Beyond the Call of Duty:Halliburton Whistleblower Suppressed

The government's contract with Halliburton stinks, and new information keeps coming up to cast suspicion both on the contract itself, and how it was issued without the normal competitive bid. Some people keep defending Halliburton and the contract, even as the Pentagon is investigating the company for huge overcharges.

The linked article is about a contracting specialist who thought that the contract was fishy, pointed it out to the Pentagon people making the deal, and was totally ignored. The Pentagon has kept her silenced, and this news is only now just coming to light. Even now, the Pentagon is keeping her from giving interviews, in spite of repeated requests from Time Magazine.

Bush supporters will keep insisting that everything about the Halliburton contract in on the up and up, but you should keep asking: Why are they trying to silence this woman? Why do new fishy details keep leaking out, when the Bush administration told us that it has nothing to hide?

Two patterns are revealed by the government's deals with Halliburton. One is that the Bush administration is chummier with military contractors than nearly any other administration. It's an embodiment of what President Eisenhower warned us about in his final speech as president: the danger of the developing military-industrial complex. Individuals go from controlling the granting of Pentagon contracts to being executives and stockholders of the very companies that received those contracts. Meanwhile, executive at those companies are brought in as appointees to the Pentagon who then grant contracts to the companies for which they once worked.

The second pattern is the extreme secrecy of the current administration. In a dramatic reverse of the Clinton administration's expansive interpretation of the Freedom of Information Act, one of the first acts of the Bush administration was to order agencies to look for any possible reason to keep government documents secret, so we're left with a government that never tells us how or why it made its decisions. The problems is that the last four years have taught us that when we suspect the Bush administration is abusing its powers -- to detain people who are never charged, to hold American citizens without access to legal counsel or other basic constitutional rights, to hide evidence that the Bush policies are not working -- we always find out our suspicions were right. The Bush administration's motto boils down to "trust us", but the administration goes to unprecedented lengths to deny us any way of judging whether it can be trusted.

This is from Time:

Then several representatives from Halliburton entered. Greenhouse, a top contracting specialist for the Army Corps of Engineers, grew increasingly concerned that they were privy to internal discussions of the contract's terms, so she whispered to the presiding general, insisting that he ask the Halliburton employees to leave the room.

Once they had gone, Greenhouse raised other concerns. She argued that the five-year term for the contract, which had not been put out for competitive bid, was not justified, that it should be for one year only and then be opened to competition. But when the contract-approval document arrived the next day for Greenhouse's signature, the term was five years. With war imminent, she had little choice but to sign. But she added a handwritten reservation that extending a no-bid contract beyond one year could send a message that "there is not strong intent for a limited competition."

[snip]

Greenhouse seems to have got nothing but trouble for questioning the deal. Warned to stop interfering and threatened with a demotion, the career Corps employee decided to act on her conscience, according to her lawyer, Michael Kohn. Kohn, who has represented other federal whistle-blowers, last week sent a letter—obtained by TIME from congressional sources—on her behalf to the acting Secretary of the Army. In it Kohn recounts Greenhouse's Pentagon meeting and demands an investigation of alleged violations of Army regulations in the contract's awarding. (The Pentagon justified the contract procedures as necessary in a time of war, saying KBR was the only choice because of security clearances that it had received earlier.) Kohn charges that Greenhouse's superiors have tried to silence her; he says she has agreed to be interviewed, pending approval from her employer, but the Army failed to make her available despite repeated requests from TIME.

[snip]

The Pentagon maintains that it awarded Halliburton's Iraq contracts appropriately, as does a Halliburton spokeswoman. A senior military official says the Army "has referred the matter to the inspector general of the Department of Defense." As for Halliburton, it has faced alleged cost overruns, lost profits and seen at least 54 company contractors killed in Iraq. Greenhouse, meanwhile, has requested protection from retaliation. But her career—and reputation—are on the line.

politics

Locked Post

Advanced Search

Watch this post

Do not email me updates for this post Email me updates for this post