On the front page of the Washington Post, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart W. Bowen Jr, is assassinated by Robin Wright. Bowen has been lauded for reveiling several corruption scandals of U.S. personal and contractors in Iraq.

The long piece is based on anonymous accounts of "officials" and "current and former employees". The main accusations:

Current and former employees have complained about overtime policies that allowed 10 staff members to earn more than $250,000 each last year. They have questioned the oversight of a $3.5 million book project about Iraq’s reconstruction modeled after the 9/11 Commission report. And they have alleged that Bowen and his deputy have improperly snooped into their staff’s e-mail messages.

Working in Iraq, the Inspector General’s people get 70% in hazard overpay. They also work much longer than they would do in DC – there isn’t much else they can do in Iraq – and that certainly makes the pay seem less scandalous.

The piece doesn’t go much into the oversight issues, though it quotes a minority(!) staff director of the House Oversight committee to say that there is an ongoing investigation of the inspectors office. But the inspector general says that investigation was closed. Couldn’t Robin Wright find the truth? Why wasn’t the majority leader asked?

And like any other bosses, the inspector general had announced a policy of reviewing emails his coworkers send in their official capacity. Email from official accounts isn’t private.

While going into small details of the above and the IG’s work, the hit piece forgets to mention how in 2006 Republicans in Congress tried to shut down the Inspector Generals office:

[T]ucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.
[…]
The termination language was inserted into the bill by Congressional staff members working for Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on Monday that he plans to run for president in 2008.

That decision was later reversed. But why wasn’t this included in the piece at all? Would it have shed light on the sources of the accusations?

The best guess is that Halliburton and Blackwater promissed some additional advertising in the Post. If only that pesky Inspector General could be taken off their back …