Today’s Must Read

And here you thought Stuart Bowen was a paragon of integrity.

Bowen is the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR). Despite being an old buddy of George W. Bush’s back in the Texas days, Bowen has earned a reputation as a tireless investigator of waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq contracting.

The quarterly reports issued by SIGIR have not hesitated to name names of both crooked contractors and crooked contracting officials. Bowen’s appearances on Capitol Hill have been remarkably candid and free of euphemism. When I was in Baghdad in March, military public-affairs officers jumped at the chance to show me how they interface with SIGIR and boasted of the enormous respect they have for an office that’s all up in their business.

But now, reports The Washington Post, the worm has turned. SIGIR faces four separate investigations — including one by a federal grand jury — looking into everything from its own profligacy to its alleged abundance of ego:

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.

The employee allegations have prompted four government probes into the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), including an investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors into the agency’s financial practices and claims of e-mail monitoring, according to law enforcement sources and SIGIR staff members. Federal prosecutors have presented evidence of alleged wrongdoing to a grand jury in Virginia, which has subpoenaed SIGIR for thousands of pages of financial documents, contracts, personnel records and correspondence, several sources familiar with the probe said.

Bowen, with no evident irony, dismisses many of the charges as the result of “disgruntled” employees. Yet some of the overtime that certain SIGIR officials have racked up is downright gaudy (1400 hours?).

One SIGIR official spoke anonymously of a climate of fear that pervades the office. SIGIR’s chiefs are “gripped by paranoia. It’s almost a siege mentality.” Such alleged paranoia, according to federal prosecutors, has led top officials to illegally snoop on their employees. One of them, Ginger Cruz, Bowen’s deputy, allegedly used, um, witchcraft to intimidate subordinates:

Cruz, a former spokeswoman for the governor of Guam, originally joined SIGIR as a contractor working for the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche. Current and former SIGIR employees have told investigators that Cruz threatened to put hexes on employees and made inappropriate sexual remarks in the presence of staff members. Cruz is a self-described wiccan, a member of a polytheistic religion of modern witchcraft. “We warned Ginger not to talk about witchcraft, that it would scare people,” a former SIGIR employee said.

Cruz denied making comments of a “sexual nature” and noted that she was cleared of any wrongdoing by an internal SIGIR investigation into the claim.

I’ll let that stand as its own punchline.

Leaving aside the question of Bowen’s alleged abuses, he’s hardly the first inspector general to come under investigation in recent years. There’s the ongoing CIA director’s probe into CIA inspector general John Helgerson, who currently has the unhappy task of investigating the destruction of the CIA torture tapes along with the Justice Department. Scott Bloch, the U.S.’s Special Counsel, can’t seem to get out from under investigation no matter how hard he tries, and the guy’s even had his computer wiped by Geeks on Call. Ex-DOD Inspector General Joseph Schmitz resigned while under investigation for political favoritism before landing safely at Blackwater. There’s also Robert “Moose” Cobb at NASA, Johnnie Frazier at Commerce and Bill Roderick at EPA. And we all know what happened to my homie Cookie Krongard.

Update: It appears Congress Daily had this story up on its website before the Post.

Late Update: That last update isn’t quite accurate. Congress Daily‘s story, which was posted on the CD website before the Post story appeared, deals primarily and in great detail with the FBI probe, while the Post‘s story is broader, and deals with all four investigations into Bowen. Both reporters, Dan Friedman and Robin Wright, did excellent work covering Bowen and both are to be commended.