There's no bidness like war bidness

from The New York Times.com

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.

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."

Ms. Greenhouse, known as Bunny, sent her letter to the acting Army secretary, with copies to Congress and the news media. The Pentagon was forced to promise an inquiry and to protect her position in the meantime, and her allegations drew the interest of the F.B.I.

In March 2003, she saw no reason why the Corps should give the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, without competition, a five-year, $7 billion contract to repair oil fields. If an emergency required a quick deal, it should be for only one year at most, she argued. (The contract was given for five years over her objection, but later, after a public outcry, was cut short and put to competition.)

In December, she said, she was outraged when Corps leaders went behind her back to issue a legal document approving the unusually high prices KBR had charged for fuel imports to Iraq - prices that the Pentagon's own auditors called inflated by at least $61 million and that are now the subject of criminal inquiries.

To the Halliburton defense that critics like Ms. Greenhouse did not understand the urgency of wartime, she replies, "Of course I care about the soldiers who are dying."

"That $61 million could have gone for body armor for the soldiers," she said in the interview.

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