By By JOHN EBY / Niles Daily Star
DOWAGIAC - U.S. Rep. Fred Upton went back to Iraq to investigate corruption.
Niles' congressman personally examined some of 8 million documents secured about toppled tyrant Saddam Hussein.
They contain suggestions that he skimmed money from the United Nations oil-for-food program.
Estimates are that the plunder of his own people possibly exceeds $10 billion. Iraq is believed to have the world's largest oil reserves.
Upton, who visited Iraq last October, first met with Chevron's head after arriving Friday and dined with the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, which serves as supply depot for the war effort. A convoy into Iraq takes six days.
Fitted for combat everywhere he went, "We didn't need coffee" to stay alert.
Saturday they toured the oilfields. The St. Joseph Republican said Tuesday afternoon in a telephone interview from Washington with the Dowagiac Daily News that one Kuwait oilfield produces as much crude each day as all of Texas.
Fuel tanks like the ones near Niles, ruined in the 1991 Gulf War, remain riddled with bullets and melted over from heat. Oil which leaked out in the desert stained Upton's favorite running shoes.
Early Sunday Upton opened the door to his room and The Kuwait Times, a newspaper in English, awaited him with a vivid picture of smoke billowing from a Humvee after a car bomb exploded as a U.S. military convoy passed in Baghdad, killing two American soldiers. Violence last week cost 300 lives.
There is a long pause Tuesday afternoon as Upton tries to recall dinner Saturday night. "We didn't have any," he finally decides. Only one "codel," or congressional delegation, is admitted at a time.
Sunday he rode in the cockpit of a cargo plane for the landing at Baghdad International Airport. "We had to be strapped in," Upton related. "We wore probably 40- or 50-pound Kevlar vests with a helmet coming in to land because a couple have been hit by insurgents."
Landing there favors a "corkscrew" over a "long glide path."
When they were safely on the ground, his party "sort of ran" across the tarmac to waiting Blackhawk helicopters. One congressman had a last-minute family emergency which prevented him from going, so Upton traveled with fellow Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and George Radanovich, R-Calif.
Upton couldn't miss machine guns mounted on the side of the chopper. "They were loaded," he said. They sat four abreast on narrow seats, facing each other, with Upton by the window because he had a camera.
They flew directly into the Green Zone, the heavily-fortified central city area along the river with 15-foot walls which has been free of suicide bombers. Then they convoyed with U.S. military accompaniment to the embassy.
He met with L. Paul Bremer there last year, who he will see Monday when he speaks to The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake Michigan College Mendel Center near Benton Harbor.
He wore long sleeves despite the oppressive heat because "they found a new disease, a sand flea with a parasite in it that creates sores that don't go away."
Then "we ventured to a storage facility to look at the documents for the oil-for-food program," Upton said. "The UN contracted with (the accounting firm) Ernst and Young to verify payments. We were pleased to find that the documents were secure" and bound in notebooks.
Another was for $2 million Euros to a Swiss firm for more non-food-related dealings, reported the Energy and Commerce Committee member.
No report has been made yet with specific findings. "The Iraqis own the documents," he said. "Through some good work by a U.S. Treasury woman we met, she had them shrink-wrapped and moved to this particular storage facility we visited. We met with her."
Upton said they are trying to get a memorandum of understanding with the Iraqi government and the UN to have access to these documents because his committee has subpoena power the UN lacks. He expects a team of congressional investigators to be dispatched.
Through interpreters, Upton had further meetings with Iraqi bankers and others with understanding of the oil-for-food operations.
He was awaiting a meeting at 4:30 Tuesday to find out if he might be able to meet privately this week with Iraq's current leader, who is in Washington.
Their next stop by convoy, was "Camp Victory, where I actually spent the night last year" after a plane broke down and he couldn't make it back to Kuwait.
Upton expects Iraqi troops to carry out more of the fighting soon. Plans have been formulated to train 100,000 troops by next spring for National Guard duty.
Coming back to the States, Upton said they stopped in Ireland and at the military hospital at Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany, which through Sept. 19 had treated 18,455 patients, of whom only 13 died - and some of those from cancer or heart attacks.
One "real noticeable" improvement Upton noticed is that the Mishawaka-made Humvees have now been plated with armor. "I rode in an armored one," he said. However, the armor and bulletproof glass work so well that "snipers shoot for the neck" in hopes of turning targets into quadriplegics.
The insurgency is "not getting stronger; it's getting more desperate," Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who took power in June, told ABC News.
With Allawi in Washington, Upton Tuesday afternoon awaited word on whether he would be granted a private meeting with the interim leader.
An al Qaida-linked group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed Tuesday to have killed the second of two American hostages, Jack Hensley. Eugene Armstrong, who grew up in Hillsdale, Hensley and Briton Kenneth Bigley were abducted Thursday from a home the three civil engineers shared in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood.
Al-Zarqawi beheaded Armstrong. The militants on Monday posted a gruesome video depicting the 52-year-old man's demise.