Musings 183--Kill the messenger

There has been wide-spread corruption and fraud in Iraq that has been reported by every major news organization. Now, the lone federal prosecutor that looks into such matters has had his agency shut down by congress. (See Link)

The Office of Special Inspector General for Iraq will cease to exist on January 1, 2007. Both democrat and republican senators are wondering why this has happened. Senator Susan Collins (R) Maine said, according to a New York Times article by James Glanz, "that she still does not know how the provision got into what is called the conference report."

Well, I can tell the senator how it happened. The Bush jr. Administration got one of its flunkies to insert the wording to do away with the one group which could embarrass the Bush War Machine. Even though the lawyer heading the office is a Bush supporter from Texas, Stuart W. Bowne jr. has sent several officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges. He has been a thorn in the side of companies like Halliburton and their divisions of Kellogg, Brown and Root. He is also the one that discovered military weapons had disappeared--a couple hundred thousand of them--that I talked about here in and earlier column.

In the Times article, Congressman Henry A. Waxman, (D) Cal., said: "It appears to me that the administration wants to silence the messenger that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq."

It also appears that the damning language may have been inserted into the bill by staff members of Duncan Hunter (R) Cal. Hunter is a known Bush lackey who wants to run for president in 2008.

So basically, the Bushies kill the messenger when it makes them look bad. What else is new? These guys make everything political. How the religious right hangs with them is an amazing thing, since their real gods are greed and corruption. This is the proof.