Why Did Bush Destroy the Iraqi Reconstruction Oversight Agency?

Question

An obscure provision in a huge military authorization bill that President George W. Bush recently signed terminates the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

The clause has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

The federal oversight agency, led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr., has sent U.S. officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Cheneys Halliburton Co. and Parsons Iraq Joint Venture, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

(I have a good Idea as to why the one office charged with exposing corruption in Iraq has been terminated, but I would really like to know what you think.)
SO......What do you think?

Answer 1

I think its more a question of which battles and when to pick them.

Answer 2

At this time roughly 75% of your tax dollar is just flat stolen.

With cost reimbursable Federal contracts, the contractor submits bills and the government pays them. Profit can be based on a number of things including an award for being really neat guys. A percentage is not allowed, and a maximum of 10% is unmistakable in the Federal Acquisition Regulations. So if a contractor inflates costs for travel, home office support, etc. etc., buys from dummy corporations ($10/gallon gas, $100 pencils, $1000 hammers, or $600 toilet seats), and nobody checks whether or not prices charged are reasonable, actual and within the realm of possibility, they get away with theft on a monstrous scale. The oversight Agency was the supposed check on all that money being pumped out of our pockets into those of the profiteers. With that gone, the hemorrhage will worsen.

The U.S. has done cost contracting with certain Saudi contractors (any bells ringing?). When King Faisal Air Base in Tabuk was built, there were so many hammers purchased that the U.S. audit team decided that rather than count them after that portion of the work was done (the government takes possession of tools and equipment purchased but the big stuff somehow evaporates) would take too long, so they filled a skip-loader bucket with hammers, counted those, then just counted the number of buckets-full of hammers at $100/each.

Welcome to the land of Republican Federal contracting. The Democrats are just as bad. Barbara Boxer's husband along with other politically connected people formed a corporation which has undergone a number of reorganizations, reincorporations and other paper-trail dodging exercises, and purchased the former Hamilton Airforce Base in Marin County, California. This is a high-end piece of real estate in a posh area, and the agreement fixed the price at $3000/acre AFTER the government paid for remediation of any and all toxic chemical problems that had developed while the Airforce occupied it.