WASHINGTON, Aug 29: A top US Army contracting official who criticized a large, non-competitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq, has been demoted for what the Army called poor job performance, the New York Times said on Monday.

The newspaper said Bunnatine 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, the report said.

Greenhouse’s lawyer, Michael Kohn, called the action an ‘obvious reprisal’ for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, which has garnered more than 10 billion for work in Iraq, The Times said.

Vice President Richard Cheney was chief executive at Halliburton before he joined President George Bush’s election campaign in 2000.

“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,” the newspaper quoted Mr Kohn as saying 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 the personnel action against Ms Greenhouse had been approved by the Department of the Army, the paper said. —AFP