NYT: Watchdog Follows Iraq Money (Bunnatine Greenhouse fighting demotion)

[DeepModem Mom]

A Watchdog Follows the Money in Iraq
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: November 15, 2004


If leaders at the Army Corps of Engineers expected the agency's pesky contracting director, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, to be forced out quietly, they were wrong.

From 1997, when Ms. Greenhouse joined the Army's sprawling construction agency with orders to end what some called casual and clubby contracting practices, Corps veterans grumbled that she was a troublemaker. As former officials describe it, some officers regarded her as a stickler for cumbersome rules on things like sharing contracts with small businesses and ensuring open competition for bids.

She was also an African-American woman and a civilian, trying to shake up what one former Corps commander has called a "good ole boy" network of longtime officers and favored companies.

Things reached a climax as the Corps was thrust into the center of the Iraq war effort, given the task of distributing billions of dollars in reconstruction money. For the urgent repair of Iraqi oil fields, the Corps turned - too readily and too generously, Ms. Greenhouse charged in bruising internal debates last year - to the Houston-based Halliburton Company with one of the biggest single contracts of the war.

Now the Army Corps of Engineers is trying to demote Ms. Greenhouse, 60, or push her into retirement. To the surprise of no one who knows her, she is unbowed, charging in a much publicized letter of Oct. 21 that the Corps has shown a pattern of favoritism toward Halliburton that imperils "the integrity of the federal contracting program."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/politics/15reconstruct.html?adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1100532327-xe1itvbnGk8cwfWlDZs5Sw