You Mess With The Bull, You Get the Horns

The latest recipient of a goring to the gluteus maximus region by this Administration is Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse. In addition to being Elvin Hayes' sister (The Big E!), she was an Army Corps of Engineers official who was the first to raise questions about Halliburton's no-bid contract in Iraq. For her service to American taxpayers, she received this:

A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.

The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq.

The demotion removes her from the elite Senior Executive Service and reassigns her to a lesser job in the corps' civil works division.

"She is being demoted because of her strict adherence to procurement requirements and the Army's preference to sidestep them when it suits their needs," Mr. Kohn said Sunday in an interview. He also said the Army had violated a commitment to delay Ms. Greenhouse's dismissal until the completion of an inquiry by the Pentagon's inspector general.

Carol Sanders, spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said Sunday that the personnel action against Ms. Greenhouse had been approved by the Department of the Army. And in a memorandum dated June 3, 2005, as the demotion was being arranged, the commander of the corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, said the administrative record "clearly demonstrates that Ms. Greenhouse's removal from the S.E.S. is based on her performance and not in retaliation for any disclosures of alleged improprieties that she may have made."

By the way, for twenty years this lady had nothing but the best performance ratings you could get from the Army. That is, until she started messing with Unca Dick's parent comapny:

Known as a stickler for the rules on competition, Ms. Greenhouse initially received stellar performance ratings, Mr. Kohn said. But her reviews became negative at roughly the time she began objecting to decisions she saw as improperly favoring Kellogg Brown & Root, he said. Often she hand-wrote her concerns on the contract documents, a practice that corps leaders called unprofessional and confusing.

Amazing that she went all funny like that at exactly the same time she started balking at Halliburton's contracts. That's what they call "accountability" in this Adminstration: do something we don't like, and you're accountable. Do something incompetent in the service of something we do like, and you're OK.

War profiteering is the great hidden story of this disastrous war. Beyond the UN "oil for food" headlines (which implicates several US companies, though you never hear that) are countless stories of mismanaged and flat-out stolen money. There's $8.8 billion missing from the Coalition Provisional Authority (led by Medal-of-Freedom-winner Paul Bremer). There's $2.4 billion in $100 bills, the largest cash transfer in the history of the New York Federal Reserve, carted up and shipped to Iraq, given away, handed out of the back of pick-up trucks (This is the government report on it). There's millions and millions and millions of dollars in overcharging and kickbacks from Halliburton, Bechtel and others for services in Iraq. There's simply no reasonable government oversight to what these companies are doing with our money. And anyone who does try to provide oversight gets demoted.

As many have said, we need a "Truman Commission" to look into these instances of war profiteering and provide real accountability, where the company engaged in these practices loses their contract or are penalized in some other fashion. Period.