Halliburton critic is demoted in Army Corps

08/31/2005

August 29, 2005

WASHINGTON, D.C.—A high-level contracting official who has been a vocal critic of the Pentagon’s decision to give Halliburton Co. a multibillion-dollar, no-bid contract for work in Iraq was removed from her job by the Army Corps of Engineers, effective Saturday.

Bunnatine Greenhouse was told last month by corps commander Lt. Gen. Carl Strock that she was being removed from the senior executive service, the top rank of civilian government employees, because of poor performance reviews. Greenhouse’s attorney, Michael Kohn, appealed the decision Friday in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it broke an earlier commitment to suspend the demotion until a “sufficient record” was available to address her allegations.

The Army said in October that it would refer Greenhouse’s complaints to the Defense Department’s inspector general. The failure to abide by the agreement and the circumstances of the removal “are the hallmark of illegal retaliation,” Kohn wrote to Rumsfeld. He said the review that Strock cited to justify his action “was conducted by the very subjects” of Greenhouse’s allegations.

Greenhouse went public last year with her concerns over the volume of Iraq-related work given to Halliburton by the corps without competition. She told Congress that the independence of the corps’ contracting process had been compromised.