2011-08-17

Army Corps Agrees to Pay Whistle-Blower In Iraq Case

Bruecke Note: Posted to show how Administrations cover for one another, and gamed the system such that fraud and profiteering would be difficult to prevent. They attacked the whistleblower to prevent others from speaking out. This is also an example of corporations working hand-in-hand with the govt to propagate business-as-usual.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/world/middleeast/29reconstruct.html?_r=1

By:
Date: 2011-07-28

Ending a six-year legal battle, the Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to pay nearly $1 million to a former top contracting official who charged that she was demoted after she objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract granted to a Halliburton subsidiary to repair oil fields in Iraq.


In a settlement agreement signed this month and made final by a federal judge this week, the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to pay the former official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, $970,000 to cover lost wages, legal fees and compensatory damages, including for harm to her reputation and her mental health. Legal fees make up about 40 percent of the total, said Michael D. Kohn, a lawyer for Ms. Greenhouse.

While the Pentagon made no admission of wrongdoing, the payment for damages is unusually large for a lawsuit by a federal employee, Mr. Kohn said. He said it validated Ms. Greenhouse’s charges. The United States attorney’s office in Washington and the Pentagon confirmed the terms of the agreement, but they declined to comment further.

The dispute is rooted in the frenetic days leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and in a project that came to symbolize the high costs and poor oversight of Iraqi reconstruction efforts. In early 2003, the Army, in secret and without competitive bidding, put KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, in charge of restoring Iraqi oil production, in a contract potentially worth $7 billion over five years. The Pentagon later said that doing so was necessary because of the “compelling emergency” of war.

Ms. Greenhouse, a career civil servant who was the chief contracts monitor at the Army Corps of Engineers at the time, objected that the contract was based on repair plans and cost estimates that KBR itself had been hired by the corps to prepare, and that the emergency conditions did not justify a multiyear no-bid contract. After internal clashes and threats of demotion, she went public with her concerns in 2004.

Ms. Greenhouse was demoted from the Senior Executive Service and given a poor performance rating, prompting her to bring the lawsuit. As part of the settlement, Ms. Greenhouse, 67, formally retired this week with full benefits.

In the end, KBR collected about $2.4 billion under the disputed contract, according to a Congressional report. It was largely superseded in 2004 by new, competitively awarded contracts that divided up the oil work in Iraq between KBR and the Parsons Corporation.


The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

No comments: