Halliburton
Contracts Illegal - Bush & Cheney Say So What
By Evelyn Pringle
16 February, 2005
Countercurrents.org
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 & 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 & 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?
(Evelyn
Pringle is a columnist for Independent Media TV and POAC, and
an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government)