Global Eye-On Halliburton

[Guest guest]

" Tammy Ballard " <shorty36a

Sat, 6 Aug 2005 14:15:04 -0700 (PDT)

Global Eye-On Halliburton

 

 

 

 

 

 

Global Eye-On Halliburton

 

Friday, August 5, 2005.

 

Global Eye

 

By Chris Floyd

 

It's easy to forget sometimes -- amid all the lofty talk of

geopolitics, of apocalyptic clashes between good and evil, of terror,

liberty, security and God -- that the war on Iraq is " largely a matter

of loot, " as Kasper Gutman so aptly described the Crusades in that

seminal treatise on human nature, " The Maltese Falcon. " And nowhere is

this more evident than in the festering, oozing imposthume of

corruption centered around the Gutman-like figure of Vice President

Dick Cheney.

 

Yes, it's once more unto the breach with Halliburton, the gargantuan

government contractor that still pays Cheney, its former CEO, enormous

annual sums in " deferred compensation " and stock options -- even while

he presides over a White House war council that has steered more than

$10 billion in no-bid Iraqi war contracts back to his corporate

paymaster. This is rainmaking of monsoon proportions. Indeed, the

company's military servicing wing announced a second-quarter profit

spike of 284 percent last week -- a feast of blood and gravy that will

send Cheney's stock options soaring into the stratosphere.

 

But although Halliburton has already entered the American lexicon as a

byword for rampant cronyism, the true extent of its dense and deadly

web of graft is only now emerging, most recently in a remarkable

public hearing that revealed some of the corporation's standard

business practices in Iraq: fraud, extortion, brutality, pilferage,

theft -- even serving rotten food to U.S. soldiers in the battle zone.

 

By piecing together bits from the fiercely suppressed reports of a few

honest Pentagon auditors and investigators, a joint House-Senate

minority committee (the Bushist majority refused to take part) has

unearthed at least $1.4 billion in fraudulent overcharges and

unsourced billing by Cheney's company in Iraq. Testimony from Pentagon

whistleblowers, former Halliburton officials and fellow contractors

revealed the grim picture of a rogue operation, power-drunk and

arrogant, beyond the reach of law, secure in the protection of its

White House sugar daddy.

 

One tale is particularly instructive: Halliburton's strenuous efforts

to prevent a company hired by the Iraqis, Lloyd-Owen International,

from delivering gasoline into the conquered land from Kuwait for 18

cents a gallon. Why? Because LOI's cost-efficient operation undercuts

Halliburton's highway-robbery price of $1.30 a gallon for the exact

same service.

 

But how is Halliburton able to interfere with the sacred process of

free enterprise? Well, it seems that Cheney's firm, a private company,

has control over the U.S. military checkpoint on the volatile

Iraq-Kuwait border, and it also has the authority to grant -- or

withhold -- the Pentagon ID cards that are indispensable for

contractors operating in Iraq. (Even contractors who, like LOI, are

working for the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government.) Halliburton

used these powers to block LOI's access to the military crossing --

which provides quick, safe delivery of the fuel -- for months. Then

the game got rougher.

 

In June, Cheney's boys blackmailed LOI into delivering some

construction materials to a Halliburton project in the friendly

confines of Fallujah: no delivery, no " golden ticket " Pentagon card,

said Halliburton. They neglected to tell LOI that convoys on the route

had been repeatedly hit by insurgents in recent days. And sure enough,

LOI's delivery trucks were ripped to shreds just outside a

Halliburton-operated military base. Three men were killed and seven

wounded. But that's not all. An e-mail obtained by investigators

revealed that Halliburton brass had expressly prohibited company

employees from offering any assistance to the shattered convoy.

 

Halliburton extended this milk of human kindness to its food services

as well. The firm had to bring in Turkish and Filipino guest workers

to feed U.S. soldiers, because the happily liberated Iraqis couldn't

be trusted not to blow up their benefactors. The Cheneymen treated

these coolies as befitted their lowly station: They packed them into

tents with sand floors and no beds, and literally fed them scraps from

the garbage. When the peons complained, Halliburton sacked the

subcontractor, who had been buying bargain produce and meat from the

locals, and hired an American crony to ship in food all the way from

Philadelphia.

 

U.S. soldiers weren't treated much better. Employees testified that

Halliburton brass had ordered them to serve spoiled and rotten food to

soldiers, day in and day out. Meanwhile, Halliburton brass were

reserving choice cuts for the big beer-soaked barbecues they threw for

themselves two or three times a week. They also billed the taxpayer

for 10,000 " ghost meals " per day at a single base: The food was

phantom, but the rake-off was real. Meanwhile, any employee who made

noises about exposing the fraud to auditors was threatened with

transfer to a red-hot fire zone, like Fallujah or Saddam's hometown,

Tikrit.

 

All of this criminal katzenjammer -- and much, much more -- was

authorized at the highest levels, as top procurement brass and

Pentagon officials confirmed. Cheney's office kept tabs on

Halliburton's bids while Pentagon warlord Don Rumsfeld " violated

federal law, " the committee noted, by directly intervening in the

procurement process to eliminate all possible rivals and to make sure

Cheney's employer got the guaranteed-profit gig. Rumsfeld's office

also removed oversight procedures for the dirty deals and ignored

repeated warnings from Pentagon auditors about Halliburton's blatant,

persistent, pervasive fraud. And the money keeps rolling in. Just last

month, Don and Dick ladled another $1.75 billion dollop of pork gravy

into Halliburton's bowl.

 

For this they have made a holocaust in the desert sands, sacrificing

tens of thousands of innocent lives: for cheap, greasy graft; for

grubby pilfering; for the personal profit of Richard B. Cheney and the

whole pack of Bushist jackals gorging themselves on blood money.

 

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/08/05/120.html