Maine Owl

Bowen, Collins, and Allen appear on January 18 broadcast:


View 1/2-hour program (Maine Watch with Jenifer Rooks)

Collins and Bowen business breakfast show at Husson College, Bangor, January 3:


Listen to 1-hour audio-only program (Maine Public Radio, Speaking in Maine series)

Review
Oversight of post-invasion Iraq has become something of a Maine Public Broadcasting cause du jour. They easily were convinced to follow the lead of Senator Susan Collins during her PR tour earlier this month with the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen. I'll keep this fairly short today because I have a major post on the double standard of Senator Collins with respect to her silence on post-invasion U.S. corruption versus the hysterics of her Governmental Affairs Committee/ Investigations Subcommittee (led by Senator Norm Coleman) on comparatively smaller corruption in the old U.N. Oil-for-Food program. I refer readers to that for a lot more analysis.

No one in either the Maine Watch program or the radio broadcast mentions the Oil-for-Food investigations so the audience never gets the chance to evaluate the measures by which the politicians decide corruption is worthy of hysterics, or silence.

Fortunately, Representative Tom Allen (Maine, 1st District) was interviewed in the Maine Watch program. Otherwise, there would have been no mention of the fact that the Republican Congress dropped the oversight ball in the post-invasion period. And now, Collins acts like the savings of "$53 million" in taxpayer money through Bowen's efforts is some kind of feather in her cap. Tom Allen does mention the $9 billion of Iraq's money that simply went missing. Those numbers make Bowen look like a piker and Collins ridiculous--Bowen never really pursued the bigger sums. But there is no further analysis.

I do agree with Tom that for the most part, Bowen has done his job. It's Congress that has not. The investigations into Bowen's office are said to be the result of the typical "disgruntled former employee." Quite a bit of air time is spent discussing those charges, and the mysterious attempt by "unknown" House Republicans to ax Bowen a little over a year ago. This intrigue may make for good Post headlines, but it hardly helps us understand that the entire U.S. presence in Iraq has been run like a criminal enterprise.

One telling moment in the Bowen interview is where he describes how his Iraqi counterpart had to leave Iraq running for his life. The pre-invasion notion that Iraq was run by "bad men," as President Bush was fond of pointing out, seems to have been eclipsed by the wave of crime America swept in.

My criticism of Rooks is that she really had not done any homework that could have given her a fuller picture of how the U.S. acquired control of Iraq's finances in 2003 and how the U.S.-run CPA handled them, giving her a basis for some better questions. For example, she could have asked, "Senator Collins, why did the Bush Administration from the beginning of the occupation insist on 9- and 10-figure, no-bid, cost plus contracts for Halliburton and Bectel? Why did Congress fail to insist on accountability since 2003? Why was the international oversight committee that was to have been established by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 blocked by the U.S.?"

I guess I can't blame her too much. There has been reporting on this in the New York Times and Washington Post, for example, but you would really have had to be paying attention in order to assemble the story. But isn't that what research is for?