MEDIA ROOTS- Considering the escalation of the war against whistleblowers, it’s getting more rare to see a lone wolf sacrifice their standing from within the system to do the right thing. Amy Goodman writes for TruthDig about the case of Bunny Greenhouse, former employee of the US Army Corps of Engineers, who courageously blew the whistle on her agency for awarding Halliburton subsidiary KBR a no bid 7 billion dollar contract before the Iraqi invasion even occurred. Instead of being rewarded for exposing the revolving door criminality of political and corporate profiteering within her agency, she was harassed and demoted from her position.
Abby
***
TRUTHDIG– “War is a racket,” wrote retired US Marine Major General Smedley D
Butler, in 1935. That statement, which is also the title of his short
book on war profiteering, rings true today.
One courageous civil servant just won a battle to hold war profiteers
accountable. Her name is Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse. She blew the
whistle when her employer, the US Army Corps of Engineers, gave a no-bid
$7bn contract to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root
(KBR) as the US was about to invade Iraq. She was doing her job, trying
to ensure a competitive bidding process would save the US government
money. For that, she was forced out of her senior position, demoted and
harassed.
Just this week, after waging a legal battle for more than half a decade,
Bunny Greenhouse won. The US Army Corps of Engineers settled with
Greenhouse for $970,000, representing full restitution for lost wages,
compensatory damages and attorneys’ fees.
Her “offence” was to challenge the KBR contract. It was weeks before the
expected invasion of Iraq, in 2003, and Bush military planners
predicted Saddam Hussein would blow up Iraqi oilfields, as happened with
the US invasion in 1991. The project, dubbed “Restore Iraqi Oil”, or
RIO, was created so that oilfield fires would be extinguished. KBR was
owned then by Halliburton, whose CEO until 2000 was none other than then
Vice President Dick Cheney. KBR was the only company invited to bid.
Bunny Greenhouse told her superiors that the process was illegal. She
was overridden. She said the decision to grant the contract to KBR came
from the office of the secretary of defence, run by VP Cheney’s close
friend, Donald Rumsfeld. As Bunny Greenhouse told a congressional
committee:
“I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts
awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I
have witnessed during the course of my professional career.”
The oilfields were not set ablaze. Nevertheless, KBR was allowed to
retool its $7bn no-bid contract, to provide gasoline and other
logistical support to the occupation forces. The contract was so-called
“cost-plus”, which means KBR was not on the hook to provide services at a
set price. Rather, it could charge its cost, plus a fixed percentage as
profit. The more KBR charged, the more profit it made.
As the chief procurement officer, Greenhouse’s signature was required on
all contracts valued at more than $10m. Soon after testifying about the
egregious RIO contract, she was demoted, stripped of her top secret
clearance and began receiving the lowest performance ratings. Before
blowing the whistle, she had received the highest ratings. Ultimately,
she left work, facing an unbearably hostile workplace.
After years of litigation, attorney Michael Kohn, president of the
National Whistleblowers Centre, brought the case to a settlement. He
said:
“Bunny Greenhouse risked her job and career when she objected to the
gross waste of federal taxpayer dollars and illegal contracting
practices at the Army Corps of Engineers. She had the courage to stand
alone and challenge powerful special interests. She exposed a corrupt
contracting environment where casual and clubby contracting practices
were the norm. Her courage led to sweeping legal reforms that will
forever halt the gross abuse she had the courage to expose.”
The National Whistleblowers Centre’s executive director, Stephen Kohn (brother of Michael Kohn), told me:
“Federal employees have a very, very hard time blowing the whistle …
I hope it’s a turning point. The case was hard-fought. It should never
have had to been filed. Bunny did the right thing.”
According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, the cost of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone will exceed $5tn. With a cost like
this, why isn’t war central to the debate over the national debt?
Two-time congressional medal of honour winner Maj Gen Smedley Butler had it right, 75 years ago, when he said of war:
“It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the
most vicious [racket] … It is the only one in which the profits are
reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives … It is conducted for the
benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”
As President Barack Obama and Congress claim it is Medicare, Medicaid
and social security that are breaking the budget, people should demand
that they stop paying for war.
• Written by Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column
© 2011 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate
Photo by Flickr user geekvsmachine