Below is an excerpt from Erik Eckholm’s piece in the Times, noting the settlement of litigation between Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse and DOD for retaliatory action after her objections, in 2005, to the Halliburton/KBR no-bid contract for logistical support in Iraq. Greenhouse had been the Chief Contracting Officer for the Army Corps of Engineers. She’d previously had a perfect record of performance ratings.
Her primary objections:
- the study rationalizing the sole-source KBR contract was itself outsourced – to Halliburton/KBR, which recommended itself as the sole source;
- Even if the contract’s premise was justified for the first few months on emergency grounds, it didn’t make sense for a multiyear, potentially indefinite contract.
Which raises the question of how much work KBR/Halliburton are doing now in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for DOD, CIA, et cet. We note the it’s KBR’s former CEO, and later the United States Vice President, who made famous the phrase “undisclosed location.” (For readers from Brooklyn, “undisclosed location” roughly translates to “going to the mattresses.”) KBR is currently, publicly, one of two logistics contractors in Iraq – but classified contracts are, by definition, outside the scope of public review – and for practical purposes – outside the scope of Congressional review.
From Pentagon Settles With Iraq-Contract Whistleblower, from The New York Times, dated 28 July 2011:
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 earlier this month and made final by a federal judge this week, the Army Corps agreed to pay the former official, Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse, $970,000 to cover lost wages, legal fees, and compensatory damages like the 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, and Mr. Kohn 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 declined to comment further.
The dispute is rooted in the frenetic days leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and 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 Corps 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.