Military Spending Raises Questions
Lawmakers: Bush Bypassed Congress

By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A17

When Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio) went on an inspection trip to several Persian Gulf countries in the summer of 2002, he was dazzled by the state-of-the-art command centers, airstrips and other facilities being built there for the U.S. military.

But he was also troubled. Some of what he saw or learned from military briefers had not been approved by the House Appropriations Committee panel on military construction, which he then chaired. "I knew I didn't have that kind of money," he quipped recently.

Hobson's inquiries ultimately led to a modest tightening of controls over the Pentagon's ability to move money between military accounts without prior approval from Congress. But the episode has sparked concerns on the part of some lawmakers that the Bush administration largely bypassed Congress as it expanded installations in the Persian Gulf region before the war with Iraq.

President Bush has acknowledged that months before Congress voted an Iraq war resolution in October 2002, he approved about 30 projects in Kuwait that helped set the stage for war, with "no real knowledge or involvement" of Congress, according to "Plan of Attack," a new book by Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post.

A Pentagon briefing paper supplied to Congress after publication of the Woodward book states that by July 2002, "in the course of preparing for a contingency in Iraq, U.S. Central Command [Centcom] developed rough estimates of $750 million in preparatory tasks."

In August and September, the Pentagon said, $178 million was made available for 21 projects, mainly in Kuwait, involving communications equipment, fuel supplies, humanitarian rations and Centcom's forward headquarters.

In Kuwait, the projects included repairs of airfield lighting and upgrades of munitions storage at the Al Jaber and Al Salem air bases; an inland petroleum-distribution system facility; a detention center to supplement the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and preparation of facilities to "support deployment of Army forces." A $15 million allocation was granted to "provide for communications equipment, utilities, equipment and sustainment support for the U.S. base at Arifjan Base Camp in Kuwait."

Also approved was money to build a forward operating headquarters in As Sayliyah in Qatar and upgrade ammunition storage and handling facilities in Oman.

Testifying last month before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has partly disputed Woodward's account, saying that nothing was built in the region before October that had Iraq as the "exclusive purpose."

In a statement to The Post last week, the Defense Department said it had "provided all the notification for war on terrorism efforts required by Congress."

But the extent to which key congressional committees were given details of the prewar buildup is now a matter of contention between the Pentagon and some senior lawmakers, who say that, at the least, the Pentagon failed to follow the spirit of the laws requiring consultation.

In August, Hobson and aides traveled to Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and saw work underway or learned about projects that had not been approved by the military construction subcommittee.

"I did what any congressman would do," Hobson said in an interview last week. "Our role in appropriations is to find money [for projects] but also to look and see where the funding is going."

Initially, however, Pentagon officials provided few details to Hobson and his aides, he said. They argued that the spending was legal under guidelines that allowed the military to transfer funds appropriated for "operations and maintenance" into a "contingency" construction account when the military needs to build facilities in territory that is not under U.S. control.

An October 2002 classified briefing for congressional committees provided only general information, and Hobson's subcommittee kept pressing for what is known as Form 1391s: descriptions of individual projects that include line-item detail.

Pentagon officials provided congressional staffs with additional briefings on spending in the winter and spring of 2003, but congressional aides, who asked not to be named, said the details were still often spotty, even allowing for the need to safeguard the security of U.S. facilities and avoid political difficulties for Muslim governments providing secret support to the United States.

The wrangle continued into the spring of 2003, when Congress, over the strong objections of the Defense Department, added a provision to a new spending bill signed by Bush on April 16, 2003. It set a $150 million ceiling on the amount of funds that could be transferred to the Pentagon's "contingency" construction account and required seven-day advance notification of the reasons for the transfer.

The provision was backed by Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.), who succeeded Hobson as chairman of the military construction panel in early 2002.

"Oversight is always needed," Knollenberg said. "We like to trust, but also verify."

Pentagon officials have continued to insist that the Defense Department adhered carefully to the letter of the law.

In its statement last week, the Pentagon said only one of the projects, with a value of $1.4 million, met the definition of a "military construction project" under the jurisdiction of the House subcommittee. That lone project was not started until Congress was notified of it in October 2002, it said.

The other construction projects, it added, involved "temporary facilities or facility improvements that did not meet the military construction criteria."

But Thomas Gavin, a spokesman for Sen. Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, took issue with that. Gavin said 11 of the 21 projects qualified as military construction activities.

"The first time that the staff of the defense subcommittee saw that list was after the publication of Mr. Woodward's book," he said.

Gavin said an October 2002 classified briefing for congressional defense staffs covered "parts" of three of the 11 projects and a second briefing the following April covered an additional four.

"To the best of our knowledge, the administration failed to follow the law when it came to keeping the people's representatives fully informed on how they were spending these dollars," Gavin said.




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