Bunnatine Greenhouse at Army Core Engineers v.s. Halliburton No Bid Iraq Contracts
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.
An in depth article in Vanity Fair @ Halliburton in Iraq. Also some other related Links.
Commentary:
Given the lack of support for Katrina in New Orleans it's an astounding perspective... What Halliburton will do to make a buck while the People in America suffer needlessly and are in great danger from the negligence of George Bush tending to his cronies and Oil profits.
Halliburton is in Iraq making Billions while people die. And the Vice President of the United States was their CEO. That is a huge conflict of interest. There is without question foul play and Bunnatine Greenhouse has put her job on the line. She's been fighting to expose this to the public since 2004.
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Vanity Fair Article Synopsis: w/Links
In the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, when order had been restored to the Balkans, KBR had won its first LOGCAP contract: it would supply everything that occupying U.S. forces needed, from tents and mess halls to swimming pools and generators. The federal government would be trimmed, private industry would profit, soldiers would be snappily serviced. The original architect of this plan was Dick Cheney, then assistant secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush. LOGCAP was a huge boon to KBR and its parent, Halliburton. Just four years later, Cheney was Halliburton's C.E.O.
In November 2004 the Pentagon would launch an investigation into allegations that two Halliburton employees in Kuwait had accepted bribes from third-party contractors, and the company would announce it had terminated its relationship with the subcontractors in question. A company spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, would say, "We are doing everything we can to make sure this particular scenario doesn't happen again." But deYoung says that that might be hard, given that a tone was set from the top. KBR chairman Jack Stanley was forced to leave the company in June 2004 for what Halliburton vaguely termed violations of business conduct. He is said to have received "improper personal benefits" involving a Swiss bank account which French investigators say contained $5 million in bribes for KBR contracts in Nigeria. Both the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have launched formal investigations.
"My first day at Camp Cedar, I noticed flatbed trucks were bringing brand-new S.U.V.'s, like Toyota Land Cruisers, Hummers, 4Runners—some of the most expensive S.U.V.'s that money can buy. I saw hundreds of them going to Iraq." The S.U.V.'s weren't hauling anything, Warren says. They were just for KBR personnel to ride in from base to base. They had power windows and CD players. "You don't have CD players in a car in wartime," Warren says wonderingly. On such delicate vehicles, desert conditions were brutal. "Within 90 days," he says, "they were completely trashed."
"A majority of the goods we transported were transported the wrong way," Warren explains. "You can't haul paper towels and napkins on a flatbed when it's raining and there's no tarp. We lost millions of dollars of goods that scattered on the roads. Pants, boots, shirts, water.… And we couldn't stop to pick that stuff up. We told KBR time and again, You can't haul this stuff on a flatbed—you need it in a container. But they never did change. And what happens is, when you start losing things that way, you attract Iraqis. We had people following convoys so they could pick up stuff that fell off the truck."
That July, at the congressional hearing where both Wilson and Warren testified, a KBR supervisor said the truckers were fired for running Iraqi-driven cars off the road with their trucks. "I did do this," Warren says. "But Halliburton management had told us to do it!" Wilson agrees. "We were told when we went to Kuwait that we were to do whatever we could to protect the integrity of the convoy. Even if it meant running people off the road." A KBR project manager for transportation later testified that the army, which made all decisions about KBR convoy security, "does not direct KBR drivers to run civilian vehicles off the road."
www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050307roco...
From 2004 when she first came out.
Behind the Halliburton investigation - Hardball with Chris Matthews - MSNBC.com
msnbc.msn.com/id/6358641/
ABC News: Army Faces Probe on No-Bid Deals With KBR
abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=194885
The Huffington Post | The Blog (June 27, 2005)
www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/charlie-cray/whist...
THE BRAD BLOG: "Whistleblowers Charge Pentagon Aided Halliburton" (June 30, 2005)
www.bradblog.com/archives/00001508.htm
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