E-mail a friendRep. Henry Waxman
original airdate February 28, 2007
Congressman Henry Waxman has represented California since ‘75. With his party's victory in the ‘06 midterm elections, he chairs the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the principal investigative committee in the House. Waxman's legislative priorities are environmental and health issues, including air and water quality standards, universal health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. Prior to his election to Congress, the Los Angeles native served three terms in the California State Assembly.
Rep. Henry Waxman
Tavis: Congressman Henry Waxman is the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is one of the most powerful committees in Congress. The California Democrat is serving his seventeenth term in the House. He was born and raised right here in the Watts section of Los Angeles, but joins us tonight from Washington. Congressman, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Congressman Henry Waxman: Thank you, pleased to be with you.
Tavis: Say it ain't so, say it ain't so. Billions, with a B, of dollars missing?
Waxman: Unaccounted for. We had control over $20 billion of Iraqi oil funds after we invaded the country, and we shipped $12 billion in cash in hundred dollar bills. It came to 363 tons. And they were put on pallets and flown into Iraq. And of that 12 billion, over eight billion was just handed out to Iraqi ministries to pay their employees, but no one knows whether they actually had those employees, and no one can even account for the money. We're talking about billions. Not millions, but billions of dollars.
Tavis: Can I ask a real simple question?
Waxman: Yes.
Tavis: Who would be, in our government, so stuck on stupid, such an idiot, as to fly $12 billion in cash into a war zone? Or am I stupid for asking that question?
Waxman: Well, Ambassador Bremer was the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was our occupying government at the time. They didn’t have banks in Iraq, so they felt they had to deal in cash. And they didn’t have to have perfect records, but they just didn’t keep any real serious accounts. There was one Iraqi ministry where they claimed they had over 8,000 employees, and they really had, I don't know, 40, 50 employees?
I don't know the numbers. But if some ministry in Iraq tells you they’ve got 8,000 employees and then you give them cash to pay those employees, where do you think these funds have gone? No one could tell us. I asked the ambassador when he testified, "Can you tell us where this money has gone?" And he said, "I can't." There's a special inspector general that President Bush appointed, and he was to evaluate what we've done with the funds in Iraq.
And he said that "Especially when it's a war zone, you have to keep track of what's going on, otherwise that money can be wasted." That money could even be in the hands of the insurgents. So we're funding the Iraqis, and we are funding the insurgents at the same time. Or somebody's Swiss bank accounts. But it's money that is just gone.
Tavis: Let me ask you a question. Who should the American public be outraged with by this development? Mr. Bremer and the White House for this reckless implementation, or you and your colleagues in Congress, respectfully, 'cause you guys are in charge of oversight?
Waxman: Well, certainly they ought to be angry at the Congress, because in the last six years of the Bush administration, the Republicans who've been running the Congress didn’t wanna do any oversight. This story is not a new story. It's only new because now that the Democrats are in power and I'm chairman of the oversight committee, we decided to raise the issue with Ambassador Bremer himself, and to bring in the special inspector general who did the monitoring of the funds.
So, number one, they ought to be angry at the Congress, because the checks and balances that Congress is supposed to provide comes through oversight to see that taxpayer's dollars aren't being wasted. With the administration, they told us that we had to go into Iraq because of the weapons of mass destruction, but as Ambassador Bremer testified, they didn’t do adequate planning, they didn’t have enough troops on the ground, and so he was trying to put together a government to run the place where no one had thought through that that might be an issue we should deal with and should have thought about before we actually did the invasion.
Tavis: Now speaking of the invasion, never mind the fact that the Bush administration was wrong about us being kissed on the cheeks and greeted with hugs and well wishes when we landed in the streets of Baghdad and beyond. Never mind that. Tell me now how we're doing on the so-called reconstruction of Iraq.
Waxman: Well, if we had been more careful in the beginning, perhaps it would have been a signal to a lot of the people who've come in for Iraqi reconstruction money not to make the Americans have to come up with as much as we did, but we have put over 20 billion of our own dollars into Iraqi reconstruction, and after the spending of the Iraqi money and our own money, the oil production is behind pre-war levels.
The electricity doesn’t even last eight hours in Baghdad. In some places, they have no electricity at all. And that electricity is below pre-war levels. Even drinking water is not available, and if you go to measure it, it's not as good as it was before the war. So with all the millions that have been spent and all the security problems we've run into trying to spend it and figure out how to reconstruct the place, we see that Iraq is not any better off.
But the ones who are really better off are all these contractors. Halliburton, Bechtel, all these different big contractors. They got mega, mega monopoly contracts. They subcontracted, and their subcontractors subcontracted, and there are layers of cost on top of layers of cost. A lot of people made money out of this who were the contractors, but the Iraqis and the American people are not better off because of all of it.
Tavis: I wanna shift gears, Congressman, and ask about a couple of other things while I've got you on the program right quick. Before I do that, though, it came back to my remembrance while you were just talking a moment ago that I read a piece in "The New York Times" yesterday by the former undersecretary of the Treasury Department John Taylor. I'm sure you read the piece in the "Times" yesterday. He took you to task for your interpretation of what happened to this money in Iraq.
Waxman: Well, he took to task the interpretation of the special inspector general, and he even contradicted Ambassador Bremer. He called this "a spectacular success." I'd like to know what he thinks a failure might be. He said that we "Got our money's worth by handing out this money." Well, Ambassador Bremer said he handed out the money because he was worried that if we didn’t pay people off that they might riot.
Well, are we better off? Do we have a more calm Iraq? Have things gone smoothly? I just found that op-ed out of touch with reality.
Tavis: One of the other issues that you're - shifting gears here now while I've got you on the satellite feed here. One of the other issues you're investigating is global warming. We, of course, here in L.A., your hometown, saw one of your former colleagues, former Vice President Al Gore, win an Oscar the other night for his documentary "Inconvenient Truth."
But you're actually investigating global warming. What are you discovering? Is this thing real, and are we responsible? Human beings, that is.
Waxman: Well, there's no doubt that global warming is real, and it's manmade. I think Al Gore did us a great service. I thought his film was an excellent one, and I applauded everybody who was involved in making it. And it brought home the problem to those who saw it, but we've gotta do something about global warming, and we only have a narrow period of time before some very important and reputable scientists are telling us that damage will be irreparable.
And we are investigating the problem because the Bush administration has been a denier of the reality of global warming in all these years since they’ve been in office. We have been investigating the fact that the Council on Environmental Quality, which the president appoints, and the head of that council who was appointed by President Bush was a lobbyist from the oil companies, censored what very distinguished scientists were telling us about global warming.
They were told they couldn’t give the information out to the American people and the Congress about the dangers of global warming. Well, that's part of a pattern of politicizing science by the Bush administration. But we've got to start acting in a serious way, and I've introduced legislation to do that that would put limits on emissions of carbon.
We've gotta put a cap on the carbon emissions, we've gotta get cars and other motor vehicles that meet the tightest standards for fuel efficiency, we've got to get things on a pattern now where we're reducing these emissions. We can't do it all at once, but if we keep on waiting, we're not gonna be able to do it at all. So we've got to take action now to control those carbon emissions that cause global warming and climate change.
Tavis: A third and final issue that circles back somewhat to what we were talking about earlier. One of your other colleagues now, John Murtha, very well respected in the House, has introduced legislation and raised the issue of no longer giving the president a blank check for the war in Iraq just because he asks for it.
What John Murtha has said, essentially, is that we ought to tie future funding for the war in Iraq to expectations, to outcomes, to training goals, etcetera, etcetera. No longer a blank check. Money ought to be tied to these specifics. It started, as you well know, a heated debate in Congress about whether or not that's the appropriate way to go, and raises another question about whether or not you can actually change policy in Iraq by going after the money, or how you distribute the money. Your thoughts?
Waxman: We gave Bush a blank check on Iraq, and we have a complete mess. Not only in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East, with a civil war going on in that country that could expand to other countries in the Muslim world. The president's asked for more money. If we could deny him the money for the escalation, or what he calls the surge, we ought to do that.
Many of my colleagues think we ought to cut off the money just to get out of Iraq completely. But if we're gonna be there, we can't just give him this ability to just spend it any way he wants. So Congress has to use our control over the purse strings to say that we've got to meet certain conditions so that we can evaluate when to pull the plug if we're getting deeper and deeper into the middle of a civil war, where all we're doing is seeing more people killed without any hope in sight…
Tavis: So let me ask you right quick, then, whether or not you think that legislation that's being hotly debated has any chance of getting off the ground? I ask that against the backdrop of this reality, that there are many Democrats who can't see themselves voting for that because they come from conservative districts, and to do so might be seen as, pardon the phrase, pulling the rug from underneath the troops while they're there in harm's way.
Waxman: Well, we have to make our decisions within the context of political reality. And one of the realities is that the President of the United States is the Commander in Chief, and he can manipulate the money and say, even if Congress said "No surge," which we certainly said overwhelmingly in our House vote a couple weeks ago, he could say, "Well, he's gonna do it anyway." And so we have to try to restrict the purse strings.
That's the only control we have. The voice of the electorate hasn’t seemed to weigh in with President Bush. The overwhelming sentiment in the Congress against the escalation doesn’t seem to have moved him in any way. So we've got to try to do something with the purse strings.
Tavis: He's the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Democrat of California, longtime Congressman Henry Waxman. Congressman, nice to have you on, thanks for your insight.
Waxman: Thank you very much for your interest.
Tavis: My pleasure.
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