I’d seen a few initial reports last year on the breathtaking fraud and mismanagement with Iraqi reconstruction funds, but I honestly can’t wait to hear the vaunted Bush political operation try and spin results like these.
A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.
The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. […]
Agents from the inspector general’s office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general’s office.
There’s more in the article; it’s rather stunning.
I wanted to add some context, however, that the NYT didn’t get to. The office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has been led by Stuart Bowen. When the White House tapped Bowen for the job in January 2004, Bush critics were deeply disappointed — Bowen was widely recognized as a close Bush ally, so few expected him to be thorough and aggressive.
The critics were wrong.
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.
And yet, as the NYT report makes clear, 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 in July 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. The guy even took on Halliburton.
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.
I’m left with the impression that giving Bowen this job is about the only thing the White House has done right in Iraq since the war began.