“He should have been a watchdog, instead he was a lapdog for Bush and his cronies,” Franken said today during a campaign stop in Duluth. He also made stops in St. Paul and Rochester.
Accompanying Franken was Daryl Bong of Wrenshall, who served with the Army in Afghanistan from 2004-05.While there, he said, he saw construction equipment, construction materials and other supplies that had been thrown away or lost.
“People should be outraged about all this stuff, and I can’t believe Norm Coleman let them get away with it,” he said.
Senator Coleman was chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations in the U.S. Senate from 2002 until 2005. That is a time that we know now defense contractors were defrauding the federal government on many contracts in Iraq, much of which has never been found, billions of dollars are missing. It was also a time when the war was going badly, reconstruction going even worse, and billions of dollars in aid simply disappearing.
Rochester Post-Bulletin’s Matthew Stolle:
Franken said Coleman’s failure to hold a single hearing contributed to a culture of laxity in which greedy contractors overcharged taxpayers for services or committed outright fraud; no-bid contracts to favored companies lasted for years; and billions of dollars meant to put Iraqis to work and maintain civil society “just disappeared.”
He says Coleman cost American tax-pays more than $15 billion because he failed to pay attention to what was and wasn’t being done correctly during the Iraqi reconstruction.
“I would have been going to Iraq to make sure that reconstruction efforts were going well and that the contractors were doing what they were supposed to do and I’m talking about immediately after we set foot in Iraq,” Franken said, “now it turns out Norm Coleman did not go to Iraq until January or 2005.”
Pioneer Press’ Rachel E. Stassen-Berger:
Franken said Coleman was in a uniquely powerful position as the subcommittee’s chairman; the office of the special inspector general wasn’t created until after the Iraq war was well under way; and Coleman “slept through one of the greatest heists of taxpayers’ money in history.”
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations grew out of work then-Sen. Harry Truman did on war profiteering before World War II.
And if you haven’t read it yet, check out Franken’s Coleman and PSI document for more on this scandal.
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