Robert C. Byrd

Our service men and women, now more than ever, are depending on your leadership to put the military medical system on a new track.

The Department is firmly committed to working closely and openly with Congress in order to protect the health of our servicemembers.

Promoting efficiency and preventing fraud in defense acquisitions will obviously be a high priority.

I will also ensure that the OIG pursues aggressive oversight of contracting issues.

My top priority will be to learn what challenges the DOD IG office needs to address and to ensure the adequacy of resources required to accomplish its mission.

In closing, may I say that the President's request includes $658 million for construction of the U.S. Embassy in Iraq.

Doesn't this send a signal to the Iraqi people and to the American people that the United States intends to have a large permanent presence there?

The President hasn't requested one dime of his $81.9 billion supplemental for the veterans' healthcare system.

I hope that wherever you can share your views, you will, because it's pretty easy in history to see this.

I cannot support this item unless there are some limitations on it, unless Congress can exercise its power over the purse, as the Constitution provides.

Why should Congress not have some limitations on this? It is the taxpayers' money.

The same situation that obtained prior to the entry of the war with Iraq might, in some respects, lend itself to a repeat in the case of Syria and/or Iran.

Why does the administration believe that the Appropriations Committee, or Congress, should have no say in how this $200 million foreign aid program should be spent?

What does it say about the state of our relations with all of these countries of the coalition of the willing, when, 2 years into the war against Iraq, the United States has to create a new foreign aid program to repay these countries for…

The Congress has passed two use-of-force resolutions, one almost immediately after the September 11 attacks

I believe it was September 14, 2001, resolution might be used by the administration as a premise to attack Syria and/or Iran.

Does the administration have any plans for attacks against Syria, either because of the assassination in Lebanon or for its supposed hand in the Iraqi insurgency?

I am equally worried that the administration has no agenda to manage what appears to be a worsening nuclear crisis in North Korea.

I am profoundly worried that the President may have a hidden agenda for dealing with Iran and Syria.

Will these funds be sufficient to address the complaints that we have heard, and that you heard also, Mr. Secretary, when you were visiting there, that our troops are scrounging for armor in trash dumps?

Why has it taken nearly 2 years of fighting in Iraq before the Pentagon asked for armor for all of these supply vehicles?

No, we're not talking about a lot of things; we're talking about this particular request for modularity.

Well, I have to tell you, Mr. Secretary, this seems to me to be an abuse, a serious abuse, of supplemental appropriations requests.

I cannot understand why the administration chose to begin a major war knowing that our troops did not have enough body and vehicle armor.