Let me first say I don’t believe in any of that war profiteering conspiracy BS the Left often spouts. But it’s still disgusting what this company has done to the U.S. (and the U.S. taxpayer, i.e. all of us), and a further consequence of the increasing privatization of much of the defense establishment under Rumsfeld.
Halliburton’s Fleecing Ends – Or Does It?: Margaret Carlson
2006-07-17 00:10 (New York)
Commentary by Margaret Carlson
July 17 (Bloomberg) – I wonder how many customers
McDonald’s Corp. would keep if instead of including a Coke with a
Happy Meal, as the menu promised, the company charged for it
twice.
That’s what Halliburton Co. did to Uncle Sam, billing $45
for soda by the case and billing for it again when served by the
glass at meals.
It’s all part of the cost-plus, no-bid life of Halliburton
and its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, the sole source of
just about everything the U.S. Army needs to supply troops in
Iraq. For three years, the U.S. government kept paying double for
soda and many other things with nary a complaint.
But last week, all that ground to a screeching halt when the
Pentagon announced the end of no-bid contracts – or did it?
Not really. That’s like saying to the outlaw Jesse James,
``We’ll no longer hand over the money. You have to ask nicely.‘’
Which is not to compare Halliburton to a common criminal.
There’s nothing common about what Halliburton did and a
heist of $1.4 billion, an estimate of Halliburton’s overcharges
by Pentagon auditors.
Two sets of hearings by Representative Henry Waxman and
Senator Byron Dorgan, using the Pentagon’s own information,
exposed Halliburton’s deceitful billing practices: charging for
twice as many employees as actually hired and always choosing the
most expensive vendor. Instead of paying 80 cents a pound for
bacon, Halliburton paid $6. Instead of $450,000 for ice,
Halliburton paid $3.4 million, blaming transportation costs.
Where did it come from, Alaska?
`MWR Baghdad'
For 2,500 soldiers, KBR billed $152,000 for videos, and
$617,000 for extra soft drinks for MWR (morale, welfare and recreation''). How's $100 per bag of dirty laundry and $1.5 million for tailoring, seamstress service and textile repair’’
sound? Need towels for the gym? Halliburton’s happy to supply ‘em
at prices you won’t believe.
At one hearing, former Halliburton employee Henry Bunting
held up an ordinary towel made extraordinary after KBR insisted
on embroidering a logo on it saying MWR Baghdad.'' That jacked the price up from $1.60 each to $7.50. Halliburton charged for surge capacity’’ for extra meals
long after there was no chance 5,000 extra mouths would be
passing through base camp to be fed. When Halliburton food
manager Rory Mayberry noted the discrepancy, his superiors told
him to keep quiet about it or face reassignment.
It would be bad enough if this awful behavior claimed no
victims, but Halliburton’s greed put soldiers already in harm’s
way at greater risk. Rather than purify the water, KBR ignored
regulations so that soldiers bathed and brushed their teeth in
water with E. coli bacteria floating in it. Rather than fix new
but poorly maintained trucks, KBR abandoned or torched them,
leaving soldiers stranded along roads mined with explosive
devices, according to an eyewitness at Dorgan’s hearings.
Sell-By Date
Food long past its sell-by date was served, along with food
spoiled by insufficient refrigeration. Imagine coming home from a
hard day at war trying not to get killed and being presented with
rancid meat.
While soldiers were afraid to shower for fear of getting
nasty bacterial infections, KBR managers charged the Pentagon for
luxurious rooms with crystal clear water at the Kempinski Hotel
on the ``unpolluted azure coastline’’ of Kuwait for $10,000 a
month, according to former Halliburton employee Marie DeYoung.
How could the Bush administration stand by and pay up while
the troops were so poorly treated? The same way L. Paul Bremer,
the U.S.'s former top official in Iraq, could get a Medal of
Freedom even as a draft audit of the Coalition Provisional
Authority shows that $8.8 billion went unaccounted for on his
watch. At the same time, for telling auditors about those 5,000
daily meals not served (adding up to over $200 million), poor
Rory Mayberry was banished to a hardship posting in Fallujah.
Life Is a Breeze
And consider what happened to Bunnatine Greenhouse, the
highest-ranking civilian in the Army Corps of Engineers. She
added a handwritten note that couldn’t be missed to the
Halliburton contract the Secretary of Defense had to see when he
signed off advising the contract be limited to one year. She had
already criticized the Defense Department for letting Halliburton
attend confidential Pentagon meetings.
Greenhouse was ignored, sidelined and lost her job. She
later testified before Congress to ``the most blatant and
improper contract abuse’’ she’d ever witnessed.
For Halliburton, life is still a breeze. The Pentagon
ignored its own auditors and paid most of Halliburton’s bills,
including hundreds of millions for gas from Kuwait. To justify
paying for double meals, it upped Halliburton’s take to 3 percent
of costs and every individual meal was counted as 1.3 meals.
Terrible Message
Letting Halliburton continue, much less bid on government
logistics contracts again, sends a terrible message. It says, If
I catch you bilking the government, I’ll suggest you knock it
off. But I’ll still pay you, and require only that you compete
for the opportunity to do so again – and likely win because of
experience gained from three years on the job, more information
than anyone but the Army itself, and an infrastructure already in
place. Halliburton could lose if federal procurement officials
took into account ``past performance,‘’ as required, although
their pathetic performance in the past makes this unlikely.
In March, Waxman tried to amend the defense appropriations
bill to deny contracts to any firm the Pentagon found billed more
than $100 million in unreasonable costs. Republicans blocked it.
With their tax cuts and sweetheart contracts, Republicans
have asked mostly what their country could do for them even while
the country is at war. Halliburton is just the lucky bidder. Dick
Cheney, Halliburton’s chief executive during the second half of
the 1990s, should be ashamed of his former company.
(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How
George Bush and I Made It to the White House’’ and former White
House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News
columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
–Editor: Greiff (scc)