Lieberman Urges Extension of Office for Iraq Watchdog
SIGIR
The Norwalk Hour
Jamie Hammon
Boston University Washington News Service
11-14-06
WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 —The Senate Tuesday voted to extend the life of the watchdog for the billions of taxpayer dollars spent in Iraq.
Without that vote, the office of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction would expire next Oct. 1.
The Senate action came only hours after Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and a bipartisan group of Senators called for approval of a bill to extend the term of the agency.
With the extension, the office would continue to operate through late 2008.
“The special inspector general must be allowed to continue his aggressive work on behalf of our country and our taxpayers as long as their money, our money, is being spent in Iraq,” Lieberman said at a press conference.
Initiated as an amendment to the 2003 Defense Authorization Bill, the office was created to oversee the billions of dollars being spent on Iraq reconstruction. The new bill proposes that the office continue to exist until 10 months after 80 percent of the Iraq reconstruction money has been expended.
Lieberman and other Senate co-sponsors said they never saw the version of the bill Congress approved before the elections that included the early-termination provision.
“I don’t believe that the leaders of the committee on the Senate side or their staffs knew it was in there, and I think we can determine it was put in by House staff – but anyway, it’s pretty clear that this shouldn’t have been in there,” Lieberman said.
Lieberman called Stuart Bowen, who heads the special office, an “extraordinarily able and appropriately aggressive individual.”
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), who co-sponsored the bill, agreed.
“I have to give the Bush Administration credit – they appointed an excellent person, and they stood behind Stuart Bowen, who has issued report after report and been diligent in coming back to me and Sen. [Susan] Collins (R-ME), and is showing the work of this program,” he said.
Lieberman said that Bowen and his team have found evidence of enormous amounts of waste and fraud in U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq. The office has reported that the U.S. government can not account for nearly $9 billion distributed to the Iraqi government and that the U.S. government lost track of thousands of nine-millimeter pistols, as well as hundreds of assault riffles and other weapons distributed to Iraqi authorities.
It also reported that defense contractor “Halliburton wasted $75 million on a failed pipeline project, after ignoring consultants’ advice that the project should be further studied before their work on it began,” Lieberman said.
“I will add that the oversight efforts by other agencies have quite frankly been inadequate,” he said.
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