Journal peacefinder's Journal: Who needs audits, anyway? 6
Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office
By JAMES GLANZ
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.
Mr. Bowen's office, which began operation in January 2004 to examine reconstruction money spent in Iraq, was always envisioned as a temporary organization, permitted to continue its work only as long as Congress saw fit. Some advocates for the office, in fact, have regarded its lack of a permanent bureaucracy as the key to its aggressiveness and independence.
[...]
Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill.
Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree.
"It's truly a mystery to me," Ms. Collins said. "I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time."
"The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion," she said.
[...]
The termination language was inserted into the bill by Congressional staff members working for Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on Monday that he plans to run for president in 2008.
Mr. Holly, who is the House Armed Services spokesman as well as a member of Mr. Hunter's staff, said that politics played no role and that there had been no direction from the administration or lobbying from the companies whose work in Iraq Mr. Bowen's office has severely critiqued. Three of the companies that have been a particular focus of Mr. Bowen's investigations, Halliburton, Parsons and Bechtel, said that they had made no effort to lobby against his office.
The idea, Mr. Holly said, was simply to return to a non-wartime footing in which inspectors general in the State Department, the Pentagon and elsewhere would investigate American programs overseas. The definite termination date was also seen as helpful for planning future oversight efforts from Bush administration agencies, he said.
But in Congress, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, there have long been accusations that agencies controlled by the Bush administration are not inclined to unearth their own shortcomings in the first place.
The criticism came to a head in a hearing a year ago, when Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, induced the Pentagon's acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, to concede that he had no agents deployed in Iraq, more than two years after the invasion.
A spokesman for the Pentagon inspector general said Thursday that Mr. Gimble had worked to improve that situation, and currently had seven auditors in Baghdad and others working on Iraq-related issues in the United States and elsewhere. Mr. Gimble was in Iraq on Thursday, the spokesman said.
Mr. Bowen's office has 55 auditors and inspectors in Iraq and about 300 reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripping any other oversight agency in the country. [...]
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Thanks, Mr. Hunter. I'l be sure to remember this in 2008.
These are not the 'Droids (Score:2)
Jeez. Every time you think it cannot become more brazen...
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Hey, maybe they can just get people to sign the bill, and then add provisions later. That would save lots of time, since then everyone wouldn't need to argue over little changes, wouldn't it?
How about making the full text of bills available to the public before a vote is allowed, so that people with the motive can go pick them apart and scream like demons when people pull crap like this? Show the original version, and then diffs as things are added/deleted (hell this would be useful for the representativ
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Yeah, like Congress wants the American people to know what gets put in some of these bills.
I fully agree with you, BTW. A big problem I think is politicians from both aisles are expected to vote the party line always. The ones that don't really don't get very far.
On the radio a few years ago a woman won vs t
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It's rule by Fiat!
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The Dubster will just add a signing statement to the effect that he need not comply with the provision, when it seen to collide with the imperitives of a President during wartime.
Of course, Congress needs to declare a war - which has not been done. This is a Constitutionally vested authority, and cannot by diverted or delegated, without an ammendment to the Constitution. A simple 'war powers' delegation by simple majority is a treasonable offence against the oaths of office of al involved.
You ne