes are always made when you are in a conflict.

I would like to remind my colleagues that George Washington,

his contemporary generals wanted him removed from power because he hadn’t won any battles. It wasn’t until he crossed the

Delaware and attacked the Hessians at Trenton on Christmas

morning that the thing started turning around and he became the

father of our country. People don’t remember that.

Abraham Lincoln’s first general was George McClellan. McClellan wouldn’t fight, and so Lincoln replaced him. McClellan was

34

running against him for reelection and because the war was going

so badly and everybody said it was terrible, it was a sure thing

Lincoln was going to be defeated until things turned around. Grant

took Richmond, and other things took place. Then Lincoln was popular, and he went back up, and he was reelected President.

Every single war that you have that goes on for any period of

time, the President, the administration in power is going to be

criticized because people tire of war, but we must remember history and that war is hell. The people that are conducting it are

really going to be the ones that bear the brunt of that, either good

or bad. Sometimes when you are going through this, you just have

to live it out. You have to stick it out.

We are in a war against terrorists, a worldwide war, and in my

opinion it is one that we must win.

Finding fault and finding things we should correct is fine, but to

just have a blame meeting isn’t, in my opinion, constructive.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. Van Hollen.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for

holding these hearings and conducting this oversight which I think

is absolutely essential in order to both assure greater accountability but also to learn the lessons of the past we move forward in

Iraq. I do believe that if this Congress as a whole had done a better

job of oversight over the past many years, we might have avoided

some of the problems and mistakes that we have encountered.

The situation, as we know, is not getting better. We just had a

national intelligence estimate that represents the consensus of the

intelligence agencies that the situation is dire and deteriorating.

Therefore, I think it is particularly of concern the Bush administration appears to continue to resist the notion of allowing this Congress to do its oversight job by not allowing Tim Carney to testify

before this committee.

I just want to say, Mr. Chairman, I think if you look at the

record, we can understand why they didn’t want him here today.

He went to Baghdad in April 2003. He left 2 months later, disgusted and disillusioned, according to a Washington Post story of

January 14, 2007. He believed that the U.S. occupation administration in Iraq, the CPA, placed ideology over pragmatism. He was

particularly concerned with the proposals for de-Ba’athification and

issues regarding what he believed inadequate attention to repairing Iraqi infrastructure.

As we know, he was recently tapped to be sent back to Iraq, an

admission, I think, by the administration that many of the earlier

decisions taken were wrong. So it seems to me it would have been

very beneficial for the committee to have him here today to understand his original concerns back in 2003 and learn from him what

he expects to do differently going forward.

Again, it is a sign that this administration is not taking this

Congress seriously with respect to our job in oversight. They are

thumbing their nose at the Congress. They got used to a blank

check, and they still want a blank check.

I hope, Mr. Chairman, that we will persist in ensuring that we

receive his testimony. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Van Hollen.

35

Mr. Bilbray.

Mr. BILBRAY. Yes, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I would like to

thank my California colleague, the chairman, for holding this hearing.

I think it is quite appropriate we investigate in depth the use of

the funds from the Development Fund for Iraq, and it is quite appropriate because this is the successor to the notorious U.N. Oil for

Food program, one of the most corrupt programs that I can remember and I think any of us would admit not only didn’t do the job

and not only wasted funds but actually financed to a large degree

exactly the opposite of what was intended. So I think it is appropriate we hold this and see it in the perspective of where we have

been, what was being done back in the nineties when I was previously serving in the House and how it evolved into where we are

today.

I would like to just remind my colleagues the great problem with

this program and its failure is not in the waste of money and is

not in the expenditure and not even in the corruption if the corruption is there. The greatest damage done here, ladies and gentlemen, is to the perception to the world and the people in this part

of the world that maybe Americans can’t do everything that they

set their heart out to do.

I don’t know how many of you spend very much time outside of

this country, but one of the perceptions that helped us win the cold

war was the Soviet Bloc really did come to the conclusion that

Americans do whatever they set their mind to do. So why call their

bluff and try to fight them. Let us work with them.

That perception has been destroyed in the Middle East because

we did not get the electricity on, the water on, the sewer running.

We did not get the infrastructure in, and we did not have the ability either for fault or by reality to do what they thought we could

always do because Americans can do anything.

I would just ask to remind us that we do have a very high standard and perception around the world. That standard might have

been hurt severely by this war, but I think we also have to remember that we will never be able to raise that standard back up unless we stop being quick to judge and tear down and look at the

fact that the rest of the world doesn’t see you as Democrats, us as

Republicans. They see all of us as Americans, and we will be

judged on our success.

So let us use this hearing to try to build on that success and get

back the feeling in America and send it to the rest of the world

that Americans can do anything we want to do if we pull together.

I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Bilbray.

Mr. Hodes.

Mr. HODES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing

on the impact of CPA decisionmaking on Iraq reconstruction. I also

thank the ranking member.

I look forward to hearing from Mr. Bremer and the rest of the

witnesses.

From the reading I have done and the course of events we have

experienced, we have a situation in Iraq that is devolved into chaos

and bloodshed which is a cancer on the body politic. It seems reaVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:21 Aug 15, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00039 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\36545.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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sonable to conclude that the failure of the administration to conduct appropriate post-conflict reconstruction and management contributed significantly to the chaos and disaster we are experiencing.

There was a short window following the bombing and invasion in

which we had to demonstrate that we could restore basic services,

preserve existing institutions, create new ones and set the proper

course for success in Iraq. It was up to American officials in charge

to plan and execute a reconstruction strategy. At the very least, the

American and Iraqi people deserved people experienced in post-conflict reconstruction and management, people with good knowledge

about Iraq, its diverse people, its history and its culture. Instead,

it appears that arrogance and incompetence were the hallmarks of

attitudes and standards.

I am curious about what it was that Mr. Bremer, a man who had

never been to Iraq, never led reconstruction efforts, could have

been put in charge of the most important civil reconstruction program since the Marshall Plan. I want to know why half of the CPA

staff had never worked outside the United States and had to get

their first passport in order to travel to Iraq. I am curious to know

why senior civil servants from agencies such as the Treasury, Energy and Commerce Departments were passed over in favor of recent college graduates with no experience in financial management,

and they were put in charge of Iraq’s $13 billion budget. It is critical that we get answers to these questions and those surrounding

the disbursal of Iraqi money. The President has just asked us for another $3.5 billion for Iraq

reconstruction. How much more do the American people and the

Iraqi people have to pay in dollars and in lives before the cycle of

incompetence, corruption and cronyism ends?

If we are to achieve security and stability in Iraq, we need to finally learn from past mistakes and engage in an honest, transparent and efficient reconstruction program.

I appreciate the opportunity to have this hearing. I look forward

to hearing from the witnesses so we can get some answers that

may help us bring some stability to Iraq.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Hodes.

Mr. Murphy.

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Occasionally, you hear from Members of this Congress and members of this administration that those that might question or investigate the premises and conduct of this war somehow don’t support

the brave men and women that are over there. Let me just share

a story from my district that I think can be told 1,000 times over

throughout this country.

I knocked on the door of a woman, during the campaign, whose

son is going back for his second tour of duty in Iraq. He has two

young kids. Though he personally opposes the war as does his family, he feels that it is his duty to not only his country but his fellow

soldiers to be there and to support those efforts. What bothers her

the most and in fact bothers the family the most is not just that

we went into this war upon false premises but that once there, our

military and our occupational infrastructure so badly mismanaged

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the mission of occupation and reconstruction, that this country,

Iraq, plunged into an unnecessary chaos that frankly is going to

put her son in even graver jeopardy than he otherwise would have

been.

I don’t know if there is any answer to that woman or the thousands who ask those same questions around this country. With billions in unaccounted for cash-flowing through the CPA, it is hard

to imagine that there is a satisfactory answer. But it is our duty

to those families and to those brave men and women that are there

to ask the questions that we are asking today, and I thank the

chairman for holding this hearing.

Mr. Bremer, I remember reading your comments to the press

when you said that we never had enough troops on the ground

from the start, and I was frankly impressed by your courage to

speak so candidly about an administration that too often treats its

critics like its enemies. I hope you display the same type of candor

today, and I look forward to your testimony and to the testimony

of this panel.

I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Murphy.

Mr. Sarbanes.

Mr. SARBANES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing today.

I am pleased that we are asking the tough questions about the

administration’s planning and prosecution of the war and the concurrent effort to rebuild Iraq. The climate created when ideological

arrogance substitutes for sound and careful analysis is one that

nurtures incompetence and usually leads to disastrous results.

The evidence is overwhelming that the administration’s plan to

reconstruct and establish governance in post-Saddam Iraq was rife

with faulty logic and bad assumptions. Execution of the plan exposed our soldiers to increased risk and has resulted in the most

tragic consequence, unnecessary loss of human life. The financial

toll and impact on America’s reputation abroad has also been enormous.

This administration’s decisionmaking process in Iraq and as a

general matter has all too often relied on the smallest group of insular advisors, ignoring military and foreign policy experts if their

advice runs contrary to a prejudiced political ideology. Excluding

dissent may result in a unified message but very often leads to

poor decisions based on flawed information. The consequences of

this can be seen every day in the continued instability and violence

in Iraq.

Mr. Chairman, as America’s civilian liberators descended upon

Baghdad, something went terribly wrong. There was a vacuum of

order and careful planning and sound judgment. The hearing today

is to understand where the failures occurred, to demand accountability and to ensure that going forward these same mistakes are

not repeated.

I thank you for holding today’s hearing. I look forward to hearing

from the panel.

[The prepared statement of Hon. John P. Sarbanes follows:]

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Sarbanes.

Mr. Welch.

Mr. WELCH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

This hearing is really focusing responsibility where it belongs,

and that is on civilian leadership. The fact of the matter is that our

military has done its job. When they were sent to war by the President, the President wanted them to topple Saddam, they did;

search for weapons of mass destruction, they reported back honestly, they didn’t exist; and to allow Iraq to have Democratic elections and they have had three.

What has never been done is for the civilian leadership to do

what it is the responsibility of that civilian leadership to do, and

that is to have a plan, a realistic mission, one that is appropriate

for a military and requires the people of America to engage in the

effort that is defined. The President now is talking about political

stability in Iraq. What we know is that there never, ever was a

plan.

We have Mr. Bremer and others who are here. The questions will

have to do with waste, fraud and abuse, decisions to disband the

Baathist Army and so on. But the reality is, and we all know this,

the people that were sent to Iraq went without a plan. They had

to wing it. They made decisions on the fly, so much so that they

literally were handing out tons of cash from the backs of pickup

trucks.

The accountability that the American people deserve should focus

where it belongs, and that is on the civilian leadership that from

the moment that the invasion began never had a plan for the postfall of Saddam efforts that would be required to stabilize Iraq.

Mr. Chairman, I thank you for convening these hearings to allow

us to have a long overdue inquiry into the civilian mismanagement

of this war.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Welch.

Mr. Braley.

Mr. BRALEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member

Davis.

As we begin these important hearings, it is important to remember that in 2005, Congress expressed in clear terms in the National

Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2006 that calendar year

2006 should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty with Iraqi security forces taking the lead for the security

of a free and sovereign Iraq, thereby creating the conditions for the

phased redeployment of U.S. forces in Iraq.

2006 has come and gone. The Iraqi security forces are not taking

the lead for the security of a free and sovereign Iraq, and instead

of progressing toward a phased redeployment, the President has escalated our troop levels in Iraq.

Like Congress, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction [SIGIR] considered 2006 to be a ‘‘Year of Transition.’’ Yet, the

SIGIR recently released review of that ‘‘Year of Transition’’ highlights grave areas of concern for the Reconstruction of Iraq: In

2006, Iraq crude oil production continued to lag significantly below

targets. In 2006, demands for electricity greatly exceeded capacity.

The capacity of Iraq’s ministries to execute their budget remains

weak. By August 2006, the Government of Iraq had executed only

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43 percent of its budget. Despite billions of dollars in investments

funded by U.S. taxpayers, the Government of Iraq has been unable

to protect its infrastructure, particularly in the areas of electricity

and oil pipelines. Finally, the security situation continues to deteriorate, and the effectiveness of the Iraqi Security Forces remains

‘‘a significant concern.’’

We are here today to examine how we got to this point and discuss lessons learned from our past mistakes and successes. A senior Department of Defense official has stated: The U.S. Government

was not systemically structured to execute overseas reconstruction

and stabilization programs when planning for managing post-war

Iraq.

We are here to find out why and make sure that our future planning for Iraq does not suffer from similar limitations.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Bruce L. Braley follows:]

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Braley.

Mr. Davis.

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank you for holding this hearing, and I am certain

that the American people will thank you also because there is

much too little known about what the needs are, what has happened in Iraq and have we spent our money and used our resources

as wisely, as broadly, as prudently as possible. I am sure that this

hearing will shed some light on these questions, and I want to

thank you for the opportunity to raise them, and I look forward to

the testimony of the witnesses.

I yield back.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Davis.

Mrs. Maloney.

Mrs. MALONEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and ranking member

for having this hearing.

In January 2005, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction issued a report stating that more than $8.8 billion was

unaccounted for. This will be the first hearing that will go into

depth to try to find some answers as to what happened to $8.8 billion. It is Iraqi money, but I would say that if we had been better

stewards of the Iraqi money, then we would have earned their

trust and support and we would not be spending so much of the

American taxpayers’ money. It is astonishing the reports that we

have read, the total lack of standards for the handling of billions

and billions of dollars.

My question today to the Special Inspector General Bowen is:

Was there any accountability for the $20 billion in funds used by

the CPA? There are allegations of last minute CPA spending

sprees, allegations that there was no physical security for the cash,

allegations that there was a total indifference to any accountability

and transparency. To me, it is astonishing that we could have $8.8

billion that is not accounted for.

I hope that Chairman Waxman lives up to his reputation of not

stopping until you get the answers as to what happened.

I would just like to conclude that as we speak and hold this

meeting, the President is now asking the country and the Congress

to support his request for an additional 21,000 troops and billions

and billions more in new funds for the war. I would like to hear

if the administration has learned any lessons from the last 4 years,

and I would like to know what accountability, oversight and management has been put in place to manage the dollars of America.

We should manage the dollars of Iraq just as prudently as we

would our own, and I would venture that if we had done a better

job, we would be in a better position today.

I look forward to all of your testimonies, and I would like to

learn as to what happened to these billions of dollars that were intended to help Iraq rebuild.

Thank you. I yield back.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mrs. Maloney.

Mr. Delahunt.

Mr. DELAHUNT. No questions.

Chairman WAXMAN. We now come to the testimony of our witnesses, and I would like to introduce our distinguished panel.

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We are pleased to have Ambassador Paul Bremer who was the

Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from

May 2003 to June 2004. He previously served as Ambassador to

the Netherlands and Ambassador at Large on Counterterrorism.

He has not testified before Congress since he left Baghdad in 2004,

and the committee appreciates his willingness to be here today and

to shed some light on some of the questions that we have for him.

Mr. Stuart Bowen is the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. He has served in that position since January 2004.

His office oversees obligations and expenditures for reconstruction

and rehabilitation activities in Iraq. Mr. Bowen has issued more

than 80 audits and other reports, and his office has more than 70

open investigations including two dozen under investigation by the

Department of Justice.

David Oliver was the Budget Director for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq for 6 months in 2003. Previously, Mr. Oliver served as a Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy and as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. Mr.

Oliver is currently the Chief Executive Officer of EADS, North

America Defense.

It is our privilege to have all of you here. It is customary in this

committee to swear in all witnesses, and I would like to ask you

to stand and take an oath.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Chairman WAXMAN. The record will reflect that each of the witnesses answered in the affirmative.

Your prepared statements will be in the record in their entirety.

I want to begin with Ambassador Bremer.

STATEMENTS OF AMBASSADOR L. PAUL BREMER, FORMER

ADMINISTRATOR, COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY;

STUART W. BOWEN, JR., SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL FOR

IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION; AND DAVID R. OLIVER, JR.,

FORMER ADVISOR, IRAQ MINISTRY OF FINANCE AND

FORMER DIRECTOR OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET, COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY

STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR L. PAUL BREMER

Mr. BREMER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to

meet with the committee.

I appear on my behalf but also on behalf of the thousands and

men and women who served with the CPA. They were all volunteers who left their families and risked their lives to work in Iraq

under difficult and dangerous conditions.

I also want to pay tribute to the courage of the men and women

in our Armed Forces, more than 3,000 of whom, as we have heard

this morning, have given their lives in Iraq. We Americans and the

Iraqi people are in their debt.

Mr. Chairman, let me say at the outset that I understand and

share the frustration Americans and members of this committee

feel about the violence we see every day in Iraq. It has certainly

proven to be a much more difficult task than we anticipated.

Let me begin by noting that the subject of today’s hearing is the

CPA’s use and accounting for funds which belong to the Iraqi peoVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:21 Aug 15, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00049 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\36545.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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ple held in the so-called Development Fund of Iraq [DFI]. These

are not appropriated American funds available for use in the

United States. They were Iraqi funds. Despite the chaotic situation

we found on the ground in Iraq, Mr. Chairman, I believe the CPA

discharged its responsibilities to manage these Iraqi funds on behalf of the Iraqi people.

Now I acknowledge that I made mistakes and that with the benefit of hindsight I would have made some decisions differently, but

on the whole I think we made great progress under some of the

most difficult conditions imaginable including putting Iraq on the

path to democracy. As you consider the actions of the CPA, I respectfully request that you keep this in mind. I am proud of what

we achieved, and I hope that after today’s hearing, Members will

understand what we faced and what we accomplished.

It is difficult, Mr. Chairman, to give a full picture of the desperate situation in Iraq in May 2003. The country was in chaos socially, politically and economically. The deep crisis had been

brought about not by war, not by sanctions but by decades long corruption and incompetence of the Saddam regime. Among many

shocking data, for example, during the 1990’s, Saddam Hussein cut

health care spending by 90 percent, 9–0 percent. No new hospitals

had been built for 20 years. Half of the country’s public health clinics were closed.

Even before the war, unemployment was running at 50 percent.

Iraq’s primitive banking system was shut down. The banks had no

system for electronic transfer of funds. This was a cash-based economy. At the end of 2002, inflation was running at 115,000 percent.

In mid-2003, two reports, one by the GAO and the other by

President Clinton’s former Deputy of Defense, Dr. John Hamre,

each compared the CPA’s task to those faced by the allies at the

end of the Second World War. The Special Inspector General for

Iraq added, ‘‘There is no known precedent for an effort to manage

the reconstruction of a nation on such a vast scale in the midst of

danger and violence.’’

To deal with this crisis, Mr. Chairman, the CPA had the services

of over 3,000 volunteers from 25 countries. Contrary to some reports, this was a remarkable and experienced group of men and

women as I show in an attachment to my full statement. It was

an honor to serve with them. Our top priority was to get the economy moving again. The reconstruction proved to be harder than anticipated because, as some members pointed out, pre-war planning

had not anticipated the difficulty of the tasks we faced.

The first step was to get money into the hands of the Iraqi people

as quickly as possible. Under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi Government had been by far the country’s largest employer, providing

about four out of five of all jobs. But for several months since before the war, millions of Iraqi families had not received money

owed them for civil services salaries or pensions. We used the Iraqi

funds that are the subject of today’s hearing to pay the Iraqis

quickly.

This was exceptionally difficult at first because the Iraqi ministries lacked good payroll records. Ideally, we would have liked to

put those records straight before paying the salaries and pensions,

but as often in Iraq, the ideal collided with the harsh realities on

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the ground. We simply could not delay paying salaries and pensions, delays would have been demoralizing and unfair to the millions of Iraqi families, and it might well have exacerbated danger

to the American soldiers on the ground.

Using the Iraqi funds to pay the Iraqi families was further complicated by the lack of an effective banking system. As I mentioned,

the banks were closed and in any event were unable to transfer

funds electronically. So we had to pay Iraqis in cash wherever in

Iraq they lived.

We also immediately put these Iraqi funds to work on large public works programs to create jobs, and we continued to pay the

Iraqis who had been employed in the state-owned enterprises even

after those enterprises were closed down. Due to a shortage of Iraqi

currency, many of these expenses were paid in American dollars

drawn from the Iraqi fund account.

Let me turn to the question of the CPA’s management of these

Iraqi Government funds. My colleagues and I, Mr. Chairman, fully

understood and accepted our responsibility for the temporary stewardship of these Iraqi moneys. We took seriously our charge to operate in an open and transparent fashion and to use these Iraqi

funds in the best interests of the Iraqi people. We always strived

to meet those objectives, and where we may have fallen short, I accept responsibility.

I understand the committee’s concern about the manner in which

contracts were awarded using Iraqi funds, but it is important to remember that although as Administrator, I accept full responsibility

for the missions assigned to the CPA, I did not have the authority

over the awarding of contracts. This rested with the Department of

Army.

Let us be clear about what we are talking about today before we

start. Some press stories and some of the statements by the Members imply that the Special Inspector General’s January 2005 report found that the CPA wasted or stole Iraqi funds. Yet, when he

appeared before this very committee in June 2005 to discuss his

audit report, the Special Inspector General stated, ‘‘There have

been some misinterpretations about exactly what we said, so let me

be clear about what the audit did not say. It did not say the money

was lost. It did not say the money was stolen. It did not say the

money was fraudulently disbursed by U.S. authorities.’’

Indeed, the Special Inspector General and the United States,

United Nations each concluded the CPA had properly disbursed

Iraqi funds from the Development Fund to the Iraqi ministries.

The core difference between the Special Inspector General and the

CPA turns largely on how the Iraqis handled the money, their

money, after we disbursed it to those ministries, for the Special Inspector General’s report implies that we should have gone much

further, seeking to impose modern or in some cases, some Members

have suggested American financial control systems on the disbursement of these Iraqi funds by Iraqi ministers themselves—this, in

less than a year on a failed state in the middle of a war.

Mr. Chairman, I know of no person who spent meaningful time

in Baghdad working with the Iraqi ministers, ministries who

thought this was possible in the conditions under which we worked.

Hereto, as so often in Iraq, the ideal clashed with the reality we

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faced. We had to find a way to get the Iraqi people’s money working quickly for them rebuilding their country. As was the case with

salaries and pensions, we could not wait to install modern financial

systems in the ministries.

A team of experts from the International Monetary Fund came

and found that the existing Iraqi systems were adequate and recommended we use them while beginning the longer term process

of modernizing those systems. We agreed, and so disbursements

from the Iraqi Development Fund were made to the Iraqi ministries according to the procedures and controls spelled out in CPA

regulations. The ministries used the existing Iraqi systems to carry

out their responsibilities for the proper use of those funds.

It was not a perfect solution, but Mr. Chairman, there are no

perfect solutions in Iraq.

Let me say in addition, Mr. Chairman, that during my time in

Baghdad, I regularly visited these ministries, the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Planning, the Central Bank. I saw first hand the

primitive systems which Iraqi civil servants were struggling with.

Most ministries did not even have computers but kept their records

on handwritten spreadsheets. While I am not, certainly not a financial expert, my personal observations convinced me that the experts from the International Monetary Fund were correct that we

could not expect rapidly to modernize those systems in the middle

of a war.

But there was also a political dimension to our decision to use

these existing Iraqi financial systems for the control of Iraqi funds

once they were disbursed. The Coalition’s strategy and indeed the

intent of the international community expressed in several U.N.

resolutions was to give the Iraqis responsibility quickly. This was,

after all, their money to be used for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

When Iraqi ministers were appointed by the Iraqi on September 3,

2003, I made clear to the ministers that it was their responsibility

to develop and execute their ministry budgets.

My colleagues and I were, of course, acutely aware of the risks

of corruption. Corruption had been encouraged, one could say even

institutionalized under Saddam Hussein, particularly in the Oil for

Food program which has already been touched on. So we took efforts to combat corruption. We established the independence of the

Iraqi judiciary. We appointed inspectors general in every Iraqi ministry, revitalized an old respected Iraqi audit agency and set up a

national commission to which any Iraqi can bring charges of fraud

or waste. Of course, these institutions alone in a short time cannot

abolish corruption, but a start has been made.

Mr. Chairman, I commend the committee’s intention to see what

lessons can be learned from this experience, and I would offer several briefly for your consideration before we turn to questions.

First, there is no substitute for good planning. We heard how the

planning before the war was inadequate. I agree. The executive

branch has taken steps in the last couple of years to improve its

ability to cope with post-conflict situations, and I hope Congress

will support these where appropriate.

Second, as I explained in my longer statement, a business as

usual approach to both contracting and personnel severely hampered our ability to begin the massive job of reconstruction. The

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Special Inspector General has developed useful ideas for processes

in both these areas, contracting and personnel, which I commend

to the attention of the committee.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ambassador Bremer follows:]

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much, Ambassador Bremer.

Mr. Bowen.

STATEMENT OF STUART W. BOWEN, JR.

Mr. BOWEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member

Davis and members of the committee, and thank you for the opportunity to address the committee on the topic that you identified,

Mr. Chairman, at the outset and that is waste, fraud and abuse in

Federal spending in Iraq.

I depart next week on my 15th trip to Iraq to join the 55 auditors, investigators and inspectors that are currently deployed there,

carrying out exactly that mission. Congress has assigned my office

the duty and responsibility to oversee and deter fraud, waste, and

abuse with respect to the Iraq relief and reconstruction fund, and

we continue to carry out that mission in Baghdad and across Iraq.

Indeed, we have 80 open investigations with respect to allegations of fraud arising from the U.S. program. Just last week, a contractor was sentenced to prison for crimes uncovered through a

sting operation run by my office, and the week before that the

former Comptroller of the South Central Region of the CPA was

sentenced to 9 years in prison for a fraudulent scheme that he engaged in with a contractor. That contractor will be sentenced next

week.

So we are making progress, aggressively pursuing fraud where

we find it. But as I have said before to this committee, fraud, as

a component of the U.S. effort in Iraq is a relatively minor component, as a percentage of the total investment. Waste is a different

story, and we continue to look into that. Indeed, when Congress extended my organization in December, you assigned me the duty to

do a forensic audit which is a stem to stern review of the Iraq relief

and reconstruction fund that will completely and thoroughly answer that second matter.

Also before the committee this morning is the review, as you

have talked about, of an audit that my office released almost exactly 2 years ago at the end of January in 2005, looking at how the

CPA managed and oversaw the disbursements of Development

Fund for Iraq moneys distributed to the Iraqi ministries.

Three years ago today, I arrived in Iraq on my first trip, and it

so turned out that my office that I was assigned in the Republican

Palace was next to the comptroller’s office. In the course of those

first 2 weeks, I conducted interviews with the comptroller and personnel in that office, and over the course of my first month there

began to uncover concerns that persons working in that office

brought anonymously to me. Out of that came my directive to my

auditors to pursue this audit, specifically looking at what was happening to the Iraqi money, Development Fund for Iraq funds that

had been transferred to the interim Iraqi ministries that were

under CPA’s guidance.

Now the regulatory and legal structure for this transfer of money

was defined by the United Nations in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 which has been referred to. It imposed upon the CPA,

the duty to disburse these oil revenues for the benefit of the Iraqi

people in a transparent manner, and indeed this discussion today

hinges on what transparency means.

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There is a disagreement between what my office found and what

CPA believed that word meant. In our review, in our review of

CPA’s Regulations 1, 2, and 3 and CPA Memo 4 which governed

and defined CPA’s financial oversight, and those were good regulations. The issue was implementation. We concluded that more

should have been done to find out what the Iraqi ministries were

doing with the $8 billion, $8.8 billion that had been disbursed to

them for use to pay salaries, administrative expenses and other expenses, operational expenses.

Indeed, our review broke down the analysis into finding fault in

managerial controls. There weren’t enough personnel frankly as

Mr. Oliver noted at the time when we interviewed him, not enough

personnel in CPA’s support office to the Ministry of Finance to be

able to provide insight into how that ministry was operating, disbursing those dollars.

Financial controls, there was a CPA firm that was hired that was

supposed to provide some internal auditing for how that money

was moving, and indeed their mission evolved in the course of their

assignment. As a result, they became more of an accounting support to the comptroller rather than an auditor of how that money

was being used.

Third, contractual, there was a duty to ensure that Iraqi ministries had some contractual capacity and by its own regulations,

CPA said hey, Iraqi ministries, you cannot engage in contracting

unless we certify you. But that happened anyway. Only two ministries were certified, the Ministry of Electricity and the Ministry

of Finance, the Ministry of Finance 2 days before the conclusion of

the CPA.

However, it was because of the lack of personnel, the lack of insight into how the ministries were operating that there was a lack

of accountability, and that is the ultimate conclusion here with respect to how those ministries used that money.

Now in our discussions with CPA officials about our findings

after we had drafted the audit, that the dispute hinged upon what

the duty of transparency was. In our view, that duty extended to

requiring the Iraqi ministries to provide something more than

nothing about how they were using that money. The CPA interpreted the transparency duty as transparency within CPA, and we

did not raise concerns about that, and KPMG’s own review found

that CPA internally had procedures that operated reasonably effectively in moving the money out.

But what happened when it left? That is where the question

mark is, and that was the concern raised and the ultimate conclusion found by our audit.

The IMF in 2003, when they did an initial review of, in mid2003, of what the status of the Iraqi ministries were after the invasion raised significant concerns about the capacity of those ministries to carry out simple accounting, simple financial tracking.

KPMG and Ernst and Young and the Board of Supreme Audit, the

Iraqis’ own oversight entity, had since reviewed the Iraqi ministries and to varying degrees in each case found those ministries

wanting. Last July, Ernst and Young issued a report and reiterated

it in October that there were shortfalls and weaknesses.

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More to the point, our latest quarterly has an audit of ministry

capacity development in Iraq, and it is still weak. As our report indicates, the facts speak for themselves. At the end of last year, the

Iraqis left, still had in their treasury $12 billion unspent. That

meant U.S. money was being spent to carry out programs that

Iraqi money should have carried out, and indeed that is what this

latest discussion about benchmarks, and indeed when I met with

the Iraq Study Group, I emphasized benchmarks with teeth, with

meaning need to be enforced to ensure that the Iraqi ministries executive their own money.

Well, the truth be told, this latest quarterly report is a watershed report for this reason. The end of the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund is here. A very generous appropriation by Congress

$21 plus billion for the restoration and recovery of that nation has

been put entirely under contract and over 80 percent disbursed,

spent. So 90 percent of the projects are done.

The period where the United States bears the preponderant burden of moving forward the relief and recovery of Iraq is past, and

that means that burden must shift to the Iraqis themselves, and

that means those ministries must execute; that Iraqi firms, Iraqi

private contractors that we have documented have had some challenges along the way, Baghdad Police College notably, must step

up; and finally that there must be a coordinated strategic plan run

by Iraq, run by the new Iraqi Government that takes on the burden to relieve and reconstruct and recover that nation.

I go back next week. We will continue to provide quarterly reports to the Congress about the U.S. program. We will carry out

a comprehensive audit of how we have spent that money, and we

will continue to review how the Commander’s Emergency Response

Program, the economic support funds and other funds continue to

be spent in Iraq to achieve these important goals.

Finally, we do continue to operate an important lessons learned

program. Ambassador Bremer referred to our personnel study and

our contracting study in March. We will release our third report on

program and project management which will lay out in depth. I

just finished editing it again, and it is being vetted, and it will lay

out in detail how reconstruction was managed at the sites and

through the programs. Finally, at the end of the year, we will

produce a capping report, the Story of Iraq Reconstruction, that

will capture all of these issues that we have looked at plus the

broad range of issues raised in our quarterly reports and present

them in an accessible and informative manner.

Mr. Chairman, thank you for your time to address the committee, and I look forward to questions.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Bowen follows:]

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Bowen.

Mr. Oliver.

You want to pull the mic in close, and there is a button.

STATEMENT OF DAVID R. OLIVER, JR.

Mr. OLIVER. Mr. Chairman, I provided a paper I wrote in November 2003, when I came back.

Sir?

Chairman WAXMAN. Pull it in a little closer if you would, please.

Mr. OLIVER. I provided a report to the committee that I wrote in

November 2003, when I came back because I wanted to show you

what I said at that time.

I think the Ambassador has addressed, fully addressed the reasons we relied upon the Iraqis, the Iraqi Government to dispense

and account for their DFI money.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Oliver follows:]

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

I thank you very much for your testimony. You pointed out that

there are lessons we need to learn. Both Ambassador Bremer and

Mr. Bowen emphasized that point, and I think that is very important. But for us to learn lessons, we also need to know what happened in the past.

As I pointed out in a memo that I circulated, what we had was in a little more than a year, $12 billion in U.S. currency removed

from the vaults of the Federal Reserve and flown into Iraq. This

money, mainly hundred dollar bills, was packed into bricks, and

each brick was worth $400,000 each. I think we have a picture of

the bricks on the screen. They were assembled into large pallets

containing over $60 million in cash and flown into Iraq.

In December 2003, Ambassador Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority asked for a shipment of $1.5 billion to be flown

into Iraq, and a Federal Reserve official described this in an e-mail

as the largest payout of U.S. currency in U.S. history. But this

didn’t remain the largest for very long because in June, $2.4 billion

was sent to Iraq, and this time a Federal Reserve official wrote,

‘‘Just when you think you have seen it all, the CPA is ordering

$2,401,600,000 in currency.’’

Well, the question this committee is trying to answer is: What

happened to the money. Was it spent responsibly? Was it

misspent? Was it wasted? Did it go to pay off corrupt officials? Or

worst of all, did some of this money get into the hands of the insurgents and those who are fighting us today in Iraq?

Mr. Bowen, in your January 2005 report, you issued an audit

and you tried to track what happened to part of the cash shipped

to Iraq. The major finding in your audit is that the CPA did not

establish or implement sufficient managerial, financial and contractual controls to ensure DFI funds were used in a transparent manner. In that report, you examined $8.8 billion in cash that was not

properly accounted for.

My first question is whether this is all the cash that is missing.

As a memo indicates, $12 billion in cash was shipped into Iraq. Do

we know how any of this money was spent?

Mr. BOWEN. Yes, a total, the total amount of Development Fund

for Iraq money that was disbursed or shipped to Iraq for its use

in the period of the CPA was about $19 billion, but it was used for

different purposes. The $8.8 billion is the amount from October

2003 through the end of June 2004, that we looked at in the course

of this audit that was disbursed for the ministries’ operations

themselves.

There was also substantial funds, several billion executed

through the Program Review Board, a program and contract review

process managed by the CPA that approved Development Fund for

Iraq money for use in the relief and reconstruction of Iraq.

Chairman WAXMAN. They had a Program Review Board. Was

that to assure the transparency of the money to audit and know

where the money was going?

Mr. BOWEN. Yes, it was to ensure that proposed projects were

adequately vetted before they were executed. CPA was the interim

government for Iraq. It had, pursuant to Regulation 1 of CPA and

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, the responsibility for the

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management of the entire DFI and also the responsibility that

money was used for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

There are different ways that money was used. One way was to

restart the operation of the ministries, and that required funding

those ministries, and that is what the ministry budgets were for,

and that is what the $8.8 billion was for.

Chairman WAXMAN. How much of that money has not been accounted for of the money you describe?

Mr. BOWEN. Are you talking about the ministry budget?

Chairman WAXMAN. Of the total amount of money that was

shipped to Iraq in cash, how much is not accounted for?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, our audit did not look at the entire DFI. We

just looked at the money appropriated for the ministries. When I

say that we don’t have good accounting, what I have really said is

that it was the conclusion of our auditors and the finding of our

audit that the CPA should have required more from the ministries

with respect to how they executed that $8.8 billion.

Chairman WAXMAN. So this $8.8 billion was distributed to the

ministries.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Chairman WAXMAN. Did you try to find out what happened with

the money once it went to the ministries?

Mr. BOWEN. No, there are audits that are conducted by KPMG,

Ernst and Young, and the Board of Supreme Audit which we continue to support in their review of that, of that money. I met with

the President of the Board of Supreme Audit who is looking at

that, and I have helped him get the documentation of how that

money was used such as it is available.

Chairman WAXMAN. How much of it went to ghost employees?

That has been a widely circulated charge that it went to ministries. They had a certain number of employees, but then they had

so much more for more employees. If they didn’t really have those

people as employees, they would be ghost employees. Do you have

any idea?

Mr. BOWEN. I don’t know how much, but we identified the problem of paying ghost employees in the course of performing this

audit. With respect to Facilities Protection Service employees at

two ministries, only a small percentage of those actually on the

rolls existed, at least pursuant to our interviews with the senior

advisors to those ministries. They raised concerns to us about it.

But the problem of ghost employees has, I think, been an issue

from the start. It is today in Iraq and was frankly before the invasion. It was a problem that endured since the age of Saddam.

Chairman WAXMAN. Ambassador Bremer, you had your own

order requiring transparency. You were responsible for this money.

Do you believe you applied appropriate standards in spending the

$12 billion in cash and how do you respond to Mr. Bowen’s concern

that you didn’t live up those responsibilities of transparency, that

so much of this money went to the ministries and a great part of

it went to ghost employees?

Mr. BREMER. Well, Mr. Chairman, first yes, as I said in my statement, I think under the circumstances that we faced in the middle

of a war on the back of a basically bankrupt country, we met our

obligations. Where the Inspector General’s report went, I think,

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further than any of us believed was possible, and it is just a difference of opinion here, was in the implication of his report that

we should have been able to impose modern accounting system on

the Iraqi ministries themselves for the execution of their budget.

You know, he said——

Chairman WAXMAN. Is that what you are saying, Mr. Bowen, because that isn’t what I understood you were saying? Mr. Bowen, is

that the complaint of the Inspector General?

Mr. BOWEN. No. It was one level above that analysis. We weren’t

implying that. What our conclusion was, was that the duty of

transparency required the CPA to obtain some reporting about how

the ministries executed their budgets. In our discussions with the

CPA during the course of this audit, the CPA’s interpretation of

transparency was that required transparency with respect to how

the CPA managed the Development Fund for Iraq internally and

not what happened to them after they were transferred to the ministries.

Chairman WAXMAN. Mr. Bowen, by dumping $12 billion in cash

into Iraq without proper safeguards, as you have determined, could

we have undermined our efforts in Iraq by actually funding the

enemy?

Mr. BOWEN. I don’t want to speculate about that, but I will say

that the security problems and the corruption problems that have

dogged the effort in Iraq and have burdened the interim Iraqi Government—and I should point out we are on our fourth government

since the invasion in Iraq—continue to be a problem today as our

latest quarterly report points out.

Chairman WAXMAN. Ambassador Bremer, are you concerned

about the possibility that some of this money went to ghost employees, we don’t know where it went, and it might be showing up in

the hands of insurgents that are fighting U.S. troops?

Mr. BREMER. If there were evidence of that, I would certainly be

concerned.

Chairman WAXMAN. We don’t know whether there is evidence of

it.

Mr. BREMER. I don’t know.

Chairman WAXMAN. But we don’t know whether the people who

got the money were entitled to it or what they did with it.

Mr. BREMER. As the Inspector General pointed out, the problem

of ghost employees was certainly there, and it was there even before the invasion, but I have no knowledge of moneys being diverted. I would certainly be concerned if I thought they were.

Chairman WAXMAN. Well, $12 billion is a lot of money. It could

have been used for a lot of projects that American taxpayers ended

up funding through our appropriations. It seems to me inconceivable that we can’t explain what happened to it, but that seems to

be the situation we are in. Is that an accurate statement, Mr.

Bowen?

Mr. BOWEN. I think the weakness of Iraqi ministries to execute

capital budgets has been a problem since the start, and our latest

audit report on that matter clearly substantiates that fact. But the

end of the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund means that the

Iraqis must sustain the burden to fund their relief and reconstruction moving forward.

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Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

Mr. Davis.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you very much.

Mr. Bowen, let me start with you. We have heard about your

January 2005 audit which determined that $8.8 billion from the

DFI, the Development Fund for Iraq, was allocated ‘‘without adequate controls.’’ Of course, we are coming into a country with basically no government, is that correct?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, yes, with the mere structures of government

in place and that had to be reconstituted.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. And a lot of records were missing?

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Payroll records, Mr. Bremer, payroll

records were missing. I mean they were starting literally from

scratch in some cases, is that correct, Mr. Bremer?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, that is right.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Two misconceptions are commonly made,

one, that these were U.S. tax dollars. Were these U.S. tax dollars,

Mr. Bowen?

Mr. BOWEN. They were not.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. These were Iraqi dollars, correct?

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Second, that this money was stolen, was

this money stolen?

Mr. BOWEN. No, it was not.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Thank you.

Can you clarify some points for us? Is there any evidence this

money was fraudulently appropriated?

Mr. BOWEN. No evidence of that.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Who had the ultimate control over these

funds, the Iraqis or the CPA?

Mr. BOWEN. The CPA was the interim government of Iraq, so it

had a fiduciary duty to manage the Development Fund for Iraq for

the benefit of Iraqis. So until June 28, 2004, pursuant to the U.N.

Security Council resolutions that were operative, the CPA had responsibility.

The Iraqi ministries were being stood up, and it was CPA’s policy

to help them stand up by giving them responsibility, and one of

those was budget execution. And my core point, as I have said, is

that there should have been some mechanism in place to obtain information about how those ministries executed those budgets.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Let me ask Ambassador Bremer. You

came in, and you have the money. The Iraqis haven’t paid their

people for sometimes months that was owed them at this point.

What safeguards could you have put in place immediately, looking

at this in retrospect?

Mr. BREMER. Well, we were dealing in a cash economy with no

banks, no funds transfers, no national telephone system.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Was there any alternative to putting the

money on a plane and sending it?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t, I haven’t heard anybody come up with an

alternative in the circumstances we had.

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Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. You are just being ridiculed, but frankly

if it is a cash economy, that is about the only option you have, isn’t

it?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, sir.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. All right. So what safeguards?

They needed to get money out to people right away. You had to

trust the ministries. There was nobody else on the ground at that

point.

Mr. BREMER. What we did was have our people from our offices

check the payrolls that were being asked to be paid in each ministry against the pre-war payroll records of those ministries. Now,

of course, we had very limited capability of knowing whether the

pre-war payrolls were adequate, as the Inspector General pointed

out, but we did that. Then the Ministry of Finance did a double

check on all of the payrolls. That was the system.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. That was really the only check that you

had at least immediately.

Mr. BREMER. Yes.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Let me ask both of you. How long would

it have taken to get up some kind of system?

Mr. Bowen, what would you have done under those circumstances where you needed to disburse money immediately and

given the records that Ambassador Bremer is talking about. You

are an accountant, and so you have to go by the book, but realistically on the ground, what would you have suggested?

Mr. BOWEN. I would have acquired some reporting from each

ministry about how the money that they executed was used.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Did you have anybody report to you, Ambassador Bremer?

Mr. BREMER. Well, the system as I understand it was that in the

Iraqi system, which we agreed to use at the recommendation of the

International Monetary Fund, every month a ministry would report

back on its expenditures for the previous month and the Ministry

of Finance would review those records before disbursing the next

month. In other words, they were basically on a month to month

basis.

The Ministry of Finance had an entire department that conducted these reviews. They often turned down requests because

they didn’t find that the Ministry of, say, Irrigation had provided

adequate information, so they would delay disbursing the next

month until they were satisfied. It is a rather, by our standards,

cumbersome way to do it, but that is how they did it.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Given the fact that you didn’t have any

systems up and operating and it was a cash economy.

Let me ask Mr. Bowen. Is it that there were no receipts or documentation or that they were just not very good?

Mr. BOWEN. In our review, there were virtually no, there was virtually no documentation. What we found were balance sheets, and

that is what the CPA published on its Web site, that showed allocations and disbursements.

The Ministry of Finance was, as it is today, weak in its accounting capacities—as the IMF identified in June 2003, very weak in

its internal controls—and as KPMG identified in December 2003 in

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its report, there were significant weaknesses there and among

other ministries with respect to those ministries’ internal controls.

But really, the issue again is about the burden imposed by the

duty of transparency that the U.N. required of the CPA with respect to how the DFI was used, and that, in our view, in the view

of our audit, was that it required reporting to the CPA, which was

the interim government of Iraq, more detail about how the money

was transferred or used.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Ambassador Bremer has just told us

what they reported back and forth, is that correct? So you didn’t

ask him for any accountability.

Mr. Oliver, this is a good time to bring you in here. You were

the advisor to the Iraqi Minister on Finance, so I hope you can

shed some light on the process. Could you describe who made up

the ministry and how it functioned?

Mr. OLIVER. The Ministry of Finance? The Ministry of Finance

essentially was the senior ministry and was composed of significant

people that knew how the distribution of the government was arranged. The key to it is you have to understand that there are no

computers and there are no, there is no Internet connection. So, for

example, the No. 3 person in finance is the man who distributes

all the money, and in Iraq all the money over $26 required a written report from him to be expended. That person only had one

thing on his desk which was not a telephone or a computer but was

a pad of tracing paper on which he wrote these things out by long

hand and they were transferred by car.

Now, as the Ambassador says, by the middle of each month

under normal circumstances, each ministry would report back to

the Minister of Finance as to what they had spent and they would

allocate it.

I had only 4 to 10 people working for me. I had a quarter of them

sitting with that person who was the Director of Finances, so they

could oversee the reports that he was getting back over what was

going on. Unfortunately, by the time the IG arrived, Jacob Noel

[phonetically], who was the man who was in charge of that, had

been injured in the attack on the Rashida [phonetically] Hotel and

had gone back to the United Kingdom.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. When you noticed the ministry wasn’t

functioning at a level of adequate accountability, who did you report this to and what did you say and what did they say back?

Mr. OLIVER. I am not sure. I don’t agree. I think the minister of,

Ministry of Finance was a very competent organization which was

supervised by the Board of Audit and Supervision which you have

to understand. The Ministry of Finance and the Board of Audit is

1,600 U.K.-trained accountants which were certainly more competent than anything we could provide at that time.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. OK.

Ambassador Bremer, did you, at any point, notice that the funds

being disbursed by the IAMB to the Iraqi Finance Ministry were

being misused?

Mr. BREMER. Disbursed by whom, sir?

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. The IAMB.

Mr. BREMER. I think the IAMB was the audit organization established by the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483. I don’t think

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they had any responsibility for disbursing funds. Did you mean

from?

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. How about of your money that you were

disbursing to them?

Mr. BREMER. I am afraid I don’t understand the question.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. The CPA money.

Mr. BREMER. The CPA money, and what? I am afraid I don’t understand.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Let me ask Mr. Bowen this. What should

you or what can the United States do to ensure that in the future

standards of accountability cover reconstruction efforts past the

point of disbursement because that is really the big problem here?

You, obviously, made adequate disbursements. You asked for accountability. You had to do this retroactively because the money

had to get out there.

Mr. Bowen, do you agree with that?

Mr. BOWEN. Yes, well, and as Ambassador Bremer has pointed

out, it was an extremely chaotic situation. When he arrived in Iraq,

I think he has described the city was on fire.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Of course, you have to get the money out.

Mr. BOWEN. And as you identified, the government was non-existent. To me, that situation screams for more oversight, more controls, more feedback than less.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. But you can’t not disburse money at that

point. You can’t say well, we are going to give you 3 weeks to get

this while people don’t get money.

Mr. BOWEN. Yes. I am not going to compartmentalize the analysis just so you can’t do this, you can’t do that. If you are going to

disburse the money, you ought to have some, and I don’t mean

Wall Street or whatever standard anyone wants, say Big 4, just

something that provides feedback to the interim government about

how that money was used. As our audit indicates, what that something was, was the Ministry said yes, we received this money; yes,

we expended it. The level of detail beyond that, as the President

of the Board of Supreme Audit has told me, is virtually non-existent.

Mr. DAVIS OF VIRGINIA. Well, let me get to the nub of this. Ambassador Bremer, just from your written testimony, I have this

question. You noted that the Special Inspector General’s report implies that the Coalition Provisional Authority should have imposed

modern accounting and financial control systems in less than a

year on a failed state in the middle of a war, and you say, I know

of no one who spent time in Baghdad working with Iraqi ministries

who thought this was possible in the circumstances under which

we worked. Isn’t that the nub of the whole issue?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, it is. Of course, I agree the ideal that the Inspector General lays out would be desirable, but we were in the

middle of a war, working in very difficult conditions and we had

to move quickly to get this Iraqi money working for the Iraqi people.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Davis.

Before I call on the next member, I just want to ask Mr. Bowen

one question. What are the consequences today of the mistakes

that we are discussing at the time that the Coalition Provisional

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Government was not handling the money in the way you thought

it should have been handled?

Mr. BOWEN. As I said, we are three governments down the road

from there, so we are encountering a whole different series of problems, some similar, some very different. The biggest issues today,

as I point out in my latest quarterly, are corruption. Barham Salih

said last week, when talking about misappropriation of funds, it is

occurring on the Iraqi side of the ledger simply because of the lack

of accounting controls internally, the lack of capacity there. He

pointed out.

Chairman WAXMAN. Just at the time of the Provisional Authority.

Mr. BOWEN. He pointed out that the Baiji Refinery lost to corruption about $1 billion in crude oil refined products, and his concern—this is the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq speaking—was

‘‘that money went to the insurgents.’’ If that is his concern, it is our

concern too, and given the situation, the lack of stabilization, it is

probably a plausible analysis on his part.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you.

Mr. Cummings.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Mr. Bowen, you said a few minutes ago information flowing that should have been flowing back to the CPA, you

used the phrase something more than nothing. Is that what you

said?

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. CUMMINGS. So, basically, we don’t know where a lot of this

money actually ended up, do we?

Mr. BOWEN. Again, it is about the interpretation of transparency.

The CPA was transparent in how the CPA managed its internal

use of the DFI, and that has been confirmed by an outside auditor.

But how that money was used by the Iraqi ministries is a question

that I can’t answer, but it is a question that the President of the

Board of Supreme Audit is vigorously proceeding, pursuing right

now with our support.

Mr. CUMMINGS. We don’t have evidence. We have no evidence.

We can’t confirm that it didn’t end up in the hands of insurgents,

is that right?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, we know that it was, we have anecdotal evidence that it was used to pay salaries. We know that. We know

that it was used to pay administrative overhead, but the reporting

mechanisms from the ministries to the Ministry of Finance were

weak, as identified by the IMF and then KPMG in 2003. But more

to the point, CPA which was the interim government of Iraq did

not get any sort of detailed insight into how that money was used

by the ministries.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you.

Ambassador Bremmer, I want to ask you about Regulation No.

2 which was issued on June 18, 2003. This regulation says that

Iraqi funds administered by the CPA shall be managed ‘‘in a transparent manner for and on behalf of the Iraqi people consistent with

U.N. Resolution 1483.’’ You are familiar with that, are you not?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, sir.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Ambassador Bremer, this is your own regulation,

isn’t it?

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Mr. BREMER. Yes, sir.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Do you think you met the standard?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, sir.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Mr. Bowen, you audited how these funds were

spent. Do you think the CPA met the standard of Regulation No.

2?

Mr. BOWEN. Again, the audit looks at the $8.8 billion disbursed

to the ministries, and so just looking at that particular tranche of

the DFI, it was our finding that the CPA should have done more

to ensure transparency of how the ministries themselves executed

their budgets.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Let me ask you this. Regulation No. 2 also says

the CPA shall obtain the services of an independent certified public

accounting firm. Mr. Bowen, what would be the purpose of an independent certified public accounting firm? What would be the purpose of that?

Mr. BOWEN. Its mission was to service functionally the internal

auditor to the comptroller of how the DFI was being managed and

to promote transparency.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Now, Mr. Bowen, during your audit, did you determine whether the Ambassador in fact hired such an accounting

firm?

Mr. BOWEN. They did hire an accounting firm, but the accounting

firm, as we identified in the audit, didn’t meet the milestones that

were expected of it.

Mr. CUMMINGS. So were the purposes fulfilled by that accounting

firm?

Mr. BOWEN. No, they weren’t.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Ambassador Bremer, why didn’t you bring a certified public accounting firm on pursuant to your own regulation?

Mr. BREMER. When I looked into this after I saw the Inspector

General’s report, it became clear that the CPA comptroller who was

in charge of this project, and again I think it was reported by the

Special Inspector General, once the accounting firm was hired,

changed the task of that accounting firm to help him produce better track accounting for DFI funds.

The regulation, as you pointed out, calls for what it should be,

he should support the objective of ensuring the fund is administered and used in a transparent way.

Mr. CUMMINGS. What was the name of that firm, by the way, the

firm you refer to, if you know?

Mr. BREMER. That was hired?

Mr. CUMMINGS. Yes.

Mr. BREMER. North Star, I understand.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Can you tell the committee what type of company North Star was and can you tell the committee whether

North Star had any accountants on its staff, any?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t know what kind of firm it was other than

it was an accounting firm. I have read the Special Inspector General’s report that says that it had certified accountants on it.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Would you be concerned or upset if you found out

that there were no accountants on North Star’s staff? Would that

concern you?

175

Mr. BREMER. It would if it were true. I don’t know. I don’t know

if it is true.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Can you tell us the value of that contract?

Mr. BREMER. No, I don’t know off the top. I would be happy to

provide it.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Well, let me tell you. I can tell you it was $1.4

million.

Let me show you this. I would like to show you a picture of a

house. Can you see that up there?

According to press accounts, this house in San Diego is listed to

North Star as North Star’s official business address. Did you know

this company was run out of somebody’s house, this company that

got the $1.4 million?

Mr. BREMER. No. At the, I didn’t know until I read about it in,

I think the hearings that were held here in June 2005.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I see my time is up. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Cummings.

Mr. Issa.

Mr. ISSA. While that picture is up, I might note that this committee has encouraged telecommuting, and much of the Federal Government is presently run out of homes very similar to that.

Mr. Bowen, if I could followup on some things the chairman

brought up earlier in his opening statement, as I understand, the

Baathist Party was somewhere between a form of socialism and

was a little between Stalin and Hitler if you wanted to look at how

they ran business, and so they had a lot of communism in the

sense that they had nationalized electricity, nationalized health

care, nationalized everything, and that leads to a large Federal

central budget.

How large pre our invasion was the budget? How much was dispensed by Saddam in his currency every month?

Mr. BOWEN. I don’t, we don’t have any information, and we never

looked at Saddam’s operations in the course of our work.

Mr. ISSA. Ambassador Bremer, what was the annual budget that

Saddam was writing checks even under Oil for Food? What was he

spending?

Mr. BREMER. I think I am going to have to defer to Admiral Oliver who may know the number. I don’t know it off the top of my

head.

Mr. ISSA. Third time is a charm, Admiral.

Mr. OLIVER. We decided that it was around $14.7 billion which

is what we established for the first year’s budget.

Mr. ISSA. OK, so we are talking about $15 billion. We are looking

at a country that before we went in was spending of its own money,

$15 billion, without any unusual war, disruption, etc., and it was

handing bills with Saddam’s picture on them. Is that right?

Mr. OLIVER. [Nodded affirmatively.]

Mr. ISSA. OK, I want to know what the there is. We are looking

at a couple hundred dollars per capita in a socialist country where,

as I understand it, the chairman as a representation of the party,

they have been saying that the worst thing we could do, Ambassador Bremer, was dismiss the military, dismiss the government,

dismiss these people and put the country into chaos. Didn’t this

money do exactly the opposite? Didn’t it keep people on their job?

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Mr. BREMER. Well, we thought it was very important after we arrived to take into account this important fact. Millions and millions

of Iraqi families depended on civil service salaries, and millions

more depended on civil service pensions. It was their only source

of income. They had not been paid since before the war. It was

clear to us that we needed to get this Iraqi money into their hands

quickly, and that was our top objective. In a cash economy, it is not

obvious to me what the alternative was, frankly.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Bowen, following up on the same line, are we dealing with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that ended up

in Swiss banks the way they did under the Oil for Food program

before the United States went into Iraq? Do you have any evidence

of money ending up in large amounts from this cash in foreign

countries?

Mr. BOWEN. I deal regularly with Commissioner Radhi who is

the head of the Commission on Public Integrity, the FBI for Iraq

set up by the CPA, and he has over 2,000 ongoing as a result of

corruption with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq moneys.

So, while we don’t have jurisdiction over those cases, the Iraqi entity that does has reported to me cases amounting to the billions

of dollars with respect to misappropriation or misallocation.

Mr. ISSA. You used a B. So out of $15 billion, you are saying $2

billion or more in cash were taken and redirected by Iraqis.

Mr. BOWEN. I should say he has allegations, cases, allegations of

fraud. Those are not convictions, but he has cases ongoing that,

yes, in multiple billions. That is correct.

Mr. ISSA. There are allegations of multiple billions.

Mr. BOWEN. Correct.

Mr. ISSA. So far, the Iraqis looking at how to control the Iraqi

money, what have they established in the way of funds seized in

foreign accounts because they obviously have the authority as a

country to seize funds of these people they are alleging against?

How much money has been found overseas, locked up or in cash

locked up?

Mr. BOWEN. They had a problem pursuing that. That is a good

question, that they have weak internal procedures with respect to

this, weak law enforcement. It is still developing government. It is

a very fledgling democracy. But there are concerns that have been,

that I have heard voiced to me by both Judge Radhi and Abdel

Baset, President of the Board of Supreme Audit, about exactly this

issue, their capacity to both convict those who have absconded with

these funds, bring them to justice and recover the money.

Mr. ISSA. In the Oil for Food program over the years, how many

billions of dollars did we assess were taken by Saddam, his family,

friends and redirected?

Mr. BOWEN. I don’t know how much we assessed, but I know that

the VOCA report identified billions in potentially misappropriated

funds.

Mr. ISSA. My time has run up.

But Ambassador Bremer, it is fair to say that this is part of what

was going on when you took over, and the idea that you were going

to completely eliminate it if you used any Iraqis at all to disburse

the funds would have been ludicrous, wouldn’t it?

Mr. BREMER. Yes.

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Mr. ISSA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Issa.

Mr. Tierney.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Last fall, the press reported that the CPA staff was filled with

people who were not the best qualified candidates but who were

hired because of their political connections. I would like to address

that issue a little bit. There are two basic questions there essentially. One is whether or not unqualified people were given positions of responsibility and the other is whether the qualified people

might have been rejected in favor of other people who were unqualified based on politics.

Let me focus on the first one of those issues, the qualifications.

A Washington Post article back in May 2004, notes that six young

people received e-mails out of the blue, asking if they would like

to work with the CPA in Iraq. None of them had expressed any interest. None of them had any experience. None knew anything

about Federal procurement and budget rules. All were hired without interviews, and all did not have security clearances.

Originally, the understanding was they were hired to take low

level jobs in the CPA budget office, but because CPA had not recruited qualified senior people, they ended up responsible for

spending the Iraq money in the budget.

All of them apparently posted their resumes on the Heritage

Foundationsite and were hired off of that site along with other people. They were just out of college, and they were paid $100,000.

Ambassador Bremer, your fellow employee, Mr. Smith, who was

the head of the CPA headquarters in Washington, DC, and worked

for you said this about the qualifications of the staff: ‘‘I just don’t

think we sent the A team. We just didn’t tap the right people to

do this job. It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who

went out there because of their political leanings’’—sort of a harsh

assessment on that.

I want to know who did the hiring. Was it you? Was it the Department of Defense and if it was the Department of Defense, who

ordered it?

Do you agree with that statement or do you think you had your

A team?

Mr. BREMER. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you for that question.

Let me first start by agreeing and underlining one point which

was that we had a chronic shortage of personnel in all areas as Admiral Oliver pointed out. It was always a problem to get enough

people there, and we never had enough.

Second, I did not do the hiring of those people in that article. I

don’t think I even ever met any of those people. My role in hiring

was very limited because of the amount of time I had to get ready

to leave which was very short. I hired my personal staff, a couple

of senior deputies to me and a couple of senior advisors.

The hiring, to answer your——

Mr. TIERNEY. Excuse me for interrupting you.

Mr. BREMER. Sure.

Mr. TIERNEY. Do you know who did hire these people?

178

Mr. BREMER. Yes, I was coming to that. You asked where the hiring was done. In an office in the Pentagon, and I think if the committee has questions about those procedures, that is the appropriate place to ask those questions.

Mr. TIERNEY. Do you know specifically which office and who was

responsible for that?

Mr. BREMER. Well, the name of the man who I think was in

charge of the office—I am not sure what his title was—was a man

named O’Beirne. I don’t know what his title was.

I have to say, Congressman, that I know this article made the

allegation these people were rewarded for their political loyalty or

something. It has never been entirely clear to me what kind of a

reward it is to send somebody to Baghdad, but perhaps somebody

can enlighten me on that. It wasn’t obvious to the rest of us.

Mr. TIERNEY. I think some of the article mentioned that they

were paid up to or more than $100,000 which by most accounts for

somebody just out of school is not a bad reward.

You also had an interview with Frontline in which you stated:

I might see a biography or one of my staff might and would say

yes or no, but we really didn’t have frankly very much time to vet

all the people coming in.

You said you never looked at these particular people. Did any of

your staff have responsibility for looking at these people in the

budget office?

Mr. BREMER. The hiring was done in Washington by the Pentagon.

Mr. TIERNEY. Nobody on your staff had a chance to look it over?

Mr. BREMER. My, not in Baghdad, not that I, to my memory, I

don’t think anybody in Baghdad had time to look at those resumes,

sir.

Mr. TIERNEY. You mentioned two goals that you had, primary

goals. One, of course, was security and the other was the reconstruction and the putting of Iraqi people back to work in their economy. In planning this whole situation, what I think you are telling

me is that the Department of Defense would force upon you individuals whom they had apparently hired and then put them in a

position of this kind of extreme importance without your having

any control over them?

Mr. BREMER. Let us, I have attached to my statement today the

list of the top hundred or so people in the CPA.

Mr. TIERNEY. These are apparently people that you thought were

vitally important. The idea of spending this money for reconstruction and economic improvement there would be, by your own admission, the second highest priority you had set.

My question really was: Once these people were put in place, you

say without your input at all, did you then have the ability to exercise any control or assignment responsibilities for them?

Mr. BREMER. Well, not the low level people who are the subject

of that particular article. What I was trying to say is that if you

look at the attachment to my statement where I have listed the

qualifications of the top 100 or so people—they would be the people

that I would normally interact with more than others—you will

find a very competent, experienced group of people from many different countries who were, in my view, competent. I don’t exclude

179

the possibility that among the 3,000 people who worked for the

CPA, there were people who were not competent.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you.

Mr. Tierney, I want to inform you and the committee members

of our efforts to try to get information. When these allegations of

cronyism appeared in the paper, we contacted last September the

Pentagon and Department of Defense and asked for a briefing by

James O’Beirne, the political appointee at the Pentagon, alleged to

have screened the applicants, and we got no response to that.

Then when the election took place in January, Mr. Davis and I

joined together in a request for a briefing and a meeting with Mr.

O’Beirne, and we were told well, the reason they didn’t answer our

first request is that they have a policy of not giving information to

those who are in the minority in Congress. We informed them that

we are now in the majority, and this is a bipartisan request, and

they indicated to us that they didn’t know about it and they hadn’t

seen it even though we mailed it, we faxed it and we e-mailed that

request to them.

It just seems to me this is quite frankly an example of

stonewalling on their part, and I would hope that we would get the

cooperation of the Department of Defense to at least let us ask

questions not in a hearing but at a briefing from the person who

is allegedly responsible for giving a litmus test and hiring political

cronies rather than the very best people for the CPA.

I want to now recognize the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Mica.

Mr. MICA. Well, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ambassador, again just to clarify a few things, you had control

from April 21, 2003 to June 28, 2004, about 131⁄2 months, correct,

OK.

When you got there, tell me each of these entities’ condition. Basically, the government, was it abolished?

Mr. BREMER. The situation in most of the ministries was that the

top ministers and deputy ministers, the top two or in some cases

three levels of officials had fled the country or were on the run.

Mr. MICA. The government was taken down. The banking system

was taken down, correct, yes?

Mr. BREMER. That is right.

Mr. MICA. The major parties that sort of controlled, the cronies,

the Baathists, all the rest, they were not part of this. The army dissolved, right. So there were no institutional ways.

I held up the money before. You know it is all about the money.

There was no way to distribute funds. You said it was a cash economy, correct?

Mr. BREMER. That is right.

Mr. MICA. Yes, let us talk about the cash because this is about

the money. This was money, Iraqi money. There was not a dollar

of U.S. money in that, correct, or not?

Mr. BREMER. That is correct if we are talking about the Development Fund.

Mr. MICA. It was under U.N. Resolution 1483, the distribution of

those funds basically. Bowen testified that IMF gave some little

oversight in this with this money, was responsible for that under

the United Nations, is that correct?

180

Mr. BREMER. I think what the Inspector General was talking

about is that we invited a team of IMF experts to come and examine the internal financial controls of the Iraq ministries.

Mr. MICA. Now did you investigate, Mr. Bowen, corruption during this period of time for 14 months approximately that the Ambassador had charge over this?

Mr. BOWEN. Corruption within the Iraqi ministries?

Mr. MICA. Yes, you talked about Iraq and a number of people

going to jail and under investigation.

Mr. BOWEN. Right.

Mr. MICA. That is contemporary?

Mr. BOWEN. That is contemporaneous, but we don’t have jurisdiction over Iraqi ministries or Iraqis.

Mr. MICA. Yes, but how many people did you say contemporarily

under investigation?

Mr. BOWEN. We have 80 investigations going on now.

Mr. MICA. For how many agencies and personnel for the government, several hundred, several thousand? I mean the span of them.

Mr. BOWEN. How many people are covered by these 80 investigations?

Mr. MICA. Yes, and the entity. Well, I will just tell you what I

was getting at. Proportionately, we probably have more people in

Congress under investigation right now. [Laughter.]

[Off mic comment.] Or in jail.

Mr. MICA. Or in jail.

Now the ministries were outside, weren’t they? Weren’t your operations in the Green Zone?

Mr. BOWEN. I traveled outside the Green Zone regularly.

Mr. MICA. Again, I am talking about from April 21st to May

2003, when the provisional government took over.

Mr. BOWEN. Yes.

Mr. MICA. Your guys went outside and went to the ministries?

Mr. BOWEN. No, no. This was a review.

Mr. MICA. Did they go outside and go to the ministries and check

the documentation of how this money was spent?

Mr. BOWEN. That was not the aim of the audit. So, no, they

didn’t.

Mr. MICA. They didn’t go outside the Green Zone and actually go

to where the money was distributed.

Mr. BOWEN. No, because that is what the Board of Supreme

Audit and the IAMB’s auditors were doing.

Mr. MICA. Do you have their report?

Mr. BOWEN. Yes, we do.

Mr. MICA. You have their report, but your guys never did it, OK.

How much was the gross domestic product or just the whole

gross economy of Iraq in, say, 2001 or 2002 prior to the invasion?

Do you know?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, I think that Admiral Oliver.

Mr. MICA. Can you tell me?

Mr. OLIVER. $22 billion.

Mr. MICA. Pardon?

Mr. OLIVER. $22 billion.

Mr. MICA. $22, I have $25 billion. That is close.

181

How much was the expenditure to run the government in 2000

or 2001 before we got there?

Mr. BOWEN. Admiral Oliver identified it about $16 billion.

Mr. MICA. How much?

Mr. BOWEN. $16 billion.

Mr. MICA. So $16 billion to run the government; $8.8 billion

sounds like a lot of money. It was Iraqi money.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. MICA. Actually, I would like to get those folks over here. If

we could run the government on half the amount of money in a

conflict, in war and distribute it in cash, maybe we ought to look

at that system because that would cut our expenses by 50 percent.

Just do the math. [Laughter.]

Weren’t you trying to make the government under war conditions

work, Ambassador Bremer?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, we had obviously very difficult circumstances.

Mr. MICA. I think you did a good job. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Mica.

We will go to Mr. Clay.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Ambassador, there have been persistent reports that during

your tenure as the head of the CPA in Baghdad, you repeatedly requested more U.S. troops but were rebuffed by the former Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld. Is that accurate and if so, what

difference would those extra troops have made at that time?

Mr. BREMER. Congressman, I took the position that the fundamental role of any government is the security of the people it is

responsible for. We were the acting government of Iraq. Our most

fundamental responsibility was security.

When I got to Baghdad, the city was on fire from looters. They

were helping themselves to in and out of stores. You probably saw

the pictures. Most of the ministries had been burned down including the Ministry of Finance. We had a real situation of chaos. I believed from the moment I arrived that we were not adequately fulfilling our duties as security, and I thought the solution to that, at

least a solution, was to have more troops. As you pointed out, on

several occasions during my entire 14 months there, I made this,

I made my views clear.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you for that response.

One of your first official acts was to disband the Iraqi military.

Do you regret making that decision? Will you now admit that your

de-Ba’athification program helped to set the stage for the takeover

of Iraqi politics by Shiite politicians with close ties to Iran?

Mr. BREMER. Those are two separate questions, and I will try to

answer them both. On the question of the army, the fact of the

matter is there was not a single unit of the Iraqi Army standing

in place anywhere in the country at the fall of Baghdad. So there

really was no army to disband. It certainly was a mistake to use

the word, disband. That, I will grant you.

The question was? Should we recall the army?

Mr. CLAY. My oversight, I am sorry.

Mr. BREMER. Excuse me.

Mr. CLAY. That is my oversight. I am sorry.

182

Mr. BREMER. No, no, no. I used the word, disband. It was my

mistake to put it in. You used the correct word. I should have not

used the word, disband.

The question was: Should we recall the army. Now, committee

members will remember that the army was Saddam’s primary instrument of repression of the Iraqi people. They conducted a decade

long war of genocide against the Kurds for which Iraqi officials are

still standing trial now in the special tribunal. The Iraqi Army was

the army that suppressed the Shi’a uprising in 1991 in the south

and killed hundreds of thousands of Shi’a.

The Kurds and the Shi’a make up about 80 percent of Iraq’s population. They were both cooperating with the occupation. To have

recalled the army would have risked the continued cooperation of

80 percent of the Iraqi people and I think led to the secession of

the Kurds from Iraq. It would have been a disastrous decision. So

I stand by the decision not to recall the army and to rebuild the

army from the bottom up.

The mistake I made, and I admit it, is when we announced that

we were going to build the new army, we should have immediately

said we are also going to pay the officers from the old army. It took

us a month to do that. Once military commanders came to me and

said, look, we really need to pay these guys, I immediately agreed.

As soon as we announced we were going to start paying those pensions which we did, the demonstrations of the old army officers

stopped. By the way, those pensions continued all the way through

our time there. They were always paid.

Now de-Ba’athification, I am sorry to take so much of your time,

but you asked two questions that are important. The Baath Party

was modeled by Saddam Hussein, validly and publicly, on the Nazi

Party because he admired the way in which Hitler used the Nazi

Party to control the German people. So, for example, in the Baath

Party, you had neighborhood committees. You had children who

were paid to spy and report on their parents. It was all right out

of Hitler’s playbook. The Baath Party was the primary instrument

of political repression.

We decided to take a very modest cut at saying the top 1 percent

only of the Baath Party should no longer be allowed to have a public job. That is all it said. It was a very modestly drawn policy. The

mistake I made was letting the Iraqi politicians implement it, and

they broadened it way out. It was the right policy poorly implemented.

Mr. CLAY. I see. Thank you for your responses and thank you for

your service to this country.

I will yield back the balance of my time.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Clay.

Mr. Burton.

Mr. BURTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Bremer, I hope all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle

are aware that you were there under a very, very difficult situation. You had to get through elections. You had to get a constitution drafted and approved while a war was going on. You had to

disburse all these funds. You had to make sure you had personnel

doing the job adequately. People need to take all of that into conVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:21 Aug 15, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00186 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\36545.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
183

sideration when they directly or indirectly start criticizing what

you were doing, and I hope that they will do that.

A lot of these members who are asking some very difficult questions, which they are entitled to do, did not go to Iraq. They did

not see firsthand what you were going through. When we were

there, you even had a difficult time meeting with six or seven

Members of the Congress because you were so busy working on

that constitution and the elections. So I just hope my colleagues

are aware of that.

Do you think, Mr. Bremer, that better preparation stateside including identifying key agency personnel would have helped with

the stand-up or the efficiency of the CPA?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, I do. I think the pre-war planning was inadequate.

Mr. BURTON. Mr. Bowen, you have been very critical of the CPA’s

accounting procedures, but did you actually find that any funds

were fraudulently spent or stolen?

Mr. BOWEN. We looked at 10 disbursements made by the CPA

comptroller’s office between October 2003 and 2004, and we found

that none of the 10 disbursements which ranged from $120 to $900

million included documentation such as the required budget spending plans or supporting documentation from Iraqi ministries. Six of

those disbursements were made without CPA OMB approving

memoranda. Two disbursements totaling $616 million were not

supported by any disbursement voucher.

Mr. BURTON. That is not my question. My question is: Did you

find that any funds were fraudulently spent or stolen?

Now you are talking about maybe inadequacy of records.

Mr. BOWEN. Yes.

Mr. BURTON. But did you find any funds were fraudulently spent

or stolen?

Mr. BOWEN. No. As I said when I last appeared before the committee and earlier today here before this committee, we found no

instances of fraud.

Mr. BURTON. That is the answer. All that verbiage is fine, but

the answer is no, right?

Mr. BOWEN. That is right. There was no instance of fraud.

Mr. BURTON. In your professional opinion, do you truly believe

that the CPA and the Iraqi ministries were capable of adopting or

enforcing the recommendations that you made to improve accounting and financial oversight? Do you think they were capable of

doing that?

I mean you are in the middle of a war. You are bringing all these

people in. You are trying to make sure the people are paid. You are

trying to make sure that there is no waste of funds if it is at all

possible. The question is: Do you think that they were capable of

adopting or enforcing the recommendations you made to improve

accounting and financial oversight in that kind of a climate?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, they did try to improve as our audit was going

forward, so yes, there was some capacity to respond to it, but at

the same time, our audit acknowledged that given the unstable environment, that it was simply difficult to carry out the mission the

CPA had assigned.

184

Mr. BURTON. In describing the scope of your audit dated January

30, 2005, you say that your auditors interviewed CPA personnel,

reviewed all available electronic and hard copy documents for the

period May 2003 through July 2004 that were maintained by the

CPA, Ministry of Finance and OMB and examined all available results performed by the Iraqi Inspector General and the Board of

Supreme Audit.

Did the SIGIR staff go to the Ministry of Finance or any of the

other Iraqi ministries where the records on budget expenditures

would be found and how can an effective audit be performed on the

basis of third-hand interviews instead of examining the actual

source documents?

Mr. BOWEN. Actually, the senior advisors whom we interviewed

had responsibility for overseeing the ministries in question, and indeed the comptroller’s office was in charge of disbursing all the DFI

money. It came out of the CPA, and so——

Mr. BURTON. The question is, and once again you are giving me

a nice speech, but did the SIGIR staff go to the Ministry of Finance

or any of the other Iraqi ministries where the records on budget

expenditures were found?

Mr. BOWEN. We didn’t.

Mr. BURTON. OK, that is the answer. You didn’t go. So you didn’t

see them firsthand, right?

Mr. BOWEN. That was not the point of the audit. The point of the

audit was to look at the CPA.

Mr. BURTON. No. The point of the audit is you look at the figures

and you look at the records and you decide whether or not there

is accuracy or whether or not there is fraudulence, and if you don’t

look and look at the documents directly, you can’t make an accurate assumption.

Mr. BOWEN. Except there were——

Mr. BURTON. You are taking second and third-hand information,

aren’t you?

Mr. BOWEN. We relied on other auditors who did do that.

Mr. BURTON. You are taking second and third-hand information,

aren’t you?

Mr. BOWEN. No, sir, not with respect to the object and the purpose of our audit.

Mr. BURTON. Did you see the documents and go out there firsthand?

Mr. BOWEN. That was not the object of our audit.

Mr. BURTON. Did you see the documents and go out there firsthand?

Mr. BOWEN. We didn’t go to the ministries to visit how they

spent.

Mr. BURTON. No, and so where did you get the information?

Mr. BOWEN. From those who were responsible for overseeing it.

Mr. BURTON. You got it secondhand, right?

Mr. BOWEN. No, because, Mr. Burton——

Mr. BURTON. Well, if you didn’t go locate it and see it firsthand,

well, how can you tell you didn’t get it secondhand?

Mr. BOWEN. The CPA was the interim government of Iraq.

Mr. BURTON. The gentleman ought to be a politician. [Laughter.]

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired.

185

Ms. Watson.

Ms. WATSON. Thank you so much.

Admiral Oliver, you were head of the CPA’s Office of Management and Budget, and you were Ambassador Bremer’s deputy responsible for the reconstruction funding, correct?

Mr. OLIVER. Yes, ma’am.

Ms. WATSON. OK, last November, you were asked about the billions in cash that were unaccounted for, and I believe that there

is an audio clip of your response. I wonder if we can get that

played.

[Audio clip: I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the

money went to the right things or didn’t nor do I actually think it

is important.

Billions of dollars of their money disappeared. Yeah, I understand. I am saying what difference does it make.]

Ms. WATSON. Admiral, these statements are hard for me to understand and they appear to reveal a total disregard for the requirements that Ambassador Bremer established in Regulation No.

2. Do you stand by these statements today?

Mr. OLIVER. That was a clip as I recall after a 30 or 40 minute

conversation, and it comes back to the essence of I hope that Stuart

has pointed out several times in a question about transparency. He

believes that the CPA should have audited the information.

We decided that the only, the best way to make sure that we

could withdraw as quickly as possible and for the safety of the

troops was to rely upon the Iraqi system to distribute that money.

Therefore, we made sure that it was transparent what we were

doing with the money to the ministries and then relied upon the

ministry system, the entire financial system they had to do that.

We had about, I had 4 to 10 people. The country population is

about the same size as California which I think has 800 people in

the same office. We thought this was the best way to make sure

that the country’s safety was performed.

Ms. WATSON. You said that you didn’t think it was important.

Ambassador Bremer, you have made similar comments. In 2005,

you gave a speech at Clark University where you said this: I suggest you not worry as the $9 billion was Iraqi money, not U.S.

money.

Is that your attitude?

Mr. BREMER. My attitude is that the question involved the question of whether we were wasting American money, and I tried to

point out in that answer that we were talking about Iraqi money,

not American money. It was a taxpayer asking about, as I remember, his taxpayer money, and it was not American money.

Of course, we took seriously our responsibilities, as I have said

right from the start, for these Iraqi funds.

Ms. WATSON. We were told by the President—this is the President’s war—that the cost of the war was going to be paid for with

the revenues from Iraqi oil, and we are trying to find out what happened to Iraqi revenues. Now we are being asked to back all of that

up with U.S. dollars. I just think we need to hear from those of you

involved, and there is such a callous attitude about well, it wasn’t

important, it was Iraqi money.

186

You can’t tell us whether you know or not where that money

went. There was no accountability, as Mr. Bowen said, after the

money was given to the agencies, where it went. We do not have

a paper trail. I think that is absolutely unacceptable at a time we

are asking for a surge of troops and we are asking for hundreds

of billions of dollars to be sent down that gopher hole that apparently was not accounted for in the past.

Why is it not important to us and to you what happened to the

$12 billion in cash that had seemed to simply disappear?

We know that we forced a government on the Iraqis and they

were not ready, but how can we in good conscience say to our constituents let us send them more money? There was no accountability then and what guarantees do we have that it is going to be accounted for now?

Mr. BREMER. Well, Congresswoman, again you are being asked

now to appropriate more funds, and I am not here to comment

about that. I don’t represent the administration.

Ms. WATSON. Just tell me about what happened in the past.

Mr. BREMER. What happened in the past was I believe we met

our responsibilities under the U.N. Security Council and under my

direction adequately to account for and disburse the Iraqi funds.

Most of the funds, to answer your direct question, went to the

running costs of the Iraqi Government, paying civil service salaries,

paying pensions, starting irrigation projects and starting modest

reconstruction products. That is where most of that money went.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentlelady’s time has expired.

Mr. Shays.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you all for being here and thank the chairman

for a continuation. This is the 20th hearing we have had on Iraq,

and many of us have done our due diligence in Iraq as well.

Mr. Bremer, when you came, am I right in believing that you

came when the looting had basically taken place?

All the ministries’ buildings had been looted, all the equipment

taken out, all the files taken out. Even the doors had been taken

out. It looked like a bombed-out, frankly what I thought Berlin

looked like. Is that kind of the environment you found yourself in?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, it was very chaotic, and the looting was still

going on actually when I was there.

Mr. SHAYS. Isn’t it true that we formed a joint task force for Iraq

that was to get volunteers from the various departments of our

Government to volunteer to go into Iraq, and isn’t it true a lot of

departments could not deliver enough people?

Mr. BREMER. During the entire 14 months we were in Iraq, we

never had sufficient support for the personnel needs we had from

various departments in the Government. That is right.

Mr. SHAYS. This is kind of the impression I get from some. Want

a cushy job? Come to Iraq. Work 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a

week, week in, week out, week in, week out. Come to Iraq. Work,

eat, maybe exercise, sleep, work, eat and have a nice day and, by

the way, dodge bullets, bombs and hope you don’t get kidnaped and

have your head chopped off.

We are to look at some people who went there and make an assumption that somehow they were rewarded and given a cushy job?

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That is the one thing I could say to all of you. I never saw a cushy

job in Iraq, and it is an outrage to make that assumption.

Every one of the people who served in Iraq were risking their

lives whether they were in military uniform or whether they

worked in your office or were sent out. Isn’t that true?

Mr. BREMER. That is absolutely right.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Bowen, I am a great supporter of the work you

did, but I want to be fair, and I don’t think we are being fair. I

think in the process of trying to show that you are valid, you are

giving an impression that I think is unfair. Isn’t it true that the

Defense Department today has hundreds of billions of dollars of

transactions that are not auditable?

Mr. BOWEN. That is true.

Mr. SHAYS. They are not auditable, so we can make any assumption. What happened to the money? We can’t be certain of how the

money was spent. We can suspect it was spent well, but it was not

auditable, correct?

Mr. BOWEN. With respect to the overarching conclusion, yes.

Mr. SHAYS. I am talking about in the United States.

Mr. BOWEN. Yes.

Mr. SHAYS. If it is not auditable, you don’t know what happened

to the money.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. SHAYS. You found money that wasn’t auditable. Now this is

where I try to put myself in Mr. Bremer’s shoes, and Lord knows,

he knows I have been critical of things, some of which is maybe

valid and some which isn’t. We had our disagreements, didn’t we,

Mr. Bremer?

Mr. BREMER. I remember.

Mr. SHAYS. But what I am wrestling with is this. It is their

money. We could have been accused of holding their money and not

giving their money, being accused of taking their oil money which

we said we wouldn’t do. We had to find a way to get their money

to them.

The first issue is in the transactions, can we account that we

gave the money to Iraqis? Is that part auditable?

Mr. BOWEN. Yes.

Mr. SHAYS. So you are not disputing with Mr. Bremer that he

gave the money, and it is auditable. We know it went to the Iraqis.

Mr. BOWEN. And there were problems with following CPA’s rules,

yes, yes.

Mr. SHAYS. We will get to that. We will get to that. But I want

to get to the part. So we know the money went to the Iraqis.

Mr. BOWEN. Yes.

Mr. SHAYS. The real issue is what the hell did they do with it.

Mr. BOWEN. Yes.

Mr. SHAYS. I think it is fair to say that hundreds of millions,

maybe even billions, were not spent the way it should have been

spent. I make that assumption. I am not happy about it?

What I wrestle with is, tell me logically, how he could have gotten the money out and could have satisfied your rules as an accountant?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, not my rules but CPA’s rules are the way that

we judged the process. CPA Regulation 2, 3 and CPA Memorandum

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4, and I was beginning to go through that with Mr. Burton before

I was interrupted, what we looked at.

Mr. SHAYS. Give me the short version.

Mr. BOWEN. Well, we looked at a series of disbursements

amounting to about over $1 billion in the course of carrying out the

audit.

Mr. SHAYS. The Iraqis spent money badly, right?

Mr. BOWEN. If I may finish, that we looked at how they were disbursed by CPA to the Iraqis and whether the regulations CPA required of that process were followed, and the answer was no. And

then, but the issue that we are talking about is the, is at another

level, and that is the requirement of transparency, and you are

asking me should the CPA have required of the Iraqis some input

about how they used that money.

Mr. SHAYS. Let me just interrupt. Your answer is yes.

Let me just conclude by saying there were no computers.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. SHAYS. There were no desks. There was no paper. There was

nothing. It was burned out, and this administrator made a decision

that soldiers had to get paid, retirees had to be paid.

At any rate, thank you for being here.

Chairman WAXMAN. This administrator also decided that he

would promulgate rules for transparency and, Mr. Bowen, he didn’t

follow his own rules. Is that what you are saying?

Mr. BOWEN. In the instances that we looked at in the course of

this audit, there were, they were not complied with accordingly.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you.

Mr. Kucinich.

Mr. KUCINICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ambassador Bremer and Mr. Bowen, I want to ask you about a

specific example of the kind of spending that concerns many of us

in this committee.

Ambassador Bremer, in your comments to the Inspector General’s report, you say that an entity called the Program Review

Board helped ensure transparency and accountability. Is that a correct characterization of what you said?

Mr. BREMER. [Nodded affirmatively.]

Mr. KUCINICH. Staff has a chart that I would like to show you,

Mr. Bowen, a summary of the minutes from a meeting of this board

in May 2004. Can we put that up?

What this chart represents is that the board, the Program Re- view Board, approved the transfer of $500 million in this meeting

under the broad category of ‘‘security.’’ On the right of this chart,

it also says composition TBD which means to be determined. Mr.

Bowen, have any of your audits uncovered where this particular

$500 million actually went?

Mr. BOWEN. No, we haven’t.

Mr. KUCINICH. Ambassador Bremer, can you tell the committee

where that half of a billion dollars went?

Mr. BREMER. Mr. Chairman, I don’t have a copy of the document

the Congressman is referring to.

Mr. KUCINICH. Can staff provide him?

Mr. BREMER. I wonder if I could get a copy of the document before I answer the question.

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Mr. KUCINICH. Can staff provide the Ambassador with a copy of

that document? Thank you.

If you would just take a minute to look at it, Mr. Ambassador.

Mr. BREMER. Can you explain again what this table is taken

from?

Mr. KUCINICH. What this represents is that the Program Review Board approved a transfer of $500 million in a meeting that was

taken in May 2004. It was under the broad category of security. If

you look to the right of it, it says composition TBD which means

to be determined.

Mr. BREMER. Right.

Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Bowen has just said that his audits have not

been able to determine where the $500 million went. Mr. Bowen,

you did say that?

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. KUCINICH. OK, and I am asking you. Now that you have

looked at the document, Ambassador Bremer, can you tell the committee where that half of a billion dollars went?

Mr. BREMER. Congressman, I think I would have to answer that

in writing later. I just am not familiar with this meeting. I don’t

know the answer.

Mr. KUCINICH. Maybe I can help refresh your memory, Ambassador Bremer. Let me refer to the minutes of that meeting. The

minutes say that the Australian and British members of the Program Review Board raised questions about the insufficient detail

and ‘‘the lack of specificity with this proposal.’’ To your knowledge,

do you know, is that true?

Mr. BREMER. Congressman, just a point of order here, I didn’t attend Program Review Board meetings, so even if you read me all

of the minutes, it would be the first I had a chance to look at the

minutes, sir.

Mr. KUCINICH. You never reviewed the minutes of any

meetings——

Mr. BREMER. I did not.

Mr. KUCINICH [continuing]. That dealt with the spending of billions of dollars?

Mr. BREMER. No, I did not attend Program Review Board meetings. I was not a member. I was not a member.

Mr. KUCINICH. Did you ever read the minutes of any of the meetings?

You just established you didn’t attend. Have you ever read the

minutes of the meetings?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t remember ever reading any minutes, no.

Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Chairman, I find it more than curious that

in his capacity as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the

disposition of billions of dollars which went through those committees has never been reviewed by the person who is responsible.

Mr. BREMER. Excuse me, Congressman. That is not what I said.

Your question was did I read the minutes, and I said I did not read

the minutes.

Mr. KUCINICH. Did you read the minutes of any meetings?

Mr. BREMER. I did approve. No, not of the PRB. My job in terms

of the Program Review Board was to work with the Iraqis and

other members of the Coalition to set broad priorities on how these

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funds should be spent. The staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority working with the Iraqi ministries would then produce proposals for how to spend the money. I assume, though I don’t know

that is what this represents, a proposal on how to spend the

money. Those——

Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Bowen just said that he doesn’t know yet

where that half a billion dollars went.

Mr. BREMER. I am not sure he was asked to look into it.

Mr. KUCINICH. What did you say?

Mr. BOWEN. We have not reviewed that, but therefore, I don’t

know what happened to that money. That is right.

Mr. KUCINICH. You don’t know either, is that right, Mr. Ambassador?

Mr. BREMER. I said I don’t know. I can provide an answer in

writing. I don’t know off the top of my head.

Mr. KUCINICH. Do you know, did the allies ever express to you

any concerns they had about the lack of detail? Did they ever contact you personally?

Mr. BREMER. Not to my memory.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. KUCINICH. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Mr. Souder.

Mr. SOUDER. Well, this is about as much of a no win situation

as you can get into. You are criticized for disbanding or not reorganizing the Iraqi Army because of ghost employees, but then

when you keep the civilians, you are criticized for having ghost employees. It was just a mess. That is part of the clear difficulty here.

I appreciate your comments about the lack of pre-war planning.

If there is one thing we have absolutely established, that it isn’t

just Monday morning quarterbacking. Senator Lugar raised this

over and over and over before we went in, that there wasn’t adequate planning for what was going to happen if it all didn’t just

join up in democracy the first day.

One of the fundamental questions, and let me clarify, Mr. Oliver,

did you know anything about the $500 million?

Mr. OLIVER. I had been gone 5 months. I was safely in Arlington.

Mr. SOUDER. Would that type of expenditure normally—it looks

like it was for security forces—would have gone to the Iraqi ministries for security?

Mr. OLIVER. I don’t know, Congressman.

Mr. SOUDER. Did you have any other previous security allocations similar to that?

Mr. OLIVER. We had many security allocations for uniforms, for

the Iraqi police forces, for the Iraqi Army, significant other entries

with significant detail. It was placed on the Web during the period

I was there.

Mr. SOUDER. Did you say you had 4 to 10 people? Is that what

you said?

Mr. OLIVER. Yes, sir.

Mr. SOUDER. And that California would have 800?

Mr. OLIVER. Yes, sir, more.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Bowen, how many people do you think they

needed to do the auditing of the Iraqi ministries?

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Mr. BOWEN. Well, we did not conclude that they needed to do the

auditing of Iraq ministries. What we concluded was that in order

to meet the transparency burden, there should have been some

mechanism to provide feedback from the ministries after they had

spent it other than the fact that they had spent it.

Mr. SOUDER. So that wouldn’t have taken any people.

Mr. BOWEN. Well, no. I think Mr. Oliver has pointed out here

and to us emphatically that he was severely under-staffed, repeatedly asked for more staff and those requests weren’t granted.

Mr. SOUDER. As an auditor, you don’t have a recommendation of

how many staff they would have needed to do that?

I mean this is to look for the future. You are in effect charging

them with not implementing their own authority which is a disagreement of doing. There are 4 to 10 people. You have correctly

said or you told us as Congress that from your perspective, they

handled their side of the money. You just didn’t feel they implemented tracking the Iraqi ministries. So the obvious question is:

How many people would they have needed to track the Iraqi ministries?

You are the auditor. If we are going to learn for the future, do

they need hundreds? Were they going to go outside the Green Zone

and trot around with these people? We needed computers. You are

criticizing them for not doing something. What is your solution for

the future not to have that happen again?

Mr. BOWEN. And we have made those recommendations in our

Lessons Learned report on personnel, specifically both with expertise and training is what was missing in this process. Persons with,

and Admiral Oliver pointed this out to us. He didn’t have people

with the right training, with the right expertise to support him in

carrying out the mission that he had been assigned.

And so, our recommendation in our Lessons Learned report on

Human Capital Management is that there be a civilian reserve

corps developed, and that recommendation is in process and under

development both in this Congress and in the executive branch. I

think that with respect to this issue, they will, that will ensure

that you will have trained——

Mr. SOUDER. We are doing hindsight here, and there should have

been foresight planning for this because clearly 4 to 10 people

aren’t going to do it.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. SOUDER. Let me ask Admiral Oliver. Did you look at, before

you took this job, what happened in the Balkans, what happened

after World War II, what has happened in Afghanistan, and did

you raise a concern that maybe 4 to 10 people couldn’t track this

amount of money?

Mr. OLIVER. One of the things we did was the expertise for this

lies in many cases with the United Nations’ activities with the

World Bank and the IMF. The Ambassador got those people in to

talk to us about that specifically during a period, and we coordinated with them closely until the explosion at U.N. headquarters

when they left the country, which was too bad because they were

a great help.

Also, we coordinated with, the person who went on to become

Prime Minister of Poland. One of the things that we determined

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was that you needed to keep sovereignty and you needed to watch

this for many years because all the countries, Communist countries

that had gotten freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union, had gone

through periods and the minimum period in which they even started to recover was 3 years.

Mr. SOUDER. If I may, Mr. Chairman, just ask do you believe had

you had 800 people, you could have followed through the way the

auditor is suggesting and been able to track the Iraqi ministries?

Mr. OLIVER. If we could have protected them, yes, sir.

Mr. SOUDER. Excuse me?

Mr. OLIVER. If we could have protected them.

Mr. SOUDER. If they would have had protection.

Mr. OLIVER. Thirty percent of the people who worked for me at

that time were killed or injured by the time I left after 5 months.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Souder.

Mr. Lynch.

Mr. LYNCH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I am going to ask that a chart be displayed. This

represents, for the witnesses, cash shipments to Iraq. As you can

see, it demonstrates that in the final days of the CPA authority

that massive amounts of cash were shipped to Iraq from the New

York Federal Reserve Bank. In fact, I am told that more than $5

billion in cash was delivered in the last month of the CPA’s existence alone.

The last two shipments of cash were truly enormous. On June

22, 2004, $2.4 billion, that is the tallest column there was June 22,

$2.4 billion in cash to Iraq. This was the single largest cash shipment in Federal Reserve Bank history. Then 3 days later, another

$1.6 billion was shipped.

Now together with the e-mails that the committee has, it demonstrates the urgency. They are actually trying to double and triple

up shipments in advance of then it was a June 30th handoff from

the CPA to the Iraqis. The Iraqis were going to take over their own

government on the 30th. That was the plan according to your book,

and I think it is generally acknowledged. So there is this huge rush

to get cash into Iraq and have the CPA hand it out in the back of

pickup trucks and in duffel bags full of cash, cash packs, before the

Iraqis take over their government because once the Iraqis take over

on the 30th, the CPA no longer has authority to remove money

from the Federal Reserve Bank. They take control of their own

money.

I am just wondering why. If your stated reason is that you wanted to get money to the Iraqis, if we left all the money there in the

Federal Reserve Bank as of June 30th, the Iraqis would have had

control of every single dollar in that account. It was their money.

We are all agreed on that. It was money seized from Saddam. It

was Oil for Food program money. It was oil revenues. There is no

question; this is all Iraqi money. Yet, here we have the Coalition

Provisional Authority breaking its back to fill enough planes,

enough C–130’s with cash to get it to Iraq and to hand it out before

the Iraqis got control. That was the deadline.

I just want to ask why. Why did you handle it this way?

And, I want to ask you how long was the Finance Ministry, the

Iraqi Finance Ministry, that you handed out all this cash to, how

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long were they in operation before the CPA handed out all this

cash?

Mr. BREMER. Thank you, Congressman. I welcome the chance because I think it is obviously a dramatic event, and I welcome the

chance to explain it.

The Iraqi Minister of Finance, to answer your second question

first, the Ministry of Finance was operating from the day we got

there on May 12th. That is the group that Admiral Oliver worked

with most of the time. The Ministry of Finance was generally regarded as one of the most competent of the Iraqi bureaucracies.

The Minister of Finance of Iraq asked us in early June for these

shipments of his money, and the reason he gave is quite logical. He

said, when we take over sovereignty on June 30th, it is going to

be confusing. The new government is going to be trying to find

their way around. They have to find their offices. There is going to

be a lot of confusion. It is very difficult to follow the elaborate procedures established by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on

getting these moneys over here.

He said, I am concerned that I will not have the money to support the Iraqi Government expenses for the first couple of months

after we are sovereign. We won’t have the mechanisms in place. I

won’t know how to get the money here. I want to, in effect, pull

forward funding for the Iraqi Government operations so that I am

sure I have it in hand in Iraq in the Central Bank of Iraq—that

is where this money went—in order to cover our expenses that are

coming up as soon as we achieve sovereignty.

So these shipments were made at the explicit request of the Iraqi

Ministry of Finance, to forward fund, in effect, government expenses, a perfectly, it seems to me, legitimate use of his money.

Mr. LYNCH. Let me just say that you knew full well that there

were no mechanisms within those ministries to account for or to

give us the assurances that those moneys, once disbursed, went to

the purposes that we intended or that were for the transparent

benefit of the Iraqi people.

Mr. BREMER. No, I don’t agree with that characterization. I said

earlier that our conclusion based on the recommendation of the

team at the International Monetary Fund was that the mechanisms in place in the Iraqi ministries were adequate. They were

certainly not modern, and we spent a great deal of time trying to

modernize those at the same time we were using them, but I don’t

accept that they were not sufficient.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. Westmoreland.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank the

panel for your willingness to not only be here today and testify but

for your willingness to take on leadership jobs in a situation that

was really, I think, unheard of for this country. So thank you for

your willingness to do that.

Ambassador Bremer, how long after the fall of Baghdad did you

actually go?

I know it was in May 2003. What was the time period there?

Mr. BREMER. Baghdad fell on April 9th. I arrived on May 12th.

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Mr. WESTMORELAND. So about 30 days. I am assuming that you

did have more to do at the time than read the minutes of all the

meetings that were taking place at that time?

Mr. BREMER. That would be right.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Asking or at least some of the questions

that I hear some of the members of this committee asking would

be almost like asking a commanding general to give an accounting

of all the bullets fired by his men and what targets they hit, what

they were aimed at, how many counted and the cost of each bullet

and how much we could have saved if we had had more target

practice. I think we did have some very poor pre-planning when we

went into this, but I can’t imagine. Could you just briefly describe?

I have read some of your opening statement. Could you just

briefly describe, and I don’t even know if it is even possible, what

you encountered not only dealing with the economy? I know that

Mr. Oliver from reading his testimony, only had a short period of

time to come up with some of the economic decisions, and I am

sure financial decisions that we were doing there.

What did you find when you got there versus what you thought

you were getting into?

Mr. BREMER. I think the biggest surprise to me and my colleagues was how much damage Saddam Hussein had done to the

economy of Iraq. We knew there would be some damage from the

war, though it was actually very little.

What we did not realize was how much he had done to the entire

economy over a period of almost three decades. And that, as I said

in my opening statement, greatly complicated the task of reconstruction and the fact that we were dealing with a very primitive

economy with no banks, no telephone, no Internet connections,

made jobs that seemed rather easy in retrospect really hard in the

reality.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Mr. Bowen, what would you, in hindsight

is always 20–20, but in the atmosphere that Ambassador Bremer

and others found themselves in 30 days after the fall of Baghdad,

what recommendations would you have made or could you make

that should have taken place then that didn’t, based on the circumstances that were there when we arrived with the CPA?

Mr. BOWEN. I think Ambassador Bremer was dealing with a situation wherein the assumptions that preceded him and shaped the

planing up to that point were proving to be incorrect, and therefore

he was in an untenable situation with the resources that he had

at that time.

Those assumptions, as we are documenting in our lessons

learned program, were that as evidenced by the initial Iraq Relief

and Reconstruction Fund appropriation, were that the U.S. presence would be relatively short, and that the transition to Iraqi control would be rather rapid, and that the level of funding and its allocation through the USAID indicated that we would move to a relief and development program rapidly. The assumption, primary assumption proof that proved incorrect was that stabilization would

be achieved rapidly. It looked like with the fall of the statue, that

might happen, but it didn’t.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Basically, even though we had appropriated

all these moneys with, I am assuming, intended purposes for them

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to be spent, it was actually what the CPA found itself in was a position of really not knowing what all the expenses were going to be.

Just in my short period of time in Government, I think had Ambassador Bremer tried to get some of the expenditures that he made

approved and gone through all the correct channels, put in a position where they could be audited and a paper trail for all of these

expenditures, he still wouldn’t have it today, and so, some of these

decisions had to be made on the fly.

I have been a small businessman all of my real adult life, and

I have had to make decisions based on the fly that after I did them

and looked at them, I may not have made them, but at the right

time under those circumstances, they were the very best decision

I could make for all people involved.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. One last point, wouldn’t you think that

sometimes when you are in a situation like that, that you wouldn’t

do things that would always be the perfect auditable direction that

you could go?

Mr. BOWEN. There is no doubt the circumstances were unprecedented in Iraq.

The other point is that my office was created just 5 months before the dissolution of CPA, and I got on the ground. I was the first

appointee. I had to stand up an organization rapidly and get a report out. I got on the ground in April. That is 3 months before the

dissolution, and so my review was narrowly targeted, but it fits

within the larger context that you are describing and that is certainly the year before that review or 10 months before, it was a

chaotic situation that was the result of assumptions being adjusted

significantly.

Mr. WESTMORELAND. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Westmoreland.

Mr. Higgins.

Mr. HIGGINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Oliver, Mr. Bowen and Ambassador Bremer, thank you very

much for being here.

In trying to get a sense of this situation that we are in Iraq, I

try to look for historical context, and several books have been written including Vali Nasr’s The Shi’a Revival, where he argues that

at the core of this is vengeance. It dates back to a history dating

back to 632, and who is the rightful successor of Muhammad and

a history of not only succession but also of oppression and repression.

I also looked to the early 20th century in the Ottoman provinces

of Baghdad, of Mosul, of Basrah, and it was strong nationalist aspiration that enjoined the Shi’a and the Sunni to rise up against the

British. They were also joined by Iraqi Christians and Jews. Now

Shi’a and Sunni are fighting each other. At that time, Shi’a and

Sunni prayed in each other’s mosques. Now they blow up each other’s mosques without contrition.

In the 1980’s, it was 90 percent of the Iraqi troops were Shi’a

fighting against a Shi’a Iran. Today, at least segments of that population are now collaborating with Iran, I think to undermine the

military presence, the American military presence there.

196

Mr. Bremer, you had said in your opening statement that sovereignty was returned to the Iraqi people. We either returned it to

them, and they really screwed it up or we never really gave it to

them in the first place. I think the latter is true because you have

also said the fundamental role, the elemental role of government

is order, without which the government has no legitimacy in the

eyes of the governed.

I am trying to figure this thing out as not a partisan but as an

American that wants my country to survive, that wants my Government to survive, to do the right thing, but I find it hard to accept that American military planners could have screwed this thing

up as badly as they did.

When I was in Iraq in August, I was very quiet. I listened to the

Shi’a leaders, the Sunni leaders, the Kurd leaders, and my conclusion is this is not an inspiring bunch. This is not a group that feels

a sense of urgency. This is not a group that has that burning national aspiration to somehow make this experiment, this very

unique and important experiment for democracy in the Middle East

work, and I am frustrated by that.

But I think at the core it was our inability to provide a center

from which a legitimate government could evolve, from which a political center could evolve and from which a legitimate economy

could evolve, and I am just afraid that it may be too late, that

there isn’t a military solution in Iraq and perhaps the political solution, we will not know for a long time. Perhaps we will still be

there which is likely or after we are long gone. I think the point

is we have lost our grip. We have lost our grasp of the complexity

of that situation, and we have lost the confidence of the Iraqi people in that regard as well.

Mr. BREMER. Well, Congressman, thank you for that very

thoughtful statement. I find much to agree with you in it. I certainly share your frustration. In fact, I think those of us who

worked so hard the first year in Iraq, who have friends in Iraq,

who have lost friends, Iraqi friends, are if anything even more,

more deeply frustrated.

It is interesting you point to a contradiction. It is correct that in

Iraqi history, Sunnis and Shi’as intermarried for generations. Most

of the Iraqi, the largest Iraqi tribes all have Sunni and Shi’a members. During the time of the CPA, sectarian violence was almost

unknown. We confirmed fewer than 100 sectarian killings in the 14

months we were there, fewer than 100.

What has gone wrong? We never provided, and you said it, and

I said it, adequate security for the Iraqi people. As the al Qaeda

terrorists carried out their stated strategy which was to kill Shi’a

men, women and children in order to provoke sectarian tension, as

they carried out, many of the Shi’a decided to turn to their own militia to defend themselves because they concluded that we couldn’t

defend them. And is, there is a dynamic there which is in some

ways unique in Iraqi history, and I, like you, hope it is not too late.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Higgins.

Mr. Yarmuth.

Mr. YARMUTH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I will concede, I think we all concede that you were put into a

position that was quite chaotic and that you may have been put

197

into a spot which was a mission impossible, and we all know that

stuff happens, right. I think part of our responsibility in trying to

assess whether the CPA did its job properly is to assess whether

the CPA was put into a position where it could do its job properly.

While we talk a lot today about money being primarily the Iraqi’s

money that we were dealing with, there was a considerable amount

of taxpayer money spent to fund the CPA, so we do have a considerable responsibility there to determine whether that money was

spent properly.

You mentioned and many people have mentioned that you didn’t

have the resources you needed to do the job. You had 3,000 people

there. That was inadequate. If you had 4,000 or 5,000, or 6,000,

what are some of the things you might have done that would have

created more effective controls that we all seem to agree could be

better?

Mr. BREMER. Thank you. That is a helpful question.

Well, I think some of the problems that the Special Inspector

General has uncovered and some of the other audits of not adequately following our procedures, which I understand from his reports we did not do, would have been, I can’t swear they would

have been corrected, but they would have been correctable if we

had more people.

We had tremendous staff turnover. It wasn’t just that we didn’t

have enough people. People came for 60 days or 90 days. So there

was very little continuity in an extremely intense work environment of 16, 18 hours a day with people being shot at. It was very

hard to acquire continuity. So I think if one had more people, we

would have been able to better do the kinds of things which the

Inspector General proposes that we should have done, and he does

address some of these questions in his lessons learned on personnel

which I commend to the Congress’ attention.

Mr. YARMUTH. You also mentioned in your prepared testimony,

you had a laundry list of what I would call preexisting conditions,

things that you found that made your job very difficult, made everyone’s job difficult, and they were things that presumably you

would have wanted to know. Again, what difference would that

have made knowing, for instance, that the banking system was inadequate, the ministries weren’t adequate? How much difference

would that have made and what would you have done differently

if you had known some of those things?

Mr. BREMER. I think it would have changed the overall approach

even before I got involved because when I had a chance to look

back at the planning before the war, as the Inspector General

pointed out, it was based on assumptions about what you have to

always make assumptions on planning. What will the post-war situation look like? And the assumptions that they had in hand were,

actually turned out to be not the same as the situation we faced.

The situation was much worse.

It is a fair question to ask why we didn’t know more about how

run-down the Iraqi economy was, and I guess the answer must be

that the intelligence services, certainly in the period after the first

Gulf war, were focused on the primary question which was WMD.

Don’t seem to have that right either.

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But they were not going out and looking at textile plants which

is what I did when I got there. They weren’t visiting refineries,

going to see cement factories and shoe factories and finding out

that these things were run on equipment that was 40 or 50 years

old. We just didn’t know the ground truth, and if we had known

that, I think we would have mobilized more quickly. If I could have

them, I would have brought more people, and we would have been

working on the basis of a plan that would have been more in touch

with reality.

Mr. YARMUTH. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Yarmuth. You yield back

your time.

Ms. McCollum.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have two questions I would like to ask, but I think that they

are very much interrelated. One is I am concerned, Mr. Bremer,

that we didn’t get an accurate description of what you thought the

security in Iraq was like. You have in July in your book, you say

you try to warn Condoleezza Rice who was then the National Security Advisor. In fact, it is page 106 of your book, that you had been

in Iraq for a while and you thought we only had half the number,

half the number of soldiers we needed there and that we were running a real risk of having this go south on us.

Mr. BREMER. What page?

Ms. MCCOLLUM. Page 106. But then on Meet the Press in July

2003, when Mr. Russert asked you if we had enough, if we needed

more American troops, if you had asked Secretary Rumsfeld for

more American troops, you said no, I have not.

Mr. Russert said, do we need more?

You said, no, I believe we do not need more troops.

Which is accurate, that we needed more troops which you were

telling Ms. Rice on 106 in your book or what you said to Mr.

Russert?

Mr. BREMER. I said in my, and thank you for reading my book.

I based my——

Ms. MCCOLLUM. I read everybody’s.

Mr. BREMER. I based my assessment on a report that was given

to me by the RAND Corp. which some members will be familiar

with, a non-partisan, very highly respected think tank which, before the war, presented me with a draft report that suggested we

needed about 480,000 troops in Iraq.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. Well, my question is: Which statement is more

accurate today.

Mr. BREMER. Today, I don’t think there is any question; we needed more troops.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. In hindsight, you are saying we needed more

troops.

Mr. BREMER. Yes, ma’am.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. I met you in Iraq.

Mr. BREMER. Yes.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. I do sincerely thank you for your service. You

put life and limb, as well as all the civilians and troops there do.

We have an ongoing war in Iraq, ongoing when you were there.

A lot has been said about Marshall Plan reconstruction. There

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wasn’t the type of war raging in Japan and Germany that you

found embraced with in Iraq, correct?

Mr. BREMER. That is right.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. Another thing that you said today, and I realize

I am jumping around but my time is limited, that you thought that

the Finance Ministry was the most competent and that you really

wanted to push that money from the Oil for Food program, the

Iraqi funds so that they had money for doing payroll and for ongoing operations. Yet, I find this a bit troubling because on page 190

of a book called Blood Money, there was a debate that went on.

Should the Coalition spend the cash or leave it for the new Iraqi

Government to manage? The decision, and you were part of it, was

well, let us get the money and let us get more work done.

That led to contracts being radically moved forward, and so Mr.

Bowen, I would like to ask you. Is it common sense on one single

day that the review program approved $1.9 billion in new projects

to be competitively bid out in 6 weeks and that in June, the United

States, U.S. officials in June doubled the number of contracts that

were issued without following any of the standing procedures using

the money that was the Iraqi money?

This does not make any sense to me at all.

Mr. Bremer, the other thing you said, and your written statement is a little different from your public statement here. You said

the International Monetary Fund found that the existing Iraqi systems were adequate and recommended that we use them.

Mr. Bowen, do you think the International Monetary Fund

thought it would be a good idea to approve in one single day to

hand over to the Iraqi Finance Ministry $1.9 billion in new

projects?

Mr. BOWEN. There was an enormous uptick in the Program Review Board’s approvals in the last month of CPA’s existence, and

our lessons learned review of that raised some concerns about it.

Our audits raised concerns about it. But Ambassador Bremer

pointed out that he was told it was the request of the Iraqi ministries to have that done, and that was not something that we have

elicited before.

But the fact is that CPA contracting was beset with problems.

They improved over time. They are much better now, but in three

audits we did of CPA contracting, we found significant shortfalls.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentlelady’s time has expired.

Mr. Hodes, you have 5 minutes, and I think you can take it now

before we break or we can break and come back.

Mr. HODES. I think it would be better if we broke.

Chairman WAXMAN. OK, that is fine.

We have two votes pending on the House floor. Let us break

until 2. It will give you a chance to get something to eat.

We will reconvene here at 2 to complete the questioning.

[Recess.]

Chairman WAXMAN. The hearing will return to order. Before we

broke, we were just about to recognize Mr. Hodes. I want to recognize him at this time to proceed with questions.

Mr. HODES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to welcome back the witnesses. I trust you had a delightful respite from this hearing.

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Mr. Bremer, I want to talk for a moment with you about deBa’athification. One of the first acts of yours was issuing Coalition

Provisional Authority Order No. 1, banning people serving the top

four levels of the Baath Party from holding government employment. Is that true?

Mr. BREMER. That is right.

Mr. HODES. Some believe that the decision to purge thousands of

Baathists from the Iraqi Government deprived the Iraqi Government of valuable talent and experience and also fueled the insurgency, and many Iraqis now advocate rolling back the process. Was

the order on de-Ba’athification your idea or did you receive instructions on this from someone else?

Mr. BREMER. I received the order from the Department of Defense.

Mr. HODES. In your book at page 12, you say I was neither

Rumsfeld’s nor Powell’s man. I was the President’s man. Do you recall that?

Mr. BREMER. Yes.

Mr. HODES. You were given all executive, legislative and judicial

functions in Iraq, correct?

Mr. BREMER. That is right.

Mr. HODES. And you answered to the President.

Mr. BREMER. Through the Secretary of Defense.

Mr. HODES. But you were the President’s man.

Mr. BREMER. Well, yes, that is a political statement. My chain

of command was through the Secretary of Defense.

Mr. HODES. Did you discuss de-Ba’athification with President

Bush?

Mr. BREMER. No.

Mr. HODES. Let me refer you, sir, to a Newsweek 2004 article,

‘‘Paul Bremer: Inner Circle No More?’’ You were quoted as saying,

‘‘The President told me that de-Ba’athification comes before the immediate needs of the Iraqi people.’’ Was that an accurate quote?

Mr. BREMER. You know I don’t remember saying that. I simply

can’t remember discussing de-Ba’athification at this point with the

President. If I said it and it is an accurate quote, I must have, but

I frankly don’t remember discussing it with the President, not before the order was issued.

Mr. HODES. Did you have any discussions at any time with the

President of the United States about de-Ba’athification?

Mr. BREMER. Well, I probably had discussions with him about it

after the order was issued in one of my meetings, but I don’t remember a specific case. It wouldn’t surprise me if I did.

Mr. HODES. Would you agree that in October 2004 when you

were quoted making the statements about what the President told

you, your memory was probably better than it is today?

Mr. BREMER. I would think it is true of almost everybody, that

their memory gets a little worse as you get older.

Mr. HODES. Now did you hear any counter-arguments about deBa’athification before you signed the order?

Mr. BREMER. What I describe in the book, as you know, the concerns that were raised by some of the political people who were advising me, that it would create people in Iraq who would not be

happy about the Coalition. Now it is important to remember we are

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talking about only the top four layers of the Baath Party, about 1

percent of the party, a very small percentage.

Mr. HODES. In your previous testimony, you said that basically

you thought de-Ba’athification was the right idea.

Mr. BREMER. Yes.

Mr. HODES. But you left it to the Iraqis to implement.

Mr. BREMER. Right.

Mr. HODES. And they implemented it too broadly. Is that a correct assessment of your testimony?

Mr. BREMER. That is right.

Mr. HODES. Steve Browning, do you remember him?

Mr. BREMER. I am sorry. What name?

Mr. HODES. Steve Browning, an Army engineer.

Mr. BREMER. Yes, yes.

Mr. HODES. At one point, he was running five ministries at a

time in Iraq, correct?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t know. I know he was busy.

Mr. HODES. He is quoted as saying to you that the Baathists

were the brains of the government and if you sent them home, the

CPA would have a major problem running most ministries. Do you

remember that conversation with Mr. Browning?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t have any memory of it.

Mr. HODES. Now, ultimately, with respect to the Finance Ministry, how many Baathists ultimately were purged from the Finance Ministry as a result of your order?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t know, but let me make a general point, Congressman, about this. The Baath Party officials who were affected

by this very narrowly drawn order generally occupied the top two,

in some cases, the top three positions in the ministry, and what we

found, as Admiral Oliver has already testified to, is that underneath them there were very competent people. So the premise that

by deBaathifying we somehow made the government unable to deliver is not correct. It was not our experience.

Our experience was that the career Iraqi civil servants who were

not affected by this policy were on the whole effective and efficient,

as Admiral Oliver has testified.

Mr. HODES. Let us focus on the Finance Ministry. You would

agree with me that as a result of de-Ba’athification, the top level

of management was removed, correct?

Mr. BREMER. No. I would say that again I will probably defer to

Admiral Oliver who was more on the ground at the ministry. In

most cases, as I said earlier, the de-Ba’athification decree had very

little effect on the top levels of the ministries because the ministers

and deputies had already left the country. They had already fled.

I don’t know what the case, precise case was at the Ministry of

Finance, but in most cases, those people had in fact already left

their posts.

Mr. HODES. With respect to the cash that went through the Finance Ministry and then was disbursed, what oversight did you

personally exercise in terms of asking for reports, following up with

people, visiting the Finance Ministry or otherwise making sure for

yourself that the money was being properly disbursed?

Mr. BREMER. As I have testified here all morning, our approach

was somewhat different from that recommended and implied by the

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question recommended by the Special Inspector General. Our approach was to focus on the transparent disbursement of these

funds from the Development Fund of Iraq into the ministries, in

most cases, the Ministry of Finance in the first case and then subsequently on to the other ministries. And as I have testified and

as the Special Inspector General himself found, that process was

done appropriately and was done transparently, and I was satisfied

that it was done that way.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. HODES. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Mr. Murphy.

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to delve into the question of accountability here. Mr.

Bowen, you came onto the scene, as you said, at the end of the

CPA’s time on the ground there.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Mr. MURPHY. But during the entirety of the occupation or at

least for a majority of it, there was a Department of Defense Inspector General on the ground in Iraq, is that true?

Mr. BOWEN. One person, that is right.

Mr. MURPHY. To your knowledge, were there other staff people

under the Inspector General’s charge through the Department of

Defense?

Mr. BOWEN. I believe there was one other person assigned there

for a short period, but I believe it was an office of one.

Mr. MURPHY. So overseeing the entire Inspector General’s operation in Iraq through the Department of Defense, there were potentially only two people.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right, and I think this is one of the key lessons learned with respect to oversight. Next time that there is a

contingency relief and reconstruction operation, there should be a

robust oversight entity from the start and not just at the end.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. Bremer, on the subject of accountability, we are talking now about $9 billion that go to agencies. Your testimony is essentially that it wasn’t the CPA’s responsibility once that

money went to the agencies, to make sure that it was spent in accordance with the goals that at least your agency had set. Yet, your

testimony also was that the Iraqi agencies simply weren’t ready to

be able to disburse that money in an effective means.

How are we as a Congress supposed to provide for accountability

if your testimony is that it was not the CPA’s job to account for

how that money was spent and those agencies weren’t ready to

spend that money? How do we decide who to hold accountable for

that?

Mr. BREMER. Well, just let me correct something, maybe a misunderstanding. I didn’t say the Iraqi ministries couldn’t account for

it. I said that they had accounting procedures in place that the

IMF considered adequate, obviously not perfect but adequate. And

so, what we did was we worked to introduce a modern financial information system into those ministries—it is in my longer statement—to try to give them the capability to do the kind of onward

accounting that you would want in a modern government.

I found it interesting that the Inspector General mentioned earlier in this morning’s session that even today the Iraqi ministries

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still have problems executing those budgets. So we seem to have

been right that it wasn’t going to happen quickly because we are

now 3 years later and the Iraqi ministries are still struggling to

put modern accounting procedures into place.

Mr. MURPHY. I would simply note, Mr. Bremer, that in Mr.

Bowen’s testimony, the International Advisory and Monitoring

Board in Iraq found, in his words, that there inadequate controls

in Iraqi spending at those ministries, and his testimony enunciates

a list of those inadequate controls.

Let me ask you about the ministerial advisors that were placed

in these agencies. Were any of those ministers during your time

there disciplined or fired for the lack of oversight and the lack of

controls that are cited here in Mr. Bowen’s testimony?

Mr. BREMER. Any of the senior advisors?

Mr. MURPHY. Any of the senior advisors.

Mr. BREMER. For lack of which kind of controls? I am sorry. I

don’t understand what controls you are talking about.

Mr. MURPHY. We have testimony here from Mr. Bowen that once

the money ended up in the various ministries, that there was a

lack of accounting and there was a lack of controls for that money

that ended up in those ministries. We had advisors there. How are

we not to hold those advisors accountable for our inability to account for the money once it went to those ministries?

Mr. BREMER. Well, I can only repeat what I said just now in answer to the previous question which is that our concept to give the

Iraqis responsibility as much as possible for this money as quickly

as we could and following the recommendation of the International

Monetary Fund, we put the responsibility into the Iraqi ministries

for how those funds were spent once they were given to the ministries.

Now we have a difference of view on transparency between the

Inspector General and me about whether that is adequate transparency. I believe it was. He has a different view.

Mr. MURPHY. The advisors that you placed in the capacities that

they had in those various ministries, none of those advisors were

held accountable during the time that you were there for the decisions made in those ministries. You, in essence, were willing to

turn over the control completely to the Iraqis with those ministries.

Mr. BREMER. If you read the very first or second, I guess, regulation we signed, CPA Regulation 2, which established the Program

Review Board, it says explicitly that it is our intention to give the

Iraqis the responsibility for the execution of the budgets. When I

met with the Iraqi ministers, they were not appointed until September 3, 2003. In the very first meeting, I said to them: You are

responsible for the budgets, and you are responsible to execute

those budgets.

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS [presiding]. Mr. Van Hollen.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Let me start by thanking all of you gentlemen for your testimony

and service. Ambassador Bremer, thank you for your service both

in the State Department and in Iraq. You did have a daunting job.

Mr. Murphy’s question actually is a good jumping-off point for my question because we have talked about the fact that this $9 bilVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:21 Aug 15, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00207 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\36545.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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lion that was given to the Iraqi ministries and was unaccounted for

and had a discussion of who should have been better tracking that.

My question really is the sort of juxtaposition of that decision

along with the de-Ba’athification decision because, as you know,

Mr. Carney, who is going to be here to testify, thought that was

a big mistake as did others. The CIA station chief at the time is

quoted in another book as saying: You are going to drive 50,000

Baathists underground before nightfall. Don’t do this.

I think it is fair to say—and I am quoting from a Washington

Post article earlier this month—Carney and the other Americans

tapped to run Iraqis’ ministries knew that the senior managers in

almost all government departments were Baathists, Hussein’s government had forced them to join the party but that didn’t mean

that they all had blood on their hands or that they were all close

associates to the former leader and without them, it would be much

more challenging to get the government running again.

On the one hand, we have this decision where the testimony has

been we are relying on the Iraqi ministries. At the same time, we

are essentially gutting the top levels or purging the top levels of

those ministries of their most competent managers which it seems

to me led inexorably, in many ways, to the problems that we have

seen.

I ask this question partly to look back so we can learn but partly

because this remains an ongoing issue, as you know, in Iraq. Now

I understood your earlier testimony to say that you didn’t think the

de-Ba’athification order was a mistake but the putting it in Iraqi

hands was a mistake. Did you, at the time, appoint Chalabi to

oversee that de-Ba’athification process?

Mr. BREMER. No. What I said when I issued the order was that

we recognized that figuring out who should be affected by this

order, who was really a believer and who was not a believer was

a job that the Coalition was not going to be able to do. We were

not going to be able to make the kind of fine distinctions. Did

Abdul become a teacher because he is a Baathist and wants to inculcate ideology or did he become a Baathist because he wants to

be a teacher? Those are distinctions which we needed to leave to

the Iraqi people, and I said that right at the outset.

The mistake I made, and I have said it several times, is when

the time came, and I said we will turn it over to Iraqis because we

can’t do it. The mistake I made was turning it over to the governing council, a group of politicians. They, in turn, turned it over to

Mr. Chalabi. But it was a mistake because then what they did was

interpret or implement it in a much broader fashion, and we had

to basically correct that in the spring.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Right, and I guess according to that report in

the Washington Post, it said after a few months, the CPA began

to receive reports that 10,000 to 15,000 teachers had been fired because of the de-Ba’athification order.

I think that the problems that we have talked about with respect to tracking the $9 billion and other problems can be at least partly

laid at the fact that these ministries were essentially stripped of

some of their better managers.

Let me just ask you going forward because, as you know, Mr.

Chalabi is now the chairman of the Supreme National Commission

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for de-Ba’athification which continues to have that ultimate authority and there is legislation that has been introduced on this very

question to try and address the concerns of the Baathists which,

as you know, are primarily Sunnis and which goes to the heart of

the ongoing dispute between the Shi’a and the Sunnis.

Do you think it is essential as part of political reconciliation,

looking at the situation today, that they pass this piece of legislation that has been proposed by the Iraqi Parliament?

Mr. BREMER. Well, Congressman, I am not familiar with the text

of the legislation, so I wouldn’t want to endorse one law or another.

I think, to take your question broadly, it is essential for them to

find some stasis that is more or less acceptable to everybody on the

question of de-Ba’athification.

It is not a straightforward question. The Shi’a who make up 60

percent of the population and the Kurds who make up another 20

percent were delighted with the de-Ba’athification and continue to

support it. After all, three successive governments have not

changed it there. So it is a sensitive problem, but I think it is a

good idea to find a way to get back toward reconciliation, if you

will.

I just can’t comment on the particular legislation, however.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Right, I understand that the Kurds and the

Shi’a were pleased with order.

Mr. BREMER. Right.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. You have mentioned that in your earlier statements, and I can understand why too, I mean given the treatment

they received from the Hussein Government.

Mr. BREMER. Right.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. On the other hand, our objective now is to try

and achieve some kind of national reconciliation. Everyone agrees

that some political solution is necessary, that the military solution

is not adequate and it cannot be achieved by military means alone.

Chalabi remains in this position. I guess my final question to you

is: Do you think it is a good idea for him to be the guy in charge

I mean of this commission because after all, as you know, he is still

very much perceived to be a strong advocate for de-Ba’athification

and that does make it more difficult, it seems to me, for others to

perceive him as fair?

Mr. BREMER. Well, Congressman, I know, I know him, and I am

aware of the controversy that surrounds him, and I don’t think.

Now I have been away for 21⁄2 years. I don’t think it is prudent for

me to start commenting on Iraqi political figures in a public forum.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.

Chairman WAXMAN [presiding]. Mr. Sarbanes.

Mr. SARBANES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It is not a surprise, I guess, when incompetent people make bad

decisions. As unfortunate as it is, from the testimony and what I

have read, I think there was a fair number of incompetent people

that were inside the CPA and that were making bad decisions.

What is more interesting is when competent people make bad decisions, and the explanations for that can be that they are put into

situations that are beyond their particular competency, and in

some cases they may be in situations that are beyond anyone’s

206

competency. I think bad decisions were made at the highest levels

here, and I am not sure which explanation is the one that applies.

I find I am incredulous at the descriptions of how the money was

handed over. To be very honest without wanting to sound flippant

about it, if the understanding was we will keep giving you money

as long as you keep telling us that you are spending it, which is

essentially the way Mr. Bowen has described it, that is not a standard I would use in giving my own children their lunch money,

frankly, which is why I don’t believe that is what was happening.

I think there must have been another agenda, and I am drawing

the conclusion that maybe it was to create some kind of plausible

deniability with respect to how the funds were ultimately being

used because if you could say well, it was the Iraqis’ responsibility

to take this money and spend it and to do the budgeting and have

the controls, and we needed to hand it over as fast as we could,

that appears to me to be driven by a desire for plausible

deniability. I think it ends up, when you listen to Mr. Bowen, being

a situation of implausible deniability.

Here is my question. I watched a Frontline episode in which they

talked about the fact that you, Ambassador Bremer, were in regular, daily contact with Secretary Rumsfeld with respect to what

was happening on the ground. I believe you have indicated that

you relayed concerns about whether the number of troops was

enough at different points along the way. What I am curious about

is the extent to which you relayed the fact that there wasn’t

enough support within the CPA, that you didn’t have the competencies that you needed. Was that ever relayed to the Secretary

and what was the response to that?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, I raised it a number of times with him personally, but more importantly in a more practical way, my chief of

staff who was trying to oversee the personnel situation in Iraq was

basically pushing all the time, all Washington agencies to produce

more people, and as both the Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office have reported, we never had sufficient

staff.

Mr. SARBANES. What was the Secretary’s response to you when

you were conveying the need for this?

Mr. BREMER. You know, I don’t remember his specific response.

I suppose he would say he would look into it. I don’t know. Actually, we had less problems getting people from the Defense Department than we did from other parts of the U.S. Government.

Mr. SARBANES. Did you ever relay to the Secretary or his designees in any kind of detail this process by which the money was

being handed over and any concerns that you might have had

about accountability on the other side?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t recall talking to him about the money transfers in any detail. I mean as I said, we set in place procedures

which were to help be sure that the money went for the needs of

the Iraqi people, and the most important of those procedures was

the budget, producing the government budget in Iraq, which the

Iraqi people did on their own with our help starting in August

2003. It is not the kind of detailed discussion I would get into with

the Secretary of Defense. I don’t remember having any detailed discussions with him about that.

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Mr. SARBANES. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Sarbanes.

Mr. Welch.

Mr. WELCH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I thank the witnesses for their appearance here.

Mr. Bowen, I wanted to ask you about Iraqi funds controlled by

the CPA. They, as you know, were held at the Federal Reserve

Bank, and shipments of cash were flown from the United States to

Iraq. As the chairman alluded to or stated specifically in his opening remarks, there were 363 tons of cash shipped to Iraq on 484

pallets. I am new to Washington, but even by Washington standards, that is a fair amount of money. I think we have a photograph

of the pallets of cash over there.

My question is your auditors evaluated the physical security of

the cash when it was stored at the CPA offices. In your view, was

that physical security adequate?

Mr. BOWEN. No. We found shortfalls with respect to that, with

respect to the storage of that, some of that money, that the keys

to the safe were not properly secured in the comptroller’s office.

They were in a duffle bag by a desk when we went in to look at

it, and it was just an example of, within the comptroller’s office, the

failure to follow their own security requirements in the maintenance of security with respect to those funds.

That alludes to a point I want to clarify. Ambassador Bremer

said that I had testified that the CPA met its standards in managing the DFI. What I said was that with respect to the transfer of

the $8.8 billion to the ministries, we did not uncover fraud. However, the CPA did not follow its rules in the process for transferring

that budget.

There were two components to our finding. One was the lack of

transparency, and the other was the failure to follow its own rules,

and I was alluding to it earlier in my testimony that there were

at least 10 disbursements that we reviewed, ranging from $200 to

$900 million each that failed to satisfy the requirements of CPA’s

rules.

Mr. WELCH. And those requirements that they ignored were?

Mr. BOWEN. The requirements were that there had to be documentation before the transfer to the Ministry of Finance or a ministry of a budget spend plan on file, that there had to be supporting

documentation for, to which ministry that would go, that there had

to be allocation memoranda approved by CPA OMB officials that

there would be disbursement vouchers signed off on. In the sample

that we looked at, covering billions of dollars that was transferred,

one or more of those requirements were not met.

Mr. WELCH. You mentioned that the comptroller didn’t follow its

own rules about the security of the cash. There have been a number of other episodes that have attributed to the fog of war. Was

there any reason related to whatever may have been going on the

street that would have interfered with the ability of the comptroller

and CPA to follow its own rules about providing for the physical

security of the cash that had been transferred to it by the Federal

Reserve?

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Mr. BOWEN. I don’t think, if you are asking me did the chaotic

situation cause the comptroller to fail to follow his rules, and the

answer is no. I think it was just administrative oversight.

Mr. WELCH. Your report mentions some payments from the back

of pickup trucks and cash stored in the gunny sacks in the ministry

office. Can you tell us any more about the physical security of those

funds once they got out there on pickup trucks?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, there was some exposure. We did not, in the

course of our review, uncover loss as a result of that exposure, but

we raised concerns about the vulnerability evident in that manner

of handling.

Mr. WELCH. Ambassador Bremer, could you respond? Do you

think that you took adequate precautions to safeguard literally the

billions in cash that was shipped to the CPA when you were in

charge?

Mr. BREMER. I think we took the precautions that were possible

under the circumstances, and I note that the Special Inspector

General pointed out he didn’t document losses of these funds. We

were in a war zone, and when these moneys were put on a truck,

they had to be guarded. There were restrictions on how it could

happen.

I guess I keep coming back to the point that I am not sure I understand what the alternative was. This was a cash economy, no

bank transfers, no Internet, no computers, no telephone systems. I

don’t understand what people think the alternative was, frankly, to

paying these people in cash. I don’t think there was one.

Mr. WELCH. A followup on that, if there was no secure administrative structure to give you confidence that the money distributed

would be used in constructive ways, why not raise that fundamental question and hold off on distributing the cash?

Mr. BREMER. Well, let me answer that in two ways. Are you suggesting that I should not have paid the Iraqi civil servants? I

should not have paid the pensions? I should not have paid the people running the government? I mean that is the implication of not

paying it in cash. There was no alternative.

There is no alternative today. There still is no bank transfer system, electronic transfer system in Iraq.

Mr. WELCH. I understand. My understanding is that there were

many so-called ghost employees. Did you have a system in place

that assured you that the cash or a paycheck went to people who

were actually doing work as opposed to the pockets of people who

were claiming they had employees working for them?

Mr. BREMER. We knew there would be a problem with ghost employees. As Admiral Oliver testified this morning, this was the circumstance under Saddam Hussein. We knew there would be a

problem. We tried our best to deal with by having our people review the payroll records that we could find in the ministries from

the pre-war period, double-checking what we were paying against

those lists and then having the Ministry of Finance itself also double-check that against its records. It was certainly not a perfect situation.

Did we pay some ghost employees? I suppose we probably did.

Chairman WAXMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired.

Mr. WELCH. OK, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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Chairman WAXMAN. Mr. Braley.

Mr. BRALEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ambassador Bremer, Mr. Bowen, Admiral Oliver, I want to start

by thanking you for the sacrifices you have made in both your personal and professional lives on behalf of the people of this country.

I know your jobs were challenging.

The purpose of my inquiry today is not to judge you but to learn.

Ambassador Bremer, you gave us a template in your opening remarks by commending the committee’s intention to see what lessons could be learned from these experiences and offering as the

first lesson on your behalf that there is no substitute for good planning. Do you remember that?

You also noted in the hearing today: I think the pre-war planning was inadequate and that we had a chronic shortage of personnel in all areas, and you recommended to us the Special Inspector’s

lessons learned on personnel which I believe is the Lessons

Learned on Human Capital Management. Was that the report you

were referring to?

Mr. BREMER. Yes.

Mr. BRALEY. One of the instructive guidelines on the very first

page of this report deals with how you staffed to prepare for the

enormous responsibility you faced when you went into Iraq. Do you

remember having that sense of overwhelming challenge when you

went there?

Mr. BREMER. That is understating it, I think.

Mr. BRALEY. This report says: Given the sheer complexity of

post-conflict reconstruction efforts, developing a clear strategic plan

of action at the outset is critical to success. Would you agree with

that as a general statement?

Mr. BREMER. Of course.

Mr. BRALEY. It also goes on to talk about the initial planning

phase before you even became involved with the CPA, and I assume that as part of your duties, you became generally aware of

what some of those planning stages consisted of.

Mr. BREMER. Well, I would say I didn’t really have a chance to

look too much in the rearview mirror until I got back 14 months

later. So I really, I wasn’t deeply involved in looking at the planning until after I finally left Iraq, but I have looked back now and

I do think the planning was inadequate.

Mr. BRALEY. I assume when you took on this awesome challenge

that you had at least some sense that people in the administration

spent some level of involvement thinking about the challenges that

you were going to face. Is that a fair statement?

Mr. BREMER. Sure.

Mr. BRALEY. One of the things that struck me from this report

as incredibly surprising is that the Department of State during this

initial planning phase had sponsored a Future of Iraq project which

had generated a 1,200 page report on a variety of ambitious concepts for post-Saddam Iraq, and yet that report did not provide a

comprehensive plan for management of post-war Iraq. Does that

strike you as surprising?

Mr. BREMER. Well, you know, the Future of Iraq has had sort of

a mixed press. It never was intended, according to the State Department, it never was intended to be a comprehensive plan for

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post-war Iraq. So the answer to your question is yes, it didn’t do

that because that wasn’t its intention.

Mr. BRALEY. But if you are going to devote that much time to

studying the conditions in a post-Saddam era, is it surprising to

you that the report did not contain at least some analysis of the

reconstruction challenges?

Mr. BREMER. Well, it is surprising to me. Here is the problem as

I understand, have come to understand it after I came back. The

pre-war planning was based on assumptions about the kind of situation they would find on the ground in Iraq that turned out to be

wrong. They thought there was going to be a large scale humanitarian problem. They thought there would be large scale refugee

movements, both within Iraq and with the neighbors. They thought

that Saddam would again set fire to the oil fields of his own country as he indeed had done in Kuwait.

Now there was some limited sabotage on the oil fields, but basically when my predecessor, General Garner, arrived in Baghdad

right after the fall of Baghdad, what he found was the situation

that he had been staffed up for was not the situation that there

was on the ground. So the lesson learned there is that first of all,

as I said in my testimony, there is no substitute for good planning,

but planing also requires assumptions. You have to make some assumptions about what kind of thing you are planning for.

Where I think the Inspector General has been very helpful in

that report and in the one on contracting is essentially saying, and

I am putting words in his mouth, no matter how well you plan,

what you have to do is have processes in place because the plan

will always be wrong. It won’t be exactly right. So what you have

to focus on is getting the right processes, whether it is contracting

or in this case, human resources.

That is why I think and hope that this committee as part of its

responsibility will look closely at those lessons learned because

some of those processes, particularly in contracting, may require

legislation. It will at least require help from this committee.

Mr. BRALEY. One of the reasons that I am so concerned about

this, if I may have a little bit of extra time to followup on that, is

in President’s Bush’s January 10th speech about his surge proposal, he indicated that Secretary Rice will soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance being spent in Iraq. My question for you is: Have

you ever been consulted about that coordinator and their responsibilities?

Mr. BREMER. No.

Mr. BRALEY. Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Braley.

Mr. Davis.

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman,

and I certainly want to thank the gentleman not only for being

here but also for your patience.

It seems to me that one of the fundamental questions that we

are trying to get at is what happened to the money that was

shipped to Iraq. We are trying to find out whether or not this

money was spent responsibly, and we have talked about $12 billion

in cash. Well, that is a lot of money, $12 billion.

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Mr. Bowen, in your report, you discussed this and came up with

some disturbing findings. Your report concludes that there was inadequate accountability for billions of dollars disbursed by the

CPA. According to your report, a lot of these funds went to Iraqi

ministries to pay salaries. You also learned of ghost payrollers.

Just so that we all understand, could you tell us what a ghost

payroller is?

Mr. BOWEN. A ghost employee, paying a ghost employee is paying someone who actually doesn’t exist. It is an extra payment to

a ministry based on its salary request, and we uncovered that in

a couple of instances in interviews with the senior advisors’ offices

to two ministries wherein they had encountered a problem of the

payment of ghost employees. They confirmed that, and my concern

to them was what had they done about it. They said they had

raised that concern, and the decision was not to take it on but to

go ahead and continue to pay those according to those salary rolls

because it was important to keep the peace by doing that.

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS. Can you tell us what kind of numbers

you are talking about? Were these a few? Were they many?

Mr. BOWEN. Yes, in the case of one ministry, there were 8,206

guards on the payroll but 602 that were validated, and in the case

of another there were over 1,400 guards, and just a fraction of

those actually were validated.

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS. To your knowledge, was any action taken

to rectify or improve the situation?

Mr. BOWEN. No.

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS. Ambassador Bremer, let me ask you, but

first let me just say what one of your senior officials at the CPA

said, a gentleman named Frank Willis. He said: I presume that

some of them are ghost employees, but we paid them. There was

a high level decision, I think, made that at least until January 1,

2004, salaries would continue to be paid to employees whether they

worked or not because there was a fear if they were unemployed

of riots and other complications.

Mr. Ambassador, did you make that decision or were these Mr.

Willis’ assumptions?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t remember a specific decision. I gave general

guidance that is consistent with that decision.

Here was the problem. The ministries or the cases that the Special Inspector General is referring to involved something called the

Facilities Protection Service. This was an idea that the U.S. Military came up with to hire Iraqis to protect ministry buildings so

that our soldiers would no longer have to have that duty and could

be used better for either guarding the borders or fighting the insurgents or finding terrorists. So we built up this Facilities Protection

Service in the various ministries, and there was quite a lot of understandable confusion about the process bringing these people on

board.

When we, when I heard from some of my advisors—I don’t remember him specifically mentioning it to me but he may have—

that they had concerns that some of these payrolls were padded or

we couldn’t be 100 percent sure that there were whatever it was,

1,400 people on the payroll, we had basically two choices. We could

try to figure out exactly who was on the payroll and who wasn’t

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which my advisors recommended against because they said, in effect, we will stop paying these people who were armed. By definition, they were armed because they defended these buildings. We

are likely to have a couple of months while we try to scrub the

numbers and figure out who is on the payroll and who is not.

It seemed a lesser risk, to me anyway, in terms of overall security to continue paying while we tried also to get this payroll system in better shape.

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS. It was kind of like on the streets in some

of the big cities, they probably call that protection money. Do you

think it is possible that some of that money could have gotten into

the hands of the insurgents?

Mr. BREMER. I don’t know. I wouldn’t. I am not enough of an expert on protection money, but this is a slightly different problem.

The question was were they getting pay for people who either

didn’t come to work or people who weren’t even on the payroll. My

view was that there was a very substantial risk. We are talking

here in terms of the Facilities Protection Service. I think something

on the order of 70,000, if I remember correctly, around the end of

the year. So it was a big number of people, and if we stopped paying them, my judgment was we were going to have real trouble.

Chairman WAXMAN. Will the gentleman yield to me?

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS. My time is up.

Can I just ask Mr. Bowen if he would think if any of that money

could have gotten to insurgents?

Mr. BOWEN. I don’t know, but in the course of our interview with

the offices that this affected, they reported that they had asked

that the Iraqi Ministry of Finance require certified payrolls prior

to salary payments, but it was decided that CPA would rather

overpay than risk not paying these other employees and inciting violence.

Mr. DAVIS OF ILLINOIS. I thank the gentleman very much and

thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Just on this point before I recognize the next

member, 70,000 employees, they weren’t all in security. These were

employees of the different ministries that run the government of

Iraq. Isn’t that what we are talking about?

Mr. BREMER. It was called the Facilities Protection Service, and

I think but I can’t remember when we made. They worked——

Chairman WAXMAN. There were 70,000?

Mr. BREMER. Excuse me.

Chairman WAXMAN. Did that amount to 70,000 employees?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, something like that.

Chairman WAXMAN. It did.

I have an example of one ministry that had 8,206 employees they

claim were on the payroll when in fact they only had 602, and another that CPA was paying the salaries of 1,471 but there were

only 642 that could be validated. Now is the first time I have heard

this figure of 70,000.

Presumably, they were people who were carried over from the existing government, isn’t that right?

Mr. BREMER. No. These were, to a large degree, former members

of the former army who were invited to become part of the security

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services, either the policy, the new army, the civil defense national

guard or the Facilities Protection Service.

Chairman WAXMAN. So they were part of the government when

the Sunni Baathists were in charge of the government. You were

worried about them the most.

Mr. BREMER. Well, I would have to, you know. If you wish, Mr.

Chairman, I can probably get a more precise number for you. I am

taking the 70,000 off the top of my head. I think it is about right.

But it was basically the idea here was to try to relieve the burden on American forces who were guarding most of these buildings

most of the time until we got this new force organized, and it was

to relieve the American forces from having to guard the Ministry

of Transportation or the Ministry of Irrigation or some museum.

That was the purpose of this Facilities Protection Service.

Chairman WAXMAN. Mr. Bowen, did you understand that all the

ministries that received cash to pay their employees were security

for the ministries?

Mr. BOWEN. In this case, the 74,000 were Facility Protection

Service employees, yes. It is in our audit.

Chairman WAXMAN. But there were others as well, weren’t

there?

Mr. BOWEN. There are lots of other employees who were paid

pursuant to salary rolls, and there was concern about ghost employees across the board, but in our audit, the focus and what was

brought to our attention were the missing FPS guards.

Chairman WAXMAN. So we don’t really have the full extent of all

the ghost employees that were paid.

Mr. BOWEN. No, and as the audit points out, it is just this particular group where it was brought to our attention that ghost employees were being paid.

Chairman WAXMAN. That strikes me, Ambassador Bremer, as

reckless. You knew the ghost employees were going to get this

money. You took presumably the requests of the ministries for

whatever numbers they gave, and you expected those were really

off target, but you paid them anyway because you were worried

about what would happen if you didn’t pay.

Mr. BREMER. Well, they were already on the payroll when the Inspector General found these anomalies, and as I said, the question

was what do we do. Are we going to stop paying them in which

case we have 74,000, I hear now, armed men out there who are

angry at us, who are no longer guarding the buildings. If I, if the

American military had to put 70,000 back on those buildings, we

are talking about a significant augmentation of American forces.

So what we did was try to continue to work to get modern payroll systems in place and scrub those lists as we went on. It seemed

to me, and I would certainly do it again today, the right decision

was to continue paying them and try to fix the payroll problem as

we went along. It is not an ideal solution. I give you that.

Chairman WAXMAN. Mr. Bowen, do you feel that you are incorrect in your charge that there wasn’t transparency? It sounds like

Mr. Bremer knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that he was

paying a lot of people that were not entitled to be paid with the

cash that was coming into Iraq.

214

Mr. BOWEN. The transparency issue has to do with feedback from

how Iraqi ministries used their funds that was transferred to them.

This was simply an anomaly that we uncovered. However, we highlighted it because of the concerns that were raised to us by CPA

staff that they had attempted to ameliorate it but a decision was

made to not address the issue because of the security matter that

Ambassador Bremer has underscored.

Chairman WAXMAN. But that seems again, the question I want

to ask you, the tip of an iceberg. There were many, many other

ghost employees in other ministries that were also paid, that didn’t

offer a threat to security, isn’t that correct?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, that is not——

Chairman WAXMAN. You didn’t audit them, but wouldn’t one expect that to be the case?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, our concern was that ensuring the Iraqi Ministry of Finance developed more reliable payrolls was essential to

avoid the misapplication of funds, and that continues to be a problem today.

Chairman WAXMAN. OK, thanks.

Mr. Delahunt.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you

for inviting me to participate.

You know we have heard a lot about the dollars from the DFI

being their money, Iraqi money, and clearly the bulk of that money

came from the Oil for Food program that was administered by the

United Nations. It was their money. Clearly, we had a fiduciary

duty to monitor and to audit the use of that money. How much of

their money is left in the control of the current government in

Baghdad, if you know, Mr. Bowen?

Mr. BOWEN. Well, the current government in Baghdad has complete control of the income from the oil and gas sales which is 95

percent of the national income.

The question I think you are alluding to is what continuing control perhaps did the U.S. Government——

Mr. DELAHUNT. No, I am not even asking that. I am asking, if

you know, if you could quantify the amount of money currently in

the account of the Iraqi Government which received the moneys

from the Oil for Food program.

Mr. BOWEN. I don’t know what the current account levels are in

the Federal District Bank of the Seventh District of New York, the

Federal Reserve Bank, but their budget is upwards of $30 billion

for 2007 and the amount left in the treasury at the end of last

year, unspent, was about $12 billion.

Mr. DELAHUNT. That is the point that I wanted to make. Yet, I

understand that in the proposal put forth by the administration

that President Bush is requesting an additional $1.7 billion of

American taxpayer dollars for reconstruction programs in Iraq. Is

that your understanding too?

Mr. BOWEN. Yes, it is.

Mr. DELAHUNT. So let me put it in very simple terms. There is

a surplus of $12 billion sitting in Iraq, and simultaneously the

American taxpayer is being requested to appropriate $1.7 billion.

Am I missing something or am I making a misrepresentation?

215

Mr. BOWEN. No. That is right, but I think the President also

pointed out that the Iraqis must commit to spending $10 billion of

their money on relief and reconstruction in this phase.

Mr. DELAHUNT. $10 billion out of the $12 billion?

Mr. BOWEN. That is probably where it must be drawn from.

Mr. DELAHUNT. That leaves still a surplus of $2 billion.

I yield to the chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Perhaps that is to pay for ghost employees.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Well, whatever it is to pay for, I am finding it

difficult to reconcile requesting American taxpayers to come up

with an additional $1.7 billion. My memory is it was a shade under

or maybe a shade over $20 billion that is already been appropriated from American taxpayers to assist in the reconstruction of

Iraq.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right, $21 billion in the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund, another $10 billion in the Iraq Security Forces

Fund and another $2.5 billion through the Commander’s Emergency Response Program on top of that economic support fund. So

the Congress has been very generous in supporting the relief and

reconstruction and recovery of Iraq. That is why I think, as the administration has spoken, benchmarks with some bite is necessary

to ensure that the Iraqi ministries participate, and it is their job

to carry forward the recovery.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Bowen, I don’t know if it is the Congress

that has been generous, but the Congress has been very generous

with the American taxpayer dollars.

At this point in time, given your testimony and presumably, Ambassador Bremer, you agree and, Mr. Oliver, you agree with what

was just represented by the Special Inspector General, where there

is $12 billion sitting somewhere in Iraq and the President has demanded—demanded that they spend $10 out of that $12 billion, my

position is clearly I would hope that the executive would review, reconsider its request of the American taxpayer and insist that the

Iraqi Government spend all of the $12 billion before we appropriate

any additional moneys.

With that, I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Delahunt.

Mr. Shays.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. I know we are closing up.

I would just like to make reference to, first, Mr. Delahunt’s comments, and I mean this respectfully. This is an area where the majority party can weigh in and may find support from the minority

party. I am not sure I want them to spend all their reserves, but

that is an area where they can in fact spend their dollars to rebuild. I just think that we made a conclusion that we would be

more successful if the rebuilding worked and that we would ultimately save lives and any way we can get them to spend money

on reconstruction would be to our advantage.

I guess I would like to just make motion, whether we call these

ghost employees or non-existing employees, isn’t it a fact that one

of the challenges we had as the general said, I had 900 people to

pay, these are the names of these employees, and we had a sense

that it may have been 800 and that this general could potentially

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pocket the money? I mean isn’t that something that we basically

said could potentially happen, Mr. Bowen?

Mr. BOWEN. Yes, it is.

Mr. SHAYS. Ambassador Bremer.

Mr. BREMER. Yes.

Mr. SHAYS. But our challenge was to decide whether they got

paid at all. I think, Mr. Bowen, you have made a valid point that

said that Ambassador Bremer didn’t follow the regulations as we

sought to implement them. He made determinations that he

couldn’t. Would you not agree that this was a tough call?

In other words, you can say I got you because your regulations

said you needed to do this, but in actual fact, in the midst of a war

where there was no machinery, no papers, no documents of any

kind, Mr. Bremer had to make a decision whether Iraqi troops got

paid, whether Iraqi security got paid or whether for 2 months or

so they didn’t and even no guarantee after 2 months that we could

resolve the issue, isn’t that true?

Mr. BOWEN. That is true, and my audit was not an ‘‘I got you.’’

It was the result. It was carried because of whistleblowers that

came to my office, raising concerns, which made me duty-bound to

address the issue and it unfolded as it did. But as a component of

the overall review, the ghost employment issue is a minor part.

Mr. SHAYS. Right, I hear you.

Just basically in conclusion, it is good you are there. It is important that we deal with this issue. But as someone who led the

whole congressional effort in our committee on the Oil for Food program, we know that Saddam undersold his oil and got kickbacks,

overpaid for commodities and got kickbacks basically to the tune,

we think, of $9 billion. We also recognize that there are hardly any

meters in any of the Iraqi pipelines, no meters on their wells, no

meters on their pipelines, no meters when it gets on board the

ship. They just look at the difference in buoyancy of the ship. So

we got a lot of work cut out for us.

Mr. Bremer, there are so many things that we can second guess

you on, but I know this. You worked 7 days a week. You gave your

heart and soul to this issue. You made some very important and

successful decisions that you would get no credit for because no bad

thing came. Then when certain things happened that weren’t all

that good, you get blamed for it. But I appreciate your eagerness

to see us transfer power to the Iraqis in June.

People said we couldn’t do that. I think we made success from

June 2004 to all of 2005, and I think we saw huge problems in

2006 when Jafari just sat and took 4 months to decide what he was

going to do before we had Mr. Maliki in. So I look at 2006 as the

bad year above anything else.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Shays.

I am going to recognize myself.

We are not holding this hearing for an ‘‘I got you,’’ and this is

not a way to criticize you, Ambassador Bremer. Others will have

to evaluate that. We are trying to find out what happened. If we

had 70,000 claimed and let us say there were only 10,000, where

would that money have gone? Would it have been in the pocket of

the minister or do you think he handed it out to other people?

217

Do you have any sense of that, either Mr. Bowen or Mr. Bremer?

Do we have any idea what happened to that money?

Mr. BOWEN. No, we don’t have accounting for it, but as I said

earlier, as a component of our overall review, the ghost employee

issue was a small part. The larger issues were the requirements of

the CPA to follow its rules, the comptroller’s failure to do that and

the necessity to ensure that there is some transparency on the

Iraqi side.

Chairman WAXMAN. Right, so that was your audit and that was

your evaluation of the failures.

Mr. BOWEN. That is right.

Chairman WAXMAN. But the reality is that maybe hundreds of

thousands of people, we don’t know, maybe less, were presumably

paid but they didn’t exist. So somebody had the money in hand.

Who would have gotten that money, the minister?

Mr. BOWEN. You are right. Corruption is endemic within the government of Iraq. That is something that we identified repeatedly

through the course of our quarterly reports in 2006, and it is something that is substantiated. It is not just a speculation but substantiated by the fact that Judge Radhi, the Commissioner of the Commission on Public Integrity has thousands of cases ongoing with respect to public corruption. The Minister of Oil was indicted the

week before last.

Chairman WAXMAN. Continuing on, it wasn’t just at that moment. It preceded that period of time, during the CPA and it has

continued on to the present time.

Mr. BOWEN. Corruption certainly characterized Saddam’s regime,

and I think that it is going to be a generational solution. It takes

the building of institutions within the country. The Inspectors General are new. The Commissioners of Public Integrity are new, and

they are having a difficult time standing up simply because there

is a lot of internal resistance to their work.

Chairman WAXMAN. A recent report by GAO examined what happened last year, 2006, and it found that the Iraqi Government

budgeted about $6 billion for reconstruction projects for 2006, but

it spent only $877 million of that amount. That is only 14 percent

of what they promised. Mr. Bowen, last week, you said the Oil Ministry has to be able to carry out its capital program, but the GAO

reported that the Oil Ministry spent less than 1 percent of its capital budget in 2006. Do you know whether that is an accurate

statement or not?

Mr. BOWEN. That is accurate, and that is the budget execution

problem that we have been talking about today.

Chairman WAXMAN. Well, I guess the question that Mr.

Delahunt and others of us have is: Do you think the United States

should continue to provide billions of dollars to Iraq with no conditions whatsoever or should Congress consider attaching some incentives for the Iraqis to use their own money and improve their

own operation?

Mr. BOWEN. I think Congress is discussing benchmarks that

have bite, and I think that is completely on target in light of these

facts.

Chairman WAXMAN. Mr. Shays said we shouldn’t be critical of

Mr. Bremer, but if you look, step back, aside from the false inforVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:21 Aug 15, 2007 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00221 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\36545.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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mation that got us into the war, there was not sufficient planning.

There weren’t enough troops to provide for security. We never realized the damage that the economy suffered under Saddam Hussein,

so when we got there, we didn’t know how damaged it was. We expected that stabilization would happen rapidly, and we allowed the

militias and the al Qaeda to stir up the rivalries as the people were

looking to either the Sunni militia or the Shiite militia to give

them security that we didn’t provide. All of that has led to the situation we are in now which is a civil war.

Now maybe you shouldn’t have paid ghost employees, maybe you

should have, but the fact of the matter is all these assumptions,

wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and we’re in the situation we

are in today.

Mr. Bremer, are you optimistic that we are going to be able to

succeed in our objectives in Iraq?

Mr. BREMER. Well, I am still hopeful, Mr. Chairman. During my

time in Iraq, I came to have a lot of respect for the Iraqi people.

They are tough-minded people who, as one of the other Congressmen pointed out, historically have had a sense of being Iraqi.

Chairman WAXMAN. You are hopeful.

Mr. BREMER. I am hopeful.

Chairman WAXMAN. Would you invest in a company that made

these many mistakes and then they might put out a little brochure

saying past performance is no guide to the future, but would you

think this is a good bet?

Mr. BREMER. We are all, if we are a taxpayer, we are an investor

unless Congress decides otherwise, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WAXMAN. We are indeed.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, can I just interject one word?

Chairman WAXMAN. Yes.

Mr. SHAYS. Just to say I would be one hypocrite if I had said not

to be critical of Mr. Bremer because Mr. Bremer knows I have been

critical of him. I just wanted to say that we need to put everything

in perspective but, Mr. Bremer, you know.

Thank you.

Chairman WAXMAN. When we put it in perspective, you are the

least of our problems. You were a problem nevertheless according

to Mr. Bowen’s audits, but we are now getting the background on

all that.

Ms. Watson, do you want one last comment?

Ms. WATSON. Yes, I would like to just conclude my involvement

here and thank these gentlemen for the time you have spent and

your patience in addressing and responding to our questions.

There certainly is a double standard. I was an ambassador. We

had to account for every single glass, every fork, every knife and

anything that I had the government take over, they wouldn’t bring

back. I am getting the impression that this was such an unusual

situation that it is not important to account for the dollars.

So I would like all of you to respond to this, and we will start

with the Ambassador first. What gives you hope that the Iraqi people can do any better with their revenues than they have shown

us in the past and Mr. Bowen, what gives you any optimism that

we can never account——

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Chairman WAXMAN. Ms. Watson, I am going to interrupt you because this is not a second round. If you could just make a concluding comment because these people have been here all day.

Ms. WATSON. I am aware of that, but I wanted them to give me

some way to say, yes, I will go along with voting. Can you comment

what makes you think this Iraqi Government can do any better

about their expenditure of their money and our money?

Whatever your response is, that is the end of my remarks.

Mr. BOWEN. I think that the targets for U.S. money, I don’t want

to comment about Iraqi money. I have already said that there is

a huge problem with ministry capacity. But with respect to U.S.

money, I think the targets of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program and the Provincial Reconstruction Team programs

are the right places. CERP is about executing rapid turnaround,

small scale reconstruction projects in an unstable environment, and

that is what we have in Iraq.

The Provincial Reconstruction Team Program is about building

governance at the provincial level across the country. In order for

democracy to take root, it has to take root locally to succeed nationally, and they are off to a challenging start. Supplementing their

capacity is important right now.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

Ms. McCollum, any last word?

Ms. MCCOLLUM. Well, yes, Mr. Chair, I am very glad we had the

hearing today.

We were functioning as, to put in lay people’s terms, as guardian

ad litem for the Iraqi Oil for Food program, and we had many,

many hearings here about how the U.N. failed in its responsibility

to be a good guardian of the Iraqi oil money. So I think it is appropriate that we examine that the United States live up to high

standards when asked to be the guardian.

Mr. Oliver, quoting from your testimony, you served as the Coalition Director for the Management and Budget for the Iraqi Government, the Administer, the Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of

Finance.

I find it very troubling in a BBC report, and I will finish up what

Ms. Watson had started earlier, when you were asked about their

money: ‘‘Yeah, their money.’’

I am quoting you: ‘‘Billions of dollars of their money disappeared.

Yeah, I understand that. I am saying what difference does it

make?’’ Question: ‘‘But you don’t know what happened to that

money. You don’t know whether it was used wisely or whether it

was stolen.’’ Mr. Oliver: ‘‘That is right. You have no idea. And the

question is whether or not you set up a system to do that. I chose

not to.’’ Question: ‘‘Was that the right decision?’’ Mr. Oliver: ‘‘Absolutely.’’

I am very concerned, Mr. Chair, and I would ask this of the committee, to followup because there is some conflicting testimony. I

am finding on page 4 of Mr. Bowen’s report, he would lead one to

believe that the International Monetary Fund found the existing

Iraqi systems were adequate and recommended that we use them

as they went forward disbursing funds, and in Mr. Bowen’s report

on page 6, the Monitor Board says there weren’t adequate systems.

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We could followup with that, so that we can learn lessons, Mr.

Chair, so that we can be a better guardian ad litem in the future.

Thank you so much for the hearing, and I thank the gentlemen,

all three of them, for staying for the whole time.

Chairman WAXMAN. Thank you, Ms. McCollum.

We do thank you very much for your participation in this hearing. I think it has been helpful. We want to be retrospective to understand what has happened, but the objective has to be not to let

things happen again. We should learn from what has happened. If

we are going to make mistakes, let us make new ones and maybe

even prevent some.

Thank you very much.

The meeting stands adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 3:15 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

[Additional information submitted for the hearing record follows:]

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