- During the days of the Nixon Watergate
scandal investigation, reporter Bob Woodword was famously advised by his
mysterious source, Deep Throat, to "follow the money" as a way
of cracking the story.
-
- Well, there is a lot of money to follow
in the current scandal that can be best described as the Bush/Cheney administration,
and so far, nobody's doing it.
-
- My bet for the place that needs the most
following is the more than $9 billion that has gone missing without a trace
in Iraq--as well as $12 billion in cash that the Pentagon flew into Iraq
straight from Federal Reserve vaults via military transports, and for which
there has been little or no accounting.
-
- When word of the missing money first
surfaced in 2004, Congress passed legislation creating an office of Special
Inspector General, assuming that this new agency would root out the problem
and figure why all that taxpayer money had disappeared, and why only minimal
reconstruction was going on in destroyed Iraq, instead of a massive rebuilding
program as intended.
-
- The new inspector general, an affable
attorney named Stuart Bowen, went to work and came up with a report in
early 2006 that sounded scathing enough. Bowen found cases of double billing
by contractors, of payments for work that was never done, and other scandals.
But he never came up with more than $1 billion or so worth of problems.
-
- Now we know why.
-
- It turns out that Bowen was never really
looking very hard.
-
- When the Boston Globe, this past April,
broke the story that President Bush has been quietly setting aside over
750 acts passed by Congress, claiming he has the authority as "unitary
executive" and as commander in chief to ignore such laws, it turned
out that one of the laws the president chose to ignore was the one establishing
the special inspector general post for Iraq. What the president did was
write a so-called "signing statement" on the side (unpublicized
of course), saying that the new inspector general would have no authority
to investigate any contracts or corruption issues involving the Pentagon.
-
- Well, since most of the missing money
has been going to the military in Iraq, that pretty much meant nothing
of consequence would be discovered by the inspector general.
-
- You might think that the inspector general
himself would have complained about such a restriction on his authority
to do the job that Congress had intended, but Bush took care of that. In
his role as Chief Executive, he appointed Bowen to the post, a man who
has a long history of working as a loyal manservant to the president. Bowen
was a deputy general counsel for Governor Bush (meaning he was an assistant
to the ever solicitous solicitor Alberto Gonzales). He did yeoman service
to Bush as a member of the term that handled the famous vote count atrocity
in Florida in the November 2000 election, and then worked under Gonzales
again in the White House during Bush's first term, before returning briefly
to private practice.
-
- Bowen simply never mentioned to anyone
that, courtesy of a secretive and unconstitutional order from the president,
he was not doing the job that Congress had intended.
-
- The deception was far-reaching. When
Thomas Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, was asked
in 2005 during a congressional hearing by Christopher Shays (R-CT), chair
of the House government reform subcommittee, why the Pentagon had no audit
team in Iraq to look for fraud, Gimble facilely replied that such a team
was "not needed" because Congress had set up the special inspector
general unit to do that. He didn't mention that the president had barred
the special inspector general from investigating Pentagon scandals.
-
- This would all be pretty funny except
for two things.
-
- First of all, Americans and Iraqis are
dying in droves because of the chaos that the U.S. invasion and occupation
have created in Iraq-a problem that that $9 billion in missing Congressionally-allocated
funds, and the bales of US dollars, were supposed to have solved.
-
- Second, and I admit this is pretty speculative
on my part, money being like water, it tends to flow to the lowest level,
which, from a moral and ethical standpoint, would be the Bush/Cheney administration
and the Republican Party machine that put them, and the do-nothing Congress
that covers up for them, into office.
-
- My guess is that a fair piece of those
many billions of dollars is sloshing around back in the U.S. paying for
things like Republican Party electoral dirty tricks, vote theft, bribing
of Democratic members of Congress, and god knows what else.
-
- If this seems far-fetched to anyone,
remember that this administration has included a number of people who were
linked to the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal, when the creative-and criminal-idea
was conceived of secretly selling Pentagon stocks of shoulder-fired Stinger
anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, and using the proceeds to secretly fund
the U.S.-trained and organized Contra fighters who were fighting to topple
the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (Congress had inconveniently banned
any U.S. aid to the Contras).
-
- It seems to me inconceivable that this
corrupt and obsessively power-mad administration would have passed up an
opportunity to get its hands on some of the easy money flowing into Iraq
over the course of the last three years.
-
- Given all this, it seems almost unfathomable
that Democratic Party leaders would be insisting, as have Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(R-CA) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Democratic leaders of the House and
Senate, that there would be no impeachment hearings in Congress if Democrats
were to succeed in winning back Congress this November.
-
- What better way to follow that money
than an impeachment hearing into why the president unconstitutionally subverted
the intent of Congress in establishing an office of special inspector general
for corruption in Iraq?
-
- Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His
new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!"
is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is "The
Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.
-
- He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff06072006.html
|