An Army lieutenant colonel who received the Bronze Star for her wartime service in Iraq was arrested on Thursday and charged with taking bribes in a growing corruption scandal involving the Iraq reconstruction program. An investigation has jolted the program, embarrassed the US military and exposed a dark underside of the US occupation authority that ran the country after the invasion in April 2003.
The officer, Lieutenant Colonel Debra Harrison, who is a reservist in a civil affairs unit based in Norristown, Pennsylvania, is the fourth person and the second senior Army officer to be arrested and charged in relation to the scandal.
The citation for her Bronze Star recognizes her service in Iraq last year, including her actions during an ambush in April that a US official who served in south-central Iraq said had killed a security guard and wounded others in a convoy.
Harrison was also ambushed earlier that year in an attack that sprayed windshield glass into her face and severed a nerve in her upper lip, the Center Daily Times of State College reported recently.
She is charged with receiving cash bribes of US$80,000 to US$100,000, a Cadillac Escalade, a trove of illegal weaponry and other items for steering construction jobs to a US contractor in Iraq.
Some of the cash, intended for projects like a library in the holy city of Karbala and an Iraqi police academy south of Baghdad, paid for a new hot tub and a deck for Harrison's home in Trenton, according to the federal affidavit. Conviction on the charges, including conspiracy to commit bribery and money laundering as well as a long list of weapons charges, could put her in prison for up to 30 years, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Kristine Belisle, a spokeswoman for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the independent office whose investigators uncovered what they say is a bribery and kickback scheme, said more people would probably be arrested.
The other military officer to be charged in connection woth the case is Lieutenant Colonel Michael Wheeler, an Army reservist of Amherst Junction, Wisconsin. The others who have been charged are two civilians, Robert Stein of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Philip Bloom, a US citizen who lived for many years in Romania.
As officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority based in Hillah, south of Baghdad, Stein, Wheeler and Harrison are charged with accepting bribes totaling more than US$200,000 a month, to steer at least US$13 million in contracts to companies controlled by Bloom, who is accused of performing the work shoddily or not at all.
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