Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee slipped a midnight rider into a spending bill that will shutter the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction, the only office watching the expenditure of $20 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars in Iraq.
From the NY Times:
Investigations led by a 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.
My Congressman, Jim Saxton, is a Republican on HASC, and deserves to lose his seat to Dem Rich Sexton on this issue alone.
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