By DANA LIEBELSON
POGO has obtained the letter Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta sent to Senator John McCain (R-AZ), asserting that a retired Air Force general turned Boeing executive had no conflict of interest while participating in a war game that featured a $50 billion contract Boeing was hoping to win. This is the Pentagon's latest move to assuage fears that its controversial "senior mentors" program was simply one big revolving door to the defense industry.
In November, USA Today reported that while Boeing was vying to build a $50 billion-plus aerial tanker for the military, Air Force officials let retired four-star general Charles Robertson—who had become an executive for Boeing—participate as a "senior mentor" in order to get around that pesky conflict of interest problem.
McCain ordered a Pentagon investigation into Robertson’s case after the USA Today report—and Panetta is flatly denying a conflict of interest. From the letter:
The Department required all then-serving Senior Mentors to complete public financial disclosure or separate from employment…after a Department-wide audit, the Department of Defense Inspector General reported on October 31, 2011, that the Department complied with these new DoD policies for hiring senior mentors as [Highly Qualified Experts]. The Department is committed to ensuring consistency and transparency in the use of Senior Mentors across the Department.
What Panetta doesn’t mention about that October IG report, is that it found that 98 percent of the retired senior officers from the Navy, Marines and three special combatant commands in the “senior mentor” program magically disappeared after Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered the Pentagon to require the senior mentors to file public financial disclosure documents.
Even if Robertson’s particular case didn’t involve a violation of conflict of interest rules, it’s still problematic, said POGO Director of Investigations Nick Schwellenbach.
“The rampant spinning of the revolving door makes these episodes far too common. Maybe nothing bad happened as a result of Robertson's participation, but the appearance it creates is, at the very least, questionable,” he said.
Dana Liebelson is POGO's Beth Daley Impact Fellow
Image from Wikimedia Commons
To put it nicely, it smells like a rotten fish...
Let's remember that this contract was the THIRD try. The first one was won by Boeing, and was canceled due to something very similar to this - a Pentagon official got a very nice job at Boeing after helping them to win the contract. The second one was apparently more fair, and Northrop Grumman/EADS won, though Boeing appealed and the decision was again reversed (though in this case there was no such thing as corruption).
On this third try Northrop Grumman refused to participate because -their statement- "the tender was biased in favor of Boeing", so the Pentagon had to ask EADS (Airbus mother company) to participate, as to prevent that stigma of a "Boeing run-in" from sticking. All analysts (even in the US) were stating that EADS would be selected, first because they had a far superior product, it held a much lower risk, and on top of that Airbus was going to manufacture it in the US, creating also a final assembly line in Mobile, Alabama, for civilian aircraft. This was true even days before the final selection, which was a big surprise to everybody. And now this? It smells big time...
Funny thing is, that while Boeing outsources a lot of its components all over the world (e.g, 787 wings are manufactured in Japan), EADS is the biggest customer of aerospace products in the United States, at the tune of 10 BILLION a year! How many jobs will be lost in the US if these guys feel cheated and decide to shop elsewhere?
Posted by: Ralph | Feb 23, 2012 at 05:41 PM