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Peter Jemley is unique among the growing ranks of war resisters who have sought refuge in Canada. He wants Canada to accept him as a refugee because he's opposed to torture. Jemley argues that as one of only a small number of Arabic linguists with top security clearance, he could be forced to violate international law by participating in the interrogations of terrorism suspects. It was something he hadn't considered when he enlisted in 2005 and was handpicked to undergo two years of intense training due to his adeptness with languages. Only last February did he discover that his government had sanctioned new rules on how terrorism suspects could be interrogated. He believes it's torture and when he realized he might be asked to be a part of it, he fled. "It's a soldier's obligation to say 'no' if their commander is doing things that are criminally complicit," Jemley, now 42, said in a recent interview in Toronto. "I think everyone is agreeing now that torture is really what has been going on ... I have every reason to believe that … I'd be ordered to do such things." Detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the undisclosed CIA prisons around the world have claimed widespread abuse. The CIA has admitted to using 'coercive techniques' during interrogations, such as waterboarding, a process whereby agents simulate drownings. Much of the legal community considers this treatment torture and point to international laws such as the Geneva Conventions, which were established after WWII to impose legal restrictions on the barbarity of war.

Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told. In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies. They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, including behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person's state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision. On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with "pharmacological land mines" that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electronic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says. "The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," the report states. The report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct current stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firing of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person's ability to tell a lie.

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The Pentagon's $50 million Minerva Research Initiative, named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and warriors, will fund social science research deemed crucial to national security. Initial proposals were due July 25, and the first grants are expected to be awarded by year's end. But the Network of Concerned Anthropologists ... said dependence on Pentagon funding could make universities an "instrument rather than a critic of war-making." In a May 28 letter to federal officials, the American Anthropological Association said that ... its members are "deeply concerned that funding such research through the Pentagon may pose a potential conflict of interest." David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin's University in Lacey, Wash., and the author of a book on anthropological intelligence in World War II, [said] the Pentagon effort is flawed. "It sets up sort of a Soviet system, or top-down system," Price said. "If you look at the big picture, this will not make us smarter -- this will make us much more narrow. It will only look at problems Defense wants us to in a narrow way." Recently, the Army's Human Terrain System has embedded social scientists in military units in Iraq and Afghanistan with the aim of helping commanders understand local culture and customs. The project has drawn criticism from many academics. Two scholars have been killed. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which describes itself as an advocate for ethical anthropology, said the research topics could "contribute to creating more national and human insecurity by trafficking in the construction of . . . a connection between Islam and violence."

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The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone. The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), [said] that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war. He spoke after oil prices set a new record on 13 consecutive days over the past two weeks. They have now multiplied sixfold since 2002. Goldman Sachs predicted last week that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next year. Dr Salameh, director of the UK-based Oil Market Consultancy Service, and an authority on Iraq's oil, said it is the only one of the world's biggest producing countries with enough reserves substantially to increase its flow. Production in eight of the others – the US, Canada, Iran, Indonesia, Russia, Britain, Norway and Mexico – has peaked, he says, while China and Saudia Arabia, the remaining two, are nearing the point at of decline. Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped some 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this had now fallen to just two million barrels. Dr Salameh [said] that Iraq had offered the United States a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil fields on "generous" terms in return for the lifting of sanctions. "This would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he said. "But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil."

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law. The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees. While the Geneva Conventions prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity,” a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments. The new documents provide more details about how the administration intends to determine whether a specific technique would be legal, depending on the circumstances involved. Some legal experts critical of the Justice Department interpretation said the department seemed to be arguing that the prospect of thwarting a terror attack could be used to justify interrogation methods that would otherwise be illegal. “What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offense,” said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University. The humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners is prohibited by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Note: For many disturbing reports of increasing threats to civil liberties, click here.

The International Criminal Court isn't discussed much in the presidential campaign, but few issues are more revealing of a candidate's perspective on the United States' legal and political relations with the rest of the world. The court was established in 2002 to deal with cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Headquartered in the Dutch city of The Hague, it was conceived as a permanent successor to the Nuremberg tribunals formed to try Nazi leaders after World War II. It now has 105 members, including virtually all current U.S. allies, but not the United States itself. President Bush has attacked the court relentlessly, saying it could subject Americans to politically motivated prosecutions abroad. He has renounced the 1998 treaty that created the court, pressed other nations to disregard it, and signed legislation - nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act" by critics - authorizing military action to free any citizen of the United States or an allied nation held for trial by the court. The presidential candidates ... took differing positions in the only congressional vote on the issue, the 2002 legislation allowing military action to free prisoners at The Hague. Clinton and McCain voted for the bill, as did then-Sen. John Edwards, who now favors U.S. membership in the court. Three other Democrats, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sens. Joseph Biden and Chris Dodd, voted against the measure. International law scholars say the candidates' positions are illuminating because the disagreements over the court represent some of the most critical foreign-policy questions in the post-Cold War world - U.S. autonomy and its limits, the role of international law and the multinational bodies that enforce it, and the balance between power and accountability. "The court can be seen as a bellwether of their approach to the rule of law and international institutions," said Michael Scharf, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University.

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The military's reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq, The Associated Press has learned. And new Defense Department figures obtained by The AP show that the Air Force more than doubled its monthly use of drones between January and October, forcing it to take pilots out of the air and shift them to remote flying duty to meet part of the demand. The dramatic increase in the development and use of drones across the armed services reflects what will be an even more aggressive effort over the next 25 years, according to the new report. Pentagon officials said that even as troops begin to slowly come home this year, the use of Predators, Global Hawks, Shadows and Ravens will not likely slow. "I think right now the demand for the capability that the unmanned system provides is only increasing," said Army Col. Bob Quackenbush, deputy director for Army Aviation. "Even as the surge ends, I suspect the deployment of the unmanned systems will not go down, particularly for larger systems." About 120 Air Force pilots were recently transferred to staff the drones to keep pace with demands, the Air Force said. Some National Guard members were also called up to staff the flights. And more will be doing that in the coming months, as the Air Force adds bases where pilots can remotely fly the aircraft. One key reason for the increase is that U.S. forces in Iraq grew from 15 combat brigades to 20 over the spring and early summer, boosting troop totals from roughly 135,000 to more than 165,000. Slowly over the next six months, five brigades are being pulled out of Iraq that will not be replaced, as part of a drawdown announced by the administration. The increased military operations all across Iraq last summer triggered greater use of the drones and an escalating call for more of the systems.

The U.S. military is making a mockery of American democratic principles by bringing a criminal case against an Associated Press photographer in Iraq without disclosing the charges against him, AP President and CEO Tom Curley said Saturday. "This is a poor example - and not the first of its kind - of the way our government honors the democratic principles and values it says it wants to share with the Iraqi people," Curley wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. The U.S. military notified the AP last weekend that it intended to submit a written complaint against Bilal Hussein that would bring the case into the Iraqi justice system as early as Nov. 29. Military officials have refused to disclose the content of the complaint to the AP, despite repeated requests. Hussein's lawyer will enter the case "blind," with no idea of the evidence or charges, Curley wrote. "In the 19 months since he was picked up, Bilal has not been charged with any crime, although the military has sent out a flurry of ever-changing claims. Every claim we've checked out has proved to be false, overblown or microscopic in significance," said Curley. Hussein, a 36-year-old native of Fallujah, was part of the AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo team in 2005. He was detained in Ramadi on April 12, 2006. "We believe Bilal's crime was taking photographs the U.S. government did not want its citizens to see. That he was part of a team of AP photographers who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for work in Iraq may have made Bilal even more of a marked man," Curley wrote. Curley said the military has refused to answer questions from Hussein's attorney, former federal prosecutor Paul Gardephe, since announcing its intentions to seek a case against him. The military has leaked baseless allegations against Hussein to friendly media outlets, Curley wrote, but it will not even share the exact date of the hearing with the AP.

Note: For a powerful summary of a former Marine general's view of war, "War is a Racket", click here.

The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street's favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts. Employees of the top five US arms manufacturers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Republicans. "The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed," said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York. Republican administrations are by tradition much stronger supporters of US armaments programmes and Pentagon spending plans than Democratic governments. Relations between the arms industry and Bill Clinton soured when he slimmed down the military after the end of the Cold War. His wife, however, has been careful not to make the same mistake. After her election to the Senate, she became the first New York senator on the armed services committee, where she revealed her hawkish tendencies by supporting the invasion of Iraq. Her position on Iran is among the most warlike of all the candidates – Democrat or Republican. While on the armed services committee, Mrs Clinton has befriended key generals and has won the endorsement of General Wesley Clarke, who ran Nato's war in Kosovo. The arms industry has duly taken note.

Note: For a revealing personal account of the "War Racket" by a U.S. general, click here.

Twenty years ago today, a 46-year-old former Air Force captain sat down on the tracks in front of a train loaded with bombs at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. The ex-captain's name was S. Brian Willson. He was there to block the train ... to protest U.S. arms shipments to Central America. But nothing was blocked that day. Instead, the train barreled into him at 16 miles an hour, slicing off his legs and one ear and laying open his skull - and igniting what quickly became the nation's biggest anti-war movement in the decades between the Vietnam and Iraq eras. Today, however, there will be more than a memory on those dusty tracks. Willson plans to come back to the spot where he lost his legs to remember and pray for global harmony. It's a different time, with different wars, but he says he feels just as passionate as he did back then. "Maybe we'll have 10 people there, maybe 30, who knows?" Willson said by phone from his home in Arcata (Humboldt County). "I guess it'll be whatever it is. I do know this, though: We have to preserve our history. That's one good reason to be there, as painful as the memories will be for me. I have to look on life as a journey, and all I can say is I'm still on track," said Willson. "Running me over with a train wasn't just criminal, it was stupid. But it has not in any way stopped me. My life is good," he said. "I like the whole idea of pursuing what I call right livelihood, reducing my footprint on Earth. I enjoy it." The protest never truly ended. A couple of times a year, peace groups use the tracks as a setting for small anti-war gatherings - and every Monday, just as he has for the past 20 years, 53-year-old Concord resident Greg Getty, sits at the tracks at 9 a.m. and says a prayer in Willson's name.

The Defense Department is paying private contractors more than $1 billion in more than 30 separate contracts to collect and analyze intelligence for the four military services and its own Defense Intelligence Agency, according to contract documents and a Pentagon spokesman. The disclosure marks the first time a U.S. intelligence service has made public its outside payments. Intelligence payments to contractors have climbed dramatically since the terror attacks in September 2001, but none had been made public, according to a report filed in April by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Outside contracting ... places critical security tasks and sensitive information in the hands of private parties, says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington privacy group. "Private contractors don't have to undergo congressional oversight or justify their budgets to appropriators," Aftergood says. "We're starting to create a new kind of intelligence bureaucracy, one that is both more expensive and less accountable (than government's own intelligence agencies)." Most of the contracts, which extend up to five years, pay for analysis of intelligence data and for related services, such as translation and interpretation of photo and electronic intelligence. A small fraction, which [a Pentagon spokesman] declined to specify, pay for private spies. Private contractors often hire former intelligence officers, sometimes leasing them back at higher salaries to the agencies that first recruited and trained them.

British soldiers in Afghanistan are being supplied with a new "super weapon" to attack Taliban fighters more effectively, defence officials said yesterday. The "enhanced blast" weapon is based on thermobaric technology used in the powerful bombs dropped by the Russians to obliterate Grozny, the Chechen capital, and in US "bunker busters". Defence officials insisted yesterday that the British bombs were different. "They are optimised to create blast [rather than heat]", one said, adding that it would be misleading to call them "thermobaric". So-called thermobaric weapons have been used by the US against suspected al-Qaida and Taliban underground bases. Combined heat and pressure kill people over a wide area by sucking the air out of lungs and destroying internal organs. Defence officials described the new weapon as a shoulder-launched "light anti-structure munition". The new weapons would be more effective against buildings and structures used by the Taliban, they said. Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, described the weapons as a "serious step change" for the British army. He added: "The continuing issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has enormous importance in the battle for hearts and minds. If these weapons contribute to the deaths of civilians then a primary purpose of the British deployment is going to be made yet more difficult." The deployment of the weapons should have been announced to MPs, Sir Menzies said. "We need much more transparency."

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned. David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”. These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt. Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. In my view, it’s time to learn from history.” Mr Walker’s views carry weight because he is a non-partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often described as the investigative arm of the US Congress. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Walker said he had mentioned some of the issues before but now wanted to “turn up the volume”. Some of them were too sensitive for others in government to “have their name associated with. I’m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake-up call,” he said. “As comptroller general I’ve got an ability to look longer-range and take on issues that others may be hesitant, and in many cases may not be in a position, to take on."

No one looked comfortable at the sentencing hearing. Not family and friends who packed the US military courtroom's straight-backed benches. Not the rookie Army prosecutor in stiff dress greens who flushed with every "Your Honor." Not Judge R. Peter Masterton, whose usually animated face was now grave. And not the convicted deserter – Army medic Agustín Aguayo – on the stand in a US military court in central Germany last March, pleading for understanding. "I'm sorry for the trouble my conscience has caused my unit," Private 1st Class Aguayo said, his voice thick with emotion. "I tried to obey the rules, but in the end [the problem] was at the very core of my being." Aguayo craned to face the judge. "When I hear my sergeants talking about slashing people's throats," he said, crying openly, "if I'm not a conscientious objector, what am I when I'm feeling all this pain when people talk about violence?" Every war has its deserters, troops who abandon their posts. And every war has its converts to pacifism. The Defense Department reports that 5,361 active-duty service members deserted the US Armed Forces last year; nearly 37,000 since October 2001. In today's all-volunteer force, that means a desertion rate of less than half a percent – much lower than the Vietnam War draft era, when it reached a 1971 high of 7.4 percent. In the past six years, 325 Army soldiers have applied to be recognized as conscientious objectors, soldiers who no longer believe in war; 58 percent were accepted. Still, Aguayo's story is revealing of the mental battles of these thousands who change their minds during a bloody war – and, arguably, of many who don't.

Note: For a powerful statement about the reality of war written by a highly decorated U.S. general, click here.

One of the largest American contractors working in Iraq, Bechtel National, met its original objectives on fewer than half of the projects it received as part of a $1.8 billion reconstruction contract, while most of the rest were canceled, reduced in scope or never completed as designed. But the report, by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent agency, places a large share of the blame for the failures on the government overseers at the United States Agency for International Development who administered the contract. [USAID] assigned just two people in Iraq to oversee the giant contract, which included some 24 major projects and 150 subcontractors and stipulated that all invoices be approved or denied in just 10 days. The report is the first of a planned series of audits of Western contractors that have received large slices of the roughly $40 billion in American taxpayer money that has been spent on the troubled program to rebuild Iraq. Stuart Bowen Jr., who heads the special inspector general's office, said the United States government clearly shared responsibility with the company for the project failures. "I would say there's fault on both sides," Bowen said in an interview Wednesday. He added that neither the aid agency nor the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which also oversaw aspects of the contract, ever came close to filling all their staff positions in Iraq. "This isn't so much an indictment of Bechtel as it is a criticism of the system," said Stephen Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington.

A Marine corporal, testifying Saturday at the murder trial of a buddy, said that Marines in his unit began routinely beating Iraqis after being ordered by officers to "crank up the violence level." Cpl. Saul H. Lopezromo said Marines in his platoon, including the defendant, Cpl. Trent D. Thomas, were angry when officers criticized them as not being as tough as other Marine platoons. "We're all hard-chargers, we're not there to mess around, so we took it as an insult," Lopezromo said. Within weeks of allegedly being scolded, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman went out late one night to find and kill a suspected insurgent in the village of Hamandiya near the Abu Ghraib prison. Unable to find their target, the Marines and corpsman dragged another man from his house, fatally shot him, and then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to make it look like he had been killed in a shootout, according to court testimony. "We were told to crank up the violence level," said Lopezromo, who testified for the defense. He indicated that during daily patrols the Marines became much rougher with Iraqis. Asked by a juror to explain, he said, "We beat people, sir." Lopezromo said he believed that officers knew of the beatings, and ... said he saw nothing wrong in what Thomas and the others did. "I don't see it as an execution, sir," he told the judge. "I see it as killing the enemy." He added that Marines, in effect, consider all Iraqi men as part of the insurgency. Prosecution witnesses testified that Thomas shot the 52-year-old Iraq at point-blank range after he had already been shot by other Marines and was lying on the ground. Lopezromo said a procedure called "dead-checking" was routine. Marines are taught "dead-checking" in boot camp ... he said.

It may seem strange to greet with relief a book [A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier] that chronicles the brutal life of a former child soldier, but given what our society considers printworthy, it is refreshing that the memories and reflections of 26-year-old Ishmael Beah receive attention. Beah was born in 1980 in rural Sierra Leone. "The only wars I knew about," Beah writes, "were those that I had read about in books or seen in movies such as Rambo: First Blood, and the neighbouring Liberia that I had heard about on the BBC news." But Beah was to find out about war in the worst way. In 1991, when he was 11, his country descended into a brutal and chaotic civil war between Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the largely ineffective and corrupt Action Peoples Congress (APC). At the centre of the conflict were issues of representation and control over Sierra Leone's diamonds. The conflict was to last through most of the 1990s and, in common with the civil war in Liberia, became intimately linked with the use of child soldiers. According to the United Nations, there are 300,000, if not more, child soldiers around the world. The majority of these children - some as young as six - live and fight in sub-Saharan Africa, and their plight has largely been ignored by the west. Beah's book stands as a vivid testament to his time as one of the nameless and faceless 300,000. After fleeing from rebels who sacked his village, getting separated from his older brother and friends, surviving alone in the forest and evading execution, Beah - at 12 - was inducted into a government corps of boy soldiers. Beah's life became a series of violent spells where killing was "as easy as drinking water".

Note: For more on the ravages of modern war, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Most of the 131 people Pfc. Amber Thill lists as friends on her MySpace.com page serve in the military. Some, like Thill's husband, are deployed to Iraq; others are serving in Afghanistan. MySpace, the 20-year-old Thill says, "is how most of us communicate." This online link between troops serving overseas and their friends and families was interrupted Monday when the Defense Department announced that it had cut off access to MySpace, YouTube and 11 other popular file-sharing and networking Web sites on the Pentagon's 5 million computers and 15,000 networks. The new policy, which military officials say is intended to reduce the amount of traffic snagging the Defense Department's overburdened worldwide network, comes on the heels of an Army regulation last month enforcing new, strict rules on soldier bloggers. The new regulation for the first time created a blanket ban on sites many troops use to share news, photos, video and audio with their family and friends. Military officials said they blocked the Web sites because they took up too much bandwidth. Military bloggers say the new rules are part of a concerted effort to suppress online publications by troops in the field. On many bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Department computers and networks are the only ones available to the troops. "These blogs, these posts on MySpace were the last tenuous connection that an everyday American ... has to what the American military is, who the troops are," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, who runs the military blog www.blackfive.net. "This last tenuous connection will get severed by those regulations." It will definitely decrease the amount of communications back home," said Burden.

Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet," would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers. It is one of several weapons being developed by scientists to combat militants. Others include super gloves that would give the user the strength of a "bionic man" and miniature sensors to detect suicide bombers. Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres [said] "The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons." Prototypes for the new weapons are expected within three years, he said.

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have 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. And tucked 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. An obscure provision...terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee. It has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree. Mr. Bowen’s office has 55 auditors and inspectors in Iraq and about 300 reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripping any other oversight agency in the country.

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