A General’s False Testimony

[Joanne98]

Will the Pentagon correct Major Gen. Jerome Johnson’s tainted testimony on the contaminated water KBR provided to the troops?

When Major Gen. Jerome Johnson appeared under oath before a congressional committee last year, he told enough untruths about KBR’s work for the military that the U.S. Army took the unusual step of retracting a portion of his testimony. Now it appears that Johnson also misled members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on another KBR-related matter: its provisioning of contaminated water to U.S. troops in Iraq.

Nearly three months ago, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), chair of the Democratic Policy Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the subject of Johnson’s testimony, but he has yet to received a reply. “This was either an attempt by General Johnson to deliberately deceive the Congress, or a display of negligent disregard for facts,” Dorgan wrote in the March 12 letter. “I hope you will review this matter and take appropriate action.”

In April 2007, Johnson, then the commanding general of the U.S. Army Sustainment Command, which is responsible for providing food, lodging, and a range of logistical support to the troops, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to answer questions about the Pentagon’s primary logistics contract in Iraq. During the hearing, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), alleged that the Army had reimbursed KBR, then a Halliburton subsidiary, for the cost of overpriced trailers the company had purchased through a subcontractor.

“he department has not paid KBR the $100 million for the trailers,” Johnson told Levin. “As a matter of fact, KBR’s cost is still suspended.” Johnson went on to say that the Department of Defense document from which Levin drew his information was “inaccurate.” But it was Johnson who didn’t have his facts straight.

More than seven months passed before the Army acknowledged Johnson’s misstatement. “We sincerely regret the confusion that arose during the testimony and apologize for any impact to the Committee’s deliberations,” wrote Claude Bolton, assistant secretary of the Army, to Levin. In his “correction for the record,” Bolton wrote that the Army had indeed paid KBR for the trailers, even though the Defense Contract Audit Agency had called the purchase “unreasonable due to KBR purchasing the from someone other than the low bidder without…adequate justification.”

The media paid little attention to the slip-up and subsequent correction, perhaps in part because, as the Army Times noted, “Bolton’s letter ends the argument between the Army and Levin’s committee because there is no way to recoup the money.”

Overlooked entirely, though, was a different part of Johnson’s testimony, when he claimed the Army was unaware of reports that KBR had also been supplying military bases with contaminated water. Because of their negligence, a 2006 investigation by Dorgan’s policy committee found soldiers had unwittingly bathed in and brushed their teeth with water that, by the senator’s account, was more polluted than the Euphrates river. The committee’s findings prompted Dorgan to request an investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3736/a_generals_false_testimony/

[hootinholler]

1. Arrest that asshole. n/t