In January 2004, when the White House announced the president had tapped Stuart Bowen to be the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Bush critics were deeply disappointed. Considering Bowen’s background as a presidential ally, their concerns made sense at the time. Few could have predicted what a tremendous public servant Bowen would turn out to be.
As Bush confidants go, Bowen was in tight. He was a senior member of Bush’s gubernatorial campaign team in 1994, he served alongside Alberto Gonzales in Bush’s office in Austin, and during the Florida recount debacle in 2000, it was Bowen who spent 35 days in the state, serving as deputy counsel to the Bush transition team. From there, Bowen was an associate counsel in Bush’s White House before becoming a powerful DC lobbyist. For Dems hoping for a strong, independent voice to exercise real oversight of Iraqi reconstruction, Bowen’s resume offered little encouragement.
But critics were wrong. Bowen has not only taken his job as inspector general seriously, he’s been the leading figure in exposing fraud and corruption. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Bowen “has become one of the most prominent and credible critics of how the administration has handled the occupation of Iraq,” and considering his record, it’s a more-than-fair description.
During a routine audit last summer of an American office in charge of doling out reconstruction funding in Hillah, Iraq, U.S. government investigators made a series of startling discoveries.
The office had paid a contractor twice for the same work. A U.S. official was allowed to handle millions of dollars in cash weeks after he was fired for incompetence. Of the $119.9 million allocated for regional projects, $89.4 million was disbursed without contracts or other documentation. An additional $7.2 million couldn’t be found at all.
To many officials in both Baghdad and Washington, the only thing more surprising than the problems was the identity of the man who had uncovered them: Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction…. In a series of blistering public reports, he has detailed systemic management failings, lax or nonexistent oversight, and apparent fraud and embezzlement on the part of the U.S. officials charged with administering the rebuilding efforts.
We’re talking about a guy who even exposed Halliburton problems. Naturally, therefore, Republicans are trying to get rid of Bowen.
Aides at both the State Department and the Defense Department have tried to curb the independence of his office. L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority until June 2004, has criticized Mr. Bowen for “misconceptions and inaccuracies” and for expecting the occupation authority, amid postwar chaos, to follow accounting standards that “even peaceful Western nations would have trouble meeting.” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, has called Mr. Bowen’s staff “dramatically out of touch with the practical realities of waging war and setting up a new government in a war-torn country.”
Predictable conservative smears aside, Bowen seems to be the only high-ranking administration official in Iraq concerned about corruption and looking out for the interests of American taxpayers.
Mr. Bowen’s audits later found evidence that the push led contracting officials to take shortcuts that made it difficult to determine where the money actually went. In Hillah, for instance, a contracting officer told Mr. Bowen’s investigators that he had been given $6.75 million in cash on June 21 with the expectation that he would spend the entire amount before the handover, which ultimately took place two days earlier than planned on June 28.
[Bowen] soon found other examples of apparently lax oversight. An employee of the CPA comptroller in Baghdad, for example, kept the key to a safe containing more than $140,000 in cash in an unattended backpack.
In one of his most attention-grabbing reports, issued on Jan. 30, 2005, Mr. Bowen concluded that the American occupation authority failed to keep track of nearly $9 billion that it transferred to Iraqi government ministries, which lacked financial controls and internal safeguards to prevent abuse. One Iraqi ministry cited in the audit inflated its payroll to receive extra funds, claiming to employ 8,206 guards when it actually employed barely 600.
In a November 2004 report, Mr. Bowen took on the big contractor Halliburton Co. in two separate reports. He urged the Army to withhold nearly $90 million in payments to Halliburton because the company couldn’t justify what it had charged the government. The report added that “weakness in the cost-reporting process” was such a problem that his investigators couldn’t do a standard audit of Halliburton’s bills to the CPA. Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann says the Houston-based oil-services and contracting company is working with the Army to resolve the matter and “we expect to work through any remaining issues in a cooperative manner.”
Mr. Bowen’s audits have also described what appears to be outright criminal behavior by several government officials. In one case, an Army soldier serving as the assistant to an American boxing coach admitted to gambling away half the $40,000 he was given to cover the expenses of an Iraqi athletic team during a trip to the Philippines; his case was referred to the military’s justice system for a court-martial. Mr. Bowen also recently gave the Justice Department information on possibly criminal behavior on the part of U.S. contracting officers in Hillah, the first time government officials have been implicated in potential fraud in Iraq. The officers left the country with no record of how they had spent nearly $1.5 million that couldn’t be found by investigators.
Looking back over the last two years, it seems as if Bush’s selection of Bowen is about the only thing the White House has done right in Iraq since the war began.