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home > radio > maine news > news story Maine NewsAllen Criticizes Collins For Failing To Prevent War Profiteering
For months, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tom Allen has maintained that if a Republican-controlled Congress had insisted on greater accountability five years ago, lawmakers could have prevented the loss of billions of dollars to war profiteers in Iraq. Now, new reports appear to bolster that claim. Allen says the U.S. House has initiated inquiries into war profiteering. He believes that it's time for the Senate to do the same. This week, a New York Times article shook the Beltway. The article claimed that a senior civilian Army official was ousted from his job after he reportedly refused to pay a $1 billion Iraq contract because of inadequate records. The news story, following a report from the BBC, found as much as $23 billion disappeared due to mismanagement and war profiteering. First District Congressman and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tom Allen says the Iraq war continues to be mishandled behind the battle lines: "The bottom line is that the stories of waste fraud and abuse in Iraq get worse everyday." He cited the Times story about Charles Smith. Smith managed the military's largest contract in Iraq, but when he refused to approve more than $1 billion in charges to Houston-based KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, he was fired. Halliburton, as it's now well known, is a Texas oil services company where Vice-President Dick Cheney formerly served as chief executive. Smith told the newspaper that KBR, which eventually got most of the money, anyway, had "a gigantic amount of costs they couldn't justify.'' Allen says his Republican opponent, Sen. Susan Collins, could have prevented the waste and abuse when she served as chairwoman of the Chief Oversight Committee in the U.S. Senate from 2003 through 2006. He explains, "If Sen. Collins had called contractors at the beginning, I believe it would have dramatically reduced that problem. There have been two recent reports: one from the Pentagon, itself, suggesting that something like $15 or $18 billion paid to private contractors in Iraq is unaccounted for, and another by a British group saying that the amount is $23 billion in taxpayer money lost to waste fraud and abuse. So the scale of the problem is growing all the time." Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate rejected legislation that would have provided greater oversight of tax dollars being spent in Iraq's reconstruction. All of this despite congressional hearings chaired by Senator Byron Dorgan that documented what Dorgan describes as the greatest amount of waste, fraud and abuse in the history of the country. Allen says Dorgan did not have the power to subpoena Halliburton or KBR officials. He thinks Collins should urge her frequent political ally, Sen. Joe Lieberman, an Independent Democrat from Connecticut, to question KBR and convene hearings as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Allen says, "Henry Waxman in the House is certainly holding hearings and being very aggressive about it, but the Senate is not doing much. Sen. Collins is no longer the chair, but Joe Lieberman is, but I think she should ask Joe Lieberman to hold hearings. It's not too late, as is evidenced by what's happening on the House side. We're being very aggressive about trying to get information about private contractors so we can stop the bleeding." Collins has distanced herself from President Bush on some issues and, in fact, has opposed some of his Iraq policies. Still, Allen insists that Collins' positions are closer to the president's than her votes would suggest. Allen says, "Sen. Collins is just too close to Bush and Cheney and their policy in Iraq. I mean, the pattern is that people who support the president's policy have not been aggressive about doing oversight on these private contractors. They were trying, I think, to keep the news coming from Iraq as good as possible, but the price of that was being paid and still is being paid by the American taxpayer and the American soldier." For the duration of the election cycle, MPBN is asking candidates to personally respond to remarks directly voiced by their opponents. Sen. Collins did not do so for this story.
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