Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart Bowen in Iraq have sent U.S. occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies such as Halliburton Co. and Parsons Corp., and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.
But tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Bowen's supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip, in the form of an obscure provision terminating the federal oversight agency that he heads, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
Bowen's office, created in January 2004 to examine reconstruction money spent in Iraq, currently has 55 auditors and inspectors in Iraq and some 300 reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripping any other oversight agency in the country.
[Excerpt of an article by James Glanz, New York Times]
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