Say Anything Blog

A while back we were posting on Say Anything about Sioux Manufacturing, a company owned by Fort Totten’s Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe, which settled a lawsuit with the federal government over millions of dollars worth of Kevlar-armored helmets for our troops.

The helmets were of an insufficient quality (the Kevlar weave was not done to standard), and so the company was forced to pay $2 million back to the federal government.  A mere slap on the wrist given that the contract to manufacture these helmets was around $70 million.  But what’s worse is despite the fact that personnel at Sioux Manufacturing knew the helmets were faulty and sent them off to be used by our troops in combat anyway, the company still got a $74 million contract to replace the faulty helmets they originally made with new helmets.

Now comes news that the Department of Justice is investigating this turn of events.

16 May 2008 - Washington, DC – Earlier this year, in light of evidence that Sioux Manufacturing, a company that makes Kevlar helmets, has been outfitting our nation’s troops with substandard Kevlar helmets, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Department of Defense asking for all records related to Sioux Manufacturing. In response, CREW has received a letter from the DoD Inspector General’s office stating that there is an ongoing investigation into the matter.

This past February, it was reported that Sioux Manufacturing had agreed to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company had shortchanged the armor in up to 2.2 million helmets for the military, including helmets used by American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Department of Defense, aware of both the problem with Sioux’s helmets and the company’s efforts to cover it up, awarded another contract to Sioux a mere 12 days before the lawsuit was settled.

I hope part of this investigation centers on Senator Byron Dorgan, chairman of the Senate’s Indian Affairs committee.  Dorgan is no stranger to securing government contracts for companies in his home state, and given his cozy relationship with the Indian communities in North Dakota I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see his fingerprints all over this.