OT: Republican slime hiding crimes in Iraq

They must be concerned about Cheney's secrets.


November 3, 2006
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.

But as the implications of the provision in the new bill have become clear,
opposition has been building on both sides of the political aisle. One point
of contention is exactly when the office would have naturally run its course
without a hard end date.

The bipartisan opposition may not be unexpected given Mr. Bowen's Republican
credentials - he served under George W. Bush both in Texas and in the White
House - and deep public skepticism on the Bush administration's conduct of
the war.

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.

A Republican spokesman for the committee, Josh Holly, said lawmakers should
not have been surprised by the provision closing the inspector general's
office because it "was discussed very early in the conference process."

But like several other members of the House and Senate who were contacted on
the bill, Ms. Collins said that she feared the loss of oversight that could
occur if the inspector general's office went out of business, adding that
she was already working on legislation with several Democratic and
Republican senators to reverse the termination.

One of those, John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the
powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Bowen
was "making a valuable contribution to the Congressional and public
understanding of this very complex and ever-changing situation in Iraq."

"Given that his office has performed important work and that much remains to
be done," Mr. Warner added, "I intend to join Senator Collins in consulting
with our colleagues to extend his charter."

While Senators Collins and Warner said they had nothing more than hunches on
where the impetus for setting a termination date had originated,
Congressional Democrats were less reserved.

"It appears to me that the administration wants to silence the messenger
that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq," said
Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking
minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform.

"I just can't see how one can look at this change without believing it's
political," he 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.

But Howard Krongard, the State Department inspector general, said that the
comparison was misleading, because many of those resources would probably
flow to State and the Pentagon if Congress shuts Mr. Bowen's office down.

"I think we are competitive to do what they ask us to do," Mr. Krongard
said, referring to Congress.

Mr. Kucinich and other lawmakers said that Iraq oversight could also be hurt
by the loss of Mr. Bowen's mandate, which allows him to cross institutional
boundaries, while the other inspectors general have jurisdictions only
within their own agencies. Mr. Krongard said that issue could be handled by
cooperation among the inspectors general.

Officials at the State Department and the Pentagon made it clear that in
general terms they supported Mr. Bowen's work and would abide by the wishes
of Congress.

While the quality of Mr. Bowen's work is seldom questioned, he is sometimes
accused of being a grandstander who is too friendly with the news media. Mr.
Bowen has responded that it is standard procedure to publicize successful
investigations as a way of discouraging other potential wrongdoers.

Among the disagreements on the termination language in the defense
authorization bill was exactly how much it would have shortened Mr. Bowen's
tenure. An amendment in the Senate version of the bill actually expanded the
pot of reconstruction money his agents could examine.

Because the tenure of his office is calculated through a formula involving
the amount of reconstruction money in that pot, the crafters of that
amendment figured that it would have extended Mr. Bowen's work until well
into 2008 - or longer if Congress granted further extensions.

Mr. Holly agrees that the Senate language would have expanded that pot of
money, but he says that in the Republican staff's interpretation of the
formula, Mr. Bowen's tenure would have run out sometime in 2007 whether the
money was added or not.

In any case, as the bill came out of conference, the termination date of
Oct. 1, 2007, was inserted, effectively meaning that Mr. Bowen would have to
start working on passing his responsibilities to other agencies by early
next year.

Capitol Hill staff members said that after House Democratic objections were
overridden, Senate conferees agreed to the provision in a bit of
horse-trading: the amount of money Mr. Bowen could look at would be
expanded, but only with the hard termination date.

Mr. Bowen himself declined to comment on the controversy surrounding his
office, saying only that he was already working with the other inspectors
general to develop a transition plan in accordance with the defense
authorization act. "We will do what the Congress desires," Mr. Bowen said.

"JoeSpareBedroom" <dishborealis@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:9GL2h.4659$Ka1.4354@news01.roc.ny...[color=blue]
> They must be concerned about Cheney's secrets.
>
>
> November 3, 2006
> 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.
>[/color]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As the "church lady" might say ..."Now, isn't that convenient!"
Amazing how the Republican Congress can sweep bad stuff under the nearest
rug.....

Remember that Congress is NOT all Republican or all Democrat:! While I am
an Independent, I am more concerned about why neither party actually has a
handle on the Islam history of conquests. Since they are probabaly the
greatest threat to world peace that the planet has ever seen, why are they
the largest lobby group in Washington, and why are they being tolerated by
either party - especially the Democrats?

Remember, Islam once invaded and controlled most of the territory from
Lisbon to China - all gained through violence. Islam controlled Spain for
almost 800 years, finally surrendering Alhambra in 1492.
Today, Islam has conquered most of Africa.

Gentlemen, we have a problem, and it is not Republican or Democrat.

However, if you want to get partisan, remember, it was Kennedy who passed
the law allowing money to be moved from the Social Security funds to the
General Fund. I believe either he or Johnson (maybe both) started the
destruction of the fund by removing about 7 billion dollars out to finance
their projects.

Also, it was Clinton who made China a favored trading partner, allowing
China to export anything they wanted to the US without restrictions, costing
thousands of jobs and forcing hundreds of companies here to move or go out
of business. Was that payback for the millions that China gave the Clinton
Administration to help finance his second election? I thought that was a
felony! But that is another story, even though Hillary appears to be doing
something similar.

So, neither party is without serious corruption. In fact, a committee of
the United Nations (a corrupt organization) released a list of corrupt
governments in the world a few years ago (during the Clinton
Administration). The report listed the United States Government as the 14th
most corrupt government in the world.. Of course, I don't believe anything
coming out of the UN, but their is some smoke there.

May God Bless us.



"JoeSpareBedroom" <dishborealis@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:9GL2h.4659$Ka1.4354@news01.roc.ny...[color=blue]
> They must be concerned about Cheney's secrets.
>
>
> November 3, 2006
> 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.
>
> But as the implications of the provision in the new bill have become
> clear, opposition has been building on both sides of the political aisle.
> One point of contention is exactly when the office would have naturally
> run its course without a hard end date.
>
> The bipartisan opposition may not be unexpected given Mr. Bowen's
> Republican credentials - he served under George W. Bush both in Texas and
> in the White House - and deep public skepticism on the Bush
> administration's conduct of the war.
>
> 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.
>
> A Republican spokesman for the committee, Josh Holly, said lawmakers
> should not have been surprised by the provision closing the inspector
> general's office because it "was discussed very early in the conference
> process."
>
> But like several other members of the House and Senate who were contacted
> on the bill, Ms. Collins said that she feared the loss of oversight that
> could occur if the inspector general's office went out of business, adding
> that she was already working on legislation with several Democratic and
> Republican senators to reverse the termination.
>
> One of those, John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of
> the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Mr.
> Bowen was "making a valuable contribution to the Congressional and public
> understanding of this very complex and ever-changing situation in Iraq."
>
> "Given that his office has performed important work and that much remains
> to be done," Mr. Warner added, "I intend to join Senator Collins in
> consulting with our colleagues to extend his charter."
>
> While Senators Collins and Warner said they had nothing more than hunches
> on where the impetus for setting a termination date had originated,
> Congressional Democrats were less reserved.
>
> "It appears to me that the administration wants to silence the messenger
> that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq," said
> Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking
> minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform.
>
> "I just can't see how one can look at this change without believing it's
> political," he 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.
>
> But Howard Krongard, the State Department inspector general, said that the
> comparison was misleading, because many of those resources would probably
> flow to State and the Pentagon if Congress shuts Mr. Bowen's office down.
>
> "I think we are competitive to do what they ask us to do," Mr. Krongard
> said, referring to Congress.
>
> Mr. Kucinich and other lawmakers said that Iraq oversight could also be
> hurt by the loss of Mr. Bowen's mandate, which allows him to cross
> institutional boundaries, while the other inspectors general have
> jurisdictions only within their own agencies. Mr. Krongard said that issue
> could be handled by cooperation among the inspectors general.
>
> Officials at the State Department and the Pentagon made it clear that in
> general terms they supported Mr. Bowen's work and would abide by the
> wishes of Congress.
>
> While the quality of Mr. Bowen's work is seldom questioned, he is
> sometimes accused of being a grandstander who is too friendly with the
> news media. Mr. Bowen has responded that it is standard procedure to
> publicize successful investigations as a way of discouraging other
> potential wrongdoers.
>
> Among the disagreements on the termination language in the defense
> authorization bill was exactly how much it would have shortened Mr.
> Bowen's tenure. An amendment in the Senate version of the bill actually
> expanded the pot of reconstruction money his agents could examine.
>
> Because the tenure of his office is calculated through a formula involving
> the amount of reconstruction money in that pot, the crafters of that
> amendment figured that it would have extended Mr. Bowen's work until well
> into 2008 - or longer if Congress granted further extensions.
>
> Mr. Holly agrees that the Senate language would have expanded that pot of
> money, but he says that in the Republican staff's interpretation of the
> formula, Mr. Bowen's tenure would have run out sometime in 2007 whether
> the money was added or not.
>
> In any case, as the bill came out of conference, the termination date of
> Oct. 1, 2007, was inserted, effectively meaning that Mr. Bowen would have
> to start working on passing his responsibilities to other agencies by
> early next year.
>
> Capitol Hill staff members said that after House Democratic objections
> were overridden, Senate conferees agreed to the provision in a bit of
> horse-trading: the amount of money Mr. Bowen could look at would be
> expanded, but only with the hard termination date.
>
> Mr. Bowen himself declined to comment on the controversy surrounding his
> office, saying only that he was already working with the other inspectors
> general to develop a transition plan in accordance with the defense
> authorization act. "We will do what the Congress desires," Mr. Bowen said.
>
>[/color]