By AL FRANKEN
September 28, 2008

There is no denying that the reconstruction of Iraq — an endeavor to which we have committed tens of billions of dollars and a significant amount of our prestige on the world stage — has been a disaster. Less well-known, but just as important for Minnesotans to consider, is Sen. Norm Coleman’s role in that disaster.

Because of waste, fraud, incompetence and abusive contracting practices by companies our government trusted to do this important job, billions were wasted, stolen or lost. Pallets of shrink-wrapped American currency simply disappeared from airport hangars. Greedy contractors got no-bid “cost-plus” contracts that guaranteed a set percentage over and above every dollar they managed to spend. Some, not content with this sweetheart arrangement, even made up fake invoices claiming they’d spent more than they did. And we paid Halliburton billions while it overcharged the military for oil it delivered from Kuwait and served our troops rotten food.

Let’s be very clear here: Ripping off the taxpayer in a time of war is a betrayal of the highest order. And the cost of this fraud cannot be measured in dollars alone.

Because the United States botched the reconstruction, critical infrastructure — water, sewage, electricity and oil pipelines — didn’t get taken care of. Iraqis weren’t put to work, and some parents watched their children, wounded by IEDs or suicide bombers, die in hospitals that had no power, no water, no medicine.

The resentment stoked by this failure fueled an insurgency that made a difficult job for our troops nearly impossible. In effect, the botched reconstruction cost American lives.

War profiteering is hardly a novel criminal pursuit. During World War II, America was fortunate to have a visionary senator with the foresight to stop it. Nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, Harry Truman got in his Dodge and toured the country, inspecting war camps and rooting out abusive practices. He put a stop to “cost-plus” contracts, preventing taxpayers from getting ripped off.

And he used his powers as chairman of a new Senate committee to hold more than 400 hearings on war contracting, beginning in March 1941. But Truman wasn’t satisfied with finding out who had ripped us off. He saw his job as one of preventing abuse. “The thing to do,” he said, “is to dig this stuff up now and correct it,” and he did — saving billions of taxpayer dollars and untold American lives.

Harry Truman’s hard-driving approach launched him to the vice presidency and, eventually, to the White House. He left a legacy of dogged oversight that was continued by later chairmen of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). If we’d had Harry Truman on the case in Iraq, our investment there would have helped stabilize the country and quell the insurgency.

But we didn’t have Harry Truman in that chair. We had Norm Coleman.

Coleman was chairman of PSI from January 2003 until January 2007. In that role, he had sole subpoena power and the unique ability to call hearings and compel testimony unilaterally. As the Star Tribune wrote, he had “the perfect perch to represent the public interest, and a good start would be looking into no-bid contracts in Iraq.”

But Coleman was no Harry Truman. He held exactly zero hearings while Halliburton — a major Coleman campaign contributor — and other defense contractors ripped off American taxpayers and effectively sabotaged the reconstruction effort.

In 2003, fellow Minnesota Sen. Mark Dayton formally asked Coleman to use his power as chairman to hold hearings on price gouging by a Halliburton subsidiary. Coleman said that he “wasn’t taking his request very serious.”

Coleman further proved how unseriously he took his job by failing to visit Iraq until January 2005 (recall that Truman began his firsthand inspections before the war even began). A month earlier, he had told the Star Tribune that he had no intention of investigating Halliburton, saying that “Halliburton became a political code word … rather than a legitimate look at someone doing something wrong.”

Four times, fellow senators frustrated by Coleman’s unwillingness to investigate contracting in Iraq tried to create a special bipartisan committee to do his job for him. Four times, Coleman voted to block that effort.

In 2006, three and a half years after the war started, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) auditor returned from Iraq, and another committee on which Coleman sat held a hearing to receive his testimony. Coleman didn’t even bother to show up.

Coleman originally tried to defend his tenure, writing in the Pioneer Press in November 2006 that Truman would have been proud of his work, concluding: “The buck, indeed, stopped with me.”

Since then, he’s changed his explanation. The buck, as it now turns out, should have stopped with someone — anyone — else. Now, according to Coleman, it should have stopped with SIGIR, even though SIGIR was an arm of the Defense Department and wasn’t even on the ground in Iraq until 2005. Or maybe it should have stopped with some other committee in the Senate, even though as chairman of the PSI, Coleman had more investigatory power than any other senator. Even more laughably, he’s suggested that it was the Democratic minority that was responsible for the lack of oversight, even though Coleman blocked their efforts to do something about the ongoing corruption.

Coleman’s dereliction, and the devastating price we have paid for it, is an indelible stain on his record. He failed our troops, he failed taxpayers and he failed Minnesotans who were rightfully proud when he inherited that fabled chairmanship.

That chairmanship is an honor, but one that carries with it a responsibility to taxpayers. And that Senate seat belongs not to the Halliburtons of the world, but to the people of Minnesota.

Al Franken, a Democrat, is running for the U.S. Senate.

The Star Tribune published this op-ed on September 28, 2008.

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