Sat Dec 23 23:37:13 CST 2000
Col. Mudd goes on record
By Barb Arland-Fye, QUAD-CITY TIMES -- December 24, 2000

Retired Col. James Mudd is fuming.

For the three years as chief of the Army Corps of Engineers' Rock Island

District, he believes he tried to bring a massive, bogged-down
navigation
study to a fair, timely conclusion.

Now his reputation has been damaged, he believes, because of a
whistleblower's victory in a complaint launched against top Corps
officials
responsible for the study.

"Twenty-six years in service, one whistleblower and all of a sudden,
everything I worked for goes down the chute. Thank you very much United
States of America," he said.

A Pentagon report released earlier this month accused Mudd, 48, and two
generals of swaying the study in favor of more than $1 billion in
unnecessary navigation improvements on the Upper Mississippi and
Illinois
rivers.

On Thursday, he received a letter of admonishment from the Army's vice
chief
of staff. It essentially criticized his actions as reflecting poorly on
the
Army, he said.

Nothing could be further from the truth, said Mudd. "I stood up for what
was
right."

He left the Quad-Cities five months ago, after an emotional farewell and

change of command ceremony on Arsenal Island. With his wife, Toni, he
walked
away from center stage on a hot July afternoon and boarded a tow that
assists in the maintenance of locks and dams on the river. The song
"Happy
Trails" played over the loudspeaker as the tow moved slowly up the
Mississippi.

His trail has been anything but happy.

The whistleblower investigation still was under way and his dream of
advancement was unfulfilled after what he said had been a very
satisfying,
26-year career.

He and Toni have moved out of state to a town he asked not to be
disclosed.
He believes the federal investigation of the navigation study has
vilified
his family.

"It has everything to do with politics," added Mudd, who questioned the
timing of the investigation report's release in the midst of a
topsy-turvy
presidential election and the amount of time -- 10 months -- it took to
complete.

"This investigation took longer than it took us to kick Saddam Hussein
out
of Kuwait," said Mudd, who served with the U.S.-led coalition that drove

Iraq out of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.

He shouldn't have been surprised, given the complexity and controversy
surrounding the 7-year-old, $57 million study.

The navigation industry insisted the improvements were necessary ASAP,
while
the environmentalists countered they were not and urged the Corps to
take
more time to research.

Congress was expecting a recommendation on a study that seemed to be
growing
out of control.

The aging study "had become a serious problem for the Corps, almost to
the
point of being an embarrassment," Mudd said. The Corps had to be able to

move on with it.

The whistleblower's complaint

In February, a Corps economist blew the whistle on his bosses, claiming
they
manipulated a navigation study to favor more than $1 billion in
unnecessary
improvements on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.

The federal Office of Special Counsel decided whistleblower Donald
Sweeney's
allegations had merit, and ordered an investigation.

On Dec. 6, the Pentagon released a 168-page report from the Army
inspector
general's office that was damning to the Corps as an agency and to three
top
Corps officials individually, including Mudd.

While the report found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, investigators

said that Mudd, Corps deputy commander Maj. Gen. Russell Fuhrman and
division commander Maj. Gen. Phillip Anderson all helped taint the most
extensive and expensive study of navigation improvements in Corps
history.

The investigation also found that Corps officials gave preferential
treatment to the barge industry and that the agency demonstrated an
institutional bias for large-scale construction projects.

"They're trying to make institutional changes to the Corps of Engineers
and
they're doing it on the backs of three good officers," Mudd said.

Singling out the "green suits"

Why, he asks, were the military officers, what he calls the "green
suits,"
implicated in the investigation but civilian employees were not?

"What did the environmental community want in February?" he asks
rhetorically. "They wanted the green suits out of the Corps and they
wanted
it to be civilian run."

Some members of Congress and environmental groups did urge Congress at
that
time to consider converting the Corps into a civilian organization.

An environmentalist who often was at odds with Mudd agrees that the
military
leaders were singled out in the report.

"I assume the Army felt more capable of dealing with its military people
and
throwing the blame on them," said Mark Beorkrem, a Mississippi River
Protection co-director with the Sierra Club.

Fuhrman, Anderson and Mudd "were the most guilty of the guilty and
everybody
else got a pass," Beorkrem added.

Mudd "firmly believed that (the Corps) needed to take care of the
navigation
industry, so his whole approach slanted to the industry on anything that

would come up. His interpretation of Corps regulations always favored
the
navigation industry," Beorkrem added.

Beorkrem also believes that the report, conducted by an agency that
oversees
the Corps, pointed out the crux of the problem: Servitude to navigation.

"Corps projects are usually initiated at the community or state level as
a
result of industry interests at having something done or community
interests
at having something done."

He puts as much blame on Congress.

Certainly, Congress uses the Corps as its main pork barrel vehicle now,"

Beorkrem said. "That's why we had such a hard time in the summer and
fall of
even getting Corps reform discussed because there are very powerful
people
in Congress that want the client-service philosophy to be the way the
Corps
operates."

"Silence is guilt"

Mudd believes the whole issue has been taken out of context, but Corps
officials won't talk about it.

He thinks that's bad policy.

"Corps employees may discuss their personal views on personal time but
cannot be Corps spokespeople regarding the issue under the current
guidance
of the Department of the Army," said Justine Barati, a public affairs
specialist with the Corps' Rock Island District.

While the investigation was under way, all media requests were referred
to
the Department of the Army, said Lt. Col. Eugene Pawlik, with the Corps'

public affairs office. That is "relatively standard procedure," he
added.

"Silence is guilt," said Mudd, who bristles at what he called a gag
order
during his final months on the job. "Did the Secretary of the Army
violate
my freedom of speech rights?" he asks.

>From the day Mudd took command of the Corps' Rock Island District on
July 9,
1997, he thought the navigation study would be the challenge of his
military
career, he said, but now he believes it was the unraveling of it.

"It was a bit of a worry and the reason it was a worry is because for
the
first four years someone else was working on it," he added. "It should
have
had a year's worth more of getting done and that was it."

Congress was expecting a final recommendation in late 1999 on the
feasibility of lock construction and improvements. The deadline was
extended
to the end of this year. Missing that deadline might very well mean
risking
his credibility, said Mudd, who aspired to advance in the Army.

"You fail at a rather large project, it wouldn't look good," he said.

Failure wasn't something Mudd experienced in the military career he
began
after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

His success at such tasks as developing models for war games in the
Persian
Gulf helped get him promoted and eventually, a command with the Corps'
Rock
Island District.

As he thinks about it now, it seems ironic that another modeling
exercise --
pertaining to barge traffic movement on the Upper Mississippi -- became
the
final chapter in the only career he had known and loved.

The testimony

There is testimony that Mudd participated in "what-if" drills to
determine
what value of a mathematical formula would produce net positive benefits
for
large-scale construction.

"The evidence established: Col. Mudd directed Mr. (Richard) Manguno to
develop economic analysis supporting an alternative supporting
large-scale
construction when there was no previous analysis to support such a
recommendation."

-- U.S. Army Inspector General Agency Report of Investigation

Mudd said he did not tell Manguno or anyone else to justify large-scale
improvements.

"That was basically just telling Manguno to spread out a menu of
alternatives, ranging from don't do anything to build large-scale
improvements on the Mississippi," he said.

Sweeney's economic model provided only one alternative, which was to do
small-scale improvements, Mudd said.

That model, he added, was new, untested and "underestimated the
benefits" of
lock expansion based on the Corps' standard model for justifying
navigation
improvements on the Ohio River, Mudd said.

He said he removed Sweeney from a leadership position on the economics
group
because the economist repeatedly missed deadlines to provide the
critical
information needed to move the economics part of the study forward.

The navigation industry was pressuring the Corps to produce results and
its
representatives were very critical of the Corps' work on it.

Mudd insisted that pressure did not sway him.

"Every day I was in Rock Island I had pressures," he said. "I had
agricultural interests screaming in my ear. I had environmentalists
screaming in my ear. Congress was screaming in my ear ... that's what I
get
paid for, to make the hard decisions in spite of the pressures," he
said.

Barge industry representatives, strong advocates of lock expansion
because
of worldwide competition for grain markets, criticized the Corps for not

moving quickly enough. They were convinced lock expansion was justified,

even though Sweeney had concluded a need for small-scale improvements
only.

"Prior to the May 1999 meeting between the Corps and industry, they were

scheduled for public disclosure of the study findings. Mr. (Chris)
Brescia,
a navigation industry official, pulled some strings and got the public
meetings postponed. He thought the meeting with industry was appropriate

because industry had a legitimate interest in the study outcome.

-- Dudley Hanson's testimony in the Army Inspector General's report

"We clearly disagree with the conclusion that we were given undue
access,"
Brescia, of Midwest Area River Coalition, or MARC 2000, told the Times.
The
group is a coalition of agricultural producers, shippers, processors,
waterway carriers and other industrial entities that use the river for
the
movement of commercial bulk commodities. "All we were trying to do was
show
what was wrong with their analysis," he added.

Anderson, then the Corps' commanding general of its Mississippi Valley
Division, called the meeting between Corps employees and barge industry
representatives "because folks were calling him," Mudd said.

But he and navigation study project manager Gary Loss of the Rock Island

District were uncomfortable about having a meeting with just those two
groups.

They asked to have representatives of environmental groups join them.
Anderson said no, Mudd recalled, because the meeting was a listening
session. "He said, 'We're going to listen.' "

The meeting in St. Louis, with more than 50 people, got ugly, Mudd said.
In
his testimony to investigators, he said the May 5, 1999, meeting seemed
to
be "Corps bashing" by the barge industry.

Anderson and Mudd remained silent, but Anderson eventually called a halt
to
the meeting when it broke down into an argument. He called for another
meeting, a few days later in Chicago, with industry economists and Corps

economists to try to resolve the differences.

Pick a number

Mudd said, "We told Brescia to query his farm folks to come up with
opportunity costs without project conditions -- what happens when they
don't
have locks and dams and can't ship in a rather cheap manner?

We said, bring us their bills, their income tax forms. We weren't
telling
him to do analysis. We were asking him to get data."

Eventually, a value was plugged into Sweeney's economic model -- a value

that investigators claim Mudd fudged to justify lock expansion.

That galls him.

If he had wanted to cook the books, he said, he wouldn't have used such
a
conservative number in the economic formula. He would have picked a
number
that would have justified lock expansion from "St. Paul to St. Louis,"
he
said.

No one -- Sweeney nor the Corps -- has the information that would
provide
the value with certainty, agrees everyone interviewed for this story.

Mudd challenges anyone, specifically the panel members of the National
Academy of Sciences, who are doing a separate review of the study, to
accurately forecast grain traffic variables for decades to come.

He firmly believes the value that investigators called mathematically
flawed
will be found to be accurate. That's why he plans to send a letter of
rebuttal to the Army's vice chief of staff, who admonished him. "I'll
tell
him, 'If I made the right decision, he better be prepared to make
reparations.'"

One week ago, Mudd put on the same military uniform he wore at his
change of
command ceremony. This time he wore Army green to commission his son,
Ryan,
as an ensign in the Navy during ceremonies at the University of
Illinois.

As a part of the ceremony, Mudd asked his son to raise his hand in the
air.
Then, Mudd said, his son "swore to God that he would defend the
Constitution
of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."_

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