LIVE FROM BAGHDAD. TAP senior correspondent Spencer Ackerman is currently embedded in Iraq and will be filing periodic reports for Tapped in the coming weeks. His first dispatch is below.
--The Editors
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GANGSTER'S PARADISE. Welcome to the Green Zone, Tapped readers. I'm here for another hour and a half before I join the unit I'm supposed to embed with elsewhere in Baghdad, but I wanted to give you something of a corruption update. Earlier today, a U.S. Embassy official named Boots Poliquin briefed reporters on his brand-new Office of Accountability and Transparency, an anti-corruption effort meant to "train, promote and develop" the Iraqi government's institutional bulwarks against the rampant cronyism and corruption that NGOs like Transparency International have identified. Poliquin told us that he's working with Iraq's multiple layers of watchdogs -- the ministerial inspectors-general, the Commission on Public Integrity and the Board of Supreme Audit -- to identify better practices for ensuring that public money gets spent the way it's intended.
