Panel I of a Hearing of the House Financial Services/Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee: Efforts to Recover Iraq's Stolen Money
HEADLINE: PANEL I OF A HEARING OF THE HOUSE FINANCIAL SERVICES/OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES
SUBJECT: EFFORTS TO RECOVER IRAQ'S STOLEN MONEY
CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE SUE KELLY (R-NY)
WITNESSES: JUAN ZARATE, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF TREASURY FOR TERRORIST FINANCING AND FINANCIAL CRIMES; PAUL SIMONS, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR ENERGY, SANCTIONS AND COMMODITIES
LOCATION: 2128 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
BODY:
REP. STEPHEN LYNCH (D-MA): Thank you, Madame Chair.
Thank you, Member Gutierrez and thank you, Chairman Oxley, for organizing this hearing and continuing your good work.
I want to thank the panel for attending as well, helping the committee with its work.
I also traveled to Iraq, although last May, shortly after the invasion. And also visited Kirkuk and was with General Odierno not that long after he and his forces had actually apprehended friends of the family of Saddam Hussein and recovered major amounts of melted- down gold and also American currency that was being pilfered from the Iraqi people.
In those days and weeks and actually hours prior to the invasion on March 19th, we had reports of members of Saddam Hussein's family taking trailer loads of cash from Iraqi banks and following those trucks up into Syria.
There's a great need here for us to lower as much as possible the cost to the American people of the effort in Iraq. And every dollar that we can recover will be one dollar less that we don't have to come up with through supplementals and other measures in this Congress.
The particular areas that I'd like to hear from, when we get to questioning, are surrounding the oil-for-food program and the mismanagement or the administration of that program, and also the siphoning-off of money for improper purposes.
I think there's a very focused reason why you are here today, but I don't want to ignore the fact that there's a wider purpose here as well. For the past two centuries, wars on this Earth have basically been waged by nations. And so it allowed us, through diplomacy, to prevent wars. Now we have the privatization of war, which is terrorism. And we need, if we are going to prevent the gravest dangers to the American people and to freedom-loving people everywhere, we need to choke off the funds for this privatization of war against private citizens, being conducted by various terrorist organizations all over this Earth.
So it's very, very important, the work that we're doing here, even though we're just looking at Saddam Hussein and trying to recover those monies. There is a network of money that is being used to fund, as I say, the privatization of war against innocent civilians. And so we hope that we can use some of the progress that's accomplished here in that wider effort.
I yield back. Thank you, Madame Chair.