Halliburton

Apologies to the American Progress Action Fund as I am going to post their recent summaries on Halliburton whole-cloth. Remember, due to the inanity of these no-bid contracts, the more they spend, the more profit they make... there are literally incentives to be as wasteful as possible.

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On Monday, we learned that the many reports of Halliburton's mistreatment of our soldiers and flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars -- tales sometimes so outrageous they were difficult to believe -- were actually just scratching the surface. A new report spearheaded by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) uncovered startling new details about Halliburton's misdeeds, including the fact that the amount of taxpayer funds lost to Halliburton is "more than twice as high as those in previous official reports." Indeed, the level of mismanagement of Halliburton's work in Iraq calls into question not simply the Bush administration's fiscal priorities, but the value it places on respecting our soldiers and its management of the war in general.

THE 'MOST BLATANT AND IMPROPER' ABUSE: "Among the costs that Pentagon auditors questioned were $152,000 in 'movie library costs,' a $1.5 million tailoring bill that auditors deemed higher than reasonable, more than $560,000 worth of heavy equipment that was considered unnecessary, and two multimillion-dollar transportation bills that appeared to overlap." In total, more than $1 billion in funds paid to Halliburton were found by auditors to be "questioned," "unreasonable in amount," "inflated," or "excessive," while another $422 million were "unsupported" by the documentation provided by Halliburton. (Even if Halliburton were paid half of the disputed charges that would come from appropriated taxpayer funds, the remainder would be enough to buy more than 3,000 armored Humvees for U.S. troops at $140,000 each.) Despite being advised not to attend the hearings, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the senior civilian contracting official of the Army Corps of Engineers, testified on Monday that Halliburton's actions were "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."

TROOPS SERVED ROTTEN, YEAR-OLD FOOD: A former food manager in Iraq for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) testified that the dining hall where he worked in early 2004 routinely served foods that were "outdated or expired as much as a year," or that had been removed from trucks whose convoys had been attacked. "[W]e were told to go into the trucks and remove the food items and use them after removing the bullets and any shrapnel from the bad food that was hit," the manager, Rory Mayberry, said. Yet during the same period, approximately three times each week, "KBR would cater events for KBR employees, like management parties and barbecues" where sanitary food was served. (Mayberry added, "Government auditors would have caught and fixed many of the problems. But KBR managers told us not to speak with auditors.")

EMPLOYEES ORDERED TO BETRAY COLLEAGUES: One of the most heinous revelations of the hearings came from Gary Butters, chairman of Lloyd-Owen International (LOI), a firm overseeing Kuwaiti-Iraq fuel transportation that has criticized Halliburton's fuel transport overcharges. Butters described how, on June 9, 2005, his firm had undertaken a "high-risk task to deliver dining construction goods" to the KBR-managed camp in Fallujah. Just a mile or so out from the camp, he said, "our convoy was ambushed...and we suffered serious casualties in a near four-hour fight. We lost 3 individuals to direct fire, 7 individuals were injured and on arrival at the US base, one US Military person was also sadly injured in an attempt to assist." LOI's subsequent investigation revealed that "KBR Management had taken an extraordinary decision to instruct their on site staff to offer no assistance to the Lloyd-Owen personnel in order to unload KBR goods or prepare for the return journey."

CODDLING THE CULTURE OF CORRUPTION:The Bush administration has thus far refused to crack down on these abuses. Michael Bopp, staff director of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, actually told the Washington Post it was a "misguided assumption that our committee, or any committee, needs to hold a hearing to figure out what Halliburton is doing in Iraq." Indeed, on many occasions, Halliburton has been rewarded for regularly bilking Americans. Among many other examples, Defense Department officials have "overruled the objections of career officials in awarding contracts to Halliburton; waived the requirements of federal procurement regulations for Halliburton without justification; disregarded auditor warnings in negotiating additional contracts with Halliburton; and provided the company with millions of dollars in unjustified fees." And, as the report points out, auditors last year "suggested in a written memorandum that the Department's failure to take action was encouraging Halliburton's continued disregard of U.S taxpayer interests."