Veterans for Common Sense

July 10, 2008 – Yesterday as the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs was holding a hearing on why veterans were being given the “suicide-inducing drug” Chantix, an Alabama attorney was busy filing the first product liability lawsuit against Chantix maker, Pfizer. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a Linda Collins, now a widow after her husband, David Collins, committed suicide while taking Chantix. In February, the FDA updated the label of the drug to warn patients that Chantix had been linked to serious nueropsychaitric events, suicidal thoughts, and suicide. The lawsuit claims that Pfizer failed to properly warn patients of the possible psychiatric side effects of Chantix.

In May the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banned the use of Chantix for Pilots and air traffic controllers citing concerns for passenger safety. Shortly thereafter the Federal Motor Carrier Saftey Adminstration banned Chantix use for 18-wheeler and other commercial vehicle drivers for concerns over highway safety.

Chantix went on sale in 2006 and sales rose briskly, totaling $883 million for 2007. But prescription volume has been hurt by the safety concerns. About 7.5 million people worldwide have taken Chantix since its approval in 2006, Pfizer said.

In a written statement, Pfizer acknowledged that they were aware that the case had been filed but had not yet been served with a copy. The pharmaceutical giant maintains that Chantix is a safe and effective treatment option for smoking cessation.

The fact is that Chantix does work very well for many people; however, for some the drug can cause serious and potentially deadly side effects that Pfizer should have know about. It is the responsibility of drug manufactures to ensure that their medications are safe for public use and when these multi-billion dollar corporations fail to adequately inspect the safety of their extremely profitable medications, they must be held responsible for their actions.

July 12, 2008 – We have seen no shortage of films and television series about the war in Iraq.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. While there have been plenty made, getting viewers to see them has been something of a challenge. Much has been said, written, analyzed and talked about as to why. We’re war-weary. In tough times, we want escapism. With the war still under way, dramatic depictions hit too close to home.

All these points are valid. Until now.

If there’s any justice – granted, in television there isn’t much – ”Generation Kill,” HBO’s new miniseries from the people who created ”The Wire,” will be the one Iraq project that viewers finally latch onto. It’s riveting, entertaining, harrowing – all the things that should bring it a wide audience. And the people who made it couldn’t care less.

”We just make it for the people who were in it is I think a safe thing to say,” said Ed Burns, an executive producer. It’s not that ratings aren’t important. They’re just not important to him.

”I’m sure the HBO executives might be concerned about them, but I have no feeling for the numbers at all,” he said. ”If I did, ‘The Wire’ might have been different.”

Happily, he didn’t, and it wasn’t.

Burns and co-creator David Simon bring the same sensibility to the battlegrounds of Iraq that they brought to the mean streets of Baltimore – an unflinching look at lives lived and lost under incredible pressure that feels a lot like the truth.

”Generation Kill” follows the Marines of the First Reconnaissance Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It’s based on a book by Evan Wright, a reporter for Rolling Stone who was embedded with the Marines. He’s also a character in the miniseries, played by Lee Tergesen. Wright’s not exactly welcomed with open arms. But his previous employment helps win over the troops.

”Him writing for Hustler kind of gave him a little bit of street cred with us,” said Eric Kocher, the senior military adviser for the show, without a shred of irony.

”And then … he survived that first firefight with us and didn’t pack his bags and go home. He kind of became one of the guys. … He was taken in like another brother that was with us, and I think that’s why the reporting kind of came out the way it did.”

The Hustler bit is true, by the way.

”I noticed right away the Hustler thing had a galvanizing effect,” Wright said. ”It’s weird, because I spent my whole journalistic career with an inferiority complex with the New York Times. They (soldiers) couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the New York Times.”

The miniseries begins with First Recon’s Bravo Company training while awaiting word to invade Iraq. Among the chief concerns, in addition to the obvious – not getting killed when the fighting starts – are things like the obsession by Sgt. Major Sixta (Neal Jones) with the soldiers shaving their mustaches.

A rumor that Jennifer Lopez might have died has an oddly dispiriting effect, as well. It’s details like that that make ”Generation Kill” so compelling. We see the men shifting their fear to other things because of the greater fear looming in the desert.

But what the men want – what they really want, what they have trained and worked and honed themselves for – is to kill. It’s what they do, or at least what they want to do. Sitting around doing not much of it goes against their nature.

It’s an existence beyond political force; indeed, except for the portrayal of senior officers as rigid and dumb – a depiction as old as war itself – ”Generation Kill” is not a political work. That’s appropriate, Kocher said, because that’s what it was like when he was fighting there.

”Nobody really cared about the politics back home,” he said. ”You’re in a war, and I could kind of see for myself we were over there to do what we thought was a good thing, you know, and we were happy to be a part of it. Our whole purpose over there was mission accomplishment.”

Wright, too, said the series avoids politics.

”In other movies, I think the troops sort of served as vehicles for a particular agenda that the filmmakers have,” he said. ”We didn’t have that.”

As the miniseries begins, the soldiers blend together, but over the course of the first couple of episodes, individual personalities develop. The Godfather – Lt. Col. Ferrando (Chance Kelly), so known because throat cancer has left him with a rasp – emerges as an opportunistic commander who refers to himself in the third person, yet does not operate wholly without reason.

The Iceman, Sgt. Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard), is perhaps the most compelling figure, though as in any worthy ensemble, that status changes somewhat from episode to episode. He seems almost above the craziness, somewhat bemused by war, until circumstances change his outlook and temperament.

Cpl. Josh Ray Person (James Ransone) is a nonstop talker, hilarious, wired, while Lance Cpl. James Trombley (Billy Lush) is a rube whose expert marksmanship doesn’t make up for his poor decision-making.

Those are just a few of the characters; the cast is huge, and the interaction is fascinating. As with ”The Wire,” Burns and Simon remain masters of dialogue, getting every word just right. When two soldiers see the borderline nut case Captain America (Eric Nenninger) – a real captain – firing at imaginary enemies and one says, ”Can you believe that (expletive) is in charge of people?” the mix of humor, frustration and danger sounds and feels perfect.

Part of this is thanks to Wright’s book. He was there, in the Humvees, taking fire with the soldiers – just as scared as they were.

”Oh yeah, I was scared all the time,” Wright said. ”When you’re bouncing and there’s a lot going on, you can’t take notes. But actually, I found when there was stillness, but it was still a scary situation … taking notes actually helped me focus, and actually gave me something to do so I wouldn’t go crazy with fear.”

Also giving ”Generation Kill” authenticity is the luxury of the miniseries, the luxury of time. Perhaps that’s what will win ”Generation Kill” an audience. More to the point, perhaps the necessary lack of a leisurely pace is what’s kept audiences away from some of the big-screen Iraq projects, as well as TV shows like Steven Bochco’s ”Over There,” which folded after a single season.

Or maybe it’s something else.

”There’s almost a shame we feel because we’re living on two parallels,” Burns said. ”There’s a war on one street and America on another street, and we’re not meeting up.”

Kocher agreed.

”I think most of America has kind of become numb to it,” he said. ”I mean, it’s the same thing – where are all the yellow flags on the cars? You saw them big in the beginning of the war, but with America’s attention-deficit disorder, they lost interest in it and now they don’t want to see it anymore.”

Kocher figures the realism of ”Generation Kill” might change that.

”A lot of these things are kind of overdramatized, for one thing,” he said. ”Everybody kind of either is a hero or, I think … kind of the opposite, being anti-war. Some people don’t agree with me, but there were really no heroes in ‘Generation Kill.’ It’s just guys over there doing what they do best. And this series kind of just stays true to that.”

It does, and is all the richer for it. ”Generation Kill” is that rare event, a series that viewers not only should see, but one that they’ll want to, as well.

July 10, 2008, Washington, DC – Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s demand for a timetable for complete U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, confirmed Tuesday by his national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, has signaled the almost certain defeat of the George W. Bush administration’s aim of establishing a long-term military presence in the country.

The official Iraqi demand for U.S. withdrawal confirms what was becoming increasingly clear in recent months — that the Iraqi regime has decided to shed its military dependence on the United States.

The two strongly pro-Iranian Shiite factions supporting the regime in Baghdad, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and al-Maliki’s own Dawa Party, were under strong pressure from both Iran and their own Shiite population and from Shiite clerics, including Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to demand U.S. withdrawal.

The statement by al-Rubaei came immediately after he had met with Sistani, thus confirming earlier reports that Sistani was opposed to any continuing U.S. military presence.

The Bush administration has had doubts in the past about the loyalties of those two Shiite groups and of the SIIC’s Badr Corps paramilitary organisation, and it manoeuvred in 2005 and early 2006 to try to weaken their grip on the interior ministry and the police.

By 2007, however, the administration hoped that it had forged a new level of cooperation with al-Maliki aimed at weakening their common enemy, Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation Mahdi Army. SIIC leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim was invited to the White House in December 2006 and met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in November 2007.

The degree of cooperation with the al-Maliki regime against the Sadrists was so close that the Bush administration even accepted for a brief period in late 2007 the al-Maliki regime’s argument that Iran was restraining the Mahdi Army by pressing Sadr to issue his August 2007 ceasefire order.

In November, Bush and al-Maliki agreed on a set of principles as the basis for negotiating agreements on stationing of U.S. forces and bilateral cooperation, including a U.S. guarantee of Iraq’s security and territorial integrity. In February 2008, U.S. and Iraqi military planners were already preparing for a U.S.-British-Iraqi military operation later in the summer to squeeze the Sadrists out of Basra.

But after the U.S. draft agreement of Mar. 7 was given to the Iraqi government, the attitude of the al-Maliki government toward the U.S. military presence began to shift dramatically, just as Iran was playing a more overt role in brokering ceasefire agreements between the two warring Shiite factions.

The first indication was al-Maliki’s refusal to go along with the Basra plan and his sudden decision to take over Basra immediately without U.S. troops. Petraeus later said a company of U.S. army troops was attached to some units as advisers “just really because we were having a problem figuring where was the front line.”

That al-Maliki decision was followed by an Iranian political mediation of the intra-Shiite fighting in Basra, at the request of a delegation from the two pro-government parties. The result was that Sadr’s forces gave up control of the city, even though they were far from having been defeated.

U.S. military officials were privately disgruntled at that development, which effectively cancelled the plan for a much bigger operation against the Sadrists during the summer. Weeks later, a U.S. “defence official” would tell the New York Times, “We may have wasted an opportunity in Basra to kill those that needed to be killed.”

In another sign of the shifting Iraqi position away from Washington, in early May, al-Maliki refused to cooperate with a Cheney-Petraeus scheme to embarrass Iran by having the Iraqi government publicly accuse it of arming anti-government Shiites in the South. The prime minister angered U.S. officials by naming a committee to investigate U.S. charges.

Even worse for the Bush administration, a delegation of Shiite officials to Tehran that was supposed to confront Iran over the arms issue instead returned with a new Iranian strategy for dealing with Sadr, according to Alissa J. Rubin of the New York Times: reach a negotiated settlement with him.

The al-Maliki regime began to apply the new Iranian strategy immediately. On May 10, al-Maliki and Sadr reached an accord on Sadr City, where pitched battles were being fought between U.S. troops and the Sadrists.

The new accord prevented a major U.S. escalation of violence against the Mahdi Army stronghold and ended heavy U.S. bombing there. Seven U.S. battalions had been poised to assault Sadr City with tanks and armoured cars in a battle expected to last several weeks.

Under the new pact, Sadr allowed Iraqi troops to patrol in his stronghold, in return for the government’s agreement not to arrest any Sadrist troops unless they were found with “medium and heavy weaponry”.

The new determination to keep U.S. forces out of the intra-Shiite conflict was accompanied by a new tough line in the negotiations with the Bush administration on status of forces and cooperation agreements. In a May 21 briefing for Senate staff, Bush administration officials said Iraq was now demanding “significant changes to the form of the agreements”.

The al-Maliki regime was rejecting the U.S. demand for access to bases with no time limit as well as for complete freedom to use them without consultation with the Iraqi government, as well as its demand for immunity for its troops and contractors. The Iraqis were asserting that these demands violated Iraqi sovereignty. By early June, Iraqi officials were openly questioning for the first time whether Iraq needs a U.S. military presence at all.

The unexpected Iraqi resistance to the U.S. demands reflected the underlying influence of Iran on the al-Maliki government as well as Sadr’s recognition that he could achieve his goal of liberating Iraq from U.S. occupation through political-diplomatic means rather than through military pressures.

Iran put very strong pressure on Iraq to reject the agreement, as soon as it saw the initial U.S. draft. It could cite the fact that the draft would allow the United States to use Iraqi bases to attack Iran, which was known to be a red line in Iran-Iraq relations.

The Iranians could argue that an Iraqi Shiite regime could not depend on the United States, which was committed to a strategy of alliance with Sunni regimes in the region against the Shiite regimes.

Iran was able to exploit a deep vein of Iraqi Shiite suspicion that the U.S. might still try to overthrow the Shiite regime, using former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and some figures in the Iraqi Army. When the U.S. draft dropped an earlier U.S. commitment to defend Iraq against external aggression and pledged only to “consult” in the event of an external threat, Iran certainly exploited the opening to push al-Maliki to reject the agreement.

The use of military bases in Iraq to project U.S. power into the region to carry out regime change in Iran and elsewhere had been an essential part of the neoconservative plan for invading Iraq from the beginning.

The Bush administration raised the objective of a long-term military presence in Iraq based on the “Korea model” last year at the height of the U.S. celebration of the pacification of the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province, which it viewed as sealing its victory in the war.

But the Iraqi demand for withdrawal makes it clear that the Bush administration was not really in control of events in Iraq, and that Shiite political opposition and Iranian diplomacy could trump U.S. military power.

July 10, 2008 – Jeremy Hall, a 23-year-old U.S. soldier is suing the Department of Defense for allegedly discriminating against him because of his religious beliefs. Army Spc. Jeremy Hall, raised as a Baptist, claims that he lost his Christian faith while serving two tours of duty in Iraq and that subsequently his atheist beliefs caused him to be denied promotions in the Army and to have his life threatened by other troops according to an interview Hall had with CNN. The military assigned a bodyguard to protect him and returned him stateside.

Hall asserts that there is a pattern of discrimination against non-Christians in the military. CNN said Hall filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Defense in March, claiming his rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment were violated. Michael Weinstein, a retired senior Air Force officer and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is joining in the lawsuit with Hall. Weinstein claims that he has been contacted by more than 8,000 members of the military and many of them complaining about pressure to embrace evangelical Christianity.

Mediacurves, a Service of HCD Research studied over 200 Christians and over 100 hundred non-Christians to determine the impact of CNN’s segment on the issue.

While viewing the CNN segment, participants indicated their levels of believability by moving their mouse from left to right on a continuum. The responses were recorded in quarter-second intervals and reported in the form of curves. To view believability curves and detailed results go to: www.mediacurves.com.

Among the study findings:

“Should US Army soldiers be required to pray with their fellow troops regardless of their religious beliefs?”

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July 10, 2008, Camp Pendleton, CA – A Camp Pendleton Marine who allegedly helped kill at least four detainees during a 2004 battle in Fallujah, Iraq, seemed to confess during a taped interview that was replayed Thursday.
Prosecutors introduced the evidence during an Article 32 hearing on the base, hoping that it will help convince the officer presiding over the proceeding and Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland to court-martial Sgt. Ryan Weemer.

The audiotape came from a 2006 job interview that Weemer had with the U.S. Secret Service. He was asked about the worst crime he had ever committed.

On the tape recording, Weemer said he and other Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment were fighting their way through Fallujah in November 2004 when they found four or five men in a barricaded house containing weapons.

He said members of his unit radioed their superiors and asked what they should do with the prisoners. Weemer said the response was, “Are they dead yet?”

Weemer said his unit interpreted the question as an order to kill the detainees, and so they did.

“We argued about it, but we had to move, we had to get out, our unit’s moving down the street. I did one guy,” Weemer said on the tape.
“We didn’t take any prisoners,” he added. “If we let anyone go, they are going to run down the street and grab an (assault rifle) because they had them stashed.”

Weemer is then heard saying there were “plenty of incidents” in which Marines killed Iraqis in similar fashion.

He left the military two years ago, but because he was still on reserve status, the Marine Corps reinstated him to active duty so it could prosecute him through military channels.

Besides Weemer, Sgt. Jermaine Nelson and former Sgt. Jose Luis Nazario are facing charges in the Fallujah case.

During the Thursday hearing, prosecutors also played a tape of Nelson saying that he, Weemer and Nazario killed the detainees.

Maj. Glen Hines, who is overseeing the hearing, will determine whether there is enough evidence to support court-martialing Weemer on one count of murder and six counts of dereliction of duty. He will make his recommendation to Helland, who is the covening authority in the case.

July 10, 2008 – Defense Secretary Robert Gates has tried to sweep out the symbols of his predecessor’s capricious reign, firing acolytes of Donald Rumsfeld and bringing glasnost to the Pentagon.

But in one area, Rummy’s Rules still pertain: the attempt to hide from public view the returning war dead.

When Gina Gray took over as the public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery about three months ago, she discovered that cemetery officials were attempting to impose new limits on media coverage of funerals of the Iraq war dead — even after the fallen warriors’ families granted permission for the coverage. She said that the new restrictions were wrong and that Army regulations didn’t call for such limitations.

Six weeks after The Washington Post reported her efforts to restore media coverage of funerals, Gray was demoted. Twelve days ago, the Army fired her.

“Had I not put my foot down, had I just gone along with it and not said regulations were being violated, I’m sure I’d still be there,” said the jobless Gray, who, over lunch yesterday in Crystal City, recounted what she is certain is her retaliatory dismissal. “It’s about doing the right thing.”

Army Secretary Pete Geren, in an interview last night, said he couldn’t comment on Gray’s firing. But he said the overall policy at Arlington is correct. “It appears to me that we’ve struck the right balance, consistent with the wishes of the family,” the secretary said.

Gray, in tank top, jeans, Ray-Bans over her Army cap and flip-flops revealing pink toenails, struck an unlikely figure for a whistle-blower yesterday as she provided documents detailing her ill-fated and tumultuous few months at Arlington. She worked for eight years in the Army as a public affairs specialist in Germany, Italy and Iraq, then returned to Iraq as an army contractor doing media operations. While working with the 173rd Airborne in Iraq in 2003, her convoy was ambushed and, she says, she still has some hearing loss from the explosion. The 30-year-old Arizonan was hired to work at Arlington in April.

Just 10 days on the job, she was handling media coverage for the burial of a Marine colonel who had been killed in Iraq when she noticed that Thurman Higginbotham, the cemetery’s deputy superintendent, had moved the media area 50 yards away from the service, obstructing the photographs and making the service inaudible. The Washington Sketch column on April 24 noted that Gray pushed for more access to the service but was “apparently shot down by other cemetery officials.”

Gates had his staff inquire with the cemetery about the article and was told that “the policy had not in any way changed,” Gates’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said yesterday. Geren, the Army secretary, added that “the policy has not changed, and I understand the practice hasn’t, either.”

That, however, is false. Through at least 2005 — during Rumsfeld’s tenure, no less — reporters were placed in a location where they could hear the prayers and the eulogies and film the handing of the folded flag to the next of kin. The coverage of the ceremonies — in the nearly two-thirds of cases where families permitted it — provided moving reminders to a distracted nation that there was a war going on. But the access gradually eroded, and Gray arrived to discover that it was gone.

And soon, so was Gray. After Gates’s inquiry into The Post column, Gray, still days into her new job, began to get some rough treatment. “Gina, when you leave the building let me know,” said a one-line e-mail from her supervisor, Phyllis White, on May 2. Then Gray was instructed not to work overtime without written approval, and then was ordered to take down a Marines poster from her cubicle wall. “Please change your title from public affairs director to public affairs officer,” White instructed in a June 9 e-mail.

Gray complained to Arlington’s superintendent, John Metzler, and was briefly removed from White and Higginbotham’s supervision. But on May 27, White sent an e-mail announcing that “Mr. Metzler changed his mind, I will continue as your supervisor.” The acrimony increased. Gray went to the hospital complaining of stress-related headaches; while she was recovering, her BlackBerry was disconnected “to alleviate you from stress,” as White put it.

Arlington’s problems with the burial of the Iraq dead go far beyond Gray; the cemetery is looking for its fourth public affairs director in the past few years. Gray contends that Higginbotham has been calling the families of the dead to encourage them not to allow media coverage at the funerals — a charge confirmed by a high-ranking official at Arlington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Gray says Higginbotham told staff members that he called the family of the next soldier scheduled for burial at Arlington and that the family, which had originally approved coverage, had changed its mind. Gray charges that Higginbotham admitted he had been making such calls to families for a year and said that the families “appreciated him keeping the media out.”

Higginbotham, White and Metzler did not respond to e-mail messages yesterday seeking their comment. An Army spokesman said Higginbotham and other Arlington officials call families only if their wishes regarding media coverage are unclear.

On June 27, Gray got her termination memo. White said Gray had “been disrespectful to me as your supervisor and failed to act in an inappropriate manner.” Failed to act in an in appropriate manner? The termination notice was inadvertently revealing: Only at Arlington National Cemetery could it be considered a firing offense to act appropriately.

July 10, 2008 – Since June 9, when Rep. Kucinich’s introduced 35 articles of impeachment, the articles have remained shelved in the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Conyers has the ability to bring the articles to a vote in the committee, but he is undecided on a course of action. In a June meeting with Veterans For Peace, Rep. Conyers promised to present his decision on impeachment in early July. However, Conyers failed to present such as decision during a meeting held with Veterans For Peace (VFP) on Wednesday, July 9. Members of VFP believe that Conyers is deploying stall tactics and that he has no intention of moving forward with impeachment. Conyers, once again, has promised to present his decision in a meeting planned for July 25.

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July 10, 2008, Washington, DC – The Pentagon’s oversight of Houston-based KBR’s work in Iraq and Afghanistan has been “irregular and highly out of the ordinary,” a former Army contracting official told Senate Democrats Wednesday.

Charles Smith, the former chief of the Army Field Support Command with responsibility for overseeing KBR’s massive contract with the Army, contends he was forced out of his job in 2004 for objecting to the Pentagon’s treatment of KBR.

“The interest of a corporation, KBR, not the interests of American soldiers or American taxpayers, seemed to be paramount,” Smith told the Democratic Policy Committee, a Democrats-only panel.

Dan Carlson, a spokesman for the Army Sustainment Command, acknowledged that Smith was reassigned within the command. Smith later retired.

Carlson said Smith’s allegations are “under investigation by appropriate authorities within the Army.”

KBR, the largest military contractor operating in Iraq, builds bases, serves meals and provides a host of other support services for U.S. troops. To date, the company has been paid nearly $26 billion for its work under the contract, Army officials say.

During his tenure, Smith said, he saw KBR submit more than $1 billion in billings to the government that lacked the necessary documentation to merit reimbursement.

KBR had come under particular criticism for its bills for providing meals at base dining halls. The Pentagon’s own auditors, the Defense Contract Audit Agency, objected to $200 million worth of billings, Smith said. But rather than pursue the issue, the Army agreed to change the contract, effectively barring the government from going after that money.

“It was at least a $200 million relief for KBR,” Smith said.

KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne, in a prepared statement, said the company “remains committed to providing high-quality service to our customer and conducting our business with ethics and integrity.

“The company in no way condones or tolerates anything to the contrary. When questions have been raised about our work, we have fully cooperated with the government in providing information requested of us. We remain committed to finding quick resolution to issues when they arise.”

Smith argued that rather than tighten control over the contract when billing issues arose, Army officials waived rules that would have allowed the government to withhold 15 percent of expected reimbursements until KBR provided the necessary documentation.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., Democratic Policy Committee chairman, noted what he called “a concerted effort in the Pentagon to award huge contracts to certain companies and to protect it at all costs.”

Smith said the Pentagon essentially “outsourced” oversight of the contract to a firm called RCI, later acquired by Virginia-based Serco.

Serco spokesman Steve McCarney said the firm does not oversee any contractor.

“We simply provide independent economic cost analysis to our client, which is the U.S. Army,” McCarney said.

Carlson, the Army Sustainment Command spokesman, pointed to improvements in recent years, including deploying contracting officers overseas, establishing a requirement review process and improving contractor business systems to better meet the standards of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

Underlying discussion of KBR’s treatment by the Army was apparent concern among at least some at the Pentagon that the company would, if pushed too far, withdraw from Iraq. That would have dealt a huge blow to a war effort heavily dependent on the work of private contractors.

Smith discounted that notion, saying KBR would not risk its corporate reputation — and its business as a military contractor — by deserting the troops in the field.

After the hearing, Smith said that while he oversaw KBR’s contract, he occasionally heard from midlevel KBR officials complaining about cash flow and warning that the company might fail to complete tasks assigned under the contract. These calls, however, invariably were followed by assurances from higher-level managers of the company’s commitment to the contract, Smith said.