Today's word from Mr. Dictionary

OVERSIGHT (o·ver·sight) (noun)---Watchful care or management; supervision.

Iraq investigator's job eliminated
New law quietly ends special oversight of reconstruction work
By James Glanz
New York Times News Service

November 3, 2006

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And 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. The provision, inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of their Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference on the bill, has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea the line was in the final legislation.

Bowen's office, created in January 2004 to examine reconstruction money spent in Iraq, was always envisioned as a temporary organization, permitted to continue its work only as long as Congress saw fit. Some advocates for the office, in fact, have regarded its lack of a permanent bureaucracy as key to its aggressiveness and independence. By some interpretations, the office might have run through its list of projects around the time of the October 2007 deadline set by the new legislation anyway.

But as the implications of the provision in the new bill have become clear, opposition has been building on both sides of the political aisle. That bipartisan reaction may not be unexpected given Bowen's Republican credentials--he served under George W. Bush both in Texas and in the White House--and deep public skepticism on the Bush administration's conduct of the war.

Susan Collins (R-Maine), who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says she still does not know how the provision made its way into the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree. "It's truly a mystery to me," Collins said. "I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report, and that provision was not in at that time."

(more)