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Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, I had a chance to meet Herman Wouk, who is one of America's greatest authors. He wrote ``Caine Mutiny'' and he wrote ``War and Remembrance.'' He is 91 years old and a remarkable man, just a remarkable man. He was telling me something kind of in jest. He said: GPO's PDFYou know, I don't know much about what happened after 1945, but I know everything that happened before 1945. He was talking about his body of work, his research on the Second World War and prior to that period of time. And he wrote wonderful books, as all of us know. He is one of America's greatest authors.
Herman Wouk and I were talking about the Iraq war and talking about the stories about the Iraq war, and he said to me: Do you know anything about the Truman Committee? Do you know anything about what happened in the Second World War with President Harry Truman, then-Senator Harry Truman, who created a committee, a special committee in the United States Senate, bipartisan, to go after this issue of contract fraud that was going on with respect to defense contracting? I told him I certainly did know about the Truman committee, and we have had, I believe, four votes in the Senate that I offered as amendments to establish a Truman committee.
At this point I want to show my colleagues a photograph of a man. I don't know this man personally. This comes from a Thursday, March 27, edition of the New York Times.
I read an article about this man on an airplane, and I was struck by it because it is such an unbelievable story, and it is another chapter of, in my judgment, a shameful series of chapters of abuse of the American people by contractors with respect to the Iraq war.
The New York Times published this article, and this is a picture of a 22-year-old man from Miami Beach. He had gotten contracts worth over $300 million in U.S. taxpayers' dollars, and he had signed a contract with the U.S. Army to provide arms to Afghan soldiers.
Apparently, we, as taxpayers, and the U.S. Army, were trying to provide additional arms for the Afghan Army with which to fight and defend itself. So this 22-year-old man got a $300 million contract from the Army Sustainment Command, through a company that had been a shell for a number of years established by this man's father. Mr. Diveroli is his name. This is a mug shot from the Miami Dade Police Department. He had allegedly assaulted a parking lot attendant and had a forged driver's license when he was arrested, which made him out to be 4 years older than he really was. He told police he had gotten the forged driver's license to buy alcohol, but now that he was over 21 he didn't need it any longer.
So this is a 22-year-old man who was the CEO of a company called AEY based in Miami Beach. And this is a picture of the building that was headquarters for his company, but there was nothing on any door in the building. Apparently, in one part of this building an office was supposed to be his office, but there was nothing that identified his office.
And here is a picture of his vice president, the vice president of this company, this company to which the U.S. Army gave a $300 million contract. The vice president is a 25-year-old masseur named David Packouz. He is the former vice president of the firm that got $300 million. So you have a 22-year-old and a 25-year-old masseur who get $300 million from the U.S. Army.
Now, what did they do with the $300 million? Well, the next photograph, again from the New York Times, shows outdated ammunition sold to Afghan forces, including 40-year-old Chinese-made cartridges. So these folks got $300 million and they were providing mid-1960s cartridges to the Afghan Army, which the Afghan Army was receiving in cardboard boxes that had not been properly taped and were falling apart. The Afghan Army described these armaments as junk. Here is an Afghan policeman surveying 42-year-old Chinese ammunition that arrived in crumbling boxes.
Again, American taxpayers, through the Army Sustainment Command, paid hundreds of millions of dollars to a company that previously had been a shell company, a shell corporation, now run by a 22-year-old who says that he is the only employee of the corporation.
Now, Mr. President, I have spent a lot of time on the floor of the Senate on these kinds of issues. It is pretty unbelievable when you think about it. I don't know Mr. Diveroli personally. Never met him. I do know that three reporters from the New York Times Ðdid some extraordinary work--C.J. Chivers, Eric Schmitt, and Nicholas Wood, to expose his activities. I don't know how long it took them to do this investigative piece, but it is two full pages inside the New York Times. They obviously traveled to Afghanistan and other countries to finish this investigative piece. We wouldn't know about this issue were it not for investigative reports by the New York Times.
In January of 2007, that is just 14 months ago, the most recent award, which I believe was $150 million, was given by the Army Sustainment Command, and the Army Sustainment Command said:
AEY's proposal represented the best value to the government.
I am telling you, this part of the U.S. Army has a lot of explaining to do to this Congress and to the American people. This is the same Army Sustainment Command and, incidentally, the same general in charge of the Army Sustainment Command who went to a hearing here in the Senate, and following my testimony before a hearing about the water problems in Iraq and about Halliburton Corporation providing water to the troops, nonpotable water that was twice as contaminated as raw water from the Euphrates River, we had the evidence, internal Halliburton
memorandums, saying it was a near miss. It could have caused mass sickness or death. This is the same general who went to that Senate committee and said: Never happened.
Well, now the inspector general has finished an investigation and said in fact it did happen. It did happen. This general has some explaining to do.
I have asked Secretary Gates, the Defense Secretary, to ask this general to explain himself, and so should this Congress.
But I don't understand, I just don't understand how even following information sent to this country, to the Army Sustainment Command by U.S. military officers in Afghanistan, saying what they are sending over here in the form of armaments under this contract is junk and it needs to stop, even following that it continued. It is an unbelievable amount of government waste .
This is but one issue. And we wouldn't know about it if it were not for the New York Times. This has been going on for years. We have been fighting in Iraq longer than we were fighting in the Second World War.
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