These are not the corruptions you are looking for...

Ever hear of Stuart W. Bowen, Jr.? He joined the Bush gubernatorial campaign in 1994 and followed Bush & Co. to the White House (after a 35-day stay in Florida watching over the recount).

Sensing a political lackey? Oh, it gets worse. Before his latest job, he spent 9 months working for a "Washington law firm with a client, URS Group, that sought and won Iraqi contracts." [Herman].

His latest job was heading the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction-- "lead investigator of the billions of dollars... spent rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure" [Herman].

Scared yet? Hillary and California Dem Henry Waxman were. Clinton voiced concern that Bowen would "lack the independence needed to fully monitor the way American taxpayer dollars are spent on Iraqi reconstruction," when it was first set up. Waxman for his part had a report published entitled The Politicization of Inspectors General, in which Bowen got his very own section*. "The report concluded that Bush has a habit of putting politically-connected people with little to no auditing experience in key spots as inspectors general." [Herman]

But here's the thing: once the administration had effectively cut off oversight by Congress, they had to do something. So they put in a lackey and went back to letting Halliburton and others rip off the country. (That's admittedly a simplification, I encourage you to use the net to fill in the blanks about how this all came about.)

OK, if you're a freedom-lover, you're probably already a little spooked about the fox getting a baby fox to guard the henhouse. Luckily, the baby fox didn't really get it, and he actually did guard the henhouse. Bowen released reports that--gasp!-- actually tracked down the free-flowing money being tossed about in Iraq and uncovered what the Australian news org The Age headlined as "Huge Fraud".

Was it enough? Did he actually track where the money went and find the crooks and prosecute them. Um, well, he might have. Even if you're horrified at another example of cronyism, today's news is worse:

the Republican-led Congress has moved quickly to address the problem: It's denying Bowen authority to monitor the $21 billion in reconstruction funds included in the latest Iraq funding bill.


Thanks to Ken Herman of the Cox News Service for his 2005 article"Former Bush aide oversees Iraq reconstruction spending" for the background info, and Tim Grieve's post at Salon.com's War Room for tipping me off to the latest news.

*"...because the slot he now holds is not under the Inspector General Act that created the other posts at federal agencies." [Herman]

(originally written in Nov 06, finally published today!)