Another Desperate, Criminal Move: Republican Congress Kills Agency To Oversee U.S. Corruption In Iraq

Shit, fuck, damn (sorry, it's all I can muster): From the incomparable Glenn Greenwald:

Matt Taibbi's superb cover article in this month's Rolling Stone is entitled "The Worst Congress Ever," and it details the corruption, sleaze, bloated hubris, and undemocratic power structure which drives every crevice of that tragically worthless institution. The article is so well-documented and the abuses it chronicles are so severe that it will astonish even the most cynical and hardened critic of corrupt one-party Republican rule.

As Taibbi documents, even the most significant bills are voted on with no debate or even time to read the bills. Worse, after the bills are approved by both houses, even their most central provisions are drastically changed and agreed to in secret "conference" by a small handful of Republican Congressional leaders, with no input from anyone other than their favored industry lobbyists. They go out of their way to avoid any oversight of any kind of the activities of the executive branch, and most of the time, they literally have no idea what they're voting on. It is difficult to summarize how broken and corrupt the Congress has become.

Anyone who has read Taibbi's exposé will not be surprised in the slightest by this astounding article in The New York Times today, concerning a relatively aggressive fraud-prevention agency in Iraq designed to uncover corruption in how U.S. government contracts are being obtained and how American money is spent over there. The agency, headed by a conscientious Republican lawyer who seems to take his job seriously, has had some real success in uncovering serious fraud:

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq 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.

But unbeknownst to virtually everyone outside of a tiny number of Congressional Republicans, a provision was surreptitiously inserted into the sprawling military authorization bill signed into law two weeks ago by the President that simply abolished Bowen's office

You know, one of the frequently spoken "fears" by the Bushies is that Dems will investigate everything. And this may be the one most legitimate thing the Dems can do.