Pentagon Won’t Halt Trade in Inquiry: It’s ‘Imprudent’

WASHINGTON —  The Pentagon said today that it would continue doing business with contractors being investigated in a procurement fraud scandal because cutting them off would be “imprudent.”

“It would be imprudent to apply such a freeze or moratorium,” Defense Department spokesman Fred Hoffman told reporters when asked about congressional calls to sever ties with companies involved in the inquiry.

In a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, criticized the military, saying it should suspend its business with suspect firms (Story, Page 18). “You’ve got to do something pretty dramatic if only to prove you are on top of the situation,” Aspin said.

But the Pentagon spokesman, in an unusually blunt rebuke to the chairman of the powerful committee that holds the military’s purse strings, said this was out of the question.

“The innocent will suffer as well as the guilty,” Hoffman said. “We wonder if those who call for a freeze or a moratorium have thought through the consequences--higher program costs, production line shutdowns, widespread layoffs and harm to our forces.

“We are proceeding in a responsible manner,” he said, adding that “hasty or precipitous action may sound good, but it doesn’t go to the heart of the problem.”

Some of the nation’s biggest defense contractors are under investigation over allegations that they bribed Pentagon officials for inside information on contracts worth billions.

The Pentagon also acknowledged it is investigating the possibility that documents had been shredded by people implicated in the scandal.

“We are looking into it,” Hoffman said when asked about a brief submitted to a federal district court in Brooklyn by Henry Hudson, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, Va., who is in charge of the Pentagon investigation.

The brief was filed in opposition to a request by the New York newspaper Newsday to unseal some documents.

“The government has already become aware of several incidents of destruction of documents related to this case,” the brief said.

Hoffman would not say what documents had been destroyed or who might have been involved.