Evelyn Pringle April 25, 2007
When President Bush announced "Mission Accomplished," and the end of the war in May 2003, he also said we would help the citizens of Iraq rebuild their country. "Now that the dictator's gone," he stated, "we and our coalition partners are helping Iraqis to lay the foundations of a free economy."
Apparently he was referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority that took up residence in Saddam's luxurious palace in May 2003, with the newly appointed King, Paul Bremer. The CPA was granted the authority to award reconstruction contracts in Iraq and it used that authority to implement what will go down in the history books as the most blatant war profiteering scheme of all time.
In large part, the masterminds of the reconstruction disaster that would occur after the CPA took over Iraq were Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Undersecretary of Defense, Douglas Feith.
But to ensure control of the contracting process on the ground in Iraq, Bush filled the top slots of the CPA with the administration cronies. For instance, a friend of Cheney's, Peter McPherson, took a leave of absence as president of Michigan State University to serve as Bremer's economic deputy.
The leader of the CPA's private development sector was Thomas Foley, an old college classmate of Bush, who served as finance chairman for his Presidential campaign in Connecticut and also raised more than $100,000 for Bush.
Relatives of the administration were also given jobs, such as Ari Fleischer's brother Michael, and Simone Ledeen, the daughter of Michael Ledeen. Cheney's daughter Liz, also did a short stint. However, it should be noted that none of them lounged around for too long in what soon became a hellhole in Iraq.
On May 16, 2003, the CPA issued its first regulation and described its authority in no uncertain terms stating:
"The CPA is vested with all executive, legislative, and judicial authority necessary to achieve its objectives, to be exercised under relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, including resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of war. This authority shall be exercised by the CPA Administrator."
With one swipe of the pen, Bremer granted himself the authority to run the government ministries, appoint Iraqi officials and award contracts for reconstruction. Next he fired 500,000 Iraqis, most of them soldiers, but pink slips also went out to many doctors, nurses, teachers and other public employees as well.
For the most part, the CPA financed its activities with billions of dollars that belonged to the Iraqis. On May 22, 2003, a UN Security Council passed a resolution that directed the proceeds from Iraqi oil to be placed in a Development Fund for Iraq, and the CPA was granted authority to control the fund and decide which profiteers would get contracts.
During the year that Bremer controlled the purse strings, the Iraqi Development Fund received $20.2 billion, including $8.1 billion from the UN's oil-for-food program, $10.8 billion from Iraqi oil, and the rest from repatriated funds, vested assets and donations.
The CPA accounting system was cash and carry and a steady stream of cash was flown into Bagdad from the US. Inspector General, Stuart Bowen later said that he knew of one $2 billion flight.
A report released by the House Government Reform Committee in February 2007, shows that in the 13 months that Bremer ruled, from May 2003 to June 2004, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York shipped nearly $12 billion in a cash to Iraq.
One can only imagine the Bank service charges associated with these shipments because to accomplish this feat, according to the Democratic chairman of the Reform Committee, Henry Waxman, the cash weighed 363 tons and the Bank had to count and pack 281 million individual bills, including more than 107 million $100 bills, and then load them onto wooden pallets to be shipped to Bagdad on C-130 cargo planes.
Inspector Bowen later said that he determined that some of this cash went to pay salaries for thousands of "ghost employees" and Iraqi civil servants who did not exist.
Within a few months of the CPA's arrival in Iraq reports of corruption in the contracting process began appearing in the media. A British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC that officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for contracts.
Reports of flat out-fraud remained steady throughout Bremer's reign in Iraq. One audit showed that the CPA Ministry of Finance could not provide documentation for about $17 million spent on employee salaries in February 2004, and a CPA Advisor to the Ministry of the Interior said the Ministry was paid for 8,602 guards but only 602 could be verified.
A CPA advisor to the Ministry of Finance was so concerned about payroll corruption that he submitted a formal complaint that stated in part: "Of the 1.6 million government employees currently on payroll, credible estimates put the number of ghost workers at somewhere between 250,000-300,000 employees."
An October 2004, audit performed for the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, created by the UN to monitor the spending of Iraqi money, found one case where a payment of $2.6 million was authorized by a CPA senior adviser to the Ministry of Oil, and auditors were unable to obtain an underlying contract or any evidence that the services had been rendered.
The auditors in this group found 37 cases where files could not be located for contracts worth $185 million all total. In another 52 cases, there was no record that goods had been received for a total of $87.9 million.
People on the ground in Iraq said that doing business with the CPA was reminiscent of the Wild West. Former CPA employees told a congressional committee that sackfuls of cash were tossed around like footballs. Franklin Willis, showed pictures of himself and others holding up bundles of $100 notes totaling $2 million, which he said was used to pay the contractor Custer Battles. "We told them to come in and bring a bag," Willis said.
He also testified that millions of dollars in $100 bills were stored in the basement of the CPA offices and distributed to favored contractors with little accounting discipline. For instance, in the year that the CPA ruled, Custer was awarded contracts worth more than $100 million.
Two former Custer employees ended up filing a lawsuit under the Federal False Claims Act, saying Custer had swindled $50 million from the CPA with scams like double-billing for salaries and repainting the forklifts found at the Baghdad airport and then leasing them back to the US government.
The employees said the CPA paid the Custer $15 million to provide security for Iraq's civilian airline, when no services were needed because the airline was grounded during the time covered by the contract.
These employees said they kept informing the CPA about Custer's fraudulent conduct for more than a year and when they asked why the firm continued to get contracts, they were told: "Battles is very active in the Republican party, and speaks to individuals he knows in the Whitehouse almost daily."
In June 2004, the Government Accounting Office estimated that more than $1 billion in had been wasted due to illegal overcharges by contractors since the war began. A later audit by the Iraqi government found that as much as $1.27 billion was lost to accounting irregularities between June 2004 and February 2005.
Inspector Bowen cited two examples of poor oversight in a November 3, 2005 interview on National Public Radio where $28 million was paid to build 5 power plants and $1.8 million was paid to rebuild a library, but the work was never performed and the money
"simply disappeared," he said.
A recent report by Bowen says DynCorp was paid $43.8 million for a residential camp for police training personnel and has been empty for months and that the company may also have billed $18 million in other unjustified costs.
About $4.2 million, he says, was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool and an additional $36.4 million in spending for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that cannot be accounted for.
Not surprisingly, Cheney's Halliburton remained the top profiteer under Bremer's rule. A July 23, 2004, audit conducted by Bowen, showed the company had received 60% of all contracts paid for with Iraq money, including 5 no-bid contracts worth $222 million, $325 million, $180 million, and the last 2 together totaled $194 million for the last two. In comparison, the audit showed that the CPA awarded only 2% of the reconstruction contracts to Iraqi companies.
In one example of blatant fraud, an audit found that Halliburton was charging for more than 41,000 meals a day for soldiers when only about 14,000 were served.
By the fall of 2003, the country was realizing that the rational for war was based on lies and that the only ones drawing any benefits were the profiteers. So when Bush asked Congress for another $20 billion for the CPA, Bremer was summoned to Washington to explain where all the money was going and of course he testified in full stonewall mode.
Before the Appropriations Committee on September 22, 2003, Bremer said the CPA had detailed records of all its receipts and outlays that could be audited by Congress. But when he testified before the Armed Services Committee 3 days later he said the Office of Management and Budget was responsible for maintaining the CPA records and that Congress would have to go to the White House to access the records.
That arrogant assertion went over like a lead balloon with many members of Congress. Senator Robert Byrd said he was outraged over the inability to monitor CPA spending. "There is no reason why any arm of the executive branch charged with making such significant spending decisions," he said, "should not be working directly with Congress."
"When we're talking about handing over another $20 billion to the CPA," he said, "there is a real need for Congress to confirm that the CPA has its finances in order and that it is managing the taxpayer's money responsibly."
"We don't even know how much of the $20 billion," Byrd said, "will flow to government contractors in Iraq."
"Whatever the amount is," he noted, "we know that the size and scope of the profits being made will be enormous."
"Former Bush Administration officials," he warned fellow Senators, "are even setting up consulting firms to act as middlemen for contractors hoping to take part in the bonanza."
"Are we turning the U.S. Treasury into a grab bag for favorite campaign contributors to be financed at taxpayer expense?" he asked.
The answer was yes, and what a grab bag it was. Media reports revealed that Bush's ex-campaign manager and Feith's former law partner had set up consulting firms to profit off the war by lining up contracts for clients through their partners in crime within the CPA.
Other reports revealed that contracts worth $407 were awarded to a firm called Nour that was formed less than 2 months after the war began. The names linked to the profits from Nour, among many others, included former Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, Ahmad Chalabi via a $2 million kickback, his nephew Salam Chalabi as the attorney handling the deal, and the money trail even led to the First Brothers, Marvin and Jeb Bush.
But come to find out, Doug Feith the ringleader on the ground in Washington, had awarded a batch of no-bid contracts to a favored company the month before the war began for the purpose of controlling the media in post-war Iraq.
In October 2003, the Center for Public Integrity obtained copies of 7 contracts awarded to the San Diego-based Science Applications. The total value of the contracts was redacted but the Center was able to determine that they were all awarded in February 2003, and called for the work to be directed by Feith.
However, the Center's most stunning discovery was that when the contracts were awarded, Feith's top deputy at the time, Christopher "Ryan" Henry, had been a senior vice president at SAIC until October 2002.
In addition, one of SAIC's board members was Army General, Wayne Downing, who ran counterterrorism in the Bush administration for almost a year after 9/11, and had even went to the CIA with Cheney to discuss intelligence on Iraq. Downing had also served as an advisor to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, and was well-known advocate for a war against Saddam.
Some of the SAIC contracts required that specific persons referred to as "executive management consultants" be hired and the pay range listed went as high as $209 and $273 per hour. The Center said congressional sources estimated the value of the media contract as $38 million for the first year and as high $90 million in 2004.
The SAIC had no special expertise to justify the award of these contracts. One company executive, quoted in the media, said the firm's only credential for setting up an independent media, supposedly modeled after the BBC, was military work in "informational warfare"-signal jamming, "perception management," and the like.
Under these contracts, the Iraq Media Network (IMN) was established and journalist, Mark North, who covered the Iraq invasion for National Public Radio, was hired to train Iraqi journalists to report for the IMN.
In one of the many Congressional hearings, North testified about the control of the IMN by the CPA and said CPA officials regularly directed and censored the activities of the news station and provided "a laundry list of CPA activities" to cover in the news reports instead of stories about security or the lack of electricity and jobs
While testifying, he also described the CPA's shabby treatment of Iraqi employees and its refusal to pay their wages. "For the first two months," North said, "the local staff of about 200 journalists and technicians were not paid their salaries."
When the staffers went on strike in attempt to get paid, he said, the CPA told the Iraqis to get back to work or the US Army would remove them from the studios.
All total, the CPA had control of Iraqi money for one year between June 2003 and June 2004, but unfortunately no auditors arrived to take a look at the agency's spending until April 2004, two months before the CPA's rule was scheduled to end.
And as so often happens when it comes to giving solid advice or warnings, the senior Senator from Virginia was absolutely right. It was far too late for audits, because the CPA and its gang of profiteers had already robbed the Iraqis blind.
The favored companies enjoyed a fraud-free-all. For instance, Halliburton said it had lost over $60 million worth of government property including trucks, office furniture and computers. Inspector Bowen reported that 6,975 items valued at $61.1 million were lost, and in June 2005, the Defense Contract Audit Agency reported that the Halliburton had overcharged or presented questionable bills for close to $1.5 billion.
In the end, Bowen's audit concluded that "the CPA's internal controls for approximately $8.8 billion in DFI funds disbursed to Iraqi ministries through the national budget process failed to provide sufficient accountability for the use of those funds."
As of February 2007, according to Bowen, audits of the CPA have resulted in 300 criminal and civil investigations, 5 arrests and convictions, and another 23 cases are currently under prosecution at the DOJ, and he is working on 76 on-going investigations.
One of the convictions involved Robert Stein, a former CPA comptroller and funding officer, who recently pleaded guilty to 5 felony counts including conspiracy, money laundering, and bribery in stealing more than $2 million of reconstruction funds and taking more than $1 million in kickbacks to rig the bids on contracts that exceeded $8 million.
The whistleblower case against Custer Battle went to trial and a jury found that Custer had committed 37 acts of fraud and filed $3 million in false claims, and rendered a verdict with a $10 million penalty. However, the verdict was overturned by Republican appointed US District Court Judge TS Ellis III, who ruled that the CPA was not a US entity and therefore the false claims act does not apply to it.
In the ruling, the judge said Custer's accusers "failed to prove that the U.S. government was ever defrauded. Any fraud that occurred was perpetrated instead against the Coalition Provisional Authority, formed to run Iraq until a government was established."
Legal experts say this ruling is great news for the CPA and contractors because from now on anyone charged with any act of fraud related to the Iraqi money doled out by the CPA in Bagdad will use it in attempt to avoid civil or criminal prosecution.
Showing posts with label Cheney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cheney. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Halliburton - Poster Child For War Profiteering
January 24, 2005
Evelyn Pringle
Of course, by now, everybody has at least heard of Halliburton, the all-time poster child for war profiteering. But I'll bet most people don't understand exactly how this company has gone the full financial circle in Iraq. Some background info may be helpful.
First of all it helps to know that between 1999 and 2002, Halliburton gave more than $700,000 in political contributions, almost always to Republicans. In 2000, it donated $17,677 to Bush. In fact, the 70 or so companies that were awarded contracts in Iraq, have contributed more money to Bush than they have to any other candidate over the past 12 years.
But overall, Halliburton owes most of its good fortune to Cheney. While he was Bush Sr's secretary of defense, Cheney directed millions of tax dollars in government business to Halliburton.
Toward the end of his tenure, Cheney decided to turn over the business of planning and providing support for military operations abroad, such as preparing food, doing the laundry, and cleaning the latrines, to one company, Halliburton. He commissioned Halliburton to do a study of how this plan might work. In effect, you might say that Cheney paid Halliburton to create its own market.
It was paid $3.9 million for its initial report, which offered a strategy for providing support for 20,000 troops. The Pentagon then paid Halliburton $5 million to do a follow-up study. In August, 1992, Halliburton was selected to do all the work needed to support the military during the next 5 years. For its services in Somalia, Halliburton was paid $109 million and over the next 5 years, it was paid $2.2 billion for work in the Balkans.
When Bush Senior lost the election to Clinton, and Cheney lost his government job, he called in the markers and cashed in big time by becoming Halliburton's CEO.
Five years later Cheney waltzed back through the revolving door right into the Vice President’s office, with a retirement package from Halliburton said to be worth more than $34 million. Not bad for a guy who never so much as ran a lemonade stand prior to being hired by one of the world's largest companies.
But it didn't end there. Cheney still draws over $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton, and he still holds over 400,000 stock options, at an estimated worth of $18 million (and rising).
Cheney Does Good By Halliburton
I have to admit, in the second half of the 1990s, as CEO, Cheney did rack up a number of notable accomplishments. He increased Halliburton’s offshore tax havens nearly 5-fold, from 9 to 44. And that sure paid off. The company went from paying $302 million in federal taxes in 1998, to getting an $85 million refund in 1999. All of which comes as no surprise considering the fact that Halliburton is one of the worlds most notorious corporate crooks.
Cheney and Halliburton were a match made in heaven. Together they found ways to make money off of just about every known terrorist county on God's green earth, regardless of the strict US laws against it.
While he was CEO, American companies were barred from doing business with Iran. So Cheney set up an address in the Cayman Islands. 60 Minutes did an investigation of the offshore subsidiary called Halliburton Products and Services, and discovered that the company had no known office or employees. The only sign of the fathom company was a forwarding address to Houston, Texas. So this bogus company was used to avoid US sanctions while doing business with Iran.
Halliburton’s bad habits don’t set so well with some of its shareholders these days. New York City's controller, William Thompson, who watches over the City workers' $80 million pension fund, said that city workers affected by 9/11, were "outraged that their retirement portfolios included stock in US firms getting fat off contracts with rogue nations like Iran, which funds the terror groups Hezbollah and Hamas and is suspected of giving sanctuary to Al Qaeda leaders."
But this conduct is nothing new. While Cheney was CEO, Halliburton even used a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands to make tens of millions of dollars off Iraq. According to UN records and oil industry executives, quoted in the June 23, 2004, Washington Post, Halliburton held stakes in 2 firms that sold over $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq.
And yet, listen to what Cheney (the pathological liar that he is), said when he running for VP in 2000, and was interviewed on ABC's "This Week" on July 30 2000, "I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal. We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanction were imposed . . ." Cheney really needs to get some help for that out-of-control compulsive lying disorder.
Anything To Make A Buck
Halliburton has been doing business with terrorists for years. In 1995, it was fined $3.8 million for doing business with Libya. The company sold Libya oil drilling tools that critics say could also be used to trigger nuclear bombs. So, keep in mind, whenever Bush starts bragging about dismantling Libya's WMD program, that it was Halliburton that helped create the program in the first place.
Under Cheney's watch, Halliburton was caught time and time again, over-billing the Pentagon. In 1997, the GAO found that it had inflated expenses in the Balkans, charging $85.98 for a sheet of plywood that only cost $14.06. A follow-up report in the year 2000, found more inflated costs, including charges for cleaning the same offices up to 4 times a day. In February 2002, Halliburton paid a $2 million fine for defrauding tax payers on its work in the Balkins.
However, don’t think for one minute that Halliburton has turned over a new leaf just because it was forced to pay a few million in fines. That is never going to happen. By now, I’m convinced that Halliburton estimates the cost of potential fines and lists them under "war profiteering expenses" when it submits the bid. Of course, that's if the company is even required to submit bid.
In the fall of 2002, Halliburton geared up to make big bucks while Bush was preparing to destroy Iraq. On the very day that Congress voted on the resolution, someone within the Bush administration, got on the phone and told Halliburton it had 9 weeks to build a base to house 7,000 soldiers. It was awarded several no-bid contracts, and its been driving a gravy train through Iraq ever since.
Who Cares About The Troops
As part of the LOGCAP contract, Halliburton serves meals to troops in Iraq and Kuwait. In December 2003, the Pentagon inspected the military kitchens and found dirty pans, dirty grills, dirty salad bars, blood all over the floor, and rotting meats and vegetables in kitchens operated by Halliburton.
In May 2004, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) determined that the company had charged for thousands of meals that were never served. Auditors then decided to look into food contracts at 50 other locations.
In June 2004, the DCAA completed its review and found that Halliburton had billed for 36% more meals than were actually served. The Pentagon has refused to reimburse the company for overcharges that amount to about $186 million. In addition, the DCAA has ordered Halliburton to send all future bills to their agency for prior approval, before submitting them for reimbursement.
If Halliburton had not been handed the no-bid food contract, tax payers could have saved a fortune. According to the LA times, "the Army recently renegotiated a contract that Halliburton had with a Kuwaiti company to provide meals. By contracting directly with the Kuwaiti company, instead of going through a middle man like Halliburton, the Army knocked 40% off the cost of the contract."
According to GAO Controller David Walker, since the Pentagon started dealing directly with the Kuwaiti company, the price fell from about $5 a meal to about $3.
On another front, in line with its usual and customary behavior, Halliburton has also been caught with its hand in yet another till. The Pentagon began another investigation after an audit revealed that the company had overcharged the Army by $61 million for gasoline it delivered to Iraq.
And this $61 million is over and above the $6.3 million it already had to pay back when employees got caught taking kickbacks, in return for awarding a Kuwaiti-based company a contract.
While continuing to rip off tax payers, and making a fortune off an endless war, Halliburton went full circle when it was awarded billions of dollars worth of no-bid reconstruction contracts (guaranteed payment by tax payers), to rebuild the same country it helped destroy. Only in America (with a corrupt Vice President in your pocket) could something like this ever happen.
Evelyn Pringle
Of course, by now, everybody has at least heard of Halliburton, the all-time poster child for war profiteering. But I'll bet most people don't understand exactly how this company has gone the full financial circle in Iraq. Some background info may be helpful.
First of all it helps to know that between 1999 and 2002, Halliburton gave more than $700,000 in political contributions, almost always to Republicans. In 2000, it donated $17,677 to Bush. In fact, the 70 or so companies that were awarded contracts in Iraq, have contributed more money to Bush than they have to any other candidate over the past 12 years.
But overall, Halliburton owes most of its good fortune to Cheney. While he was Bush Sr's secretary of defense, Cheney directed millions of tax dollars in government business to Halliburton.
Toward the end of his tenure, Cheney decided to turn over the business of planning and providing support for military operations abroad, such as preparing food, doing the laundry, and cleaning the latrines, to one company, Halliburton. He commissioned Halliburton to do a study of how this plan might work. In effect, you might say that Cheney paid Halliburton to create its own market.
It was paid $3.9 million for its initial report, which offered a strategy for providing support for 20,000 troops. The Pentagon then paid Halliburton $5 million to do a follow-up study. In August, 1992, Halliburton was selected to do all the work needed to support the military during the next 5 years. For its services in Somalia, Halliburton was paid $109 million and over the next 5 years, it was paid $2.2 billion for work in the Balkans.
When Bush Senior lost the election to Clinton, and Cheney lost his government job, he called in the markers and cashed in big time by becoming Halliburton's CEO.
Five years later Cheney waltzed back through the revolving door right into the Vice President’s office, with a retirement package from Halliburton said to be worth more than $34 million. Not bad for a guy who never so much as ran a lemonade stand prior to being hired by one of the world's largest companies.
But it didn't end there. Cheney still draws over $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton, and he still holds over 400,000 stock options, at an estimated worth of $18 million (and rising).
Cheney Does Good By Halliburton
I have to admit, in the second half of the 1990s, as CEO, Cheney did rack up a number of notable accomplishments. He increased Halliburton’s offshore tax havens nearly 5-fold, from 9 to 44. And that sure paid off. The company went from paying $302 million in federal taxes in 1998, to getting an $85 million refund in 1999. All of which comes as no surprise considering the fact that Halliburton is one of the worlds most notorious corporate crooks.
Cheney and Halliburton were a match made in heaven. Together they found ways to make money off of just about every known terrorist county on God's green earth, regardless of the strict US laws against it.
While he was CEO, American companies were barred from doing business with Iran. So Cheney set up an address in the Cayman Islands. 60 Minutes did an investigation of the offshore subsidiary called Halliburton Products and Services, and discovered that the company had no known office or employees. The only sign of the fathom company was a forwarding address to Houston, Texas. So this bogus company was used to avoid US sanctions while doing business with Iran.
Halliburton’s bad habits don’t set so well with some of its shareholders these days. New York City's controller, William Thompson, who watches over the City workers' $80 million pension fund, said that city workers affected by 9/11, were "outraged that their retirement portfolios included stock in US firms getting fat off contracts with rogue nations like Iran, which funds the terror groups Hezbollah and Hamas and is suspected of giving sanctuary to Al Qaeda leaders."
But this conduct is nothing new. While Cheney was CEO, Halliburton even used a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands to make tens of millions of dollars off Iraq. According to UN records and oil industry executives, quoted in the June 23, 2004, Washington Post, Halliburton held stakes in 2 firms that sold over $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq.
And yet, listen to what Cheney (the pathological liar that he is), said when he running for VP in 2000, and was interviewed on ABC's "This Week" on July 30 2000, "I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal. We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanction were imposed . . ." Cheney really needs to get some help for that out-of-control compulsive lying disorder.
Anything To Make A Buck
Halliburton has been doing business with terrorists for years. In 1995, it was fined $3.8 million for doing business with Libya. The company sold Libya oil drilling tools that critics say could also be used to trigger nuclear bombs. So, keep in mind, whenever Bush starts bragging about dismantling Libya's WMD program, that it was Halliburton that helped create the program in the first place.
Under Cheney's watch, Halliburton was caught time and time again, over-billing the Pentagon. In 1997, the GAO found that it had inflated expenses in the Balkans, charging $85.98 for a sheet of plywood that only cost $14.06. A follow-up report in the year 2000, found more inflated costs, including charges for cleaning the same offices up to 4 times a day. In February 2002, Halliburton paid a $2 million fine for defrauding tax payers on its work in the Balkins.
However, don’t think for one minute that Halliburton has turned over a new leaf just because it was forced to pay a few million in fines. That is never going to happen. By now, I’m convinced that Halliburton estimates the cost of potential fines and lists them under "war profiteering expenses" when it submits the bid. Of course, that's if the company is even required to submit bid.
In the fall of 2002, Halliburton geared up to make big bucks while Bush was preparing to destroy Iraq. On the very day that Congress voted on the resolution, someone within the Bush administration, got on the phone and told Halliburton it had 9 weeks to build a base to house 7,000 soldiers. It was awarded several no-bid contracts, and its been driving a gravy train through Iraq ever since.
Who Cares About The Troops
As part of the LOGCAP contract, Halliburton serves meals to troops in Iraq and Kuwait. In December 2003, the Pentagon inspected the military kitchens and found dirty pans, dirty grills, dirty salad bars, blood all over the floor, and rotting meats and vegetables in kitchens operated by Halliburton.
In May 2004, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) determined that the company had charged for thousands of meals that were never served. Auditors then decided to look into food contracts at 50 other locations.
In June 2004, the DCAA completed its review and found that Halliburton had billed for 36% more meals than were actually served. The Pentagon has refused to reimburse the company for overcharges that amount to about $186 million. In addition, the DCAA has ordered Halliburton to send all future bills to their agency for prior approval, before submitting them for reimbursement.
If Halliburton had not been handed the no-bid food contract, tax payers could have saved a fortune. According to the LA times, "the Army recently renegotiated a contract that Halliburton had with a Kuwaiti company to provide meals. By contracting directly with the Kuwaiti company, instead of going through a middle man like Halliburton, the Army knocked 40% off the cost of the contract."
According to GAO Controller David Walker, since the Pentagon started dealing directly with the Kuwaiti company, the price fell from about $5 a meal to about $3.
On another front, in line with its usual and customary behavior, Halliburton has also been caught with its hand in yet another till. The Pentagon began another investigation after an audit revealed that the company had overcharged the Army by $61 million for gasoline it delivered to Iraq.
And this $61 million is over and above the $6.3 million it already had to pay back when employees got caught taking kickbacks, in return for awarding a Kuwaiti-based company a contract.
While continuing to rip off tax payers, and making a fortune off an endless war, Halliburton went full circle when it was awarded billions of dollars worth of no-bid reconstruction contracts (guaranteed payment by tax payers), to rebuild the same country it helped destroy. Only in America (with a corrupt Vice President in your pocket) could something like this ever happen.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Bush-Cheney and Big Oil's Big Summer
November 2005
Evelyn Pringle
or those with short memories, during campaign 2000, the Bush-Cheney team promised voters an energy plan that would lower gasoline prices and here we are 5 years later, paying the highest prices at the pumps in the nation's history.
With soaring energy prices putting our economy at risk, and dependence on oil from the Middle East putting our national security at risk, Americans are still being held hostage to price fixing schemes and Bush has not made a single move to remedy the situation.
In campaign 2000, he lead voters to believe that he knew how to deal with OPEC. In fact, the little twirp told President Clinton to get on the phone and "jawbone" OPEC.
"What I think the president ought to do is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots," he told reporters.
"OPEC has gotten its supply act together, and it's driving the price, like it did in the past," Bush said. "And the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the prices," he advised.
Bush ended that little speech with this brilliant remark: "One reason why the price is so high is because the price of crude oil has been driven up." Duh-----really?
I guess phone service at the White House must have been cut off once Bush took office because on February 10, 2004, when OPEC announced its intention to cut its output by 1 million barrels a day, and crude oil reached a 13-year high in mid-March 2004, there was no "jawboning" on phone to OPEC by the blabber-mouth president.
By the end of 2004, higher oil prices had cost consumers over $25 billion since Bush took office. The big three American oil companies, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobile, and ConocoPhillips, realized profits of $33.6 billion during Bush's first three years in office.
According the Wall Street Journal and CNN Money, during the first few months of 2004, top oil companies saw a gain in profits of close to 40%. And its been all downhill for Big Oil this year.
On October 27, 2005, Reuter's reported that Exxon Mobil posted a quarterly profit of $9.9 billion, "the largest in U.S. corporate history, as it raked in a bonanza from soaring oil and gas prices." Exxon's record earnings topped the $9 billion net profit previously reported by Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Reuters said.
Exxon reported third-quarter net income up 75 percent from the year-ago period. "It was among the biggest quarterly profits of any company in history, and amounted to a per-minute profit of $74,879.23 during the quarter," according to the October 28, 2005 Wall Street Journal.
"Shell, the third largest oil company by market value behind Exxon and Britain's BP PLC, said its third-quarter net income rose 68 percent to $9.03 billion, on $76.44 billion in revenue," the Journal reported.
These record profits are scandalous at a time when Americans are being squeezed dry at the pumps and heating costs are set to go through the roof in the coming winter months.
According to the Federal Energy Information Administration, the price of a gallon of regular gas in the same week the profits were announced, was up 28% from a year ago. Natural-gas prices have almost doubled in the past year and the EIA predicts that owners of gas-heated homes will see a 48% hike this winter over last year's already inflated prices, and homes heated with heating oil could see a 32% increase.
While Big Oil keeps raking in the dough, rising fuel costs are taking a heavy toll on other US industries. The added expense is creating havoc for the airline industry. For every 1 cent increase for jet fuel, the industry spends an additional $180 million a year. In 2004, increased costs for the airline industry were estimated to be more than $7 billion.
According to the American Trucking Association, truckers use about 30 billion gallons of diesel a year and for every 1 cent hike in price the industry incurs about $300 million more in operating costs. The increased cost to the trucking industry was over $6 billion in 2004.
Farmers are battling with much higher operating expenses since Bush took office. In 2004, farmers combined spent an additional $7 billion for gasoline and diesel fuel for agricultural needs.
During the dynamic duo's reelection campaign, Bush-Cheney spokesman, Scott Stanzel, told reporters: "President Bush and Vice President Cheney want to keep taxes low and keep the economy moving. They have proposed an energy plan that will provide for a stable, affordable and secure energy supply."
To that I say, then where the hell is it?
By now, the administrations policies and tax cuts are having trickle down adverse effects on the average family's everyday life as well. During their 2004 campaign, a Bush-Cheney campaign slogan was "results do matter." Lets compare overall "results" on families since Bush moved to Washington.
When Clinton left office, life was much better for the average American than when he took the reins from the first president Bush. The nation's record of economic success was unprecedented. Budgets were balanced, family income was up by 17%, 23 million jobs were created, nearly 8 million Americans had moved out of poverty, there was record homeownership, and Clinton left a huge budget surplus.
In comparison, the Bush-Cheney record is atrocious. While it is certainly true that corporate profits are at an all-time high, average wages for American workers haven't even kept pace with inflation. Millions of jobs have been lost, there has been a continuous increase in poverty year after year, household debt is at a record high, college tuition will soon be unreachable for many families, over 3 million people have lost their health insurance, and family insurance premiums have increased by an average $2630 a year.
The $397 billion surplus, previously projected by the Congressional Budget Office for 2004, has been frittered away through $2 trillion worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and the war profiteering scheme that was launched 3 years ago could end up bankrupting the whole country before its all over.
In hindsight, I say give me a guy with an overactive libido who cares about average Americans any day, over our current president, who at best is completely incompetent, and at worst is a greedy, self-centered control freak who doesn't give a damn about anybody besides himself and his rich cronies.
Evelyn Pringle
or those with short memories, during campaign 2000, the Bush-Cheney team promised voters an energy plan that would lower gasoline prices and here we are 5 years later, paying the highest prices at the pumps in the nation's history.
With soaring energy prices putting our economy at risk, and dependence on oil from the Middle East putting our national security at risk, Americans are still being held hostage to price fixing schemes and Bush has not made a single move to remedy the situation.
In campaign 2000, he lead voters to believe that he knew how to deal with OPEC. In fact, the little twirp told President Clinton to get on the phone and "jawbone" OPEC.
"What I think the president ought to do is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots," he told reporters.
"OPEC has gotten its supply act together, and it's driving the price, like it did in the past," Bush said. "And the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the prices," he advised.
Bush ended that little speech with this brilliant remark: "One reason why the price is so high is because the price of crude oil has been driven up." Duh-----really?
I guess phone service at the White House must have been cut off once Bush took office because on February 10, 2004, when OPEC announced its intention to cut its output by 1 million barrels a day, and crude oil reached a 13-year high in mid-March 2004, there was no "jawboning" on phone to OPEC by the blabber-mouth president.
By the end of 2004, higher oil prices had cost consumers over $25 billion since Bush took office. The big three American oil companies, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobile, and ConocoPhillips, realized profits of $33.6 billion during Bush's first three years in office.
According the Wall Street Journal and CNN Money, during the first few months of 2004, top oil companies saw a gain in profits of close to 40%. And its been all downhill for Big Oil this year.
On October 27, 2005, Reuter's reported that Exxon Mobil posted a quarterly profit of $9.9 billion, "the largest in U.S. corporate history, as it raked in a bonanza from soaring oil and gas prices." Exxon's record earnings topped the $9 billion net profit previously reported by Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Reuters said.
Exxon reported third-quarter net income up 75 percent from the year-ago period. "It was among the biggest quarterly profits of any company in history, and amounted to a per-minute profit of $74,879.23 during the quarter," according to the October 28, 2005 Wall Street Journal.
"Shell, the third largest oil company by market value behind Exxon and Britain's BP PLC, said its third-quarter net income rose 68 percent to $9.03 billion, on $76.44 billion in revenue," the Journal reported.
These record profits are scandalous at a time when Americans are being squeezed dry at the pumps and heating costs are set to go through the roof in the coming winter months.
According to the Federal Energy Information Administration, the price of a gallon of regular gas in the same week the profits were announced, was up 28% from a year ago. Natural-gas prices have almost doubled in the past year and the EIA predicts that owners of gas-heated homes will see a 48% hike this winter over last year's already inflated prices, and homes heated with heating oil could see a 32% increase.
While Big Oil keeps raking in the dough, rising fuel costs are taking a heavy toll on other US industries. The added expense is creating havoc for the airline industry. For every 1 cent increase for jet fuel, the industry spends an additional $180 million a year. In 2004, increased costs for the airline industry were estimated to be more than $7 billion.
According to the American Trucking Association, truckers use about 30 billion gallons of diesel a year and for every 1 cent hike in price the industry incurs about $300 million more in operating costs. The increased cost to the trucking industry was over $6 billion in 2004.
Farmers are battling with much higher operating expenses since Bush took office. In 2004, farmers combined spent an additional $7 billion for gasoline and diesel fuel for agricultural needs.
During the dynamic duo's reelection campaign, Bush-Cheney spokesman, Scott Stanzel, told reporters: "President Bush and Vice President Cheney want to keep taxes low and keep the economy moving. They have proposed an energy plan that will provide for a stable, affordable and secure energy supply."
To that I say, then where the hell is it?
By now, the administrations policies and tax cuts are having trickle down adverse effects on the average family's everyday life as well. During their 2004 campaign, a Bush-Cheney campaign slogan was "results do matter." Lets compare overall "results" on families since Bush moved to Washington.
When Clinton left office, life was much better for the average American than when he took the reins from the first president Bush. The nation's record of economic success was unprecedented. Budgets were balanced, family income was up by 17%, 23 million jobs were created, nearly 8 million Americans had moved out of poverty, there was record homeownership, and Clinton left a huge budget surplus.
In comparison, the Bush-Cheney record is atrocious. While it is certainly true that corporate profits are at an all-time high, average wages for American workers haven't even kept pace with inflation. Millions of jobs have been lost, there has been a continuous increase in poverty year after year, household debt is at a record high, college tuition will soon be unreachable for many families, over 3 million people have lost their health insurance, and family insurance premiums have increased by an average $2630 a year.
The $397 billion surplus, previously projected by the Congressional Budget Office for 2004, has been frittered away through $2 trillion worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and the war profiteering scheme that was launched 3 years ago could end up bankrupting the whole country before its all over.
In hindsight, I say give me a guy with an overactive libido who cares about average Americans any day, over our current president, who at best is completely incompetent, and at worst is a greedy, self-centered control freak who doesn't give a damn about anybody besides himself and his rich cronies.
Resume of Dick Cheney to be Posted on Monster.Com
August 6, 2004
Evelyn Pringle
Dick Cheney is too modest to list his past accomplishments as CEO of Halliburton on the White House Website, so I decided to give him a few pointers on writing a resume to submit to future employers when he leaves the White House in January 2005.
I would definitely keep the focus on three areas of expertise: (1) Setting up fraudulent tax havens to avoid paying US taxes; (2) Doing business with terrorist countries; and (3) Stonewalling criminal investigations without going to prison.
(1) How To Set Up Fraudulent Corporate Tax Havens
As CEO of Halliburton, Cheney did rack up a number of accomplishments. He increased Halliburton's offshore tax haven subsidiaries nearly 5-fold. The company currently has 143 subsidiaries, but only 36 are incorporated in the US. The other 107 are located in other countries. According to CitizenWorks.org, Halliburton is 8th on the Fortune 500 list of companies with the most offshore tax havens.
For tax purposes, a subsidiary is defined as a controlled foreign corporation if US shareholders own more than 50% of its voting stock, or more than 50% of the value of all its outstanding stock (directly, indirectly, or constructively) on any day of the year.
Here's how they work. Under the US tax code, American corporations must pay taxes on income earned in foreign countries. But if a company incorporates a subsidiary under the laws of a foreign nation, the subsidiary is not considered a US resident, it is considered a foreign citizen. This allows the US parent company to avoid paying US taxes on the subsidiary's income as long as the income is retained and reinvested outside the US.
So by filing a few incorporation papers and paying a small fee to a foreign government Halliburton can turn a subsidiary into a foreign corporation that can avoid paying any US income tax. Its that easy.
Overall, the tax saving generated by Halliburton's tax havens, and the correlative tax loss to American taxpayers, is enormous. For example, in 2002, Halliburton only paid $15 million of its $80 million tax bill (or 19%) to the US government. The remaining 81% went to foreign governments.
Bob McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, talks about tax havens engaging in complex deals to shelter their profits, "The more these companies can bounce things around offshore, the more profit that can be kept offshore and tax free," McIntyre says. "They shouldn't get away with it, but it is really hard to police."
This may be true, but I think Bob would agree that with Cheney in the VP office, Halliburton gets away with a lot more than other corporations do.
(2) How To Do Business With Terrorists
Cheney and Halliburton were a match made in heaven. Together they found ways to make money off of just about every known terrorist country on God's green earth, regardless of the strict US laws against it.
While Cheney was CEO, American companies were barred from doing business with Iran. So the company set up an address in the Cayman Islands. The TV news program 60 Minutes did an investigation of a subsidiary called Halliburton Products and Services, and discovered that the company had no office or employees. The only sign of the phantom company was a forwarding address to Houston, Texas.
The 60 Minutes reporter traveled to the Cayman Islands, went to the address listed for Halliburton Products, and found a building owned by a local bank and a bank employee who told him that when mail arrived for Halliburton Products, it was forwarded directly to Houston, Texas.
The company's luck might be running out because this particular subsidiary has recently come under new scrutiny. A grand jury is said to be examining whether it is truly independent and whether Halliburton violated federal sanctions by operating in Iran.
The LA Times explains that US companies are allowed to operate in Iran, but under strict guidelines requiring that their subsidiaries have a foreign registry, and no US employees, and that they act independently of the parent company. So in a nutshell, it boils down to whether Halliburton Products met those criteria.
The Treasury Department website details US sanctions that bar almost all trade with Iran, and says that, "No US person may approve or facilitate the entry into or performance of transactions or contracts with Iran by a foreign subsidiary of a US firm that the US person is precluded from performing directly. Similarly, no US person may facilitate such transactions by unaffiliated foreign persons," it says.
According to media reports, investigators are examining Halliburton documents dating back to 1997 - 1998 that relate to a Dubai based subsidiary that received several tender offers from Kala Ltd, which is a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company. Investigators want to know whether the deals were completed and whether they were in violation of US sanctions against Iran.
So, is Halliburton worried? Apparently not. It has known since 2001, that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was conducting an investigation to determine whether the company violated the ban, and it still went right on doing business with Iran. In fact in 2003, Halliburton's subsidiary was used to sell $63 million worth of oil products to Iran.
Something must have turned up because the OFAC recently referred the matter over to the Justice Department for investigation, which in turn prompted the Justice Department to issue a subpoena that calls on Halliburton to provide documents relating to its business relationships with Iran. It will be interesting to see what information Halliburton turns over (if anything).
But this trading with the enemy is nothing new. While Cheney was CEO, Halliburton even used subsidiaries to make tens of millions of dollars off Iraq. According to UN records and industry executives quoted in the Washington Post, Halliburton held stakes in 2 firms that sold over $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq.
And yet, listen to what that pathological liar said when he running for VP and was interviewed on ABC's "This Week" on July 30 2000. "I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal. We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanction were imposed...," Cheney claimed. He really needs to get some help for that compulsive lying disorder. Its obviously out of control.
Halliburton has been doing business with known terrorists for years. Back in 1995, it was fined $3.8 million for doing business with Libya. The company sold tools to Libya that critics said could be used to trigger nuclear bombs. So be sure to keep in mind whenever Bush starts bragging about dismantling Libya's WMD program, that it was Halliburton that helped create it in the first place.
(3) How To Stonewall Investigations and Stay Out Of Prison
Halliburton is the all-time pro at fraudulent scams and war profiteering. And its top level executives are pros at stonewalling investigations and finding ways to stay out of prison.
Under Cheney's watch, the company was caught over-billing the government time and time again. In 1997, the GAO caught Halliburton charging $85.98 for a sheet of plywood that only cost $14.06. A 2000 follow-up investigation caught it charging tax payers for cleaning the exact same office space 4 times a day. So what happened to Halliburton as a result of these lengthily and expensive investigations? Nothing until 2002. Then it was fined $2 million for defrauding the government and that's it.
And nobody better think for one minute that the company has turned over a new leaf just because it was forced to pay a few million in fines. That is never going to happen. By now, I'm convinced that Halliburton estimates the cost of potential fines and lists them under "war profiteering expenses" when it submits the bid. Of course, that's if its even required to submit bid.
For example, as recently as January 2004, Halliburton employees were caught accepting $6.3 million in kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor. The company paid back the $6.3 million, said it fired the employees, and went right on as if nothing had ever happened.
In fact, the administration not only ignored the kickbacks, it gave Halliburton another $1.2 billion contract. Republican Congressman Tom Davis, Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, even said, "It's incomprehensible that the [Bush] Administration could give Halliburton another billion-dollar contract without fully investigating such serious criminal wrongdoing." Well incomprehensible or not, it did.
Here's another good example of Halliburton officials stonewalling and avoiding prison. In May of 2003, Halliburton was forced to admit to the SEC that it had paid $2.4 million in bribes to officials of Nigeria's Federal Inland Revenue Service in 2001 and 2002 "to obtain favorable tax treatment."
Halliburton put all the blame on a couple of lowly employees and claimed that none of its senior officers were involved in the bribe. But as the Houston Chronicle pointed out, "left unanswered is how a 'low-level employee' could channel that much money from the company to the pockets of a corrupt official."
So what are they asking us to believe? That 2 employees took a brown paper bag to an ATM machine and made withdrawals of $2.4 million? Oh Please!
We are talking here about ripping off hundreds of millions of dollars from the US government (aka the taxpayers), and yet no matter how bad it gets, there are never any arrests.
In fact, the SEC might even end up letting the $2.4 million bribery case slide, because it has far bigger fish to fry. As of July 2004, the French, British, Nigerian and US governments are all investigating allegations that Halliburton and three other companies paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials in exchange for a $6 billion contract to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria, while Cheney was CEO.
French police started the initial investigation into the matter way back in October, 2002. In June 2003, the chief prosecutor on the case believed that there was enough evidence to appoint anti-corruption judge, Renaud van Ruymbeke, to expand the investigation.
This second case is far more complicated because it involves an international consortium between Halliburton and three other companies from France, Italy, and Japan. Together, they formed the joint venture TSKJ, a company registered in Medeira, Portugal.
TSKJ was then awarded the $6 billion contract. But here's where it gets tricky for Halliburton because the alleged bribery payments were made through TSKJ, and Halliburton owns 25% of the company.
According to the Washington Post, "at the heart of the investigation is the question of whether those payments amounted to illegal commissions, or bribes, to Nigerian public officials." The payments were made during Cheney's tenure, and according to the Boson Globe, "If such payments were made and Cheney approved them, he could be guilty of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act."
Ex-Halliburton consultant, Attorney Jeffrey Tesler, says that Cheney knew all about the bribes. Tesler testified under oath in May, 2004 that he made payments to Jack Stanley, while Stanley was president of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, and Tesler specifically said that Cheney approved the payments.
His testimony is backed up by banking records that show that at least $5 million in payments were wired to Stanley through a secret bank account in Zurich. Tesler also testified that he paid $350,000 to another Halliburton executive, William Chaudran, through a secret bank account on the isle of Jersey.
On June 18, 2004, Halliburton announced that it was cutting its ties with Jack Stanley. But there's good news for Stanley in France. Judge Ruymbeke is said to be offering him a deal if he implicates Cheney, and sources within the French legal system say that there is more than enough evidence to indict Cheney on charges of bribery, money laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
It's Definitely Time To Lawyer Up
Halliburton knows it's in big trouble with this case. Cheney might have pull in the US but not France. In February 2004, Halliburton hired Attorney James Doty, from (where else but) the Baker-Botts law firm.
Doty just happens to be the same attorney that Bush hired when he bought the Texas Rangers, and he was also general counsel to the SEC when it investigated Bush for insider trading while he was a director on the board of Harken Energy. What a tight-knit little group. I guess birds of a feather definitely do flock together.
Something I heard recently suddenly makes sense. Halliburton apparently purchased some kind of insurance policy to cover legal expenses that Cheney might incur as a direct result of problems arising from his employment with Halliburton. Now it becomes clear.
Well lets hope that's true and that they get Cheney a good attorney too, because the way things stand right now, he may very well be looking at criminal indictments for the some of the illegal activities he engaged in while CEO of Halliburton. With such a long history of corrupt business deals hanging over his head, its no wonder that he has heart trouble.
I bet Cheney longs for the good old days of Campaign 2000, when his only legal problems consisted of trying to hide drunk driving arrests, and worrying about whether, if elected Vice President, he could get into Canada since he was a two-time convicted criminal.
Evelyn Pringle
Dick Cheney is too modest to list his past accomplishments as CEO of Halliburton on the White House Website, so I decided to give him a few pointers on writing a resume to submit to future employers when he leaves the White House in January 2005.
I would definitely keep the focus on three areas of expertise: (1) Setting up fraudulent tax havens to avoid paying US taxes; (2) Doing business with terrorist countries; and (3) Stonewalling criminal investigations without going to prison.
(1) How To Set Up Fraudulent Corporate Tax Havens
As CEO of Halliburton, Cheney did rack up a number of accomplishments. He increased Halliburton's offshore tax haven subsidiaries nearly 5-fold. The company currently has 143 subsidiaries, but only 36 are incorporated in the US. The other 107 are located in other countries. According to CitizenWorks.org, Halliburton is 8th on the Fortune 500 list of companies with the most offshore tax havens.
For tax purposes, a subsidiary is defined as a controlled foreign corporation if US shareholders own more than 50% of its voting stock, or more than 50% of the value of all its outstanding stock (directly, indirectly, or constructively) on any day of the year.
Here's how they work. Under the US tax code, American corporations must pay taxes on income earned in foreign countries. But if a company incorporates a subsidiary under the laws of a foreign nation, the subsidiary is not considered a US resident, it is considered a foreign citizen. This allows the US parent company to avoid paying US taxes on the subsidiary's income as long as the income is retained and reinvested outside the US.
So by filing a few incorporation papers and paying a small fee to a foreign government Halliburton can turn a subsidiary into a foreign corporation that can avoid paying any US income tax. Its that easy.
Overall, the tax saving generated by Halliburton's tax havens, and the correlative tax loss to American taxpayers, is enormous. For example, in 2002, Halliburton only paid $15 million of its $80 million tax bill (or 19%) to the US government. The remaining 81% went to foreign governments.
Bob McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, talks about tax havens engaging in complex deals to shelter their profits, "The more these companies can bounce things around offshore, the more profit that can be kept offshore and tax free," McIntyre says. "They shouldn't get away with it, but it is really hard to police."
This may be true, but I think Bob would agree that with Cheney in the VP office, Halliburton gets away with a lot more than other corporations do.
(2) How To Do Business With Terrorists
Cheney and Halliburton were a match made in heaven. Together they found ways to make money off of just about every known terrorist country on God's green earth, regardless of the strict US laws against it.
While Cheney was CEO, American companies were barred from doing business with Iran. So the company set up an address in the Cayman Islands. The TV news program 60 Minutes did an investigation of a subsidiary called Halliburton Products and Services, and discovered that the company had no office or employees. The only sign of the phantom company was a forwarding address to Houston, Texas.
The 60 Minutes reporter traveled to the Cayman Islands, went to the address listed for Halliburton Products, and found a building owned by a local bank and a bank employee who told him that when mail arrived for Halliburton Products, it was forwarded directly to Houston, Texas.
The company's luck might be running out because this particular subsidiary has recently come under new scrutiny. A grand jury is said to be examining whether it is truly independent and whether Halliburton violated federal sanctions by operating in Iran.
The LA Times explains that US companies are allowed to operate in Iran, but under strict guidelines requiring that their subsidiaries have a foreign registry, and no US employees, and that they act independently of the parent company. So in a nutshell, it boils down to whether Halliburton Products met those criteria.
The Treasury Department website details US sanctions that bar almost all trade with Iran, and says that, "No US person may approve or facilitate the entry into or performance of transactions or contracts with Iran by a foreign subsidiary of a US firm that the US person is precluded from performing directly. Similarly, no US person may facilitate such transactions by unaffiliated foreign persons," it says.
According to media reports, investigators are examining Halliburton documents dating back to 1997 - 1998 that relate to a Dubai based subsidiary that received several tender offers from Kala Ltd, which is a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company. Investigators want to know whether the deals were completed and whether they were in violation of US sanctions against Iran.
So, is Halliburton worried? Apparently not. It has known since 2001, that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was conducting an investigation to determine whether the company violated the ban, and it still went right on doing business with Iran. In fact in 2003, Halliburton's subsidiary was used to sell $63 million worth of oil products to Iran.
Something must have turned up because the OFAC recently referred the matter over to the Justice Department for investigation, which in turn prompted the Justice Department to issue a subpoena that calls on Halliburton to provide documents relating to its business relationships with Iran. It will be interesting to see what information Halliburton turns over (if anything).
But this trading with the enemy is nothing new. While Cheney was CEO, Halliburton even used subsidiaries to make tens of millions of dollars off Iraq. According to UN records and industry executives quoted in the Washington Post, Halliburton held stakes in 2 firms that sold over $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq.
And yet, listen to what that pathological liar said when he running for VP and was interviewed on ABC's "This Week" on July 30 2000. "I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal. We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanction were imposed...," Cheney claimed. He really needs to get some help for that compulsive lying disorder. Its obviously out of control.
Halliburton has been doing business with known terrorists for years. Back in 1995, it was fined $3.8 million for doing business with Libya. The company sold tools to Libya that critics said could be used to trigger nuclear bombs. So be sure to keep in mind whenever Bush starts bragging about dismantling Libya's WMD program, that it was Halliburton that helped create it in the first place.
(3) How To Stonewall Investigations and Stay Out Of Prison
Halliburton is the all-time pro at fraudulent scams and war profiteering. And its top level executives are pros at stonewalling investigations and finding ways to stay out of prison.
Under Cheney's watch, the company was caught over-billing the government time and time again. In 1997, the GAO caught Halliburton charging $85.98 for a sheet of plywood that only cost $14.06. A 2000 follow-up investigation caught it charging tax payers for cleaning the exact same office space 4 times a day. So what happened to Halliburton as a result of these lengthily and expensive investigations? Nothing until 2002. Then it was fined $2 million for defrauding the government and that's it.
And nobody better think for one minute that the company has turned over a new leaf just because it was forced to pay a few million in fines. That is never going to happen. By now, I'm convinced that Halliburton estimates the cost of potential fines and lists them under "war profiteering expenses" when it submits the bid. Of course, that's if its even required to submit bid.
For example, as recently as January 2004, Halliburton employees were caught accepting $6.3 million in kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor. The company paid back the $6.3 million, said it fired the employees, and went right on as if nothing had ever happened.
In fact, the administration not only ignored the kickbacks, it gave Halliburton another $1.2 billion contract. Republican Congressman Tom Davis, Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, even said, "It's incomprehensible that the [Bush] Administration could give Halliburton another billion-dollar contract without fully investigating such serious criminal wrongdoing." Well incomprehensible or not, it did.
Here's another good example of Halliburton officials stonewalling and avoiding prison. In May of 2003, Halliburton was forced to admit to the SEC that it had paid $2.4 million in bribes to officials of Nigeria's Federal Inland Revenue Service in 2001 and 2002 "to obtain favorable tax treatment."
Halliburton put all the blame on a couple of lowly employees and claimed that none of its senior officers were involved in the bribe. But as the Houston Chronicle pointed out, "left unanswered is how a 'low-level employee' could channel that much money from the company to the pockets of a corrupt official."
So what are they asking us to believe? That 2 employees took a brown paper bag to an ATM machine and made withdrawals of $2.4 million? Oh Please!
We are talking here about ripping off hundreds of millions of dollars from the US government (aka the taxpayers), and yet no matter how bad it gets, there are never any arrests.
In fact, the SEC might even end up letting the $2.4 million bribery case slide, because it has far bigger fish to fry. As of July 2004, the French, British, Nigerian and US governments are all investigating allegations that Halliburton and three other companies paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials in exchange for a $6 billion contract to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria, while Cheney was CEO.
French police started the initial investigation into the matter way back in October, 2002. In June 2003, the chief prosecutor on the case believed that there was enough evidence to appoint anti-corruption judge, Renaud van Ruymbeke, to expand the investigation.
This second case is far more complicated because it involves an international consortium between Halliburton and three other companies from France, Italy, and Japan. Together, they formed the joint venture TSKJ, a company registered in Medeira, Portugal.
TSKJ was then awarded the $6 billion contract. But here's where it gets tricky for Halliburton because the alleged bribery payments were made through TSKJ, and Halliburton owns 25% of the company.
According to the Washington Post, "at the heart of the investigation is the question of whether those payments amounted to illegal commissions, or bribes, to Nigerian public officials." The payments were made during Cheney's tenure, and according to the Boson Globe, "If such payments were made and Cheney approved them, he could be guilty of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act."
Ex-Halliburton consultant, Attorney Jeffrey Tesler, says that Cheney knew all about the bribes. Tesler testified under oath in May, 2004 that he made payments to Jack Stanley, while Stanley was president of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, and Tesler specifically said that Cheney approved the payments.
His testimony is backed up by banking records that show that at least $5 million in payments were wired to Stanley through a secret bank account in Zurich. Tesler also testified that he paid $350,000 to another Halliburton executive, William Chaudran, through a secret bank account on the isle of Jersey.
On June 18, 2004, Halliburton announced that it was cutting its ties with Jack Stanley. But there's good news for Stanley in France. Judge Ruymbeke is said to be offering him a deal if he implicates Cheney, and sources within the French legal system say that there is more than enough evidence to indict Cheney on charges of bribery, money laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
It's Definitely Time To Lawyer Up
Halliburton knows it's in big trouble with this case. Cheney might have pull in the US but not France. In February 2004, Halliburton hired Attorney James Doty, from (where else but) the Baker-Botts law firm.
Doty just happens to be the same attorney that Bush hired when he bought the Texas Rangers, and he was also general counsel to the SEC when it investigated Bush for insider trading while he was a director on the board of Harken Energy. What a tight-knit little group. I guess birds of a feather definitely do flock together.
Something I heard recently suddenly makes sense. Halliburton apparently purchased some kind of insurance policy to cover legal expenses that Cheney might incur as a direct result of problems arising from his employment with Halliburton. Now it becomes clear.
Well lets hope that's true and that they get Cheney a good attorney too, because the way things stand right now, he may very well be looking at criminal indictments for the some of the illegal activities he engaged in while CEO of Halliburton. With such a long history of corrupt business deals hanging over his head, its no wonder that he has heart trouble.
I bet Cheney longs for the good old days of Campaign 2000, when his only legal problems consisted of trying to hide drunk driving arrests, and worrying about whether, if elected Vice President, he could get into Canada since he was a two-time convicted criminal.
Cheney and Halliburton Hold Title of Top Earners In Iraq
March 31, 2006
Evelyn Pringle
There has never been an investigation into Cheney's involvement in awarding Halliburton no-bid contracts making the company the number one war profiteerer in Iraq. Apparently people have forgotten about the March 5, 2003 e-mail between the Army Corps of Engineers and a Pentagon employee that stated the contract "has been coordinated w VP's office."
People also seem to have forgotten that Cheney continues to own stock in Halliburton. Stock that has risen in leaps and bounds since its former CEO moved into the White House and developed the most prolific war profiteering scheme of all time.
A study released in June 2005, originating from the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), revealed that overall, Halliburton had received roughly 52% of the $25.4 billion that has been paid out to private contractors since the war in Iraq began.
Halliburton was the top profiteer when it came to funds belonging to the citizens of Iraq as well. A March 18, 2004 audit report by the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, titled, "Acquisition: Contracts Awarded by the Coalition Provisional Authority by the Defense Contracting Command-Washington," determined that the CPA and its predecessor, the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, had circumvented federal contracting procedures since the early days of the occupation.
The audit found that federal procurement rules were not followed in 22 of 24 contracts awarded by the Defense Contracting Command and that defense department personnel conducted “inadequate surveillance” on more than half of the contracts; did not “perform or support price reasonableness determinations;” and allowed activity that was “out-of-scope” of the original contracts.
An analysis of the data released in August 2004, showed the CPA had awarded 85% of the contracts to US and UK firms and that Iraqi companies received a mere 2% of the contracts paid for with Iraqi funds. Halliburton received 60% of all contracts paid for with Iraqi money.
Halliburton's contracts are "cost-plus" deals and according to Peter Singer, author of "Corporate Warrior," when the government gives out cost-plus contracts, "essentially it rewards firms when they add to costs rather than rewarding them for cost savings," he said.
Halliburton employees told Knight Ridder about a scam where the company ran up costs by having employees drive empty trucks back and forth across Iraq.
"There was one time we ran 28 trucks, one trailer had one pallet (a trailer can hold as many as 26 four-foot square pallets) and the rest of them were empty," said David Wilson, who was the convoy commander on more than 100 runs. Four other drivers who were with Wilson confirmed his account for Knight Ridder.
Halliburton's contract allows the company to pass on the cost of the truck runs and add between 1% and 3% for profit. "Trucking experts estimate that each round trip costs taxpayers thousands of dollars," according to Knight Ridder.
But if you listen to Cheney, people are just picking on Halliburton because they don't like him. Not so. I would be mad at any company that billed me for driving empty trucks across the desert, but it just so happens that Halliburton is the company at the wheel.
Other whistleblowers described how employees were instructed to abandon or torch new trucks, worth $80,000, if they got a flat tire or had some other minor problems, so that Halliburton could purchase new trucks with taxpayer dollars.
People must have been picking on Halliburton long before Iraq because under Cheney's watch, the company was caught ripping of the government time and time again. In 1997, the GAO caught the company charging $85.98 for a sheet of plywood that only cost $14.06. In a 2000 follow-up investigation, Halliburton was caught billing tax payers for cleaning the exact same office space 4 times a day.
So what happened as a result of these expensive drawn-out investigations? In 2002 Halliburton paid a $2 million fine for defrauding the government. The investigation probably cost more than $2 mill.
In January 2004, two Halliburton employees were caught red-handed taking $6.3 million in kickbacks from a subcontractor in Iraq. The company gave the $6.3 million back, claimed it fired the employees, and went on like nothing ever happened.
I guess Cheney would have us believe that 2 guys stuffed $6.3 million in their back pockets without Halliburton's knowledge. Well call me cynical or whatever, but I don't buy it.
This time around, the Bush team not only ignored the blatant misconduct, it gave Halliburton another $1.2 billion contract, a move that even upset republicans. Rep Tom Davis, Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform stated: "It's incomprehensible that the [Bush] Administration could give Halliburton another billion-dollar contract without fully investigating such serious criminal wrongdoing."
And that ain't all. In June 2004, the Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency completed a review that found Halliburton had billed for 36% more meals in Iraq than it had served to the troops, resulting in an overcharge estimated to be as high as $186 million.
In July 2004, the GAO reported that when Halliburton acted as a middleman for the operation of dining halls, costs were over 40% higher.
So what kind of punishment did this misdeed bring? The DCAA told Halliburton to send all bills to their agency for approval before submitting them for reimbursement.
In an August 16, 2004, memorandum, the DCAA "identified significant unsupported costs" submitted by Halliburton and said "while contingency issues may have had an impact during the earlier stages of the procurements, clearly, the contractor should have adequate supporting data by now."
When DCAA examined 7 task orders with a combined proposed value of $4.33 billion, its auditors identified unsupported costs totaling $1.82 billion.
On September 16, 2004, the Pentagon found that $34.2 million of the costs associated with KBR's task order of the Iraqi oil infrastructure contract were unreasonable, including $14.9 million in overcharges and $17.7 million in "unsupported" costs.
On March 14, 2005, a Pentagon audit discovered $108 million in overcharges by KBR for delivering gasoline to Iraq. The minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee later determined that the total overpayment through April 1, 2004 was $167 million
And that still ain't all. In another case of fraud, government auditors found Halliburton claimed to have lost over $60 million worth of government property in Iraq, including trucks, office furniture and computers.
Stuart Bowen, auditor of the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority, said that 6,975 of 20,531 items on Halliburton's ledgers were unaccounted for.
"This occurred because KBR did not effectively manage government property," his report said. "As a result," Bowen said, "we projected that KBR could not account for 6,975 property items from an inventory of 20,531 valued at $61.1 million."
The June 2005 DCAA study revealed new evidence of Halliburton fraud to include the company: (1) overcharged or presented questionable bills for close to $1.5 billion;
(2) lost 12 pre-fabricated bases worth over $75; (3) billed $152,000 to provide a movie library for 2,500 soldiers; and (4) submitted inconsistent billings, eg: video cassette players $300 in some instances, and $1000 in others; $2.31 for towels one day and $5 on another.
If Cheney is to be believed, the conspiracy to pick on Halliburton is a global effort because as of July 2004, the French, British, Nigerian and US governments were all investigating Halliburton's activities while Cheney was CEO, for paying over $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials in exchange for a $6 billion contract to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria.
In this investigation, former Halliburton employees are ratting out Cheney himself. Ex-Halliburton consultant, Attorney Jeffrey Tesler, testified under oath in May, 2004 that he made bribery payments to Jack Stanley, while Stanley was president of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, and also made payments to Halliburton executive William Chaudran. His testimony was backed up by banking records and Tesler said CEO Cheney approved the payments.
Cheney had better not get too comfortable because his criminal empire may soon come crashing down around him. If democrats take back the house and the senate next November, I think its safe to say that investigations will follow.
Evelyn Pringle
There has never been an investigation into Cheney's involvement in awarding Halliburton no-bid contracts making the company the number one war profiteerer in Iraq. Apparently people have forgotten about the March 5, 2003 e-mail between the Army Corps of Engineers and a Pentagon employee that stated the contract "has been coordinated w VP's office."
People also seem to have forgotten that Cheney continues to own stock in Halliburton. Stock that has risen in leaps and bounds since its former CEO moved into the White House and developed the most prolific war profiteering scheme of all time.
A study released in June 2005, originating from the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), revealed that overall, Halliburton had received roughly 52% of the $25.4 billion that has been paid out to private contractors since the war in Iraq began.
Halliburton was the top profiteer when it came to funds belonging to the citizens of Iraq as well. A March 18, 2004 audit report by the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, titled, "Acquisition: Contracts Awarded by the Coalition Provisional Authority by the Defense Contracting Command-Washington," determined that the CPA and its predecessor, the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, had circumvented federal contracting procedures since the early days of the occupation.
The audit found that federal procurement rules were not followed in 22 of 24 contracts awarded by the Defense Contracting Command and that defense department personnel conducted “inadequate surveillance” on more than half of the contracts; did not “perform or support price reasonableness determinations;” and allowed activity that was “out-of-scope” of the original contracts.
An analysis of the data released in August 2004, showed the CPA had awarded 85% of the contracts to US and UK firms and that Iraqi companies received a mere 2% of the contracts paid for with Iraqi funds. Halliburton received 60% of all contracts paid for with Iraqi money.
Halliburton's contracts are "cost-plus" deals and according to Peter Singer, author of "Corporate Warrior," when the government gives out cost-plus contracts, "essentially it rewards firms when they add to costs rather than rewarding them for cost savings," he said.
Halliburton employees told Knight Ridder about a scam where the company ran up costs by having employees drive empty trucks back and forth across Iraq.
"There was one time we ran 28 trucks, one trailer had one pallet (a trailer can hold as many as 26 four-foot square pallets) and the rest of them were empty," said David Wilson, who was the convoy commander on more than 100 runs. Four other drivers who were with Wilson confirmed his account for Knight Ridder.
Halliburton's contract allows the company to pass on the cost of the truck runs and add between 1% and 3% for profit. "Trucking experts estimate that each round trip costs taxpayers thousands of dollars," according to Knight Ridder.
But if you listen to Cheney, people are just picking on Halliburton because they don't like him. Not so. I would be mad at any company that billed me for driving empty trucks across the desert, but it just so happens that Halliburton is the company at the wheel.
Other whistleblowers described how employees were instructed to abandon or torch new trucks, worth $80,000, if they got a flat tire or had some other minor problems, so that Halliburton could purchase new trucks with taxpayer dollars.
People must have been picking on Halliburton long before Iraq because under Cheney's watch, the company was caught ripping of the government time and time again. In 1997, the GAO caught the company charging $85.98 for a sheet of plywood that only cost $14.06. In a 2000 follow-up investigation, Halliburton was caught billing tax payers for cleaning the exact same office space 4 times a day.
So what happened as a result of these expensive drawn-out investigations? In 2002 Halliburton paid a $2 million fine for defrauding the government. The investigation probably cost more than $2 mill.
In January 2004, two Halliburton employees were caught red-handed taking $6.3 million in kickbacks from a subcontractor in Iraq. The company gave the $6.3 million back, claimed it fired the employees, and went on like nothing ever happened.
I guess Cheney would have us believe that 2 guys stuffed $6.3 million in their back pockets without Halliburton's knowledge. Well call me cynical or whatever, but I don't buy it.
This time around, the Bush team not only ignored the blatant misconduct, it gave Halliburton another $1.2 billion contract, a move that even upset republicans. Rep Tom Davis, Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform stated: "It's incomprehensible that the [Bush] Administration could give Halliburton another billion-dollar contract without fully investigating such serious criminal wrongdoing."
And that ain't all. In June 2004, the Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency completed a review that found Halliburton had billed for 36% more meals in Iraq than it had served to the troops, resulting in an overcharge estimated to be as high as $186 million.
In July 2004, the GAO reported that when Halliburton acted as a middleman for the operation of dining halls, costs were over 40% higher.
So what kind of punishment did this misdeed bring? The DCAA told Halliburton to send all bills to their agency for approval before submitting them for reimbursement.
In an August 16, 2004, memorandum, the DCAA "identified significant unsupported costs" submitted by Halliburton and said "while contingency issues may have had an impact during the earlier stages of the procurements, clearly, the contractor should have adequate supporting data by now."
When DCAA examined 7 task orders with a combined proposed value of $4.33 billion, its auditors identified unsupported costs totaling $1.82 billion.
On September 16, 2004, the Pentagon found that $34.2 million of the costs associated with KBR's task order of the Iraqi oil infrastructure contract were unreasonable, including $14.9 million in overcharges and $17.7 million in "unsupported" costs.
On March 14, 2005, a Pentagon audit discovered $108 million in overcharges by KBR for delivering gasoline to Iraq. The minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee later determined that the total overpayment through April 1, 2004 was $167 million
And that still ain't all. In another case of fraud, government auditors found Halliburton claimed to have lost over $60 million worth of government property in Iraq, including trucks, office furniture and computers.
Stuart Bowen, auditor of the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority, said that 6,975 of 20,531 items on Halliburton's ledgers were unaccounted for.
"This occurred because KBR did not effectively manage government property," his report said. "As a result," Bowen said, "we projected that KBR could not account for 6,975 property items from an inventory of 20,531 valued at $61.1 million."
The June 2005 DCAA study revealed new evidence of Halliburton fraud to include the company: (1) overcharged or presented questionable bills for close to $1.5 billion;
(2) lost 12 pre-fabricated bases worth over $75; (3) billed $152,000 to provide a movie library for 2,500 soldiers; and (4) submitted inconsistent billings, eg: video cassette players $300 in some instances, and $1000 in others; $2.31 for towels one day and $5 on another.
If Cheney is to be believed, the conspiracy to pick on Halliburton is a global effort because as of July 2004, the French, British, Nigerian and US governments were all investigating Halliburton's activities while Cheney was CEO, for paying over $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials in exchange for a $6 billion contract to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria.
In this investigation, former Halliburton employees are ratting out Cheney himself. Ex-Halliburton consultant, Attorney Jeffrey Tesler, testified under oath in May, 2004 that he made bribery payments to Jack Stanley, while Stanley was president of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, and also made payments to Halliburton executive William Chaudran. His testimony was backed up by banking records and Tesler said CEO Cheney approved the payments.
Cheney had better not get too comfortable because his criminal empire may soon come crashing down around him. If democrats take back the house and the senate next November, I think its safe to say that investigations will follow.
Bush and Cheney Directed Wilson-Plame Hit Squad
April 18, 2006
Evelyn Pringle
Now that we've spent millions of tax dollars on the CIA leak investigation, here’s a new bit of information that adds a whole new twist to the saga.
According to a recent article by ace investigative reporter, Jason Leopold, Dick Cheney met with Bush in early June 2003, and told him that CIA agent Valerie Plame was the wife of Iraq war critic Joe Wilson and that she was responsible for sending Joe on a fact-finding mission to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from Africa.
And the chat wasn't limited to Bush and Cheney. “Other White House officials who also attended the meeting with Cheney and President Bush,” Jason reports, “included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.”
Furthermore, Jason says, during the second half of June 2003, Rove, Card, and other officials from Cheney's office kept Bush apprised on the progress of the campaign to discredit Wilson, in emails and internal White House memos, no less, some of which were only recently turned over to the special prosecutor's office, Jason says.
No wonder Libby is so ticked off. Cheney and Bush got the ball rolling and the whole gang was involved in the planning and execution of the plot, yet Scooters the one on the outside looking in and facing a possible 30-year prison term.
So, the big question is, how many members of the Wilson-Plame-assassination-squad have been interviewed by the FBI, how many have testified under oath before the grand jury, and most importantly for Bush and Cheney, how many have been able to stick to the same story.
Jason says that 36 administration officials have been interviewed which means 36 people would have to stay on message and repeat the same talking points. This would take a miracle.
Also, according to Jason’s sources, during Bush's interview with the special prosecutor, he did not fess up to the fact that he was aware of the campaign to discredit Wilson and said he did not know who had leaked Valerie’s name to the media.
On June 24, 2004, Bush was interviewed for about 70 minutes. The only other member of the Bush team in the room during the meeting was Jim Sharp, the private lawyer that Bush hired, according to White House press secretary, Scott McClellan.
"The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," McClellan told reporters at the time. "No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States," he said.
I like that line, "no one wants to get to the bottom of this matter" more than Bush.
Yea sure. In a book released around the same time as Bush's interview, Joe Wilson, pointed the finger at Scooter Libby as the leaker, and the White House not only adamantly denied the claim, it accused Wilson of trying to bolster John Kerry's campaign.
If its any consolation to Fitzgerald, the President's memory was no better on September 30, 2003, a year before his interview, when talking to reporters at the University of Chicago. Bush never once mentioned the little group-think sessions in the White House to them either.
Instead, he just kept repeating the same talking points until he sounded like a drunk three sheets to the wind. But then who knows, maybe he was.
In reading Bush's statements, its important to understand that the sole issue raised by reporters was the question of who leaked Valerie's identify to the media, nothing about classified documents or anything else. So every comment refers to that issue only.
When a reporter asked, “Do you think that the Justice Department can conduct an impartial investigation, considering the political ramifications of the CIA leak, and why wouldn't a special counsel be better?”
Bush completely skirted the question, and swung into his well-rehearsed talking points.
"Let me just say something about leaks in Washington," he said. "There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington," he told reporters.
"There's leaks at the executive branch," he said, "there's leaks in the legislative branch."
"There's just too many leaks," Bush stated. "And if there is a leak out of my administration," he said, "I want to know who it is."
But apparently here lies the catch-all legal loop-hole phrase. "And if the person has violated law,” Bush said, “the person will be taken care of.”
"I have told our administration, people in my administration to be fully cooperative," he assured reporters.
In light of Jason‘s findings above, this particular comment has me concerned that maybe Dick Cheney, Andy Card, Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Karl Rove are all deaf.
"I want to know the truth," the President proclaimed.
I found this statement extremely comical, coming from a pathological liar who cheated his way into the White House to begin with and then rigged the next election to get a second term.
That said, Bush put on an Oscar-winning performance for the reporters in Chicago when he was practically begging for anyone with information about the CIA leak to come forward.
"If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration," he said, "it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business."
When a reporter started to ask whether he had talked to Karl Rove and whether he had confidence in Karl....
The President cut him off and went right back to the talking points. "Listen," he stuttered, "I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information."
"If somebody did leak classified information," he continued, "I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action."
"And this investigation is a good thing," he lied through his teeth and said.
"And again I repeat," he said, like a broken record, "you know, Washington is a town where there's all kinds of allegations."
"You've heard much of the allegations," the President said. "And if people have got solid information," Bush pleaded again, "please come forward with it."
"And that would be people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources," he stuttered on, "or people outside the information -- outside the administration."
The guy almost sounds sincere when he says he wants to wrap the situation up quickly.
"And we can clarify this thing very quickly," Bush said, "if people who have got solid evidence would come forward and speak out."
"And I would hope they would," he added. "And then we'll get to the bottom of this and move on."
He obviously was up all night rehearsing because he went right back to the mantra a third time about how, "leaks of classified information are a bad thing."
How there's "too much leaking in Washington," and on and on like a drunken slob.
"I've spoken out consistently against them," he said, "and I want to know who the leakers are."
I think Jason Leopold should go talk to Bush. The poor guy's been begging for somebody to come forward with this information for 3 years.
Evelyn Pringle
Now that we've spent millions of tax dollars on the CIA leak investigation, here’s a new bit of information that adds a whole new twist to the saga.
According to a recent article by ace investigative reporter, Jason Leopold, Dick Cheney met with Bush in early June 2003, and told him that CIA agent Valerie Plame was the wife of Iraq war critic Joe Wilson and that she was responsible for sending Joe on a fact-finding mission to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from Africa.
And the chat wasn't limited to Bush and Cheney. “Other White House officials who also attended the meeting with Cheney and President Bush,” Jason reports, “included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.”
Furthermore, Jason says, during the second half of June 2003, Rove, Card, and other officials from Cheney's office kept Bush apprised on the progress of the campaign to discredit Wilson, in emails and internal White House memos, no less, some of which were only recently turned over to the special prosecutor's office, Jason says.
No wonder Libby is so ticked off. Cheney and Bush got the ball rolling and the whole gang was involved in the planning and execution of the plot, yet Scooters the one on the outside looking in and facing a possible 30-year prison term.
So, the big question is, how many members of the Wilson-Plame-assassination-squad have been interviewed by the FBI, how many have testified under oath before the grand jury, and most importantly for Bush and Cheney, how many have been able to stick to the same story.
Jason says that 36 administration officials have been interviewed which means 36 people would have to stay on message and repeat the same talking points. This would take a miracle.
Also, according to Jason’s sources, during Bush's interview with the special prosecutor, he did not fess up to the fact that he was aware of the campaign to discredit Wilson and said he did not know who had leaked Valerie’s name to the media.
On June 24, 2004, Bush was interviewed for about 70 minutes. The only other member of the Bush team in the room during the meeting was Jim Sharp, the private lawyer that Bush hired, according to White House press secretary, Scott McClellan.
"The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," McClellan told reporters at the time. "No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States," he said.
I like that line, "no one wants to get to the bottom of this matter" more than Bush.
Yea sure. In a book released around the same time as Bush's interview, Joe Wilson, pointed the finger at Scooter Libby as the leaker, and the White House not only adamantly denied the claim, it accused Wilson of trying to bolster John Kerry's campaign.
If its any consolation to Fitzgerald, the President's memory was no better on September 30, 2003, a year before his interview, when talking to reporters at the University of Chicago. Bush never once mentioned the little group-think sessions in the White House to them either.
Instead, he just kept repeating the same talking points until he sounded like a drunk three sheets to the wind. But then who knows, maybe he was.
In reading Bush's statements, its important to understand that the sole issue raised by reporters was the question of who leaked Valerie's identify to the media, nothing about classified documents or anything else. So every comment refers to that issue only.
When a reporter asked, “Do you think that the Justice Department can conduct an impartial investigation, considering the political ramifications of the CIA leak, and why wouldn't a special counsel be better?”
Bush completely skirted the question, and swung into his well-rehearsed talking points.
"Let me just say something about leaks in Washington," he said. "There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington," he told reporters.
"There's leaks at the executive branch," he said, "there's leaks in the legislative branch."
"There's just too many leaks," Bush stated. "And if there is a leak out of my administration," he said, "I want to know who it is."
But apparently here lies the catch-all legal loop-hole phrase. "And if the person has violated law,” Bush said, “the person will be taken care of.”
"I have told our administration, people in my administration to be fully cooperative," he assured reporters.
In light of Jason‘s findings above, this particular comment has me concerned that maybe Dick Cheney, Andy Card, Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Karl Rove are all deaf.
"I want to know the truth," the President proclaimed.
I found this statement extremely comical, coming from a pathological liar who cheated his way into the White House to begin with and then rigged the next election to get a second term.
That said, Bush put on an Oscar-winning performance for the reporters in Chicago when he was practically begging for anyone with information about the CIA leak to come forward.
"If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration," he said, "it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business."
When a reporter started to ask whether he had talked to Karl Rove and whether he had confidence in Karl....
The President cut him off and went right back to the talking points. "Listen," he stuttered, "I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information."
"If somebody did leak classified information," he continued, "I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action."
"And this investigation is a good thing," he lied through his teeth and said.
"And again I repeat," he said, like a broken record, "you know, Washington is a town where there's all kinds of allegations."
"You've heard much of the allegations," the President said. "And if people have got solid information," Bush pleaded again, "please come forward with it."
"And that would be people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources," he stuttered on, "or people outside the information -- outside the administration."
The guy almost sounds sincere when he says he wants to wrap the situation up quickly.
"And we can clarify this thing very quickly," Bush said, "if people who have got solid evidence would come forward and speak out."
"And I would hope they would," he added. "And then we'll get to the bottom of this and move on."
He obviously was up all night rehearsing because he went right back to the mantra a third time about how, "leaks of classified information are a bad thing."
How there's "too much leaking in Washington," and on and on like a drunken slob.
"I've spoken out consistently against them," he said, "and I want to know who the leakers are."
I think Jason Leopold should go talk to Bush. The poor guy's been begging for somebody to come forward with this information for 3 years.
Cheney Fitted for New Halliburton Uniform - Striped Jumpsuit
Evelyn Pringle November 2006
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a formal investigation into whether Halliburton made improper payments to government officials in Nigeria in connection with the construction and expansion by TSKJ of a natural gas liquefaction complex and facilities at Bonny Island in Rivers State, Nigeria.
TSKJ is a company registered in Portugal whose members include Technip SA of France, Snamprogetti Netherlands BV, a subsidiary of Saipem SpA of Italy, JGC Corporation of Japan, and Kellogg Brown & Root, a successor to the MW Kellogg Company, each of which has a 25% interest in the venture.
TSKJ entered into various contracts to build and expand the liquefied natural gas project for Nigeria LNG Limited, which is owned by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp, Shell Gas BV, Cleag Limited, and Agip International BV, an affiliate of ENI SpA of Italy.
MW Kellogg Limited is a joint venture in which Halliburton has a 55% interest; and MW Kellogg Limited and the MW Kellogg Company were subsidiaries of Dresser Industries before Halliburton's 1998 acquisition of Dresser Industries. The MW Kellogg Company was later merged with a Halliburton subsidiary to form Kellogg Brown & Root.
The US Department of Justice is also conducting a related criminal investigation of the Nigerian bribery matter pursuant to the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
In addition to the SEC and the DOJ investigations, other investigations are being conducted in France, Nigeria and Switzerland and in Nigeria, a legislative committee of the National Assembly and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission are also investigating the matter.
And last but not least, on August 7, 2006, the Financial Times of London reported that KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is being investigated by Britain's Serious Fraud Office over the company's role in an alleged plot to pay more than $170 million in bribes to win $7 billion worth of contracts at a Nigerian oil plant.
For part of the period under investigation, the newspaper reported, Halliburton was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The SFO said it had conducted searches at business and residential premises as part of its investigation into KBR, which it said was opened in March 2006. The probe comes after criticism that the SFO was doing too little on the case even though a British-based company and a British lawyer were at the centre of a plot, the Times noted.
During the investigations, information has surfaced suggesting that at least 10 years ago, members of TSKJ planned to make bribery payments to Nigerian officials.
According the Times article, documents from the French investigation show the payments relate to four separate contracts under which the consortium agreed to pay a total of just over $170 million to an offshore company controlled by London-based attorney, Jeffrey Tesler.
Investigators in the US, France and Nigeria, the Times said, have looked with particular interest at handwritten meeting minutes surrendered by Halliburton, in which the consortium partners use highly suggestive language about how they plan to do business.
"One note," the Times reports, "from December 1994 says that “all services” will cost the consortium $180m, with a further $60m allocated to “culture”.
"Elsewhere in the notes," the article says, "KBR and its consortium partners – Technip of France, Italy’s Snamprogetti and JGC of Japan – discuss the pros and cons of a series of possible “secret” and “open” payments to agents."
The payments were made during Cheney's tenure, and according to the Boson Globe, "If such payments were made and Cheney approved them, he could be guilty of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act."
Mr Tesler swears that Cheney knew about the bribes. He testified under oath in May, 2004 that he made payments to Jack Stanley, while Stanley was president of KBR, and specifically testified that Cheney approved the payments.
His testimony is backed up by banking records that show that at least $5 million in payments were wired to Stanley through a secret bank account in Zurich. Mr Tesler also testified that he paid $350,000 to another Halliburton executive, William Chaudran, through a secret bank account on the isle of Jersey.
A French magistrate has officially placed Mr Tesler under investigation for corruption of a foreign public official and is said to be offering him a deal if he implicates Dick Cheney.
Sources within the French legal system contend that there is more than enough evidence to indict Cheney on charges of bribery, money laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
In connection with the Bonny Island project, TSKJ entered into a series of agreements, including with Tri-Star Investments, of which Mr Tesler is a principal, beginning in 1995, and a series of subcontracts with a Japanese trading company beginning in 1996.
The SEC and DOJ are seeking to determine whether TSKJ’s engaged Tri-Star as an agent, and the Japanese company as a subcontractor, to make improper payments to Nigerian officials.
According to Halliburton's SEC filing, company representatives have met with the French magistrate and Nigerian officials and in October 2004, representatives of TSKJ testified before the Nigerian legislative committee.
If violations of the FCPA are found in these investigations, a guilty person or entity could be subject to fines, and civil penalties of up to $500,000 for each violation, as well as equitable remedies, including disgorgement, and injunctive relief.
Under the statute, criminal penalties could range from up to the greater of $2 million per violation or twice the gross pecuniary gain or loss. The SEC and the DOJ could also decide that continuing conduct constitutes multiple violations for purposes of assessing the penalty amounts for each violation.
Potential consequences of a criminal indictment to Halliburton could include suspension by the US Department of Defense, or other federal, state, or local government agencies, of KBR and its affiliates from their ability to contract with government agencies.
If a criminal or civil violation is found, KBR and its affiliates could be debarred from receiving future contracts and also from receiving new orders under existing contracts to provide services to any such entities, which would naturally include current KBR contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And this would be no small penalty for Halliburton. According to the company's SEC filing for the quarter ending June 30, 2006, during 2005, "KBR and its affiliates had revenue of approximately $6.6 billion from its government contracts work with agencies of the United States or state or local governments."
"Suspension or debarment from the government contracts business," the filing states, "would have a material adverse effect on the business, results of operations, and cash flows of KBR and Halliburton."
The investigations could also result in third-party claims against the company, "which may include claims for special, indirect, derivative or consequential damages, damage to our business or reputation, loss of, or adverse effect on, cash flow, assets, goodwill, results of operations, business, prospects, profits or business value, adverse consequences on our ability to obtain or continue financing for current or future projects or claims by directors, officers, employees, affiliates, advisors, attorneys, agents, debt holders or other interest holders or constituents of us or our subsidiaries," the SEC filing says.
In addition, Halliburton "could incur costs and expenses for any monitor required by or agreed to with governmental authority to review our continued compliance with FCPA law," it notes.
On another front, during the investigation into the Bonny Island project, the SEC filing states, "information has been uncovered suggesting that Mr. Stanley and other former employees may have engaged in coordinated bidding with one or more competitors on certain foreign construction projects, and that such coordination possibly began as early as the mid-1980s."
On the basis of this information, the DOJ is reportedly seeking to determine the nature of any improper bidding practices, whether antitrust laws were violated, and whether Halliburton employees have received payments as a result of such bidding practices on foreign projects.
If violations of antitrust laws are found to have occurred, according to Halliburton's SEC filing, "the range of possible penalties includes criminal fines, which could range up to the greater of $10 million in fines per count for a corporation, or twice the gross pecuniary gain or loss, and treble civil damages in favor of any persons financially injured by such violations."
"Criminal prosecutions," the filing states, "under applicable laws of relevant foreign jurisdictions and civil claims by, or relationship issues with customers, are also possible."
As part of the investigation, the SEC has issued subpoenas seeking information regarding current and former agents used in connection with projects over the past 20 years located in and outside of Nigeria in which MW Kellogg Company, MW Kellogg, Ltd, KBR or their joint ventures, as well as the Halliburton energy services business, were participants.
Halliburton says it has "produced documents to the SEC and the DOJ both voluntarily and pursuant to company subpoenas from the files of numerous officers of Halliburton and KBR, including current and former executives of Halliburton and KBR, and we are making our employees available to the SEC and the DOJ for interviews."
In addition, the SEC has issued a subpoena to Jack Stanley, and to other current and former KBR employees, former executive officers of KBR, and at least one subcontractor of KBR.
The DOJ has invoked its authority under a sitting grand jury to issue subpoenas for the purpose of obtaining information abroad, and other partners in TSKJ have provided information to the DOJ and the SEC related to the investigations.
Back in May of 2003, Halliburton was forced to admit to the SEC that it had paid $2.4 million in bribes to officials of Nigeria's Federal Inland Revenue Service in 2001 and 2002 "to obtain favorable tax treatment."
Of course Halliburton pointed the finger of blame at a couple of lowly employees for bribing the Nigerian IRS, and claimed that none of its senior officers were involved in the bribery plot. But as the Houston Chronicle pointed out at the time, "left unanswered is how a 'low-level employee' could channel that much money from the company to the pockets of a corrupt official."
The current investigation into the payment of $170 million in bribes could be near to a conclusion because Halliburton seems to be ready to throw in the towel.
"We have reason to believe," Halliburton said in its SEC filing, "based on the ongoing investigations, that payments may have been made to Nigerian officials."
So if Dick Cheney goes missing again, it probably just means that he's off being fitted for a new Halliburton uniform - a striped jumpsuit.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a formal investigation into whether Halliburton made improper payments to government officials in Nigeria in connection with the construction and expansion by TSKJ of a natural gas liquefaction complex and facilities at Bonny Island in Rivers State, Nigeria.
TSKJ is a company registered in Portugal whose members include Technip SA of France, Snamprogetti Netherlands BV, a subsidiary of Saipem SpA of Italy, JGC Corporation of Japan, and Kellogg Brown & Root, a successor to the MW Kellogg Company, each of which has a 25% interest in the venture.
TSKJ entered into various contracts to build and expand the liquefied natural gas project for Nigeria LNG Limited, which is owned by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp, Shell Gas BV, Cleag Limited, and Agip International BV, an affiliate of ENI SpA of Italy.
MW Kellogg Limited is a joint venture in which Halliburton has a 55% interest; and MW Kellogg Limited and the MW Kellogg Company were subsidiaries of Dresser Industries before Halliburton's 1998 acquisition of Dresser Industries. The MW Kellogg Company was later merged with a Halliburton subsidiary to form Kellogg Brown & Root.
The US Department of Justice is also conducting a related criminal investigation of the Nigerian bribery matter pursuant to the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
In addition to the SEC and the DOJ investigations, other investigations are being conducted in France, Nigeria and Switzerland and in Nigeria, a legislative committee of the National Assembly and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission are also investigating the matter.
And last but not least, on August 7, 2006, the Financial Times of London reported that KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is being investigated by Britain's Serious Fraud Office over the company's role in an alleged plot to pay more than $170 million in bribes to win $7 billion worth of contracts at a Nigerian oil plant.
For part of the period under investigation, the newspaper reported, Halliburton was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The SFO said it had conducted searches at business and residential premises as part of its investigation into KBR, which it said was opened in March 2006. The probe comes after criticism that the SFO was doing too little on the case even though a British-based company and a British lawyer were at the centre of a plot, the Times noted.
During the investigations, information has surfaced suggesting that at least 10 years ago, members of TSKJ planned to make bribery payments to Nigerian officials.
According the Times article, documents from the French investigation show the payments relate to four separate contracts under which the consortium agreed to pay a total of just over $170 million to an offshore company controlled by London-based attorney, Jeffrey Tesler.
Investigators in the US, France and Nigeria, the Times said, have looked with particular interest at handwritten meeting minutes surrendered by Halliburton, in which the consortium partners use highly suggestive language about how they plan to do business.
"One note," the Times reports, "from December 1994 says that “all services” will cost the consortium $180m, with a further $60m allocated to “culture”.
"Elsewhere in the notes," the article says, "KBR and its consortium partners – Technip of France, Italy’s Snamprogetti and JGC of Japan – discuss the pros and cons of a series of possible “secret” and “open” payments to agents."
The payments were made during Cheney's tenure, and according to the Boson Globe, "If such payments were made and Cheney approved them, he could be guilty of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act."
Mr Tesler swears that Cheney knew about the bribes. He testified under oath in May, 2004 that he made payments to Jack Stanley, while Stanley was president of KBR, and specifically testified that Cheney approved the payments.
His testimony is backed up by banking records that show that at least $5 million in payments were wired to Stanley through a secret bank account in Zurich. Mr Tesler also testified that he paid $350,000 to another Halliburton executive, William Chaudran, through a secret bank account on the isle of Jersey.
A French magistrate has officially placed Mr Tesler under investigation for corruption of a foreign public official and is said to be offering him a deal if he implicates Dick Cheney.
Sources within the French legal system contend that there is more than enough evidence to indict Cheney on charges of bribery, money laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
In connection with the Bonny Island project, TSKJ entered into a series of agreements, including with Tri-Star Investments, of which Mr Tesler is a principal, beginning in 1995, and a series of subcontracts with a Japanese trading company beginning in 1996.
The SEC and DOJ are seeking to determine whether TSKJ’s engaged Tri-Star as an agent, and the Japanese company as a subcontractor, to make improper payments to Nigerian officials.
According to Halliburton's SEC filing, company representatives have met with the French magistrate and Nigerian officials and in October 2004, representatives of TSKJ testified before the Nigerian legislative committee.
If violations of the FCPA are found in these investigations, a guilty person or entity could be subject to fines, and civil penalties of up to $500,000 for each violation, as well as equitable remedies, including disgorgement, and injunctive relief.
Under the statute, criminal penalties could range from up to the greater of $2 million per violation or twice the gross pecuniary gain or loss. The SEC and the DOJ could also decide that continuing conduct constitutes multiple violations for purposes of assessing the penalty amounts for each violation.
Potential consequences of a criminal indictment to Halliburton could include suspension by the US Department of Defense, or other federal, state, or local government agencies, of KBR and its affiliates from their ability to contract with government agencies.
If a criminal or civil violation is found, KBR and its affiliates could be debarred from receiving future contracts and also from receiving new orders under existing contracts to provide services to any such entities, which would naturally include current KBR contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And this would be no small penalty for Halliburton. According to the company's SEC filing for the quarter ending June 30, 2006, during 2005, "KBR and its affiliates had revenue of approximately $6.6 billion from its government contracts work with agencies of the United States or state or local governments."
"Suspension or debarment from the government contracts business," the filing states, "would have a material adverse effect on the business, results of operations, and cash flows of KBR and Halliburton."
The investigations could also result in third-party claims against the company, "which may include claims for special, indirect, derivative or consequential damages, damage to our business or reputation, loss of, or adverse effect on, cash flow, assets, goodwill, results of operations, business, prospects, profits or business value, adverse consequences on our ability to obtain or continue financing for current or future projects or claims by directors, officers, employees, affiliates, advisors, attorneys, agents, debt holders or other interest holders or constituents of us or our subsidiaries," the SEC filing says.
In addition, Halliburton "could incur costs and expenses for any monitor required by or agreed to with governmental authority to review our continued compliance with FCPA law," it notes.
On another front, during the investigation into the Bonny Island project, the SEC filing states, "information has been uncovered suggesting that Mr. Stanley and other former employees may have engaged in coordinated bidding with one or more competitors on certain foreign construction projects, and that such coordination possibly began as early as the mid-1980s."
On the basis of this information, the DOJ is reportedly seeking to determine the nature of any improper bidding practices, whether antitrust laws were violated, and whether Halliburton employees have received payments as a result of such bidding practices on foreign projects.
If violations of antitrust laws are found to have occurred, according to Halliburton's SEC filing, "the range of possible penalties includes criminal fines, which could range up to the greater of $10 million in fines per count for a corporation, or twice the gross pecuniary gain or loss, and treble civil damages in favor of any persons financially injured by such violations."
"Criminal prosecutions," the filing states, "under applicable laws of relevant foreign jurisdictions and civil claims by, or relationship issues with customers, are also possible."
As part of the investigation, the SEC has issued subpoenas seeking information regarding current and former agents used in connection with projects over the past 20 years located in and outside of Nigeria in which MW Kellogg Company, MW Kellogg, Ltd, KBR or their joint ventures, as well as the Halliburton energy services business, were participants.
Halliburton says it has "produced documents to the SEC and the DOJ both voluntarily and pursuant to company subpoenas from the files of numerous officers of Halliburton and KBR, including current and former executives of Halliburton and KBR, and we are making our employees available to the SEC and the DOJ for interviews."
In addition, the SEC has issued a subpoena to Jack Stanley, and to other current and former KBR employees, former executive officers of KBR, and at least one subcontractor of KBR.
The DOJ has invoked its authority under a sitting grand jury to issue subpoenas for the purpose of obtaining information abroad, and other partners in TSKJ have provided information to the DOJ and the SEC related to the investigations.
Back in May of 2003, Halliburton was forced to admit to the SEC that it had paid $2.4 million in bribes to officials of Nigeria's Federal Inland Revenue Service in 2001 and 2002 "to obtain favorable tax treatment."
Of course Halliburton pointed the finger of blame at a couple of lowly employees for bribing the Nigerian IRS, and claimed that none of its senior officers were involved in the bribery plot. But as the Houston Chronicle pointed out at the time, "left unanswered is how a 'low-level employee' could channel that much money from the company to the pockets of a corrupt official."
The current investigation into the payment of $170 million in bribes could be near to a conclusion because Halliburton seems to be ready to throw in the towel.
"We have reason to believe," Halliburton said in its SEC filing, "based on the ongoing investigations, that payments may have been made to Nigerian officials."
So if Dick Cheney goes missing again, it probably just means that he's off being fitted for a new Halliburton uniform - a striped jumpsuit.
Halliburton Contracts Illegal - But Bush Busts The Whistleblower
Evelyn Pringle August 31, 2005
In October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top military official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton when awarding military contracts.
The allegations made by this official were first reported by Time Magazine.
Greenhouse said that when the Pentagon awarded Halliburton a five-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions which she claimed were unprecedented in her experience.
In a letter from her attorney's office, Greenhouse told members of Congress that the Army gave the no-bid contracts to Halliburton's subsidiary KBR for political reasons.
Greenhouse charged that contracts were approved over her reservations, some of which were handwritten on the original contracts, and extensions of contracts were awarded because underlings signed them in collusion with senior officials without her knowledge.
A five-year Iraq contract was awarded less than a month before the invasion, under a clause which allowed for no-bid contracts in the case of a "compelling emergency." Greenhouse contends that she objected to the 5-year terms of the contract, questioning the probability of an emergency lasting for five years.
When her superiors signed off on the contract and sent it back for her approval, she wrote the following message next to her signature: "I caution that extending this sole-source effort beyond a one year period could convey an invalid perception that there is not strong intent for a limited competition."
Federal contracting rules say contracts must be awarded by career civil servants, not political appointees. Greenhouse claimed the Army ignored this requirement when giving contracts to Halliburton and violated "the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor."
"Employees of the U.S. government have taken improper action that favored KBR's interests," Greenhouse wrote. "This conduct has violated specific regulations and calls into question the independence" of the contracting process, she said.
She also said the Army altered documents in order to justify the Halliburton's contract work in the Balkans. In a letter from Michael Kohn, Greenhouse's attorney, to then acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee, Greenhouse charged that on a Balkan's contract, a deputy assistant secretary of the Army had ordered changes in documents to legitimize the contract "for political reasons."
According to Kohn's letter, in January 2002, Greenhouse sent an investigative team to review the Halliburton operation in the Balkans. After which she reported: "The general feeling in the theater is that the contractor (KBR) is 'out of control'" and was able to manipulate Corps of Engineer officials.
The Balkan's contract was scheduled to expire no later than May 27, 2004. However, it was extended without Greenhouse's knowledge, after a search for other contractors was stopped. Although the contract was originally awarded a "compelling emergency" exception, the extended contract was awarded under another exception, that KBR was the "one and only source."
Nothing was ever done about the illegal contracts awarded to Halliburton. Instead, less than a year after she reported these blatant violations of procurement law, Bush decided to bust the Whistleblower, Ms Greenhouse.
The August 29, 2005 New York Times reports: "A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.
"The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse," the Times wrote, "has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq."
Ms Greenhouse's lawyer, Michael Kohn, "called the action an "obvious reprisal" for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq," according to the Times.
Whistleblower Told The Truth
When Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept 14, 2003, he arrogantly stated: "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
And when Cheney was specifically asked whether he had known about Halliburton's no-bid contract, he said, "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."
Those statements were proven false on June, 2004, by an article in Time Magazine entitled, “The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?”
The truth is, Bush and Cheney both were informed that Halliburton would get the contract before it was ever awarded. Time Magazine quoted an email sent by the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith “contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.”
The author of the email, Stephen Browning, said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen Jay Garner met with Douglas Feith about plans to declassify the earlier $1.8 million contract with the Halliburton.
According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office.
The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later without allowing for any bids from other companies.
The email totally contradicts Cheney's televised claims that he had no involvement in Halliburton's contracts whatsoever and proves that Cheney and the White House played a key role in boosting Halliburton into the number one war profiteering position in Iraq.
When confronted with the email, Bush dismissed it by saying the Corp of Engineers was just trying to give the Vice President's office a heads-up on the process. Now I suppose people's opinions could vary as to what the email actually meant, depending on what the definition of co-or-di-na-ted is.
No Political Appointees Were Involved - None
In the heat of the debate over Halliburton contracts, some readers may recall a news conference, where Richard Boucher, spokesman for State Department at the time, explained how decisions are made on military contracts. "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts," he said.
Then the chief counsel of the Army Corp of Engineers appeared on "60 Minutes" where he denied that there was any involvement by political appointees in the Halliburton contract. He specifically said: "The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants."
We also heard from a spokesman from the Department of Defense, Major Joseph Yoswa, who claimed safeguards existed to insure that the process was free of favoritism. "Most important,” he said, “career civil servants, not political appointees, make final decisions on contracts," according to The New Yorker.
Next Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, stepped up to the mike in August, 2003, and said Halliburton's military contracts were awarded "not by politicians but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines."
Finally, during a hearing on March 11, 2004, before the Government Reform Committee, six senior government officials from the CPA and DOD testified under oath, and were each asked the following question by Republican Committee Chairman, Tom Davis:
"I want to get this on the record, and everybody is under oath. Have you or anyone in your office ever discussed with the Vice President or with his office the award of a contract for Iraqi reconstruction prior to any contract being awarded?"
Every single one of those six officials said "no sir," which means every single one of them lied under oath. I may not know how Cheney got this number of people to lie under oath, but the fact is he did it and nothing was ever done about it.
Three months after the hearing, the June 14, 2004, LA Times reported: "The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a political appointee from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job."
The political appointee referred to was Michael Mobbs, a special assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
During the Summer of 2002, the Times wrote, "Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG) to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry."
This is how the Halliburton contract got set up. In November 2002, a Pentagon group led by Mobbs (under Cheney's instruction), came up with the idea to pay Halliburton $1.9 million to develop a secret contingency plan for handling the Iraqi oil industry. Its important to understand that it was this order to develop a contingency plan, that ultimately led to the firm being awarded the $7 billion oil infrastructure contract.
To ensure that Halliburton would get the contract, Cheney used the exact same strategy that he developed back when he was secretary of defense during the first Bush Presidency. The way it works is actually quite simple. Halliburton gets funding to create a market for its services and then it becomes the logical company to carry out the plan when the time for awarding contracts rolls around.
I'm sure no one needs reminding of how well this plan paid off for Cheney when he left office in 1992 and soon thereafter became very gainfully employed with Halliburton. Ten years later, his method of contract manipulation worked like a charm again.
According to testimony at a House oversight hearing, by GAO investigator, William Woods, it was discovered that Michael Mobbs even acknowledged in a memo that the $1.9 million task order would uniquely position Halliburton to win the far larger sole-source contract to actually do the restoration work to Iraqi oil fields.
In fact, Mobbs himself later admitted that he had described the contingency plan in a meeting of the Deputies' Committee to an audience that including Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Rice's deputy national security adviser, Steven Hadley (guy who took the fall for the 16 words about uranium in Africa in Bush's state of the union address), the deputy secretaries of state and defense, and the deputy director of the CIA.
On March 8, 2003, Halliburton was awarded the $7 billion contract and the war began on March 20, 2003.
When the topic of the no-bid contract came up in the media, Bush claimed that it was merely a deal to put out oil well fires. However, Pentagon officials were soon forced to admit that it was a very big deal and would in fact amount to billions of dollars for Halliburton. But even then, the story of the day was that the contract was only temporary and would be replaced by competitive bidding shortly.
After months of senseless delays, new contracts were finally awarded on January 16, 2004 but once again, Halliburton netted the top prize. The Parsons Corporation was awarded an $800 million contract, but the $1.2 billion contract went to Halliburton.
During a June 8, 2004, briefing to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform, Mobbs and Pentagon officials were asked about the specific details of the contracting procedure that was employed with Halliburton.
Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were also at the meeting. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith that the group did not object.
These disclosures prove that Cheney and Bush were informed about the Halliburton contracts on at least two key occasions during the procurement process.
So we've got all these high level officials plotting together for 6 months to set up a plan to hand Halliburton billions of dollars, and Bush and Cheney expect us to believe that not one of these guys uttered a word about contracts to either one of them.
And the media is no help.
During the Clinton administration, it chased after a stupid story about a 20-year-old land deal involving $100,000 (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years and to this day, I still have never figured out what they were expecting to find exactly. I do know one thing, it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies were accused of funneling billions of tax dollars through the bodies of our slain and injured young soldiers like what is going on right now in the Bush administration.
The media in fact spends very little effort and time investigating and reporting on the real crimes within the current administration, even when they involve fraud and corruption by officials at every level of government who are openly handing our tax dollars to war profiteers to the tune of a billion dollars a month.
I often find myself wondering whether the mainstream media has been bought off entirely.
Who's Next In Line For Retaliation?
The question is, who's next? Greenhouse wasn't the only official to report on the illegal procurement practices of the Bush administration. According to a report on an investigation of Halliburton by the Government Accounting Office titled, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded to Halliburton without full and open competition, including Iraq's oil infrastructure contract.
The GAO determined that the administration had violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under already existing contracts and that out of 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts.
As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO report described how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation."
After wasting millions of tax dollars conducting the investigation, the GAO concluded that the contracts should have never been awarded to the company in the first place and yet Halliburton remains the number one contractor in Iraq. Go figure.
In October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top military official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton when awarding military contracts.
The allegations made by this official were first reported by Time Magazine.
Greenhouse said that when the Pentagon awarded Halliburton a five-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions which she claimed were unprecedented in her experience.
In a letter from her attorney's office, Greenhouse told members of Congress that the Army gave the no-bid contracts to Halliburton's subsidiary KBR for political reasons.
Greenhouse charged that contracts were approved over her reservations, some of which were handwritten on the original contracts, and extensions of contracts were awarded because underlings signed them in collusion with senior officials without her knowledge.
A five-year Iraq contract was awarded less than a month before the invasion, under a clause which allowed for no-bid contracts in the case of a "compelling emergency." Greenhouse contends that she objected to the 5-year terms of the contract, questioning the probability of an emergency lasting for five years.
When her superiors signed off on the contract and sent it back for her approval, she wrote the following message next to her signature: "I caution that extending this sole-source effort beyond a one year period could convey an invalid perception that there is not strong intent for a limited competition."
Federal contracting rules say contracts must be awarded by career civil servants, not political appointees. Greenhouse claimed the Army ignored this requirement when giving contracts to Halliburton and violated "the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor."
"Employees of the U.S. government have taken improper action that favored KBR's interests," Greenhouse wrote. "This conduct has violated specific regulations and calls into question the independence" of the contracting process, she said.
She also said the Army altered documents in order to justify the Halliburton's contract work in the Balkans. In a letter from Michael Kohn, Greenhouse's attorney, to then acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee, Greenhouse charged that on a Balkan's contract, a deputy assistant secretary of the Army had ordered changes in documents to legitimize the contract "for political reasons."
According to Kohn's letter, in January 2002, Greenhouse sent an investigative team to review the Halliburton operation in the Balkans. After which she reported: "The general feeling in the theater is that the contractor (KBR) is 'out of control'" and was able to manipulate Corps of Engineer officials.
The Balkan's contract was scheduled to expire no later than May 27, 2004. However, it was extended without Greenhouse's knowledge, after a search for other contractors was stopped. Although the contract was originally awarded a "compelling emergency" exception, the extended contract was awarded under another exception, that KBR was the "one and only source."
Nothing was ever done about the illegal contracts awarded to Halliburton. Instead, less than a year after she reported these blatant violations of procurement law, Bush decided to bust the Whistleblower, Ms Greenhouse.
The August 29, 2005 New York Times reports: "A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.
"The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse," the Times wrote, "has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq."
Ms Greenhouse's lawyer, Michael Kohn, "called the action an "obvious reprisal" for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq," according to the Times.
Whistleblower Told The Truth
When Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept 14, 2003, he arrogantly stated: "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
And when Cheney was specifically asked whether he had known about Halliburton's no-bid contract, he said, "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."
Those statements were proven false on June, 2004, by an article in Time Magazine entitled, “The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?”
The truth is, Bush and Cheney both were informed that Halliburton would get the contract before it was ever awarded. Time Magazine quoted an email sent by the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith “contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.”
The author of the email, Stephen Browning, said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen Jay Garner met with Douglas Feith about plans to declassify the earlier $1.8 million contract with the Halliburton.
According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office.
The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later without allowing for any bids from other companies.
The email totally contradicts Cheney's televised claims that he had no involvement in Halliburton's contracts whatsoever and proves that Cheney and the White House played a key role in boosting Halliburton into the number one war profiteering position in Iraq.
When confronted with the email, Bush dismissed it by saying the Corp of Engineers was just trying to give the Vice President's office a heads-up on the process. Now I suppose people's opinions could vary as to what the email actually meant, depending on what the definition of co-or-di-na-ted is.
No Political Appointees Were Involved - None
In the heat of the debate over Halliburton contracts, some readers may recall a news conference, where Richard Boucher, spokesman for State Department at the time, explained how decisions are made on military contracts. "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts," he said.
Then the chief counsel of the Army Corp of Engineers appeared on "60 Minutes" where he denied that there was any involvement by political appointees in the Halliburton contract. He specifically said: "The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants."
We also heard from a spokesman from the Department of Defense, Major Joseph Yoswa, who claimed safeguards existed to insure that the process was free of favoritism. "Most important,” he said, “career civil servants, not political appointees, make final decisions on contracts," according to The New Yorker.
Next Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, stepped up to the mike in August, 2003, and said Halliburton's military contracts were awarded "not by politicians but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines."
Finally, during a hearing on March 11, 2004, before the Government Reform Committee, six senior government officials from the CPA and DOD testified under oath, and were each asked the following question by Republican Committee Chairman, Tom Davis:
"I want to get this on the record, and everybody is under oath. Have you or anyone in your office ever discussed with the Vice President or with his office the award of a contract for Iraqi reconstruction prior to any contract being awarded?"
Every single one of those six officials said "no sir," which means every single one of them lied under oath. I may not know how Cheney got this number of people to lie under oath, but the fact is he did it and nothing was ever done about it.
Three months after the hearing, the June 14, 2004, LA Times reported: "The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a political appointee from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job."
The political appointee referred to was Michael Mobbs, a special assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
During the Summer of 2002, the Times wrote, "Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG) to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry."
This is how the Halliburton contract got set up. In November 2002, a Pentagon group led by Mobbs (under Cheney's instruction), came up with the idea to pay Halliburton $1.9 million to develop a secret contingency plan for handling the Iraqi oil industry. Its important to understand that it was this order to develop a contingency plan, that ultimately led to the firm being awarded the $7 billion oil infrastructure contract.
To ensure that Halliburton would get the contract, Cheney used the exact same strategy that he developed back when he was secretary of defense during the first Bush Presidency. The way it works is actually quite simple. Halliburton gets funding to create a market for its services and then it becomes the logical company to carry out the plan when the time for awarding contracts rolls around.
I'm sure no one needs reminding of how well this plan paid off for Cheney when he left office in 1992 and soon thereafter became very gainfully employed with Halliburton. Ten years later, his method of contract manipulation worked like a charm again.
According to testimony at a House oversight hearing, by GAO investigator, William Woods, it was discovered that Michael Mobbs even acknowledged in a memo that the $1.9 million task order would uniquely position Halliburton to win the far larger sole-source contract to actually do the restoration work to Iraqi oil fields.
In fact, Mobbs himself later admitted that he had described the contingency plan in a meeting of the Deputies' Committee to an audience that including Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Rice's deputy national security adviser, Steven Hadley (guy who took the fall for the 16 words about uranium in Africa in Bush's state of the union address), the deputy secretaries of state and defense, and the deputy director of the CIA.
On March 8, 2003, Halliburton was awarded the $7 billion contract and the war began on March 20, 2003.
When the topic of the no-bid contract came up in the media, Bush claimed that it was merely a deal to put out oil well fires. However, Pentagon officials were soon forced to admit that it was a very big deal and would in fact amount to billions of dollars for Halliburton. But even then, the story of the day was that the contract was only temporary and would be replaced by competitive bidding shortly.
After months of senseless delays, new contracts were finally awarded on January 16, 2004 but once again, Halliburton netted the top prize. The Parsons Corporation was awarded an $800 million contract, but the $1.2 billion contract went to Halliburton.
During a June 8, 2004, briefing to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform, Mobbs and Pentagon officials were asked about the specific details of the contracting procedure that was employed with Halliburton.
Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were also at the meeting. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith that the group did not object.
These disclosures prove that Cheney and Bush were informed about the Halliburton contracts on at least two key occasions during the procurement process.
So we've got all these high level officials plotting together for 6 months to set up a plan to hand Halliburton billions of dollars, and Bush and Cheney expect us to believe that not one of these guys uttered a word about contracts to either one of them.
And the media is no help.
During the Clinton administration, it chased after a stupid story about a 20-year-old land deal involving $100,000 (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years and to this day, I still have never figured out what they were expecting to find exactly. I do know one thing, it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies were accused of funneling billions of tax dollars through the bodies of our slain and injured young soldiers like what is going on right now in the Bush administration.
The media in fact spends very little effort and time investigating and reporting on the real crimes within the current administration, even when they involve fraud and corruption by officials at every level of government who are openly handing our tax dollars to war profiteers to the tune of a billion dollars a month.
I often find myself wondering whether the mainstream media has been bought off entirely.
Who's Next In Line For Retaliation?
The question is, who's next? Greenhouse wasn't the only official to report on the illegal procurement practices of the Bush administration. According to a report on an investigation of Halliburton by the Government Accounting Office titled, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded to Halliburton without full and open competition, including Iraq's oil infrastructure contract.
The GAO determined that the administration had violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under already existing contracts and that out of 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts.
As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO report described how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation."
After wasting millions of tax dollars conducting the investigation, the GAO concluded that the contracts should have never been awarded to the company in the first place and yet Halliburton remains the number one contractor in Iraq. Go figure.
Halliburton Contracts Illegal - Bush Says So What
Evelyn Pringle February 2005
After millions of tax dollars were spent investigating how Halliburton ended up being awarded billions of dollar worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq, the Government Accounting Office determined that the company should never have been awarded the contracts in the first place.
In response to those findings, Cheney and Bush both, as much as thumbed their noses at tax payers as if to say "so what, what are you going to do about it?" Well, it's beginning to look like they were right, there is nothing we can do about it.
According to the GAO's report, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded without full and open competition, including Halliburton’s oil infrastructure contract.
The GAO found that the Bush Administration violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under existing contracts. Of the 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts, according to the report.
As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO told how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation," the report said.
Once and For All - How Did Halliburton Get Those Contracts?
Remember back when Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept 14, 2003, and said, "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
And remember when he was asked whether he had known about Halliburton's noncompetitive contract, and he said, "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."
Those statements were proven false by a June, 2004, article in Time Magazine entitled, “The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?” As it turns out, Bush and Cheney both were informed that Halliburton would get the contract before it was awarded. Time quoted an email sent by the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith “contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.”
This email totally contradicts Cheney's nationally televised assertion that he had no involvement in Halliburton's contracts whatsoever. It proved once and for all that Cheney and the White House had played a key role in making Cheney's ex-employer the number one war profiteer in Iraq.
The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later without any bids by other companies.
The administration tried to dismiss the email by saying the employee at the Corp was just trying to give the Vice President's office a heads-up on the process. Now I suppose opinions on what the email mean could differ. However, people's opinions on what it means are likely based on what their definition of co-or-di-na-ted IS.
No Political Appointees Involved - None
Some people may recall the news conference, where State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, explained who makes the decisions on contracts. "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts," he maintained. Boucher lied.
Then there was the time that the chief counsel of the Army Corp of Engineers appeared on "60 Minutes" and denied that there was any involvement by political appointees in the Halliburton contract. He specifically said: "The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants." Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this guy is a liar too.
Major Joseph Yoswa, a Department of Defense spokesman, also claimed safeguards existed to insure that the process was free of favoritism. "Most important,” he said, “career civil servants, not political appointees, make final decisions on contracts," according to The New Yorker. As it turns out, the Major has a problem telling the truth as well.
Then back in August, 2003, there was Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, who said the company’s military contracts were awarded "not by politicians but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines." I for one, would like to see the list of strict guidelines, and then, I'd like to have the names of the civil servants Wendy dealt with.
Finally, during a March 11, 2004, hearing before the Government Reform Committee, six senior officials from the CPA and DOD testified under oath, and were asked to answer the following question by Republican Committee Chairman, Tom Davis:
"I want to get this on the record, and everybody is under oath. Have you or anyone in your office ever discussed with the Vice President or with his office the award of a contract for Iraqi reconstruction prior to any contract being awarded?"
Every single one of those six officials said "no sir," which means every single one of them lied under oath. So how Cheney could pull this off? How could he get all these people to lie? I may not know how he did it, but the fact is he did it and nothing has been done about it.
Because, according to the June 14, 2004, LA Times, "The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a political appointee from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job. ... the political appointee was Michael Mobbs — a special assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. During the Summer of 2002, Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG) to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry," the Times reported.
For obvious reasons, contracting experts say political appointees like Mobbs should not decide which companies compete for contracts. "The suggestion that political appointees would be directing that type of investigation does not seem consistent with maintaining the appearance of propriety," expert Steven Schooner told the Times.
How Could They Pull This Off?
In November 2002, long before the war began, a Pentagon group led by Mobbs, deceded to pay Halliburton $1.9 million to develop a secret contingency plan for handling the Iraqi oil industry.
Tax payers need to understand that it was this initial task order to develop a plan, that led to the company being awarded the $7 billion oil infrastructure contract.
Remember the strategy that Cheney's developed back when he was secretary of defense under the first President Bush. It goes like this, you give Halliburton funding so it can create a market for its services and then its the logical company to hire to carry out the plan when it comes time for contracts to be awarded.
In this particular instance, according to testimony by GAO investigator, Willim Woods, at a House oversight hearing, Mobbs even acknowledged in a memo that the $1.9 million task order would uniquely position Halliburton to win the far larger sole-source contract to actually do the restoration work to Iraqi oil fields.
So once again, Cheney’s contract manipulation strategy worked like a charm.
Mott described the Halliburton contingency plan in a meeting of the Deputies Committee. Those attending the meeting included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, the deputy national security adviser, Steven Hadley, the deputy secretaries of state and defense, and deputy director of the CIA.
On March 8, 2003, Halliburton was chosen to carry out the plan. When the contract came up in the media, Bush claimed the contract was merely a deal to put out oil well fires. However, it wasn't long before Pentagon officials were forced to admit that it was a big deal and would involve billions of dollars. But even then, they said that the contract was only temporary and would be replaced by competitively bid contracts shortly.
After umteen delays, new contracts were finally awarded on Jan 16, 2004 and surprise, surprise, Halliburton won the big prize again. An $800 million contract went to the Parsons Corporation, and a $1.2 billion contract went to Halliburton.
Bush and Cheney In Up To Their Necks
During a June 8, 2004 briefing to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform, Pentagon officials, including Mobbs, were asked about the specific details of the contracting procedure that was employed with Halliburton.
Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were among those at the meeting.
So, we've got Cheney's top dog, Libby, and Rice's second in command, Hadley, and White House staff members, and political appointee, Mobbs, leading the pack. And Bush and Cheney want us to believe that not one of these officials uttered a word about Halliburton contracts to either one of them. Yea right.
Following the June 8th Mobb's briefing, Waxman sent a letter to Cheney and gave reporters a copy. "These new disclosures appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts," Waxman wrote. "They also seem to contradict the administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of the contracts to Halliburton," he said.
The letter described the briefing at which Mobbs acknowledged that he chose Halliburton. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith the group did not object, according to Waxman's letter.
Waxman also raised questions about the March 5, 2003, e-mail that Cheney received. The author of that email, Stephen Browning, said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen Jay Garner met with Douglas Feith about plans to declassify the earlier $1.8 million contract with the Halliburton.
According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office. Three days later, Halliburton got the $7 billion contract and the war began March 20, 2003. At the briefing, "Browning repeated his story," Waxman wrote.
"These disclosures mean that your office was informed about the Halliburton contracts at least twice at key moments," Waxman wrote.
When Waxman tried to investigate the matter further, Cheney simply refused to respond to a request for records of any communications he and his staff had with Halliburton, or actions they took on the contracts. And in what has by now become a pattern when it comes to Cheney, Congress did nothing about it.
The Whistleblower
Finally, in October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton.
Greenhouse said that when the Pentagon awarded the company a 5-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions that were unprecedented in her experience, she said.
The Greenhouse allegations were first reported by Time Magazine. In a letter, Greenhouse told members of Congress that the Army gave the no-bid contract to Halliburton for political reasons. She also said the Army altered documents in order to justify the company's contract work in the Balkans.
Federal contracting rules say contracts must be awarded by career civil servants, not political appointees. Greenhouse said the Army ignored this requirement when giving contracts to Halliburton. She said the Army violated "the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor."
"Employees of the U.S. government have taken improper action that favored KBR's interests," Greenhouse said in the letter. "This conduct has violated specific regulations and calls into question the independence" of the contracting process.
Bush and Cheney Are Busted - So What?
The media chased after that dumb 20-year-old Whitewater story (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years To this day, I still don't know what they were trying to prove exactly. I do know it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies had scammed billions of dollars from tax payers. Yet now with Bush administration, the media spends little or no effort exposing crimes involving real fraud and corruption even though the schemes are costing tax payers billions of dollars.
Has the mainstream media been bought off entirely?
After millions of tax dollars were spent investigating how Halliburton ended up being awarded billions of dollar worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq, the Government Accounting Office determined that the company should never have been awarded the contracts in the first place.
In response to those findings, Cheney and Bush both, as much as thumbed their noses at tax payers as if to say "so what, what are you going to do about it?" Well, it's beginning to look like they were right, there is nothing we can do about it.
According to the GAO's report, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded without full and open competition, including Halliburton’s oil infrastructure contract.
The GAO found that the Bush Administration violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under existing contracts. Of the 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts, according to the report.
As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO told how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation," the report said.
Once and For All - How Did Halliburton Get Those Contracts?
Remember back when Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept 14, 2003, and said, "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
And remember when he was asked whether he had known about Halliburton's noncompetitive contract, and he said, "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."
Those statements were proven false by a June, 2004, article in Time Magazine entitled, “The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?” As it turns out, Bush and Cheney both were informed that Halliburton would get the contract before it was awarded. Time quoted an email sent by the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith “contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.”
This email totally contradicts Cheney's nationally televised assertion that he had no involvement in Halliburton's contracts whatsoever. It proved once and for all that Cheney and the White House had played a key role in making Cheney's ex-employer the number one war profiteer in Iraq.
The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later without any bids by other companies.
The administration tried to dismiss the email by saying the employee at the Corp was just trying to give the Vice President's office a heads-up on the process. Now I suppose opinions on what the email mean could differ. However, people's opinions on what it means are likely based on what their definition of co-or-di-na-ted IS.
No Political Appointees Involved - None
Some people may recall the news conference, where State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, explained who makes the decisions on contracts. "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts," he maintained. Boucher lied.
Then there was the time that the chief counsel of the Army Corp of Engineers appeared on "60 Minutes" and denied that there was any involvement by political appointees in the Halliburton contract. He specifically said: "The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants." Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this guy is a liar too.
Major Joseph Yoswa, a Department of Defense spokesman, also claimed safeguards existed to insure that the process was free of favoritism. "Most important,” he said, “career civil servants, not political appointees, make final decisions on contracts," according to The New Yorker. As it turns out, the Major has a problem telling the truth as well.
Then back in August, 2003, there was Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, who said the company’s military contracts were awarded "not by politicians but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines." I for one, would like to see the list of strict guidelines, and then, I'd like to have the names of the civil servants Wendy dealt with.
Finally, during a March 11, 2004, hearing before the Government Reform Committee, six senior officials from the CPA and DOD testified under oath, and were asked to answer the following question by Republican Committee Chairman, Tom Davis:
"I want to get this on the record, and everybody is under oath. Have you or anyone in your office ever discussed with the Vice President or with his office the award of a contract for Iraqi reconstruction prior to any contract being awarded?"
Every single one of those six officials said "no sir," which means every single one of them lied under oath. So how Cheney could pull this off? How could he get all these people to lie? I may not know how he did it, but the fact is he did it and nothing has been done about it.
Because, according to the June 14, 2004, LA Times, "The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a political appointee from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job. ... the political appointee was Michael Mobbs — a special assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. During the Summer of 2002, Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG) to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry," the Times reported.
For obvious reasons, contracting experts say political appointees like Mobbs should not decide which companies compete for contracts. "The suggestion that political appointees would be directing that type of investigation does not seem consistent with maintaining the appearance of propriety," expert Steven Schooner told the Times.
How Could They Pull This Off?
In November 2002, long before the war began, a Pentagon group led by Mobbs, deceded to pay Halliburton $1.9 million to develop a secret contingency plan for handling the Iraqi oil industry.
Tax payers need to understand that it was this initial task order to develop a plan, that led to the company being awarded the $7 billion oil infrastructure contract.
Remember the strategy that Cheney's developed back when he was secretary of defense under the first President Bush. It goes like this, you give Halliburton funding so it can create a market for its services and then its the logical company to hire to carry out the plan when it comes time for contracts to be awarded.
In this particular instance, according to testimony by GAO investigator, Willim Woods, at a House oversight hearing, Mobbs even acknowledged in a memo that the $1.9 million task order would uniquely position Halliburton to win the far larger sole-source contract to actually do the restoration work to Iraqi oil fields.
So once again, Cheney’s contract manipulation strategy worked like a charm.
Mott described the Halliburton contingency plan in a meeting of the Deputies Committee. Those attending the meeting included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, the deputy national security adviser, Steven Hadley, the deputy secretaries of state and defense, and deputy director of the CIA.
On March 8, 2003, Halliburton was chosen to carry out the plan. When the contract came up in the media, Bush claimed the contract was merely a deal to put out oil well fires. However, it wasn't long before Pentagon officials were forced to admit that it was a big deal and would involve billions of dollars. But even then, they said that the contract was only temporary and would be replaced by competitively bid contracts shortly.
After umteen delays, new contracts were finally awarded on Jan 16, 2004 and surprise, surprise, Halliburton won the big prize again. An $800 million contract went to the Parsons Corporation, and a $1.2 billion contract went to Halliburton.
Bush and Cheney In Up To Their Necks
During a June 8, 2004 briefing to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform, Pentagon officials, including Mobbs, were asked about the specific details of the contracting procedure that was employed with Halliburton.
Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were among those at the meeting.
So, we've got Cheney's top dog, Libby, and Rice's second in command, Hadley, and White House staff members, and political appointee, Mobbs, leading the pack. And Bush and Cheney want us to believe that not one of these officials uttered a word about Halliburton contracts to either one of them. Yea right.
Following the June 8th Mobb's briefing, Waxman sent a letter to Cheney and gave reporters a copy. "These new disclosures appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts," Waxman wrote. "They also seem to contradict the administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of the contracts to Halliburton," he said.
The letter described the briefing at which Mobbs acknowledged that he chose Halliburton. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith the group did not object, according to Waxman's letter.
Waxman also raised questions about the March 5, 2003, e-mail that Cheney received. The author of that email, Stephen Browning, said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen Jay Garner met with Douglas Feith about plans to declassify the earlier $1.8 million contract with the Halliburton.
According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office. Three days later, Halliburton got the $7 billion contract and the war began March 20, 2003. At the briefing, "Browning repeated his story," Waxman wrote.
"These disclosures mean that your office was informed about the Halliburton contracts at least twice at key moments," Waxman wrote.
When Waxman tried to investigate the matter further, Cheney simply refused to respond to a request for records of any communications he and his staff had with Halliburton, or actions they took on the contracts. And in what has by now become a pattern when it comes to Cheney, Congress did nothing about it.
The Whistleblower
Finally, in October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton.
Greenhouse said that when the Pentagon awarded the company a 5-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions that were unprecedented in her experience, she said.
The Greenhouse allegations were first reported by Time Magazine. In a letter, Greenhouse told members of Congress that the Army gave the no-bid contract to Halliburton for political reasons. She also said the Army altered documents in order to justify the company's contract work in the Balkans.
Federal contracting rules say contracts must be awarded by career civil servants, not political appointees. Greenhouse said the Army ignored this requirement when giving contracts to Halliburton. She said the Army violated "the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor."
"Employees of the U.S. government have taken improper action that favored KBR's interests," Greenhouse said in the letter. "This conduct has violated specific regulations and calls into question the independence" of the contracting process.
Bush and Cheney Are Busted - So What?
The media chased after that dumb 20-year-old Whitewater story (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years To this day, I still don't know what they were trying to prove exactly. I do know it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies had scammed billions of dollars from tax payers. Yet now with Bush administration, the media spends little or no effort exposing crimes involving real fraud and corruption even though the schemes are costing tax payers billions of dollars.
Has the mainstream media been bought off entirely?
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