Innocent Question #29383750... Now that the General Accounting Office has revealed the sordid details behind the formerly Cheney-run
Halliburton's two-year/seven billion dollar no-bid/no-take-backs/no-questions-asked contract with the Pentagon to put out oil well fires - and taking
into account the fact that there are currently no oil well fires waiting to be put out in Iraq - would it be too cynical to assume that the crews will
make work for themselves by planting WMD throughout the desert? Or that they're probably doing that right this very moment? I mean, they gotta earn
that money somehow, right? And they're real tight with the executive branch, so they'd be naturally inclined to help a brother out, right? So why
not kill two birds with one rocket-propelled depleted uranium fragmentation device?
Extra bonus rhetorical question: Where do they get the balls?!
Details Given on Contract Halliburton Was Awarded
By ELIZABETH BECKER
WASHINGTON, April 10 The Pentagon contract given without competition to a Halliburton subsidiary to fight oil well fires in Iraq is worth as much as
$7 billion over two years, according to a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers that was released today.
The contract also allows Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, to earn as much as 7 percent profit. That could amount to $490 million.
The corps released these new details in a letter to Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and one of the two senior lawmakers who
asked the General Accounting Office to investigate how the Bush administration is awarding contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq.
............
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, Kellogg Brown & Root has won significant additional business from the federal government and the Pentagon. It has built
cells for detainees at Guantmo Bay in Cuba and is
the exclusive logistics supplier for the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking,
construction, power generation and fuel transportation.
READ ABOUT THE DISGRACE
HERE
But of course, it's been a well established gravy train route by now...
The War on Terrorism's Gravy Train
Cheney's Former Company Wins Afghanistan War Contracts
By Pratap Chatterjee
Special to CorpWatch
May 2, 2002
Queenstown, Vogaria, West Africa -- On July 16, 2000, United States Army scrambled to deploy troops at the request of the embattled Vogarian
government in a top secret mission code named Operation Restore Order.
Political and economic instability, factional fighting outside the capital of Queenstown created large numbers of displaced civilians. Large-scale
famine and disease were feared. In five days the U.S. Army teamed up with a private company in Texas to deploy and assemble a military camp out of a
pre-fabricated kit known as Force Provider to assist the Vogarians.
Vogaria, of course, is a fictional country but the military exercise -- which took place at Fort McPherson, Georgia and the Diamond Reserve Center in
Louisiana -- could not be more real. The Logistics Civil Augmentation Program's War Fighter Exercise 2000 was the first ever Department of Defense
simulation of civilian contractors assisting the army in rapid response assembly of military bases in a war situation.
The U.S. military has always relied on private contractors to provide some basic services such as construction, dating back as far as the Civil War.
But today as much as 10% of the emergency U.S. army operations overseas are contracted out to private companies run by former government and military
officials. These private companies operate with no public oversight despite the fact that these contractors work just behind the battle lines. The
companies are allowed to make up to nine percent in profit out of these war support efforts. And experience so far has shown that the companies are
not above skimming more profits off the top if they can.
Kellogg, Brown & Root Joins the War on Terrorism
Employees of Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton Corporation of Dallas, Texas, are set to
arrive at the Bagram airbase in southern Afghanistan in late April or early May 2002 (the exact date is classified) to take over the support services
a Force Provider camp. They are also scheduled to arrive at the Khanabad airbase in Uzbekistan, one of the main military support stations for the war
in Afghanistan, to run three Air Force Harvest Eagle camps (an earlier version of Force Provider) for the 1,500 U.S troops based there since October,
according to Daniel McGinty, a spokesman at the Defense Contract Management Agency.
Kellogg, Brown & Root will take charge of support services including base camp maintenance, laundry services, food services, airfield services, and
supply operations, among others. Gale L. Smith, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Operations Support Command in Alexandria, Virginia refuses to confirm
or deny whether Kellogg, Brown & Root would be working on similar bases in Manas, Kyrgyzstan or other sites in Afghanistan and Pakistan to support
Operation Enduring Freedom. The new job is one of the first examples of a lucrative, new ten-year contract that Kellogg, Brown & Root won from the
Pentagon on December 14, 2001 titled Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP). The contract is what the Pentagon calls a "cost-plus-award-fee,
indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity service," which basically means that the federal government has an open-ended mandate and budget to send
Kellogg, Brown & Root anywhere in the world to run humanitarian or military operations for profit.
The Revolving Door
Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown & Root's parent company, is a Fortune 500 construction corporation working primarily for the oil industry. In the early
1990s the company was awarded the job to study and then implement privatization of routine army functions under Dick Cheney, then secretary of
defense.
When Cheney quit his job at the Pentagon, he landed the job as chief executive of Halliburton, bringing with him, his trusted deputy David Gribbin.
The two substantially increased Halliburton's government business until they quit in 2000 when Cheney was elected vice-president, taking
multi-million dollar golden parachutes with them. Since then, another former military office and Cheney confidante, Admiral Joe Lopez, former
commander in chief for U.S. forces in southern Europe, took over Gribbin's former job of go-between the government and the company, according to
Kellogg, Brown & Root's own press releases. Other close friends include Richard Armitage, the assistant secretary of state, who worked as a
consultant to Halliburton before taking up his present job.
more...
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