September 12, 2005
Evelyn Pringle
I have come to the conclusion that even if I live to be 100, I will never be able to track down every Bush-connected profiteer involved in this phony war on terror scheme. According to a report released in March 2005, by Transparency International (TI), an international organization that focuses on matters of corruption, Iraq could become "the biggest corruption scandal in history."
"I can see all sorts of levels of corruption in Iraq," report contributor Reinoud Leenders told the Christian Science Monitor, "starting from petty officials asking for bribes to process a passport, way up to contractors delivering shoddy work and the kind of high-level corruption involving ministers and high officials handing out contracts to their friends and clients."
One of the top ten crooks, has got to be Ahmed Chalabi. A former banker in Jordon, Chalabi was forced to flee the country in 1989 before he could be arrested for his involvement in a $200 million financial scam. He was later tried and found guilty in his absence, and sentenced to 22 years in prison for more than 30 charges of theft, embezzlement, misuse of depositor funds, and currency speculation.
However, a little criminal history obviously didn't bother the Bush gang, because Chalabi was one of the first Iraqis flown into Iraq by the Pentagon during the 2003 invasion, supposedly so he could solidify his political base, which pretty much has proved to be non-existent.
By now, I cannot believe that anyone could possibly doubt Chalabi's role in the plot to take over Iraq. He was very much in the loop from day one, according to a March 17, 2005, report by BBC's Newsnight which said, "the Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil." Insiders told Newsnight that the planning began "within weeks" of Bush taking office.
An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant, Falah Aljibury, told Newsnight that he took part in secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat. Aljibury said that he had even interviewed potential successors for Saddam on behalf of the Bush administration.
However, "The industry-favored plan was pushed aside by yet another secret plan," wrote Newnight, "drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields."
The sell-off plan was given the OK at a secret meeting headed by none other that Ahmed Chalabi, shortly after the invasion of Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst. He attended the London meeting at the request of the State Department, Ebel told Newsnight.
Falah Aljibury contends that it was the plan to sell off Iraq's oil, which ultimately led to the insurgency and attacks on US occupying forces. "We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatization is coming," he reported.
Of course it probably didn't help matters when the Iraqis were forced to watch as Halliburton's fortunes increased with money from the Development Fund for Iraq, through the award of 5 no-bid contracts, by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to the tune of $222 million, $325 million, $180 million, and a total of $194 million for the last two, which I just happened to find listed back in the Appendix to a July 28, 2004, report by the CPA Inspector General, titled "Comptroller Cash Management Controls over the Development Fund for Iraq."
The CPA Office of the Inspector General (CPA-IG) was established by Congress on November 6, 2003, to serve as “as an independent, objective evaluator of the operations and activities of the CPA,” according to the official web site. The CPA-IG reported directly to Administrator Paul Bremer, although it had independent authority to conduct audits and investigations without the Administrator’s approval.
A report in January 2005, by CPA Inspector General, Stuart Bowen, concluded that occupation authorities accounted poorly for $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds. "The CPA did not implement adequate financial controls," Bowen said.
That was definitely an understatement. A former CPA senior adviser, Franklin Willis, compared Iraq to the "Wild West," saying he delivered one $2 million payment to one company, Custer Battles, in bricks of cash.
"We called Mike Battles in and said, 'Bring a bag'," Willis said in testimony before Congress in February 2005.
Custer was another piece of work. Two former employees turned whistleblowers filed a law suit against the company with a complaint that said among other things, that Custer Battles double-billed for salaries and repainted the Iraqi Airways forklifts they found at the Baghdad airport, which Custer was hired to secure, and then leased them back to the US government. The two former employees, Pete Baldwin and Robert Isakson, claim Custer swindled the CPA out of about $50 million.
Bush was quick to criticize the UN over millions of dollars stolen from the Oil-for-Food Program under Saddam. But the CPA, as the successor to Oil-for-Food Program, aka Development Fund for Iraq, involves the swindling of billions of dollars.
And Custer represents only one crooked contractor. The investigation by the CPA-IG which resulted in the Comptroller Cash Management Report, determined that when it came to Iraqi cash, proper accountability was not maintained, physical security was inadequate, records were incomplete, and fund managers’ responsibilities were not assigned properly.
The auditors who participated in the investigation were unable to reconcile financial statements for the DFI, in large part due to the CPA’s decision to use cash basis accounting, which is more difficult to track than accrual accounting.
The investigators also found poor oversight of the fund managers who were responsible for transferring payments. While examining 15 disbursement locations, the auditors found that officials routinely failed to properly document advances to paying agents and receipts. For example, officials at 14 of the sites did not even maintain a register of cleared receipts. In examining 26 paid receipts, they found 25 had no supporting invoices, and all 26 were missing one or more of the required signatures.
They determined that of $400 million available for disbursement, as much as $50 million was handed out without proper receipts. “During the review, we found that there were no supporting receipts for some invoices; receipts were cleared with limited explanations of services or materiel received; and funds were disbursed for services that were contradictory to the allowable expenses,” the Inspector General said in the report.
Similarly, a United Nations sanctioned audit concluded that about half of the $5 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds could not be accounted for because of poor financial controls, according to the “Development Fund of Iraq-Report of Factual Findings in connection with Disbursements from January 1, 2004 to 28 June 2004, by the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, in September 2004
Until the summer of 2004, the CPA refused to release the names of companies that were awarded contracts paid for with Iraqi funds. Although information was available about US funded contracts, there was no public information available about companies paid with Iraqi money. In August 2004, information was finally made available for contracts valued at more than $5 million. But to this day, no details have been released about contracts worth less than $5 million.
An analysis of the data released in August 2004, showed that the CPA had awarded 85% of the contracts to US and UK firms. By contrast, Iraqi companies received a mere 2% of the contracts paid for with Iraqi funds.
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 (ORHA), 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.
The audit said that the DoD cannot be assured that it either “provided the best contracting solution or paid fair and reasonable prices for the goods and services purchased” during the reconstruction process.
However, not only did the CPA fail to follow DoD reporting rules, it failed to follow its own rules. CPA regulation Number 2 required the CPA to retain an independent certified public accounting firm to ensure that the Development Fund of Iraq was being used transparently and for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
But instead of hiring a certified public accounting firm, the CPA awarded a $1.4 million contract to North Star Consultants, a financial services firm, to review its internal controls for the DFI. In the end, neither North Star, nor any other firm, ever performed a review, because the Comptroller “verbally modified the contract and employed the contractor to primarily perform accounting tasks in the Comptroller’s office,” the report said.
In response to the report, the CPA claimed the reason that North Star did not perform a review was because the contract was not signed until shortly before the CPA was dissolved. Although it acknowledged that the contract “should have been modified to reflect the change,” the CPA did not bother to explain why it would award a contract to review its control of the DFI if the organization was about to be dissolved.
The truth is, that the CPA' shabby accounting procedures left all doors open to fraud, waste, bribery, and the misappropriation of funds, and nobody will ever be able to figure out what exactly happened to the Iraqi money.
But the fact remains that Halliburton received 60% of all contracts paid for with Iraqi money, even after it was proven time and time again that its projects involved fraud on every front, from paying over $6 million in kickbacks to a Kuwaiti contractor; to charging for three times as many meals as the company actually served to soldiers; to spending millions on laundry and monogrammed towels; to running up costs by driving empty trucks back and forth across Iraq; to leasing overpriced vehicles from Kuwaiti purchasing offices.
In 2003, Halliburton was delivering gasoline, through the Kuwait subcontractor, Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company, for an average price of $2.65 per gallon. In the spring of 2004, the contract was canceled and the new Iraqi Interim government gave an identical contract to Lloyd Owens International, a British company that manages 700 trucks from 7 separate subcontractors, which left Halliburton resentful toward the new company because of losing the contract.
LOI and its partners, Geotech Environmental Services of Kuwait, only charged 18 cents a gallon to haul the gasoline to the same sites.
An oversight hearing on "Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in U.S. Government Contracting in Iraq" was held on June 27, 2005, conducted by Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee.
Alan Waller, CEO of Lloyd Owens International, and his business partner, Gary Butters, flew to the US to testify at the hearing.
Waller said that over the past year while working in southern Iraq, he had encountered only one Halliburton worker and that every fuel station set up to provide gasoline to the Iraqis was in bad shape, including those that Halliburton was supposed to have repaired.
"As Lloyd-Owen delivers fuel to nearly every refinery or depot in southern Iraq, we find ourselves frequently encountering examples of poor equipment, no equipment or complaints from Iraqi staff," Waller said.
Waller and Butters told lawmakers at the hearing that every morning the drivers of 120 trucks who line up at the Kuwait-Iraq border to deliver gasoline have to cross the border at dawn because if they wait too long, KBR employees who patrol the border during the day, will subject them to far-reaching inspections and effectively shut down the operation.
The LOI also reported that on June 9th, 2005, a convoy of LOI trucks that was on its way to deliver construction materials for a Halliburton dining facility at an army base near Fallujah, came under attack and 3 drivers were presumed dead and six trucks had to be abandoned.
The surviving drivers limped to a military base, expecting to get help from the Halliburton staff running the facility, but instead got the cold shoulder. When the drivers tried to leave Iraq, they hit a roadside bomb and another man was killed.
Waller said Halliburton employees were instructed not to help the drivers and that the company had failed to warn LOI that two other convoy had been attacked in the same area the previous week.
At the start of the hearing, Congressman, Henry Waxman, (D-CA), introduced a new study based mostly on confidential reports originating from the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA).
The study revealed that overall, Halliburton had received roughly 52% of the $25.4 billion that has been paid out to private contractors in Iraq. The 52% was divided between two different contracts. The first, known as LOGCAP, was to provide logistical support like cooking and cleaning for the troops, and was outsourced to civilian workers, for which Halliburton had been paid $8.6 billion.
On the LOGCAP contract, the company was paid for its actual costs, plus an additional commission of between 1 to 3 percent, depending on its performance.
The "Restoring Iraq Oil" contract covered the repair of Iraqi oil fields in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion and imports of consumer fuel. The RIO contract is now complete and ended up costing $2.5 billion. A second RIO contract is now underway.
New evidence of fraud and contract abuse, was released right before the hearing and showed that KGB:
1) Had overcharged or presented questionable bills for close to $1.5 billion, almost four times the previous amount disclosed.
2) Had lost 12 pre-fabricated bases worth over $75 million which could have housed as many as 6,600 soldiers.
3) Had billed $152,000 to provide a movie library for 2,500 soldiers
4) Had billed inconsistently across the board. Eg, Video cassette players cost $300 in some instances, and $1000 in others; the company charged $2.31 for towels on one day and $5 for the same towels on another.
Rory Maryberry, a former Halliburton contractor, who worked at the dining facilities at the largest military base in Iraq, also testified at the hearing. Mayberry said the company charged the government for serving 20,000 meals a day when it was only serving 10,000 and that he was sent to a more dangerous post as punishment for speaking to auditors.
In a video-taped deposition testimony played at the hearing, Mayberry told how Halliburton would sometimes supply food that was more than a year past the expiration date or that had spoiled due to poor refrigeration. The few times the military refused to accept the spoiled food, Maryberry said truckers were told to deliver it to the next base in the hope that they would escape scrutiny.
He said that Halliburton was also supposed to serve 600 meals to Turkish and Filipino workers in Iraq, and "although KBR charged for this service, it didn't prepare the meals. Instead, these workers were given leftover food in boxes and garbage bags after the troops ate. Sometimes there were not leftovers to give them," he said.
According to Mayberry, "Iraqi drivers of food convoys that arrived on the base were not fed. They were given Meals Ready to Eat, with pork, which they couldn't eat for religious reasons."
"As a result, the drivers would raid the trucks for food," he said.
The star witness at the hearing was Bunnatine Greenhouse, a former math teacher, who moved up the latter to become the highest ranked civilian employee in the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for signing off on Iraq contracts. She testified that her superiors forced her to sign no-bid contracts for Halliburton on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.
She filed a complaint against her superiors for harassment but the harassment has not ceased. She said Pentagon attorneys had to tried to talk her out of testifying at the hearing three days before the hearing date.
"I have agreed to voluntarily appear at this hearing in my personal capacity because I have exhausted all internal avenues to correct contracting abuse I observed while serving this great nation as the United States Army Corps of Engineers senior procurement executive," Greenhouse said. "In order to remain true to my oath of office, I must disclose to appropriate members of Congress serious and ongoing contract abuse I cannot address internally," she said.
"I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career," she said in her testimony.
Members of Congress at the hearing reacted strongly to Greenhouse's revelations. "This testimony doesn't just call for Congressional oversight -- it screams for it," Senator Dorgan said.
Hover, I have not heard of any oversight hearings in response to Greenhouse's testimony. Instead, about a short time after the hearing I read the August 29, 2005 New York Times which said: "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."
In fact, none of testimony by any witness phased the top brass at the Pentagon one bit. On May 1, 2005, the Army quietly awarded the company a new contract worth nearly $5 billion to continue on with its wonderful logistical support of the soldiers in Iraq, and last I knew, the contract is as good as money in the bank for KBR.
But then what the hell. People have been nagging Halliburton of war profiteering for over 40 years. In 1966, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Illinois, demanded to know about the 30-year association between Halliburton Chairman George R. Brown and Lyndon B. Johnson. Brown had contributed $23,000 to the President’s Club while the Congress was considering whether to continue another multimillion-dollar Brown & Root Services project, according a report by the Center for Public Integrity, on August 2, 2001. “Why this huge contract has not been and is not now being adequately audited is beyond me. The potential for waste and profiteering under such a contract is substantial,” the indignant Republican Congressman, Donald Rumsfeld said.
In 1982, the GAO reported that the company lost accounting control of $120 million and that its security was so poor that millions of dollars worth of equipment had been stolen.
For those readers who may hoping that the millions of tax dollar spent on all the investigations and hearings discussed in this report might result in a turn-around by contractors in Iraq, here is a discomforting tidbit. According to the July 15, 2005 Boston Globe, "The federal government's chief investigator yesterday blasted the Pentagon for its 'atrocious financial management,'" saying the Defense Department was not able to give federal oversight officials a full accounting of the $1 billion being spent each week on the war in Iraq."
I'm not sure whether the Americans or the Iraqis are picking up the tab for the billion a week, but I think it must the Iraqis in light of the latest announcement by officials in Iraq. On September 9, 2005, the Guardian reported that, "Key rebuilding projects in Iraq are grinding to a halt because American money is running out and security has diverted funds intended for electricity, water and sanitation, according to US officials."
There are an estimated 20,000 foreign security contractors currently in Iraq, with some being paid more than $1,000 a day. According to IG, Stuart Bowen, $5 billion of the $18.4 billion appropriated by Congress for reconstruction, has been diverted to security.
A GAO report said that "attacks, threats and intimidation against project contractors and subcontractors" were to blame.
For those wondering what kind of bang the Iraqis got for their big bucks, some areas of Iraq still only get less than four hours of electricity a day. The estimated cost of providing enough electricity for the country by 2010 is $20 billion, according to the Guardian.
Water and sanitation projects have been hit hard. According to a report published early this month by the GAO, so far, $2.6 billion has been spent on water projects, but that amount equals only half the sum allocated for the work, because the remainder was spent for security and other uses.
A quarter of the $200 million worth of completed water projects handed over to the Iraqi authorities no longer work properly because of "looting, unreliable electricity or inadequate Iraqi staff and supplies," the GAO report said. There has be a surge in cases of dehydration and diarrhea among children and the elderly.
Shortages of fuel have produced lines a mile long at gas stations. Crude oil production is averaging around 2.2 million barrels a day, still below its pre-war peaks, according to the Brookings Institution in Washington.
As for Halliburton, it is currently facing a number of investigations for overcharging in Iraq, according to a report released in March 2005, by Rep Henry Waxman (D-CA).
But hey, what better choice could Bush have made than for Halliburton to get the $700 million reconstruction contract to repair the damage caused by Katrina? I mean, look what the firm has done for the Iraqis.
And just think how thankful the Iraqis must feel toward Bush, especially the ones who have managed to stay alive.
Showing posts with label Greenhouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greenhouse. Show all posts
Monday, August 2, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
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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