Bruce L. Braley: “Well, as our good friend and colleague from Arkansas Marion Berry would say, That dog don't hunt. This is a classic…”

“Well, as our good friend and colleague from Arkansas Marion Berry would say, That dog don't hunt. This is a classic example of what we've seen over and over and over again from procurement decisions that are being made that have an adverse effect on American taxpayers. And I think if you go back to the beginning when they set up the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, that it was set up with the intent of using Iraqi assets to rebuild the country and to shift the dependency from the government or from the United States back to the Iraqi people through the oil revenues that we're talking about. And we've seen in committee hearings here photographs of Ford trucks full of pallets that had $250 million in cash per pallet that were part of a $2.1 billion one-day transfer of cash to the Iraqi government, the largest single transfer of cash in U.S. history. And that was part of a transfer of cash that led to $9 billion of missing money that was supposed to be part of the initial reconstruction of Iraq. Then the idea was to use those Iraqi oil revenues to pick up the responsibility and complete the work of rebuilding Iraq. And instead, we know that one of the big challenges the Iraqi government has faced is coming to some agreement on the division of oil revenues, and that's been a major obstacle to rebuilding the country and bringing about national reconciliation. And who is paying the tab for that? U.S. taxpayers. That is why the issue we're talking about is so important.”