FRACTIOUS FRIDAY

In case you missed it, here's another reason to throw the bums out: The Los Angeles Times reports it has obtained documents showing that Halliburton, Bunker Boy's old company, won a lucrative extension of its no-bid military contract after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did an end-run around its own chief contracting officer, who objected to the proposal in vivid, handwritten notes.

Times reporter T. Christian Miller quotes documents for the first time showing that chief contracting officer Bunnatine Greenhouse wrote her objections on a version of the $165-million extension proposal. She scrawled comments such as: "I cannot approve this"; "Incorrect!"; "No! How!"; and "Not a valid reason."

After Greenhouse raised her objections, she was threatened with demotion. She nonetheless recorded her complaints in a letter her lawyer wrote to acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee. As reported in the Times and elsewhere, Halliburton is being probed by the FBI in an expanded investigation of alleged company overcharges of millions of dollars for fuel deliveries in Iraq.

Halliburton's response to the Greenhouse case is the usual. The company blames politics. "On the overall issues, the old allegations have once again been recycled, this time one week before the election," a spokeswoman is quoted as saying.

"But," Miller writes, "the previously undisclosed documents are part of a growing body of evidence indicating unusual treatment was given to government contracts won by the Houston-based firm.

"Career civil servants repeatedly raised objections to contracting decisions that benefited Halliburton, only to be overruled by higher-ups."

October 29, 2004 11:12 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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