Congress Decides to Do Something About Iraq: Fire the Auditors
A lot of people have been talking about today’s NY Times story regarding the “Nuclear Primer” the Bush administration made available online. As is usually the case, the story is overblown and the reaction to the story pitifully ignorant. What bothers me, however, is that there is a far more disturbing story in the same issue that has received scant attention:
Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.
And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.
The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.
“We had no idea we were supposed to read these things!”
Of course, there’s a question of whether Bowen had very much power to begin with. From President Bush’s Nov. 6 2003 signing statement:
The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investiga-tions by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security. The Secretary of Defense may make exceptions to the foregoing direction in the public interest.
