Word: inspectors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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EVENT Challenge '98! The Year of the Inspector! in Long Beach, Calif...
Hell hath no fury like a Marine spurned, and Scott Ritter is in no rush to forgive the CIA for shutting him out of its Baghdad covert operations. The former U.N. arms inspector at the center of last winter's confrontation with Iraq has written a tell-all book accusing the Clinton administration of compromising the U.N. arms inspection program. Few surprises there, but nobody was expecting Ritter to confirm that UNSCOM contained a number of CIA covert operatives -- one of the reasons cited by Baghdad for his own expulsion from Iraq...
...second statute is the Inspector General Act, which gives autonomy to the inspectors general of Executive departments and agencies, enables them to effectively abridge due process in their investigations, and makes them more answerable to Congress than to their nominal superiors. They too do their dirty work without serious accountability...
Under the Inspector General Act, anonymous denunciations thrive in Washington as they have rarely done since the Council of Ten in the Venice of the doges. Like road-company Kenneth Starrs, inspectors general and their flatfoots roam through the private lives of public officials. The idiotic pursuit of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, our proposed ambassador to the United Nations, a man who has spent most of the past 40 years working for the government only to have his whole life investigated anew, is the latest dismal consequence of uninhibited and unaccountable prosecutorial authority...
These two laws were passed with benign intent. The independent counsel act was designed to facilitate the appointment of impartial special prosecutors. The Inspector General Act was designed to protect patriotic whistle-blowers who seek to reveal malversation in government. But what these laws have in fact done is to create a fourth branch of government--powerful, unaccountable and wonderfully designed to make it hard to recruit people for public service and easy to intimidate them once they are serving. A priority for the 106th Congress should be the dismemberment of these institutional manifestations of our prosecutorial culture. Abolishing...